The last major global shock—the 2008 recession—led to what economists call a “jobless recovery” as companies found they could get by with fewer employees. But post-pandemic, the author writes, managers should focus on changing employees’ roles instead. He has five key pieces of advice: Enable employees to meaningfully connect with customers in the moments that count; help them make mo…
In Jan 2005, after more than three years of sluggish employment growth, the US economy finally recovered the jobs lost during the 2001 recession. Baffled by such a delayed rebound in payrolls, many speculated about the cause. Inevitably, observers compared the 2001 and 1991 recoveries, both widely considered to have been jobless. Schreft and Singh showed previously that one common feature of th…
Organizational rule violations are more likely when performance falls below aspiration levels. We propose that such violations are systematically selective and that this selectivity emerges during the problematic search for solutions to the performance shortfall. During this search, contextual conditions (structural secrecy and coupling between violations and outcomes) and characteristics of ru…
Large corporations were a dominant force in American society for generations through their employment practices, expansion choices, and community connections. As the United States has shifted to a postindustrial economy, however, finance has increasingly taken center stage. This article documents shifts in corporate employment, institutional investment, corporate organization, financial service…
Although managerial practices are often structured with the explicit goal of improving performance by increasing employee well-being, these practices frequently create tradeoffs between different dimensions of employee well-being, whereby one aspect of employee well-being improves but another aspect of employee well-being decreases. We call attention to the multi-dimensional nature of well-bein…
Idiosyncratic employment arrangements (i-deals) stand to benefit the individual employee as well as his or her employer. However, unless certain conditions apply, coworkers may respond negatively to these arrangements. We distinguish functional i-deals from their dysfunctional counterparts and highlight evidence of i-deals in previous organizational research. We develop propositions specifying …