Engineering remains one of the most highly and persistently sex segregated occupations in the United States. Though extant literature submits that women’s increased access to managerial positions in male-dominated occupations should represent an important strategy for addressing sex segregation, my analysis of 61 interviews with industry engineers suggests that increasing women’s disproportionate representation in managerial roles in engineering may promote the very sex segregation it is attempting to mitigate. The analysis highlights how organizations reinforce female engineers’ movement into managerial roles and foster a form of intraoccupational sex segregation with unintended consequences for women. These consequences include fostering mixed identification with engineering, reinforcing stereotypes about women’s suitability for technical work, and increasing work–life balance tensions. The findings further suggest that an inverted role hierarchy in engineering may explain these gendered career patterns and their unintended consequences. By inverted role hierarchy I mean the valuing of technical over managerial roles. Implications for the literatures on occupational sex segregation, women’s representation in managerial roles, and the experience of women in male-dominated occupations are discussed. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1132 .
Despite growing research on the perceived desirability and positivity of callings, there is intriguing evidence that while many experience personal benefits associated with viewing their work as a calling, others may experience detrimental effects. This discrepancy highlights the need to better understand when pursuing a calling might be positive or negative for individuals and to identify potential conditions under which such positive or negative outcomes may occur. In this article, the authors take a relational perspective on what they refer to as “healthy” versus “unhealthy” pursuit of callings, highlighting the conditions under which callings might be beneficial versus problematic for one’s personal relationships, and relationships with coworkers and one’s employing organization. Furthermore, our theoretical framework incorporates an identity perspective emphasizing work-identity flexibility as a critical factor that explains when and why pursuing one’s callings might be associated with positive and enriching relationships for some, but negative and depleting relationships for others.
There has been growing interest in both management and marketing regarding how individuals become identified with organizations and how organizations attempt to manage these identifications. The authors present a framework built on explicit and implicit points of convergence in research conducted in both these disciplines. In their review of the management and marketing literatures, the authors suggest three fundamental mechanisms, or “bases,” for managing organizational identification: relational, behavioral, and symbolic. Furthermore, the authors argue that how an individual is affiliated with an organization will impact the relative influence of these identification management bases. The authors conclude by suggesting how management and marketing scholars can create a theoretical space for future interdisciplinary work. Such a change would involve moving away from “employees” versus “customers” as a prime division between the fields and moving toward a more fine-grained approach that emphasizes the unique characteristics of individual-organizational relationships.
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