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Published By SAGE Publications

0001-8392, 1930-3815

2021 ◽  
pp. 000183922110676
Author(s):  
Katherine M. Keyes ◽  
Jeffrey Shaman

In their 2022 paper, Kensbock, Alkærsig, and Lomberg provide compelling evidence of an increased risk in treated depressive, anxiety, and stress-related disorders within workplaces, associated with the introduction of new hires who either have treated disorders themselves or are hired from workplaces with an increased prevalence of treated disorders. The authors interpret these findings as evidence of a “contagion” effect for psychiatric disorders, illustrative of workplace spread of disorder that may affect the mental health of employees. In this commentary, we contextualize these findings through psychiatric epidemiology. The evidence provided by Kensbock and colleagues is consistent with a long history of evidence in psychiatric and social epidemiology illustrating that many health outcomes are affected by those in our social networks and that psychiatric disorders, in particular, evidence spatial and temporal autocorrelation as well as social network spread that can be best conceptualized through well-known infectious disease principles. Thus, there is a large empirical literature that supports the findings of Kensbock, Alkærsig, and Lomberg. That said, the findings should not be overinterpreted; they fit some patterns of previous literature and known facts about psychiatric disorders, but not all. They also must be appropriately situated within the literature on workplace determinants of mental well-being more generally and, in particular, the global movements to situate the rights of workers with mental illness for employment protections and safe working conditions.


2021 ◽  
pp. 000183922110582
Author(s):  
Kate Odziemkowska

Collaborations between organizations from different sectors, such as those between firms and nonprofits or governments, can offer effective solutions to complex societal problems like climate change. But complications arise because organizations operating in different sectors rely on the approval of different audiences, who may not view these relationships positively, for resources and survival. I show how concerns about audience approval impede cross-sector collaborations forming between firms and social movement organizations (SMOs) despite their potential societal benefits. Firms wanting to signal their efforts in support of a movement’s cause may be eager to form collaborations with SMOs. But when SMOs’ supporters and/or peers define their identity in opposition to firms—when they are oppositional audiences—collaborations do not form. I argue and find that SMOs who cooperate, and don’t compete, with oppositional peers can better navigate the constraint of oppositional audiences. Firms, in contrast, aggravate the constraint of oppositional audiences. Firms’ inclination to seek collaborations to repair their reputations with their own audiences after being contentiously targeted by a movement compounds the challenge to SMOs of partnering with the enemies of their friends. My arguments on countervailing audience effects stifling collaborations are corroborated in 25 years of data on interactions between SMOs in multiple environmental movements and Fortune 500 firms.


2021 ◽  
pp. 000183922110595
Author(s):  
Arvind Karunakaran

Status–authority asymmetry in the workplace emerges when lower-status professionals are ascribed with the functional authority to oversee higher-status professionals and elicit compliance from them on specific processes or tasks. Eliciting such compliance is ridden with challenges. How and when can lower-status professionals with functional authority elicit compliance from higher-status professionals? To examine this question, I conducted a 24-month ethnography of 911 emergency coordination to understand how 911 dispatchers (lower-status professionals with functional authority) can elicit compliance from police officers (higher-status professionals). I identify a set of relational styles—entailing interactional practices and communication media—enacted by the dispatchers. My findings suggest that dispatchers whose relational styles involved customizing the workflow via private communications with police officers or privately escalating cases of officers’ noncompliance to supervisors did not elicit greater compliance. In contrast, dispatchers who did elicit compliance used a peer publicizing relational style: they shared news of the noncompliant behavior—generally in a bantering, humorous manner—with an officer’s immediate peers using a communication medium that all officers in the police unit could hear. Publicizing noncompliant behavior among the immediate peers triggered the officer to self-discipline, as that noncompliant officer’s trustworthiness was on the line in front of the peer group. More generally, through enrolling an alter’s peers in the compliance process, the lower-status professionals with functional authority could generate second-degree influence and elicit compliance from the higher-status professionals.


2021 ◽  
pp. 000183922110584
Author(s):  
Christopher G. Myers

Learning vicariously from the experiences of others at work, such as those working on different teams or projects, has long been recognized as a driver of collective performance in organizations. Yet as work becomes more ambiguous and less observable in knowledge-intensive organizations, previously identified vicarious learning strategies, including direct observation and formal knowledge transfer, become less feasible. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with flight nurse crews in an air medical transport program, I inductively build a model of how storytelling can serve as a valuable tool for vicarious learning. I explore a multistage process of triggering, telling, and transforming stories as a means by which flight nurses convert the raw experience of other crews’ patient transports into prospective knowledge and expanded repertoires of responses for potential future challenges. Further, I highlight how this storytelling process is situated within the transport program’s broader structures and practices, which serve to enable flight nurses’ storytelling and to scale the lessons of their stories throughout the entire program. I discuss the implications of these insights for the study of storytelling as a learning tool in organizations, as well as for revamping the field’s understanding of vicarious learning in knowledge-intensive work settings.


2021 ◽  
pp. 000183922110551
Author(s):  
Yonghoon G. Lee ◽  
Martin Gargiulo

People in the early stages of their careers often face a trade-off between cultivating a closed network that helps them secure the resources they need to survive or developing an open network that can help them succeed. Actors who overcome this trade-off transition from a closed network to an open network; those who fail to do so can be caught in a survival trap that jeopardizes their chances of having a successful career. We identify the factors that enable and constrain network transitions and test our theory on a sample of Korean pop (K-pop) freelance songwriters before they have attained their first commercial hit. These songwriters initially rely on a closed network of collaborators and transition toward an open network by working with fellow songwriters who are not connected to those collaborators. This network transition occurs faster among songwriters who eventually attain their first hit than among those who remain unsuccessful. Songwriters are more likely to collaborate with new distant colleagues when they have a reference group of commercially successful peers and when they have created stylistically similar songs in the past that have failed to become hits. However, most of their new distant colleagues also lack a hit, revealing a status barrier that constrains the network transition of early-career songwriters.


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