This paper analyzes the contextual cues female managers attend to when considering raising gender-equity issues at work. Study 1 provides a qualitative look at the range of cues indicating context favorability, including demographic patterns, top management qualities, and cultural exclusivity. Study 2 experimentally manipulates these cues and reveals that the exclusiveness of organizational culture is the most potent cue affecting willingness to sell a gender-equity...

This paper offers a revised understanding of intentional cultural change. In contrast to prevailing accounts, we suggest that such change can take place in the absence of initiating jolts, may be infused in everyday organizational life, and led by insiders who need not hold hierarchical power. Drawing on data from field studies and in-depth interviews, we develop a model of cultural change in which everyday...

How do individual actors institute changes in established ways of working? Longitudinal research is the basis for our theoretical model showing how actors legitimize new practices by accomplishing three interdependent, recursive, situated “microprocesses”: (1) cultivating opportunities for change, (2) fitting a new role into prevailing systems, and (3) proving the value of the new role. These microprocesses are demarcated by an accumulating series of small...

In this study, we examined 82 accounts of “issue selling” to better understand managers' implicit theories for successfully shaping change from below by directing the attention of top management. The study reveals the importance of various issue-selling moves, including packaging, involvement, and timing. Managerial accounts uncover three kinds of contextual knowledge that are critical to the execution of issue-selling moves. The study shows managers actively...

A considerable amount of research in hope is driven by Snyder's (1994) model which proposes that hope is positively associated with agency thinking and pathways thinking. However, the current research suggests that hope as understood by the layperson (Hope) is only associated with agency thinking and not with pathways thinking. This was found over four studies using different agency and pathways variables, different Hope variables,...

This research begins to develop and validate a multidimensional measure of psychological empowerment in the workplace. Second-order confirmatory factor analyses were conducted with two complementary samples to demonstrate the convergent and discriminant validity of four dimensions of empowerment and their contributions to an overall construct of psychological empowerment. Structural equations modeling was used to examine a nomological network of psychological empowerment in the workplace. Tested...

Using multilevel structural equations modeling, we examine the extent to which the influence of transformational leadership on work group effectiveness flows through follower perceptions of person-organization or person-supervisor value congruence. Results indicate that the group-level effect of transformational leadership on work group effectiveness was fully accounted for by the group-level impact of transformational leadership on follower perceptions of person-organization value congruence, not by its impact...

In this paper, we present a model of interpersonal sensemaking and describe how this process contributes to the meaning that employees make of their work. The cues employees receive from others in the course of their jobs speak directly to the value ascribed by others to the job, role, and employee. We assert that these cues are crucial inputs in a dynamic process through which...

Senior managers are important to the successful management of ethics in organizations. Therefore, their perceptions of organizational ethics are important. In this study, we propose that senior managers are likely to have a more positive perception of organizational ethics than lower level employees do largely because of their managerial role and their corresponding identification with the organization and need to protect the organization’s image as...

In the aftermath of recent corporate scandals, managers and researchers have turned their attention to questions of ethics management. We identify five common myths about business ethics and provide responses that are grounded in theory, research, and business examples. Although the scientific study of business ethics is relatively new, theory and research exist that can guide executives who are trying to better manage their employees'...