Social support reciprocity and occupational self-efficacy beliefs during mothers’ organizational re-entry

The present study assesses the effects of a lack of social support reciprocity at work on employees' occupational self-efficacy beliefs. We assume that the self-efficacy effects of received support and support reciprocity depend on the specific work context (e.g., phase in the process of organizational socialization). 297 women who returned to work after maternity leave participated at three measurement points (five weeks, eleven weeks, six months after re-entry). We measured self-reported received and provided support as well as occupational self-efficacy beliefs. Women who received a high amount but provided only little support at work (overbenefitting) reported lowered self-efficacy beliefs. As expected, this effect was not found at the beginning of re-entry, but only later, when over-benefitting began to be negatively related to recipients' self-efficacy beliefs.

Beyond belief : Strategic taboos and organizational identity in strategic agenda setting

A comprehensive strategic agenda matters for fundamental strategic change. Our study seeks to explore and theorize how organizational identity beliefs influence the judgment of strategic actors when setting an organization's strategic agenda. We offer the notion of "strategic taboo" as those strategic options initially disqualified and deemed inconsistent with the organizational identity beliefs of strategic actors. Our study is concerned with how strategic actors confront strategic taboos in the process of setting an organization's strategic agenda. Based on a revelatory inductive case study, we find that strategic actors engage in assessing the concordance of the strategic taboos with organizational identity beliefs and, more specifically, that they focus on key identity elements (philosophy; priorities; practices) when doing so. We develop a typology of three reinterpretation practices that are each concerned with a key identity element. While contextualizing assesses the potential concordance of a strategic taboo with an organization's overall philosophy and purpose, instrumentalizing assesses such concordance with respect to what actors deem an organization's priorities to be. Finally, normalizing explores concordance with respect to compatibility and fit with the organization's practices. We suggest that assessing concordance of a strategic taboo with identity elements consists in reinterpreting collective identity beliefs in ways that make them consistent with what organizational actors deem the right course of action. This article discusses the implications for theory and research on strategic agenda setting, strategic change, a practice-based perspective on strategy, and on organizational identity.

Diagnosing Organizational Identity Beliefs by Eliciting Complex, Multi-Modal Metaphors

The purpose of this article is to extend the organizational development diagnostics repertoire by advancing an approach that surfaces organizational identity beliefs through the elicitation of complex, multimodal metaphors by organizational members. We illustrate the use of such "Type IV" metaphors in a postmerger context, in which individuals sought to make sense of the implications of the merger process for the identity of their organization. This approach contributes to both constructive and discursive new organizational development approaches; and offers a multimodal way of researching organizational identity that goes beyond the dominant, mainly textual modality.

Discursive Practices Of Organizational Identity Negotiations

How do organizations discursively negotiate organizational identity? In a longitudinal interpretive case study, we investigate the discursive practices of identity negotiations in a non-profit organization. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, documents and participant observations, and in applying a discourse analytical framework, we first identify three distinct discourses that provide the discursive resources for three different identity propositions. Then and in order to understand how these discursive resources are activated and utilized, we reconstruct four distinct discursive practices of organizational identity negotiations: (1) external comparison and differentiation (2) denial of trade-offs and harmonization (3) historization, and (4) moralization. We discuss how this structure relates to other similarly pluralistic organizational contexts.

Intelligence and the psychological refractory period: A lateralized readiness potential study

The psychological refractory period (PRP) refers to a delay of response times (RT) to the second of two stimuli when these stimuli are presented in rapid succession. If this limitation of rapidly processing the second stimulus contributes to the well-known differences in speed of information processing between individuals with higher and lower mental ability, individuals with lower mental ability should exhibit a more pronounced PRP effect than individuals with higher mental ability. Previous studies on this question, however, yielded inconsistent results. In the present study, we assessed mental ability-related differences in the PRP by measuring lateralized readiness potentials (LRPs) to separate premotor and motor aspects of speed of information processing in 95 individuals with higher and 95 individuals with lower mental ability. Although individuals with higher mental ability processed information faster than individuals with lower mental ability as indicated by shorter RTs and shorter premotor LRP latencies, the PRP effect was equally pronounced in both groups. These findings suggest that the processes underlying the PRP effect do not contribute to mental ability-related differences in speed of information processing. Rather, these differences seem to occur at an earlier stage of information processing such as stimulus encoding, stimulus analysis, or stimulus evaluation.