Suchergebnisse

Constructive confrontation was originally the central strategy in work-based programs to deal with problem drinking employees. The broadening of these programs to employee assistance programs, coupled with their rapid growth and diffusion, has been accompanied by the medicalization of employee performance problems and the professionalization of means for handling such problems. These trends, together with ideologies based in organizational management and the value orientations of American society, are barriers to supervisory use of constructive confrontation. Data from a 1981 national survey of external program consultants reveals continuing attitudinal support for constructive confrontation. Other attitudes of these consultants point however to the strong need for deliberately designed support systems for the encouragement of supervisory use of constructive confrontation.

Factors in the organizational environment have been posited to be related to the development of employee alcohol problems and the identification of such problems. Previous research has yielded ambiguous findings on these relationships, but has indicated that some role is played. Data from a study of the experience of 2,083 Federal supervisors and managers with employees who had alcohol problems indicate that task interdependence and opportunities for mobility on the job are associated with greater probability of the identification of alcohol problems. The pattern of relationships indicates that peer influences may overshadow those of supervisors in the identification of employee drinking problems. Work characteristics were not related to the success of treating such problems and returning employees to the job.

The recent past has seen a surge of interest in and funding of programs designed to combat alcohol problems. One of the few innovative approaches in the alcohol problem field is the occupational programming concept. Policies are developed within work organizations which call for the identification of performance deterioration which may stem from problem drinking. Employees so identified are offered assistance with their problem without penalty, although the leverage of the job setting is used to pressure behavior change. Promotion of these concepts has become a small-scale nationwide movement. Among the current problems facing those in occupational programming are the absence of a sound research base and a lack of direction in the development of supportive constituencies.

While many studies have focused on race and gender differences in monetary labor market rewards, few studies have used national samples to examine race and gender differences in nonmonetary labor process rewards. Utilizing multivariate analysis on data from the 1993 and 1997 National Employee Survey, the present study examines how race and gender interact in shaping workplace autonomy. We regress an index of autonomy on human capital, structural level variables, and race and gender interaction terms. Findings show that black and white females, relative to white males, fare worse net of controls for human capital and structural level variables. Black males fare worse than white males when controlling for human capital but this disadvantage fails to retain its significant effect when controlling for structural level variables. We conclude that contrary to some beliefs that black females have experienced greater success in the labor market as a result of affirmative action policies, black females remain hindered by the double jeopardy of race and gender.

The present study proposes a theoretical model depicting information diffusion within work organizations. Express concern is with this diffusion as it relates to organizational innovation. This model conceptualizes information flow as having two important dimensions: origin of the information, viewed as having three foci (organizational, interpersonal, and personal); and organizational emphasis on innovation, viewed as having two levels (general organizational emphasis on innovation and specific organizational emphasis on a given innovation). This multilevel model was tested with a random sample of 2083 work supervisors in 96 different organizations. The dependent variable employed was the supervisor's compliance in transmitting information about the innovation to subordinates. Multivariate analysis illustrates the importance of three factors upon this transmission: the degree of specific innovation emphasis, the number of modalities used to transmit this information, and the degree to which the supervisor individually sought out information about the innovation.