Business publications and the popular press have stressed the importance of creating conditions for meaningful employee expression in work roles, also known as engagement. Few empirical studies, however, have examined how individual or situational factors relate to engagement. Consequently, this study examines the interplay between employee age, perceived coworker age composition, and satisfaction with older (older than 55) and younger (younger than 40) coworkers on engagement using a sample of 901 individuals employed in the United Kingdom. Results indicated that satisfaction with one's coworkers related significantly to engagement. Moreover, perceived age similarity was associated with higher levels of engagement among older workers when they were highly satisfied with their coworkers over 55 and lower levels of engagement when they were not.Keywords: age, diversity, engagement, similarity, satisfaction with coworkers Two seemingly unrelated workplace trends could have a considerable conjunctive impact on management. First, the global workforce is aging. In the United States, there are 18.4 million workers age 55 or older, a figure representing 13% of the workforce. By 2015, this number is projected to grow to 31.9 million, or approximately one in every five employees (U.S. General Accounting Office, 2001). Similarly, 41% of the Canadian working population is expected to be between the ages of 45 and 64 by the year 2021 (cf. Lende, 2005). In the United Kingdom, 30% of workers are over 50 (Dixon, 2003). Across the European Union as a whole, the proportion of workers over 50 is expected to rise nearly 25% over the next 15 years ("Turning boomers into boomerangs," 2006).Simultaneously, the challenge of engaging employees is mounting (Fleming, Coffman, & Harter, 2005;May, Gilson, & Harter, 2004;Pech & Slade, 2006). Kahn (1990) initially defined engagement as "the harnessing of organization members' selves to their work roles" (p. 694). Despite its seeming conceptual overlap with existing constructs such as organizational commitment and job involvement, evidence suggests that engagement is a distinct construct (Hallberg & Schaufeli, 2006). According to a survey of 656 chief executive officers hailing from countries around the world, engaging employees is the fourth most important management challenge, behind creating customer loyalty, managing mergers and alliances, and reducing costs (Wah, 1999). Further illustrating the magnitude of this challenge, the Gallup Organization recently found that nearly 20% of U.S. employees were disengaged and an additional 54% were effectively neutral about their work (see Fleming et al., 2005). The authors estimated disengaged employees to cost U.S. organizations more than $300 billion per year in lost productivity. Furthermore, research by Gallup and Towers Perrin (Momal, 2003;Seijts & Crim, 2006) suggests that employee disengagement is equally problematic in other countries as well. In fact, the latter found that only 14% of more than 85,000 employees across 16 countries were eng...

Because research is needed to identify the conditions that facilitate or impede the prevalence of perceived workplace discrimination, the authors examined the effects of demographics and demographic similarity on the prevalence of sex- and race/ethnicity-based perceived workplace discrimination. Results from a national survey of 763 full-time, United States employees show perceived sex-based discrimination at work was more prevalent among female than male employees, and perceived race-based discrimination at work was more prevalent among Black and Hispanic than White employees. Additionally, perceived racial/ethnic discrimination was less prevalent among those with same-race/ethnicity supervisors. The effect of employee-coworker sex similarity on perceived sex discrimination was significant only for women, and the effects of supervisor-subordinate racial similarity on the prevalence of perceived racial discrimination varied between Black and White respondents, depending on employee-residential-community racial similarity.

This paper examines Computer-based Performance Monitoring (CBPM) in two UK financial services organizations. In doing so, it examines and critiques the existing manner in which this area has been theorized by both traditional and critical organization theorists. It then offers an alternative analysis of CBPM in terms of power, control and resistance, which involves the close interrogation of subject positioning within the speech of those who are subject to and manage this technology. By examining subject positions in interpretive repertoires, the paper demonstrates how power, control and resistance are constituted at an individual level and are specifically linked to the use (and abuse) of CBPM technology. It then further considers the nature and origins of the interpretive repertoires in relation to their organizational contexts, describing the differential circulation of disciplinary power in each. CBPM is thus understood as a politically neutral technology of power, which, when mobilized by management and discursively interwoven into practice becomes a potent force within local organizational sites. The central message of this paper is that it is possible to reveal the intertwining of individual and institutional discourses purely by examining technologies, practices and subjectivities in local organizational sites.

Although prior evidence has demonstrated racial differences in employee absenteeism, no existing research explains this phenomenon. The present study examined the roles of 2 diversity cues related to workplace support—perceived organizational value of diversity and supervisor–subordinate racial/ethnic similarity—in explicating this demographic difference among 659 Black, White, and Hispanic employees of U.S. companies. Blacks reported significantly more absences than their White counterparts, but this difference was significantly more pronounced when employees believed their organizations placed little value on diversity. Moreover, in a form of expectancy violation, the Black–White difference was significant only when employees had racially similar supervisors (and thus would expect their companies to value diversity) and perceived that the organization placed little value on diversity.

This paper reports on the results of an in-depth study of how a top management team (TMT) puts strategy into practice in a UK university. A study of the top team in Warwick University was conducted to analyse how strategy was formulated and implemented. The results suggest that a combination of two broad theoretical lenses provides useful analytical insight. These are strategy as practice and strategy as process. The main elements of this university's strategy result from an interplay of localized routines and patterns of action within an organizational context, which both produces and is a product of such actions. The TMT itself was found to be clearly identifiable and stable in composition. The team exhibited identifiable patterns of strategic thinking and acting. However, the role of organizational structure was also found to be a key influence on the actions and processes of the TMT with strong central control tendencies in the team being counterbalanced by devolved operational control to individual departments. The data also reveal inter-relationships between organizational structures and the TMT in four key areas: direction-setting, monitoring and control, the allocation of resources, and processes of interaction. The overall conclusion is that to understand how strategy is practised, analysis needs to focus on how patterns of action are associated with the characteristics of both the team and the wider organization. The nature and characteristics of these patterns can be related to how strategy is put into practice. This paper examines how a top team in a UK university formulates and implements strategy. From the perspective of the discipline of strategic management, such an investigation involves analysing both the practice and the process of strategy. The practice of strategy deals with 'how managers act and interact in the whole strategy-making process' (Whittington, 1996, p. 732). Whittington refers to strategy as