In his famous social conformity experiments in the 1950's, Asch found 75% of participants conformed to confederates’ incorrect answers at least once, with an overall conformity rate of 32%, revealing that humans are highly likely to conform to group behavior even when that behavior is clearly wrong. The purpose of this study was to determine if the social conformity effect generalized to scenarios involving sexual harassment punishment selections in the workplace. Participants read various workplace sexual harassment scenarios and then witnessed four confederates chose one of three types of punishments (verbal warning, 1‐week suspension, or termination). The confederates stated aloud punishments that were either appropriate (i.e., similar to normative data) or inappropriate (i.e., deviating either too harshly or leniently to normative data). Participants then provided their punishments selection aloud, and confidentially rated their decision confidence. We found an overall conformity rate of 46%, as 82.67% conformed at least once to harsh or lenient punishment selections. Participants who conformed to incorrect punishment selections exhibited lower levels of decision confidence, indicating that conformity may have been due more to social normative influence. The current results imply the social responses of others (i.e., coworkers, supervisors, or HR) can impact responses to sexual harassment. The results imply that social influence may be a significant contributing factor in mislabeling, misreporting, or inappropriately punishing sexual harassment in some organizations.
Organization culture and technology adoption are two of the most critical issues facing organizations in a global society. Increasingly, organizations operate in uncertain, networked, decentralized environments, where adoption and use of information technology has become central to fulfilling organizational missions. To examine the influence of organization culture on individual willingness to adopt technology, this work began by examining theories of behavioral intent, technology adoption, and organization culture and then proposed a model for examining technology adoption in public organizations. The research was based on the responses from an online survey of government, nonprofit, and social service workers from around the United States. The study found that there is a relationship between individual perception of organization culture and individual willingness to adopt technology. Finally, we addressed the limitations of the study design and propose future research.
This study examined the response of an organization's members to subversive leadership and the undermining of the CEO. When the top‐management team is in conflict, there is a lack of leadership from the highest levels within the organization. The lack of leadership is likely to produce extraordinary stress throughout the firm, and become a health‐risk factor for the organization's members, especially the CEO. After exposure to this undermining, we hypothesize that organizational members will lose trust in the leadership and will have lower job satisfaction, as well a higher intent to leave the organization. The findings indicated that individuals, within the subversive‐leadership environment, have lower job satisfaction and higher intent‐to‐leave the organization. Furthermore, the individual's emotional intelligence level does mediate the relationship between trust in the leadership and job satisfaction, but does not mediate intent‐to‐leave.
Organizations implement information technology for a variety of reasons. Most often organizations look to information technology to automate existing processes in search of efficiency. We suggest that strategic management of technology allows for efficiency gains, but also holds the potential to create a healthier work environment. Organizational efficiency and effectiveness need not be mutually exclusive in the strategic management of information technology. Organizations can create a competitive advantage by using information technology to create a positive work environment while also automating existing processes. Our analysis begins with a discussion of positive psychology and strategic management. We discuss strategic uses of technology and present a framework for creating a positive work environment through the strategic use of technology. We conclude by developing areas for future research and present applicable strategies managers can use to increase organizational efficiency as well as empower and enhance the well-being of workers
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