It's Only Abusive If I Care

Drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory, we propose that abusive supervision increases stress responses in targets, which, in turn, diminishes their ability to perform extra- and in-role work behaviors. However, based on COR theory, we argue that followers who are driven by low rather than high organizational concern motives place less value on their work and the social context in which technical activities occur. As such, feeling low organizational concern should make people less susceptible to abusive supervision rather than more so. Thus, organizational concern was proposed to moderate the abuse–stress relationship. Across two multisource studies, we found support for most of our hypotheses. Abusive supervision negatively affected organizational citizenship behaviors via increased stress, and low organizational concern was found to attenuate the detrimental effects of abusive supervision. Implications for leadership literature and future research are discussed.

Organizational commitment and work-related implementation of enterprise social networks (ESNs): the mediating roles of employees' organizational concern and prosocial values

PurposeThis study, based on the cognitive dissonance and commitment theories, aims to show that employees with high organizational commitment take more advantage of enterprise social networks (ESNs) due to work-related motivations. Furthermore, this study used the tricomponent attitude model to show that the employees' organizational concern and prosocial values mediate the impact of the organizational commitment on the work-related use of an ESN.Design/methodology/approachIn all, 361 employees from seven Iranian companies using different ESN software packages were surveyed. The validity of the hypotheses was evaluated using partial least square–structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).FindingsThe results of this study confirm that the employees' organizational commitment has a positive impact on their work-related use of the relevant ESN directly and through the mediating roles of their organizational concern and prosocial values.Originality/valuePrevious studies have carefully addressed the role of organizational commitment in the implementation of conventional information systems. However, this is among the few studies addressing the role of commitment in the work-related implementation of ESNs. The results of this study shed light on how employees with a high level of commitment toward the organizations for which they work take advantage of ESNs due to a work-related motivation for the accomplishment of their duties, for bringing benefits into the organization and for helping their coworkers.

Experience Matters

Information systems security is a major organizational concern. This study examines the role of vicarious experience on an individual's behavioral intent to perform a secure recommended response. The protection motivation theory model is expanded to include vicarious experience, which was examined through the separate constructs of vicarious threat experience and vicarious response experience. This study closes a gap in the literature by including vicarious experience in the PMT model and confirming its role as a significant direct influence on the PMT threat and coping constructs, and thus on the PMT model's ability to explain the variance of an individual's intent to perform secure behaviors. Additionally, vicarious experience measures were multi-item reflective scales rather than the single item measures that are more typically used to measure experience. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Organizational Citizenship Behavior Motives and Thriving at Work: The Mediating Role of Citizenship Fatigue

Employees can affect the sustainability of organizations, yet the different effects of employee organizational citizenship behavior motives on employee thriving at work, as elements of organization sustainability, are not clear. Based on self-determination theory and conservation of resource theory, this study examined whether organizational concern motives and impression management motives behind employees’ organizational citizenship behaviors are differently associated with their citizenship fatigue and their subsequent thriving at work, and whether task performance moderates these relationships. Results from a multi-wave and multisource study using a sample of 349 employees show that organizational concern motives had a positive indirect effect on thriving at work through reducing employees’ citizenship fatigue, while impression management motives will undermine thriving at work through inducing citizenship fatigue. This study further found that task performance strengthened the positive relationship between impression management motives and citizenship fatigue. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Disappearing ‘formal organization’: How organization studies dissolved its ‘core object’, and what follows from this

This article addresses itself to accounting for how and why the situation has arisen whereby much, though by no means all, of what self-identifies as organizational analysis – whether in sociology or organization studies – isn’t actually organizational, and to exploring what follows from this. The article argues that the specificity of ‘organizational analysis’ – which requires its proponents to think (and, indeed, act) ‘organizationally’ – has been returned to the amorphous world of ‘social explanation’. The article therefore attempts to highlight the manner in which the tropes of social explanation deployed within contemporary sociology and organization studies reduce ‘formal organization’ to the status of a social container. In making this case, the article commends an alternative stance towards organization that precisely eschews ‘talking about organizations’ epiphenomenally. It does so by seeking to highlight key aspects of the practical disposition towards organization adopted by classic organization theories and other related approaches throughout the history of organization analysis. In approaching organizational matters in this way, it also attempts to upend the reflex accusation of naivety, rationalism and contemporary irrelevance directed towards the ‘historical artefacts’ of organizational theorizing from the present, and indeed to suggest how classical preoccupations can be applied to pressing matters of contemporary organizational concern without any need to ‘update’ them.

Challenges and Measures for Information Security Practices: A Literature Review on Systemic and Idiosyncratic Aspects

Information security is becoming a key organizational concern in light of increasingly demanding regulations, customers’ apprehension, and, significant operational risks. The information security practices of employees are pivotal for preventing, detecting, and responding to security incidents. This paper is synthesizing the insights from prior research based on a systematic literature review that explores challenges related to information security practices in organizations and the ways these challenges are managed to avoid security breaches. Four general challenges are identified: (1) security rules and procedures, (2) individual and personal risks, (3) culture and security awareness, and (4) organizational and power relations. To manage these challenges, three types of measures are prominent: measures related to training and awareness, measures related to organizational support, measures related to rewards and penalties. These measures aim to enhance systemic capabilities and to adapt security mechanisms to the idiosyncratic characteristics of organizations.