“Many books and articles claim that younger and older workers see their jobs differently and want different things,” said 91��ɫ faculty member Paul Fairlie, a behavioural scientist, consultant and the study’s researcher. “But some of that is based on opinion and hearsay. More rigorous research is needed.”

Paul Fairlie 

The study found that age and generations had only a zero to three per cent effect how people see their work and what they desire from the workplace. Positive working conditions were far more responsible for people’s satisfaction, commitment, and retention. 

Younger and older workers surveyed in the study reported similar working conditions, satisfaction, commitment, stay intentions, burnout, engagement and discretionary effort. All workers were motivated by similar work characteristics, with meaningful work topping the list. 

“A 10 per cent increase in meaningful work was linked to seven per cent higher satisfaction, commitment, stay intentions and lower burnout,” said Fairlie. “It was almost eight per cent for higher engagement.” 

Meaningful work was measured as self-actualizing work (work that enables an employee to realize their full potential, values and life goals), social impact (having a positive impact on people and things through work), feelings of personal accomplishment and believing that their highest career goals can be achieved within their current organization. 

The study recommends that employers provide the same positive working conditions to all employees, regardless of age, especially meaningful work, which may have the most widespread, pervasive and positive impacts. The study also suggests that meaningful work can often be provided through communication strategies rather than re-tooling the organization. 

The findings, which were statistically significant and replicated in two other studies, will be published later this year in an academic volume on aging, work and society.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

The post Study finds all generations want meaningful work appeared first on Research & Innovation.

Doorey says the main reason he started Doorey's Workplace Law Blog was to better connect with his students. “I wanted to make my courses in workplace law and industrial relations interesting and ‘real’ for the students. By linking course theory and readings to real cases and current news events, I can build student interest in the course in ways a textbook never can.”

Right: David Doorey

But then he thought he could do that even better through an app. “The iTunes app is the next step,” he says. “Most students today have smartphones, and this app means I can now communicate with students daily, wherever they are. They are learning in fun new ways that fit with their lifestyles.”

His central audience has always been students studying in his subject areas at 91��ɫ and at other institutions. His blog looks at all aspects of employment law and highlights some of the more interesting and current cases, such as Fraser vs. Ontario: Constitutional Right to Collective Bargaining Survives, a discussion on whether Target Canada will buy unionized Zellers, and how the City of Toronto Committee voted to fire 300 unionized garbage collectors. Doorey's Workplace Law Blog won a CLawBies – Canadian Law Blog Award – in 2008 and again in 2009, and was a CLawBies finalist in 2010.

“I'm trying to stimulate their critical thinking in the field and make them want to learn more,” says Doorey. “The blog has attracted a much wider audience than just students, including legal and human resources practitioners and other academics, and I anticipate that the app will allow me to connect to more of these busy professionals.”

The blog, and now the app, will help interested students and professionals keep up with what's going on in new case law and in the academic world “as they commute to
work or wait in line to order coffee.” Doorey sees the app as a way to provide a service to the professional community in his field by summarizing relevant news. “It connects me to a whole new audience that is interested in the subject matter of my blog, but whose lives are too hectic to read it,” he says. “With the app, they just tap an icon, and they can quickly see what's going in the field.”

Doorey points out, however, that writing blogs and creating apps is not for everyone. “They are a lot of work to keep up, and you need to be really committed to it over the long haul for it to work. My motivation is my students, who turn over every few months. The new students give me the energy to keep going, since they respond very favourably, and since the blog and app are always introducing new stories and issues to the classroom, it never gets boring for me or the students.”

He is grateful for the help he received from Oksana Silkina and Alex Neumann in 91��ɫ's e-Services office in getting his app created and submitted to Apple for its approval to be published.

For more information, visit Doorey’s Workplace Law Blog or . It is compatible with the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

The post Law Professor David Doorey builds app to extend workplace blog's digital reach appeared first on Research & Innovation.

According to professor of organizational behaviour in the School of Administrative Studies and the School of Human Resource Management at 91��ɫ [Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies], telework, or telecommuting, is increasing dramatically in many countries as organizations seek to reduce costs and individuals look to be more flexible in their working arrangements.

However, while there are many benefits ranging from greater flexibility for employees and improved performance for employers, Richardson also pointed out several concerns associated with telework, including isolation, blurring of boundaries between home and work, and loss of control over employees.

While telework isn't a new phenomenon, thanks to the rapid rise of computer networking, it's one trend that's being watched closely, said , professor in the School of Human Resource Management at 91��ɫ. "And the trend is here to stay," she said, adding there's a drive to get more out of workers by not having them commute to work.

"If you look at the best places to work on the Fortune 100 list, most of them offer some kind of flexibility," Ezzedeen said. "It's a reflection of the changing nature of our social values and norms. It challenges our notion of what does it take to produce good work? Is this the end of the job as we know it?"

Best Buy may be lauded for its revolutionary "results-only work environment", which measures performance on output instead of hours spent at the office, but managing a virtual team comes with numerous implications and challenges, including dealing with conflict, managing performance and issues of measurement, Ezzedeen said.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

The post Professors Richardson and Ezzedeen on rise of telework appeared first on Research & Innovation.

, a professor in 91��ɫ’s School of Human Resource Management, is the lead researcher for a -funded study which involved interviewing 45 qualified immigrants in Canada, Spain and France. The study looked at the barriers to career development for qualified immigrants in each country, how they coped with them and whether they were able to overcome them.

“These are people who consciously made this decision to move to a new country and had the education and resources to do so,” says Zikic. “It’s a highly skilled group.”

Left: Jelena Zikic

The study is one of three in Zikic’s research project “Investigating Labour Market Experiences of Immigrant Professionals (IPs) in Canada, the Role of Personal and Organizational Barriers to Career Success in the Host Country”. An article based on the study, “Crossing National Boundaries: A Typology of Qualified Immigrants’ Career Orientations”, co-authored by Zikic, Jaime Bonache of the ESADE Business School in Spain and Jean-Luc Cerdin of the ESSEC Business School in France, has been published in the July issue of the .

In terms of experience in dealing with immigrants, Canada is considered the "country of immigrants", Spain is just beginning to get an influx of immigrants, and France falls somewhere in between, says Zikic. Despite the differences, what researchers found was that immigrants in each country faced similar significant barriers to the labour market, such as a lack of recognition for their foreign career training and experience, learning how to navigate the labour expectations of a new country, and difficulty creating new social networks and tapping into local resources to assist in finding a job.

“It is a very challenging journey that these people take. Getting work doesn’t happen overnight,” says Zikic. “A lot of these immigrants had great careers in their own country. They had to give up quite a bit. Many of them had a lot of status, friends, a network, and it all disappeared when they entered the host country.”

The study sought to understand the underlying causes of underemployment for qualified immigrants from professional backgrounds and how they managed physical and psychological mobility.

What they found was the subjective experiences of qualified immigrants were interdependent with the social, economic and cultural realities, such as the structure of local labour markets and the need to retrain. Older immigrants were often more resistant to retraining and re-education, believing they were too old. As a result, they were more disappointed with the experience and had less success in finding work in their field.

Those who embraced the new challenges, about 24 per cent of those interviewed, were extremely positive about career success in the new country, while the majority – 49 per cent – adapted to their new circumstances and were successful at either adapting their careers or crafting new ones, although many were in survival jobs. The adaptive group understood the reality of having to retrain or get more education and was prepared to deal with the circumstances. “They had this sort of future orientation; they knew good things would come eventually,” says Zikic. The remaining 27 per cent found the obstacles impossible to overcome as they often had psychological barriers as well, such as age or other constraining circumstances.

Immigrants used six strategies in finding work – maintaining motivation, managing identity, developing new credentials, developing local know-how, building a new social network and understanding career success – but again, how successful they were was dependent on whether they embraced, adapted or resisted the challenges.

“It’s incredible how much talent is searching for the right job and a lot of immigrants just give up,” says Zikic. “We often call this the brain waste; they’re underemployed.”

It is important when devising programs for immigrants to keep in mind the interplay between subjective experiences and the objective realities, she says. Most studies look at one or the other, but little has been done on how each affects the other, and more research is needed.

Zikic also notes that in Canada there is a need for more programs that offer occupation-specific mentoring to immigrants, such as The Mentoring Partnership available through the .

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

The post Professor Jelena Zikic's SSHRC-funded study finds immigrants who embrace challenges more successful appeared first on Research & Innovation.

The annual award, presented last month, is named for Rosabeth Moss Kanter, who has influenced modern research literature on work and family, and is a partnership of the and the , and is sponsored by the Alliance of Work-Life Progress.

Ezzedeen’s article, “The Man Behind the Woman: A Qualitative Study of the Spousal Support Received and Valued by Executive Women”, appeared in the Journal of Family Issues and was based on a study she co-authored that found female executives were backed by emotionally supportive husbands more often than previous research would suggest (see YFile, Aug. 13, 2008).

A professor in the School of Human Resource Management in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, Ezzedeen interviewed 20 senior and executive-level women in the United States. The study, which began at the University of Penn State Harrisburg, looked at spousal behaviours that impacted the women’s ability to juggle the demands of career and family life.

Out of the 20 best articles of 2009, four were selected as finalists for the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award, and from those, only one as the winner – a University of California, Irvine sociology professor’s article about career prioritizing and dual-earning couples.

Ezzedeen’s research interests focus on work-life balance and the advancement of women in organizations. She is a recipient of the George Washington University 2002-2003 Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award and the Harrisburg Chapter of Beta Gamma Sigma's 2006 Professor of the Year Award.

The purpose of the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award is to raise awareness of excellent work-family research, foster debate about quality research standards and identify the best of the best for future research.

For more information about the award, visit the Web site.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

The post Professor Souha Ezzedeen's study on men behind successful women recognized as one of 2009's 20 best on work-family research appeared first on Research & Innovation.