Group & Organization Management

The relationship between an organization’s use of various career management practices and career attitudes was examined in a multisource, cross-level field study using organization-level data from 65 companies and individual-level data from 1,876 employees. A bundle approach was used to categorize 16 career management practices into clusters. As expected, the career management bundle associated with future strategic planning was positively related to satisfaction with the promotion process and negatively related to perceptions of job content plateauing. Consistent with research on strategic human resource management, significant interactions were found between some of the career management bundles in predicting satisfaction with the promotion process. A significant interaction was also found between the career management bundle of future strategic planning and sex, in terms of predicting satisfaction with the promotion process. Implications for theory and applied research are discussed.

This study examines whether recruiter-applicant demographic similarity affects selection decisions. In addition, the mediators proposed by the similarity-attraction paradigm were tested. However, consistent with Graves and Powell’s (1995) findings and with the propositions of social identity theory, I also proposed that female recruiters would prefer male applicants. Significant race similarity effects were observed for White recruiters on overall interview assessments and offer decisions, sex dissimilarity had a significant direct effect on overall interview assessments, and age similarity was not related to either criterion. In addition, there was some evidence that the significant direct effects were mediated by perceived similarity and interpersonal attraction. The sex dissimilarity effect appeared to be the result of male recruiters’ preference for female applicants. Post hoc analyses revealed that this relationship was mediated by applicant appearance.

Group task satisfaction has been conceptualized as the group-level counterpart to individual job satisfaction and represents the group’s shared attitude toward its task and work environment. This study investigated whether group task satisfaction would explain incremental variance in organizational citizenship behaviors, group performance, and absenteeism norms, after the variance explained by aggregated individual job satisfaction and group affective tone was taken into account. Survey data were collected from 66 work groups and 51 supervisors. Measures of group task satisfaction explained unique variance in ratings of citizenship behavior and absenteeism norms but did not explain unique variance in ratings of group performance. Our findings support the validity and utility of group task satisfaction and illustrate the importance of assessing group-level constructs directly.

High-level managers are often faced with challenging demands at work, and much of the managerial development literature has researched the responses to these challenges. The authors propose an extension to this research by investigating the influence of challenge-related and obstacle-related job demands on job search among a sample of U.S. managers and a sample of international managers. Specifically, the authors propose divergent relationships among job search and the type of job demands managers experience, and we also explore the mediating effect of job satisfaction. The authors’ study provides further insight into the complexities of managerial responsibilities and their behavioral outcomes.