Samantha A. Conroy

Teaching compensation system principles to undergraduate students who have limited practical experience can be challenging. We describe an exercise that puts students in the roles of compensation system designer and organization employee. This one-session exercise prompts students to create a compensation system for a fictitious paper airplane organization, then work as an employee (i.e., make paper airplanes). The exercise is particularly useful for demonstrating the sorting and incentive effects of compensation systems. This exercise is intended for undergraduate students in a human resource management or compensation course.

As many organizations have sought to increase their neurodiversity, they have tended to focus on human resource (HR) practices and programs for increasing representation, especially of autistic employees. There has been comparatively less attention regarding HR practices that relate to sustaining employment and fostering workplace performance for autistic employees. Sustaining employment is a particular challenge because the signals sent by HR practices and the neurotypical managers implementing them are often differently interpreted by autistic employees—the double empathy problem. As the pay practices and pay‐for‐performance (PFP) systems critical to retention and career advancement have increasingly broadened beyond objective assessments of task performance to include more subjective assessments and contextual performance, the double empathy problem can worsen leading to unintended negative consequences. We draw upon signaling theory to theorize how and when PFP worsens or mitigates the double empathy problem. Specifically, we develop a model and set of propositions that posit how the attributes of signals (observability, consistency, and frequency), the resulting shared relevance of signals, their effects on behavior, and managers' subsequent interpretations of employee behavior and performance form a cycle through which performance‐reward signals tighten or loosen and, in turn, affect autistic employee well‐being and turnover. We close by discussing how our model may apply to other forms of neurodivergence and implications for future research regarding the practices, signals, and interpretations that create or inhibit environments supportive of neurodiversity.

Background: Our understanding of how highly reliable care delivery is brought about remains elusive, in part, because there is limited evidence regarding the organizational practices that enable safety organizing—the behaviors and processes underlying high reliability. Purpose: Because safety organizing relies on discretionary effort and lowering barriers to sharing expertise and discussing threats to safety and errors, we investigate three pay practices and their effects on information sharing and, in turn, safety organizing. Specifically, we examine average pay level, minimum pay rates, and pay dispersion on nursing units and their relationship with information sharing and safety organizing. Method: Cross-sectional analyses of survey data from 1,461 registered nurses in 45 nursing units in three Midwestern hospitals on safety organizing linked to administrative data on pay practices from the organization’s human resource systems. Pay data and survey responses were aggregated to the nursing unit level. PROCESS and structural equation modeling were used to simultaneously test for direct and indirect effects of pay variables on information sharing and safety organizing. Results: PROCESS and Mplus path analysis indicated that paying a higher minimum rate in the unit and having lower pay dispersion have indirect, desirable associations with safety organizing through information sharing. Conclusion: Pay practices can help organizations enhance safety organizing. In particular, higher pay rates for the lowest level nurses and lower pay dispersion among nurses are associated with unit-level information sharing and safety organizing. Practice Implications: Having pay practices associated with lower within-unit variation and higher pay for the lowest paid members of a unit may be viable strategies for greater information sharing and safety organizing.

This symposium showcases four papers that draw on a diverse array of methods to investigate various circumstances in which a person’s social identities (organizational, professional, occupational, ...

Frontline workers represent some of the most critical employees in an organization yet often experience low job quality (e.g., low pay, low autonomy, low job security). Some organizational leaders ...

Many organizations have turned to “just-in-time” pay systems to manage fluctuations in demand for products and services. For example, the trucking industry commonly pays truck drivers by the mile, and retail organizations fluctuate hours available to work to align with holiday demand. Based on the Unfolding Model of Turnover, we propose that the pay volatility, that is, fluctuations in individual pay over time, created by such systems create shocks that initiate thoughts of leaving the organization. We propose that these thoughts increase turnover likelihood. We also propose that pay level and pay trajectory moderate the pay volatility and turnover relationship. Based on a large dataset containing information on objective pay and turnover for truck drivers over a period of 34 weeks, the results of this study support the role of pay volatility, pay level, and pay trajectory in affecting voluntary turnover. Specifically, the results show that all three factors predict turnover likelihood and that pay volatility and pay level interact to predict turnover likelihood. The findings indicate that pay volatility has organizational downsides due to its effects on employee turnover in addition to its known upsides (i.e., flexibility).

While there is no shortage of calls for research to study management concepts within organizations, there is far too little guidance on how to accomplish this feat. Conducting research in the field is especially important within the domain of organizational team research. Accordingly, we seek to provide an understanding of the current state of the organizational team field research literature and highlight recommendations and best practices. As such, we identified 10 recommendations and 10 best practices through three methods: (1) a literature review, (2) a survey of individuals who have published team field research, as well as some of the most impactful scholars investigating organizational team phenomenon, and (3) a set of interviews with practitioners in positions that can grant field access to researchers. By implementing this multi-pronged approach, we were able to incorporate multiple stakeholder voices so as to fully understand the value and ideal process for scientist-practitioner endeavors.

This paper tests the relationship between organizational expectations to monitor work-related electronic communication during nonwork hours and the health and relationship satisfaction of employees and their significant others. We integrate resource-based theories with research on interruptions to position organizational expectations for e-mail monitoring (OEEM) during nonwork time as a psychological stressor that elicits anxiety due to employee attention allocation conflict. E-mail–triggered anxiety, in turn, negatively affects the health and relationship quality of employees and their significant others. We conducted three studies to test our propositions. Using the experience sampling method with 108 working U.S. adults, Study 1 established within-employee effects of OEEM on anxiety, employee health, and relationship conflict. Study 2 used a sample of 138 dyads of full-time employees and their significant others to replicate detrimental health and relationship effects of OEEM through anxiety. It also showed crossover effects of OEEM on partner health and relationship satisfaction. Finally, Study 3 employed a two-wave data collection method with an online sample of 162 U.S. working adults to provide additional support for the OEEM construct as a distinct and reliable job stressor and replicated findings from Studies 1 and 2. Taken together, our research extends the literature on work-related electronic communication at the interface of work and nonwork boundaries, deepening our understanding of the impact of OEEM on employees and their families’ health and well-being.

Summary: Although horizontal pay dispersion has been explored extensively using cross‐sectional field methods, it has received little attention using the control available through experimental designs. Many of the questions relevant to pay dispersion research can be addressed by taking an individual‐level experimental approach because this allows for clean separation of pay policies and individual effects. In this paper, we hypothesize both the motivation‐based and affect‐based effects of pay dispersion policies and test our hypotheses with a sample of over 400 participants in a real‐pay, real‐effort experiment. Results of the experiment provide support that two pay dispersion‐related pay policies, performance‐based pay dispersion and allocation criteria, have unique effects. Whereas motivation and performance effects are direct, pay satisfaction and interest in continuing work effects are the result of interactions, incorporating the performance level of workers. In follow‐up analyses, we find evidence that the temporal nature of responses to pay dispersion should be incorporated into future studies of pay dispersion.