Search

A small but growing volume of research identifies values work as the activities through which values are performed in organizations. Despite contributing to overall knowledge about values in organizations, this budding stream of values work literature has yet to offer insight into how collectives such as workplace organizations maintain, or consistently enact, important but abstract values through the concrete, shared daily work of members. The ability to maintain multiple important values has performance implications for employees, organizations and the communities served by organizations. To better understand how organizations (i.e., collectives of individuals working together towards shared outcomes in the workplace), maintain multiple important values in concrete daily work, I conducted a seven-month ethnographic case study of a radiation oncology center as its team members created individual treatment plans for cancer patients. I found that in most cases organizations maintain core values by engaging in the values work of framing work projects as standard and delegating them to a set of standard means that habitually enact core values with little additional work or effort. However, in some cases, salient concerns result in framing concerning project work as an exception to the standard. In these instances organizations effortfully enact adjusted means to resolve the concern and protect core values or accommodate additional, important but non-core values.

Organizations and individuals invest resources in supporting employee wellbeing, a trend that has intensified in recent years. Despite this increased emphasis on enhancing wellbeing, employees continue to vary in terms of the state of their wellbeing. To gain insight into how and why employee wellbeing statuses vary, I adopted an inductive approach to explore the diverse contributors to employee wellbeing outcomes. This exploration involved interviews with 57 employees at a single organization and uncovered a wide array of wellbeing facilitators, factors that support employee wellbeing, and wellbeing inhibitors, factors that are detrimental to employee wellbeing. I examined what employees identified as contributors to the state of their wellbeing and developed a theoretical framework outlining archetypes of employees that relate to high and low levels of wellbeing. Drawing on the interviews with participants who reported low and high wellbeing statuses, I examined contextual factors that contributed to employee wellbeing. Contributing to the body of work that examines how contextual factors impact employee wellbeing, I elucidated the role of historical comparison, finding that employees make comparisons between their current context to their historical contexts to validate their present state of wellbeing. In highlighting the role of the past to the present, I revealed how employees support themselves by trying to leverage coping skills developed in the past. As a result, existing skills act as reinforcing, compensatory, or ineffective contributors to their wellbeing. In highlighting the role of employee comparisons between their past context and their present, and the ways that coping skills may or may not support their wellbeing, I uncovered findings that may shape future research and organizational endeavors to support employee wellbeing.

In addition to interruptions to work stemming from coworkers, supervisors, and other work-related matters, working parents are likely to experience interruptions to their workday related to their children. Here, I argue that understanding the social and parenting goals underlying these interruptions are important factors for predicting the effects of these distinct types of interruptions both at work and at home. To explore this idea, I conducted a preliminary qualitative investigation and thematic analysis of parenting interruptions to form the foundation for my dissertation, finding two types of interruptions. The first—survival interruptions—refer to interruptions where parents need to help maintain and support their child’s everyday well-being (e.g., run errands, feed them, manage sicknesses or emergencies). The second—generative interruptions—are interruptions related to raising their child or promoting their social and emotional development (e.g., supporting them, helping correct behavioral problems, socializing). Having established these two domains of interruptions, I hypothesized that survival interruptions would positively affect employees instigated incivility towards coworkers and family, and negatively affect self-sacrifice for coworkers and family via frustration. Likewise, I hypothesized that generative interruptions would be negatively related to incivility and positively related to self-sacrifice via love. Finally, I hypothesized that family motivation would moderate these effects. I tested my hypotheses with a three-week experience sampling study of 113 working parents, finding mixed support for the daily emotional effects of parenting interruptions.