The practitioner-academic gap has been widely discussed for decades along with recommendations for increasing the practical application of management research. We review some of the reasons for this disconnect and argue this has been the norm going back to the beginnings of the field. At the same time contemporary management practice has obviously been greatly influenced by management research. We suggest that much of this influential work has been done by academics who choose to work in the middle between university and practice. We review the experience of the Center for Effective Organizations and others working in the middle to make recommendations for doing useful research and suggest there are reasons for optimism in research to practice transfer in a changing landscape.

This paper examines how national culture relates to the ways that individuals define career success. Data are drawn from interviews with 269 professional services employees in 15 countries. Interviews are content coded and linked with country-level Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness measures of cultural values. We test our hypotheses using a multilevel multinomial logit model. The results demonstrate that the ways in which employees define career success vary across countries, due in part to differences in cultural values after controlling for gender, occupation, job level, and national economic development. We find that employees from countries high in future orientation, uncertainty avoidance, and performance orientation are more likely to define career success in terms of interpersonal outcomes, and those from countries high in collectivism (institutional and in-group), humane orientation, and gender egalitarianism are more likely to prefer intrapersonal outcomes. We find that employees from countries that are high in assertiveness, uncertainty avoidance, and performance orientation are more likely to define career success in terms of achievement-oriented outcomes. Finally, we find that employees from countries high in power distance report career success definitions in terms of safety and security outcomes. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of cultural differences in careers across countries.

Identity and identity processes are growing areas of research in management scholarship. Organizational, occupational, and role identities influence personal self-concept and impact how one makes sense of the workplace. Similarly, the processes that trigger identity formation or construction within the workplace has the potential to affect many individual and organizational outcomes. In fact, identity construction spans research in organizational behavior, human resources, and careers alike as individuals seek to understand self while navigating the workplace. This symposium explores identity processes faced by contemporary workers. Specifically, the symposium highlights the influence of identity processes in the context of gig employment and entrepreneurial pursuits. The unique context in which a gig worker performs identity construction may affect the processes available to those individuals, which could impact the formation of the identity. For entrepreneurs, their identity exploration may affect the individual’s ability and willingness when it comes to discovery and pursuit of new opportunities. In addition to these unique contexts, this symposium introduces an instrument to measure identity work in an effort to expand and strengthen empirical research in this area. The Gig Identity: A Theory of Work Identity for the Gig Economy Presenter: Ifeyimika Ogunyomi; U. of Texas At Arlington Presenter: Shelia Hyde; U. of Texas At Arlington Presenter: George Benson; U. of Texas At Arlington Wax and Prosper or Dwindle and Die: A Multiple Identity Tale of Entrepreneurial Opportunity Presenter: Ryan Scott Teschner; U. of Texas at Dallas Development and Validation of an Identity Climate Scale Presenter: Esther Lamarre Jean; U. of Texas At Arlington Presenter: Wayne S. Crawford; U. of Texas At Arlington

Employee involvement is a foundational construct for theory and research in job design (Oldham & Hackman, 1980), high performance work systems (Boxall & Mackey, 2009) and employee thriving (Spreitzer et al, 2005). While various aspects of employee involvement have been examined in more than 100 studies since the 1980’s there has been no systematic review of this work. This meta-analysis examines Ed Lawler’s high involvement model which emphasizes principles of decision-making power, shared information, incentive rewards, and employee knowledge (PIRK). We intend for this work to test the validity of this model and the combination of these specific principles in predicting employee motivation and attitudes as well as unit and organizational performance.

SummaryThis study investigates the relationship between coworker work hours and perceived work‐to‐family conflict (WFC) in a multinational sample of professional service employees. Building on recent research on the ways in which workgroups influence individual WFC, we demonstrate that the average hours worked by coworkers has a significant relationship to reported WFC independent of an employee's own work hours. Although this finding is universal across the multinational sample, national cultural differences were found to moderate the relationship, such that employees in more collectivist countries are more strongly influenced by average coworker hours than their counterparts in less collectivist countries. The multilevel analysis was conducted using a sample of 7,600 professional service employees in 497 different workgroups across 20 countries. The results provide support for the effect of culture on the relationship between group average hours and perceptions of WFC. We conclude with a discussion of how national culture affects WFC.

The debate over eliminating performance ratings addresses many important theoretical and practical issues. However, the academic debate on the topic is disconnected from the concerns of practitioners. Knowledge gained from theory-driven research is not leading practice on the use of performance ratings, despite the large volume of potentially relevant research findings. Many organizations are charging ahead with performance management solutions that seem sensible to them. They may be interested in academic research, but they are not waiting for it. We will argue that academic researchers who hope to influence practice need to better understand the concerns of practitioners and the research opportunities that are presented by contemporary practice.

This symposium examines the emerging trend in performance management practices to do away with formal numerical or letter performance ratings. Performance management appears to be at the beginning of a paradigm shift towards practices that emphasize more frequent, timely, and developmental feedback for employees. While few organizations are eliminating performance appraisal altogether, it is clear that many are experimenting with new practices, including ratingless feedback, on-going coaching, and the “feedforward” interview. Our goal is to present some early empirical work that addresses the rapid changes we are seeing in practice, assess their impacts, and detail implications for researchers and practitioners. This symposium will present findings from academic studies of four organizations experimenting with the new styles of feedback, perspectives from consultants working with companies implementing the new practices, and discussion led by two Academy Fellows to put these changes in context of the past, present and future of performance management. Feedforward: An Alternative to Deficit Based Models of Performance Management Presenter: Marie-Helene Budworth; York U. Presenter: Gary P. Latham; U. of Toronto Employee and Supervisor Reactions to Ratingless Performance Feedback Presenter: George S. Benson; The U. of Texas at Arlington Presenter: Gerald E Ledford; U. of Southern California Forget the Ratings Debate: How to Really Drive High Performance Presenter: Sharon Arad; CEB Presenter: Jane Brodie Gregory; Personnel Resources Decisions Institute

This research examines employees’ preferences for different job characteristics using a hierarchical Bayesian estimation of a discrete choice model. We conducted a discrete choice experiment in which employees were asked to select a preferred job among different options combining annual compensation, speed of promotion, and work hours, and flexibility. Our results show the relative importance of these job characteristics in a sample of 2019 employees from a professional service firm in North America. We also investigated whether job preferences would depend on gender, having children, or career stage. Significant relationships were found between these demographic groups and their preference for alternative work arrangements.

This paper addresses a gap in the literature about career success by examining the ways in which national culture influences definitions of perceived career success across cultures. This study applies the Hofstede (1980) dimensions of culture to the Dries, Pepermans & Carlier (2008) multi-dimensional model of career success. Structured interviews with 291 employees in fourteen countries were coded to provide insight about how employees around the world define career success. Specifically collectivism, power distance, masculinity and uncertainty avoidance are used to predict definitions of career success along the dimensions of interpersonal and intrapersonal affect and achievement. Results suggest that uncertainty avoidance is a strong predictor of variance in the ways that people define career success across cultures. We find that the higher a country is on uncertainty avoidance, the more likely that employees in that country will define career success according to values related to intrapersonal achievement rather than interpersonal achievement. Employees from countries with high uncertainty avoidance that do define career success in terms of interpersonal measures express a preference for affect-based measures of success. The implications of these findings are discussed along with recommendations for future research about the relationship between national cultural values and career success.

Employee involvement (EI) is a major part of high-performance work systems (HPWS) that have successfully transformed a large number of organizations and have become standard practice in many new organizations. Despite the proven benefits of EI, however, it is still not as widely utilized as it could be even when accounting for industry and organization differences in its applicability. We suggest that EI implementation is limited in part by the change management challenges it presents. We review the recent research on EI and HPWS, and suggest ways in which change research and theory can inform our understanding of why EI practices have fallen short of their potential and how they can be effectively implemented.

This research investigates how the quality of the relationship between sending supervisors and expatriates is related to turnover and performance. Utilizing goal congruence and leader–member exchange (LMX) theories, it is hypothesized that the quality of the relationship between sending supervisors and expatriates mediates goal congruence and the two outcome variables: performance and turnover intentions. The goal examined is the degree to which the expatriation fits into expatriates' career paths at the firm. Regression analysis is used to test the hypotheses with a sample of 44 matched sending supervisor–expatriate dyads. Findings indicate that LMX mediates the relationship between goal congruence and performance. Furthermore, goal congruence has a direct negative relationship with turnover intentions. These results suggest that sending supervisors significantly influence the success of expatriate assignments.

Performance appraisals are often criticized and poorly done. However, they are not going away and should not go away. They are needed to effectively manage an organization’s talent. Our research suggests that performance management systems can be effective if they are designed and executed correctly. Performance management systems are effective when they are based on goals that are jointly set and are driven by an organization’s business strategy. The use of competency models that are based on business strategy is strongly associated with organizational effectiveness. When they drive salary increases and bonuses, they are executed better. Often absent but critical to the success of performance management systems is senior management leadership and ownership; much less important is ownership by human resources. Additional keys to effectiveness are training managers to do appraisals, holding them accountable for how well they do appraisals and using measures of how results are achieved.