Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management: Volume 26

Volume 26 of Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management continues the tradition of publishing papers that contain an eclectic mix of ideas from economics, psychology, and sociology written to illuminate our understanding of the HRM field and to capture the multidisciplinary spirit of the field. This volume contains seven engaging papers on important HRM topics such as the notion of diversity context, dynamic performance research, and the role of humor in promoting creativity and other positive outcomes.

Several comprehensive reviews are united in drawing the conclusion that the cumulative research evidence on work team diversity is equivocal. Rather than review the extant state of diversity research, in this paper we redirect attention to the context of workplace diversity as a possible explanation for these mixed findings. We discuss how diversity context may be conceptualized, specify various aspects of this context at multiple levels of analysis, and consider how contextual variables can shape the outcomes of work team diversity. We present findings from a literature review (1999–2006) to identify key trends and patterns of results reported in recent research as well as contextual factors that have received attention to date. This paper also considers how the non-significant, positive, negative, and curvilinear effects of diversity reported in studies can be explained by the contextual factors outlined. Implications for future research are also discussed.

This article reviews the extensive history of dynamic performance research, with the goal of providing a clear picture of where the field has been, where it is now, and where it needs to go. Past research has established that job performance does indeed change, but the implications of this dynamism and the predictability of performance trends remain unresolved. Theories are available to help explain dynamic performance, and although far from providing an unambiguous understanding of the phenomenon, they offer direction for future theoretical development. Dynamic performance research does suffer from a number of methodological difficulties, but new techniques have emerged that present even more opportunities to advance knowledge in this area. From this review, I propose research questions to bridge the theoretical and methodological gaps of this area. Answering these questions can advance both research involving job performance prediction and our understanding of the effects of human resource interventions.

Individuals are often stigmatized by virtue of their status on various dimensions and as a consequence, they typically evoke negative cognitions, affect, and emotions among observers. In addition, they are often the targets of both access and treatment discrimination in organizations. Thus, we present a model of the cognitive, affective, and cultural influences on stigmatization in organizations, detail how stigmatization affects human resource management processes and practices, and consider strategies that can be used to reduce the problems faced by stigmatized individuals in organizations.

In everyday life, as well as in work organizations, we engage in frequent and quite comfortable discourse about the nature of reputations, and wealso see personal reputation used as a basis for important human resources decisions (e.g., promotions, terminations, etc.). Unfortunately, despite its recognized importance, there has been very little theory and research on personal reputation in organizations published in the organizational sciences. The present paper attempts to address this need by proposing a conceptualization of personal reputation in organizations. In this conceptualization, reputation is presented as an agreed upon, collective perception by others, and involves behavior calibration derived from social comparisons with referent others that results in a deviation from the behavioral norms in one's environment, as observed and evaluated by others. Implications of this conceptualization are discussed, as are directions for future research.

The study of humor has a long tradition in philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and communications. Evidence from these fields suggests that humor can have effects on creativity, cohesiveness, and performance, but organizational scholars have paid it relatively little attention. We hope to “jump-start” such a research program. To do this, we first outline the theoretical rationale underlying the production and appreciation of humor, namely, its motivational, cognitive, and emotional mechanisms. Next, we review the literature linking humor to creativity, cohesiveness, and other performance-relevant outcomes. In particular, we note how this literature is theoretically well-grounded, but that the empirical findings are largely correlational and/or based on qualitative research designs. Finally, we go beyond the current humor literature by developing specific predictions about how culture might interact with humor in organizational contexts. Throughout the paper, we discuss possible research directions and methodological issues relevant to the study of humor in organizations.

For decades, since at least the famous Hawthorne studies, the happy/productive worker thesis has forcefully captured the imagination of management scholars and human resource professionals alike. According to this “Holy Grail” of management research, workers who are happy on the job will have higher job performance, and possibly higher job retention, than those who are less happy. But what is happiness? Most typically, happiness has been measured in the management sciences as jobsatisfaction. This viewpoint is unnecessarily limiting. Building upon alittle remembered body of research from the 1920s, we suggest a twofold, expanded view of this thesis. First, we suggest the consideration of worker happiness as psychological well-being (PWB). Second, incorporating Fredrickson's (1998, 2001) broaden-and-build model ofpositive emotions as the theoretical base, we suggest that the job satisfaction to job performance and job satisfaction to employee retentionrelationships may be better explained by controlling for the moderating effect of PWB. Future research directions for human resource professionals are introduced.

In this article, we focus on alternative dispute resolution procedures, in particular third party procedures. We describe eight different procedures and provide examples of how these procedures are used in different cultural contexts. We then evaluate the procedures in terms of how they impact four key criteria that have been noted in the literature related to negotiation: process criteria, settlement criteria, issue-related criteria, and relationship criteria. We subsequently explore the potential impact of culture on evaluations of these criteria. We finish with a discussion of future directions for research and practice, emphasizing that procedural recommendations should be made carefully when the criteria for effectiveness and applicability are derived from US-centric research. In other words, there is not “one best choice” for third party procedures universal to the myriad cultures on our planet.

Fred R. Blass is an Assistant in Management at Florida State University. He received a Ph.D. in Management from Florida State University, and before joining the faculty at Florida State, served on the Department of Management faculty at the United States Air Force Academy. Blass has research interests in power and influence in organizations and organizational socialization. He has published his research in such journals as Human Resource Management and The Leadership Quarterly. Also, he has presented his research at both national and regional professional conferences.