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Homophily, the tendency to associate with similar others, is a fundamental pattern underlying human relationships. Although scholars largely agree on the definition of homophily, their empirical me...

Behavioral integrity (BI) is the alignment pattern between an actor’s words and deeds as perceived by another person. Employees’ perception that their leader’s actions and words are consistent leads to desirable workplace outcomes. Although BI is a powerful concept, the role of leader referents, the relationship between perceived BI of different referents, and the process by which BI affects outcomes are unclear. Our purpose is to elaborate upon this process and clarify the role of different leader referents in determining various outcomes. To understand the impact of referents, we explicitly compared the BIs of two leader referents: senior management and supervisor. In contrast to previous research findings where supervisory BI was found to have a stronger relationship with outcomes than senior management, we find that both referents are important. However, their impact varies based upon the outcome studied. Only senior management BI predicted organizational commitment, while senior management BI, supervisory BI and supervisory trust predicted organizational cynicism. Only trust in supervisor, and not supervisory BI, impacted organizational citizenship behaviors. When senior management is the referent, trust and not BI might play an important role for outcomes that require extensive employee investments, such as organizational commitment. In contrast, when the outcome measured does not require employee investments, BI might have a direct impact on the outcome. We also uncovered that trust in supervisor substantially influences the trust employees have in their senior management.

When people are asked about their career decisions, they often invoke the influence of they. They may include family or teachers, but it repeatedly includes some amorphous group of generalized others. This article describes my inquiries into the question: Who is they? Initial studies examined individuals’ perceptions of career timetables within organizations. The results suggested that individuals experience their social context as an intricate territory informed by self-perceptions, shared perceptions, and actual distributions. However, these studies assumed they equalled the employee population. Later work showed that in large organizations this assumption is unwarranted. Each individual acquires his or her own non-random version of social context: an organizational reference group. These individual-level reference groups and the neighborhoods in which they cluster are distinctive because they include distant associations defined only by awareness. Both concepts offer opportunities for exploring the social structure that emerges between individuals’ informal social networks and the organization.

This study examines how women's and men's career referents—the people they see as having similar careers—affect career expectations. We raise two questions. First, what is the relative effect of the gender composition and comparison level of career referents on such expectations? Second, what happens to career expectations when women and men identify career referents at the same comparison level? Current research suggests that women have lower career expectations than men because they compare themselves with women who hold lower-level positions than the career referents identified by men. Thus, if women and men identify with career referents at a similar level, their career expectations should be equal. However, this chain of reasoning has not been tested. Using data collected from a large organization, we identify both the specific individuals that women and men perceive as having similar careers and these referents' career levels, defined as their hierarchical level in the firm. The results show that the level of career referents is more important than their gender composition in explaining individuals' career expectations. In contrast to extant explanations, the results show that even when women identify career referents at the same levels as men do, they still exhibit significantly lower career expectations. Drawing on social comparison theory, we speculate that this occurs because men's expectations are bolstered by extreme upward comparisons, whereas women's expectations are dampened, perhaps because they see high-achieving others as representing a less probable goal.

This paper introduces and empirically explores the concept of an organizational reference group: the set of people an individual perceives as belonging to his or her work environment that defines the social world of work in which he or she engages. The concept is proposed to fill a gap in studies of social context. Scholars tend only to infer, not identify, the people an individual is aware of at work. This surmise creates no problem in groups or small organizations where everyone knows everyone else. However, it becomes troublesome in large organizations where the set of people one individual discerns may vary considerably from that of another. Social network studies of large organizations examine people an individual perceives, but focus on interpersonal communication through salient relationships. They tend to neglect the many distant others who populate an individual's social context: those known only through company newsletters or office gossip, those with whom the individual never has contact, and those who carry little immediate salience. Data from a large organization are used to explore whether organizational reference groups provide distinct, useful information about individuals' perceptions of their social context at work. The findings replicate those showing individuals' preferences for similar others, but also note previously unobserved systematic differences in the composition of close associations compared to the broader ones of organizational reference groups. Distant associations are considerably more homogeneous than close ones. Moreover, the results show that organizational reference groups illuminate career referent selection and expected achievement beyond what would be learned from a typical social network analysis.

Since its definition in the early 1980s, organizational demography has become an influential research area. Scholars map the relationship between demographic variables and organizational outcomes, examining such questions as whether increasing work group diversity leads to greater turnover and whether decreasing tenure similarity within a top management team leads to more numerous strategic reorientations. Asking such questions requires only a demographic predictor and an outcome, but answering them often requires additional theoretical constructs. For example, the relationship between work group diversity and turnover might be explained by communication and conflict. As work group diversity increases, communication within the group may become more difficult, resulting in greater conflict and thus increasing turnover. Despite the important, sometimes critical, role of such additional theoretical concepts, researchers often leave them loosely specified and unmeasured, creating a “black box” filled with vague, untested theories. This article presents a critical analysis of this approach. The results show that simple demographic explanations may generate multiple, mutually exclusive, often implicit theories involving numerous additional concepts. An evaluation of these more complex theories against previous research shows that they receive only weak support. Hence, the black box approach to organizational demography presents serious theoretical problems. Examples are provided to illuminate these problems. Four directions are suggested for research in organizational demography: deepening current variance explanations, creating dynamic models, exploring factors that produce demographic distributions, and moving beyond the variance model.

Scholars believe that age norms, defined here as widely shared judgments of the standard or typical ages of individuals holding a role or status within a given context, circumscribe behavior in all human societies. Admonitions such as "act your age" indicate that we expect older people to conduct themselves differently from younger people. Laws codify society's judgments of when people are old enough to vote and purchase alcoholic beverages. Work organizations have informal rules about typical ages for promotion. Yet, despite the centrality of age norms to human interaction, we know very little about them. Age norms seem easy to observe, but they have proved difficult to define and measure. Moreover, although many scholars consider age norms in a societal context, few examine them in other structured settings, such as communities or work organizations. This article explores theoretical and measurement issues that have impeded age norm studies, and presents one approach to their resolution using data from three work organizations.

Individual attainment within organizational careers, or career mobility, has been explained by individual attributes and by demographic processes. These seemingly unrelated views can be reconciled by suggesting that employees develop a shared perception of their organizations's career hierarchy, and that this shared perception produces systematic managerial selection preferences that influence individual attainment. A study that examines the first part of this process is presented. The results, based on questionnaire data from an electric utility, suggest that managers do develop a shared perception of their organization's career hierarchy. However, managers' perceptions are not unanimous, and the analysis examines two explanations for perceptual variation. The implications of the proposed connection for further development of a multiple-level explanation of individual attainment are discussed.

Organizational demography research tends to invoke multi-level concepts that require multi-level theories and analysis. Scholars originally paid little attention to this multi-level work. However, the complex issues involved in studying multi-level demographic phenomena are receiving increasing scrutiny. Three historical oppositions in social science have contributed to current limitations: the disciplinary differences between psychology and sociology; the analytical antagonism between quantitative and qualitative analysis; and the rhetorical distinctions between deductive and inductive discussion. These oppositions suggest that a more qualitative, inductive approach may uncover new directions for multi-level demographic theory. Two possibilities are discussed. One is to refocus on the phenomena themselves instead of their outcomes. Another is to explore how demographic misperceptions influence individual behavior.

This paper introduces an outcome-based theory of work motivation. This theory focuses on the individual's expected consequences of his or her action. We identify four different types of expected consequences, or motives. These motives lead to four types of motivation: extrinsic, intrinsic, contributive, and relational. We categorize these outcomes using two criteria: the perceived locus of causality, which defines the origin of the motivation, and the perceived locus of consequence, which defines who receives the consequences of the action. Individuals generally act based on a combination of extrinsic, intrinsic, contributive, and relational motivations, each one having a particular weight. We use the term motivational profile to refer to the particular combination of an individual's motivations in a certain context. Individuals may experience conflict when different alternatives convey different expected consequences (or motives). Resolution of conflicts among motives results in motivational learning. Specifically, the resolution of conflicts among motives of the same type results in calculative learning. On the other hand, the resolution of conflicts among motives of different types results in evaluative learning. Evaluative learning implies a change in the individual's motivational profile.

Previous studies explain situational antecedents of OCB using social exchange theory. However, the effects of factors such as perceptions of job characteristics on OCB seem to require a different explanatory mechanism. We propose that these effects can be explained through a new exchange relationship that we call work exchange. We develop a theory for the situational antecedents of OCB that includes economic, work, and social exchange relationships. The theory is tested using structural equations.

Careers unfold within and are bound by multiple social systems, most obviously organizations, but also occupational groups, family, and society at large, as expressed, for instance, in the relation...

Careers manifest themselves in people's behaviour, and behaviour-as Kurt Lewin once reminded us-is a function of the person and his or her environment (Lewin, 1951). By this logic, all career research should consider environmental influences. And, we should expect to find some balance between research focusing on people and research focusing on environments. Further, we might expect that the cumulative knowledge about careers would integrate findings about both individual and environmental variables. Yet relatively little of the above has taken place. Instead there has been a heavy emphasis on the 'person' side of Lewin's equation. We respect such activity; however, careers do not occur in a vacuum. We believe this past emphasis must be complemented with an understanding of the environments in which careers are experienced before the real meaning and usefulness of such work is known. The purpose of this special issue is, therefore, to turn our attention to the relationship between careers and the environments that surround them.

Age seems lo play an important role in a wide range of employee behaviors. One interpretation of this role is that it depends more on people's beliefs about age than mi the ages themselves. Despite...