WHEN POLITICS PAYS: FACTORS INFLUENCING MANAGERIAL COMPENSATION DECISIONS

Managerial Pay Raise and Promotion Decisions for Workers with I-deals

Managers use idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) to motivate and retain employees. Yet we know little about the subsequent effects i-deals have on decisions about pay raises and promotions. Two studies investigate how managers make pay raise and promotion decisions for workers with i-deals. Using a policy-capturing design, managers ( N = 116) made pay raise and promotion allocations for workers presented as good performers, based on information provided regarding whether and what type of i-deal workers had and the extent to which they helped peers. Developmental i-deal recipients tend to be recommended for both pay raises and promotions, while such recommendations are less likely for employees with flextime i-deals (for promotions) or reduced workload i-deals (for promotions and pay raises). In addition, workers with i-deals who help their peers are viewed more favorably in both decisions. The second study surveyed managers ( N = 174) regarding their actual subordinates ( N = 806), both controlled for the manager’s rating of subordinate performance. It supports the positive effect of developmental i-deals on pay and promotion decisions, but not the negative effects of flextime and reduced workload i-deals. Helping effects depend on the i-deal: Managers report that unhelpful recipients of developmental i-deals are less likely to be promoted than those with such i-deals who help their peers; unhelpful recipients of reduced workload i-deals are less likely to get pay raises than those with such deals who help. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research and career management.

Dealing With Negative Workplace Gossip: From the Perspective of Face

In this study, we investigate the coping response of individuals who are being gossiped about. Drawing on face research and affective events theory, we propose that employees who are targets of negative gossip will actively respond to the gossip about them via engagement in negative gossip themselves. The findings showed that negative workplace gossip stimulated fear of losing face and led to subsequent behavioral responses, namely, engaging in negative gossip. Moreover, self-monitoring, as a moderating mechanism, mitigated the negative impacts of negative workplace gossip on the targets. We discuss theoretical implications for gossip research and note its important practical implications.

How the Influence of Unethical Leaders on Followers Is Affected by Their Implicit Followership Theories

Our research examines the role of followers in unethical leadership. Drawing on a social–cognitive approach to leadership and recent research in the field of behavioral ethics, we focus on how leader behavior and follower information processing interact to produce unethical outcomes. In two experimental studies simulating a personnel selection context, we examine to what extent individual implicit assumptions regarding the follower role (i.e., implicit followership theories, IFTs) relate to employees’ tendency to comply with leader unethical suggestions. In Study 1, controlling for possible alternative explanations such as personal need for structure, romance of leadership, and moral disengagement, we found that the IFT Good Citizen increased and the IFT Insubordination decreased followers’ tendencies to contribute to unethical leadership. In Study 2, we varied the leader’s unethical suggestions to further investigate the conditions under which these effects occur and included authoritarianism as an additional control variable. Overall, our findings suggest that IFTs make a unique contribution to our understanding of the role of followers in unethical leadership, and that this contribution depends on the way leaders frame their unethical request. Interaction effects suggest that follower characteristics need to be considered as they are embedded in specific situational settings rather than as isolated traits.

A development of the dimensions of personal reputation in organizations

Purpose

The current, established scale used to measure personal reputation treats the construct as a unidimensional measure. For example, the scale fails to distinguish between individuals who are known for being socially popular versus those who are known for being experts in their field. This study aims to address this issue by developing a multidimensional personal reputation scale.

Design/methodology/approach

Based on existing theory, a scale is developed and validated against existing, similar constructs. First, a panel of three academic experts who have done research on personal reputation, and also two professional experts who have rich experience in the management field, evaluated the items for face validity. Then 112 working adults were asked to rate the reputation of a co-worker. Each dimension of personal reputation was validated against an existing, similar scale (e.g. social reputation was validated against an existing “popularity” scale).

Findings

A multi-dimensional, personal reputation scale is presented. This measure purports that personal reputation has three dimensions: task, social and integrity.

Originality/value

The presented scale allows researchers to distinguish different types of reputations in the workplace. This is significant because both anecdotal evidence and empirical findings suggest that to simply assume that reputation based upon being a person of high integrity and upon being an expert at a specific task will present the same outcomes is a fallacy. To further the knowledge of personal reputation, a need exists to be able to measure the different dimensions of reputation.

Agency Theory and Uncertainty in Organizations: An Evaluation

This paper evaluates agency theory as a theory of performance outcome. Agency theory attributes uncertainty in performance outcomes to moral hazard, adverse selection and the state of nature. This paper argues that by overlooking two critical sources of outcome uncertainty in organizations — incomplete knowledge about the effort-outcome relationship and lack of agreement about effort and outcome — the generalizability of the theory is strictly limited. Even in such settings where it is generalizable, principal-agent approaches to contract design are unrealistic to the extent that they presume that performance in organizations results exclusively from individual-contributor jobs, exagger ate the degree to which individuals are work-averse, and emphasize the quant ity of effort at the expense of the quality and type of effort. As a theory of performance, principal-agent approaches overstate the importance of opera tional effort and ignore the importance of facilitative effort such as team work.

Just Doing Business: Modern Racism and Obedience to Authority as Explanations for Employment Discrimination

In two experiments, we investigated the effects of prejudice (in the form of modern racism) and business justifications by authority figures (i.e., organizational superiors) to discriminate against minorities (Blacks in our research) in hiring situations. As expected, business justifications by legitimate authority figures led to participants' obedience in the form of discrimination relative to a no-justification condition and, in the second experiment, also relative to a condition in which the business justification came from an illegitimate authority figure. Moreover, in both experiments, as expected, modern racism did not have a main effect on discrimination, but interacted with business justifications such that modern racism predicted discrimination when a legitimate authority figure provided a business-related justification for such discrimination but not in the absence of such a justification. These results are discussed in terms of their theoretical implications for understanding prejudice and obedience to authority in organizations and in terms of their practical implications for addressing the problem of discrimination in the workplace. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.