Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Corporate restructuring and the employment relationship
- 3 The up and out in organizations
- 4 In the pursuit of quality and quantity: the competing demands in call centers
- 5 Three's a crowd? Understanding triadic employment relationships
- 6 The changed world of large law firms and their lawyers: an opportune context for organizational researchers
- 7 The upside of bureaucracy: unintended benefits for professional careers
- Index
- References
3 - The up and out in organizations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
By
Edited by
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Corporate restructuring and the employment relationship
- 3 The up and out in organizations
- 4 In the pursuit of quality and quantity: the competing demands in call centers
- 5 Three's a crowd? Understanding triadic employment relationships
- 6 The changed world of large law firms and their lawyers: an opportune context for organizational researchers
- 7 The upside of bureaucracy: unintended benefits for professional careers
- Index
- References
Summary
Introduction
Social scientists have conducted numerous wage studies in the past few decades, yet promotions and employment separations in organizations remain relatively unexplored areas. In the past decade, as organizations flatten their organizational hierarchies, restructure, merge, and divest to ensure agility, efficiency, and effectiveness, promotions have become less common, whereas separations have become more commonplace. Understanding who gets promoted and exploring the nature of separation have important implications for both the efficiency of organizations and the compensation levels of workers. Using administrative data from between 1996 and 2000 from a large North American high-tech organization with annual employment ranging from 19,000 to 26,000 employees, this chapter explores the trends, the correlates, and the consequences of these two phenomena: promotions, the “up” side of the story, and separations, the “out” side of the story. In particular, the role of race and gender, as well as other factors, in promotions and separations will be explored.
The “up” side of the story
Promotions have a significant positive impact on wage levels: the rate of wage gain is often higher for those who have been promoted than it is for those who have not (Baker, Gibbs, and Holmstrom, 1994a, 1994b; McCue, 1996; Bognanno, 2001). An employee's rank in an organizational hierarchy not only determines the level of financial rewards but also confers other non-pecuniary benefits, such as more autonomy and more opportunities for personal development. It has also been shown that promotions lead to higher levels of job satisfaction (Francesconi, 2001).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Employment RelationshipsNew Models of White-Collar Work, pp. 65 - 111Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
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