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Who Gets Headhunted–and Who Gets Ahead? The Impact of Search Firms on Executive Careers.

 

Employing 44 in-depth interviews and examining a large multinational search firm’s detailed records for 2,000 executives working for more than 800 corporations, this research finds that the executive search firm targets large, reputable, high-performing companies to recruit from, and identifies individual target executives on the basis of their job title rather than their accomplishments. Moreover, executives who agree to be considered for a search tend to come from less successful firms and have shorter tenures than those who are targeted but decline to be considered for a search. The search firm studied tends to help individuals move between industries but not across job functions or to new roles. This evidence-based research guides attention to a type of labor market intermediary that plays an increasingly important role in labor markets today, but has remained underexplored by academics.

See on amp.aom.org

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Organizations in the United States alone spend billions on
training each year. These training and development activities
allow organizations to adapt, compete, excel, innovate, produce,
be safe, improve service, and reach goals. Training
has successfully been used to reduce errors in such high-risk
settings as emergency rooms, aviation, and the military. However,
training is also important in more conventional organizations.
These organizations understand that training helps
them to remain competitive by continually educating their
workforce. They understand that investing in their employees
yields greater results. However, training is not as intuitive as it
may seem. There is a science of training that shows that there
is a right way and a wrong way to design, deliver, and implement
a training program.

The research on training clearly shows two things: (a)
training works, and (b) the way training is designed, delivered,
and implemented matters. This article aims to explain
why training is important and how to use training appropriately.
Using the training literature as a guide, we explain what
training is, why it is important, and provide recommendations
for implementing a training program in an organization. In
particular, we argue that training is a systematic process, and
we explain what matters before, during, and after training.
Steps to take at each of these three time periods are listed and
described and are summarized in a checklist for ease of use.

We conclude with a discussion of implications for both
leaders and policymakers and an exploration of issues that
may come up when deciding to implement a training program.
Furthermore, we include key questions that executives and
policymakers should ask about the design, delivery, or implementation of a training program. Finally, we consider future
research that is important in this area, including some still
unanswered questions and room for development in this evolving
field.

See on psi.sagepub.com

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What fires you to get through today’s pile of work? Does it intrinsically attract you, tugging your curiosity? Or do you feel a weight of obligation to do as you’re supposed to? These two motivation sources, enjoying work versus being driven to work, have been well examined in the workaholism literature, with obligation leading to personal outcomes such as anxiety and rising guilt. However, despite popular accounts such as Daniel Pink’s Drive, there is limited research contrasting how these approaches translate to workplace outcomes.

See on bps-occupational-digest.blogspot.gr

See on Scoop.it – personnel psychology

Few disciplines of behavioral science, if any, have gathered more attention in recent years than positive psychology. The volume of happiness research that’s poured from the labs of scientists such as APS Fellow Ed Diener and APS James McKeen Cattell and William James Fellow Martin Seligman has sparked enormous public interest and inspired countless popular books. Some of the appeal is no doubt the power of the work. Researchers have linked positive emotions with all sorts of social, cognitive, and physical health benefits. But some of it may just be that given a choice between feeling happy or not, most of us prefer the former.

 

What the positive psychology movement often fails to describe, however, are the boundaries of these benefits. It’s great to feel good; it’s less great to feel manic or to feel good when you’re supposed to feel fear or anger or to make the pursuit of happiness your only goal in life. In a 2011 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a group of researchers led by June Gruber of Yale University surveyed what they call the “dark side” of happiness: a grey line of literature that exposed the times, ways, and degrees to which the emotion stops being useful and starts being harmful.

See on www.psychologicalscience.org

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About 5 years ago a colleague in the Sociology Department told the following anecdote to one of the authors:

One of my students applied for a job as a summer camp counselor at a Christian camp. She said the interview went well, and it looked like she was going to get the job. Then after a couple of weeks she got a letter from the camp that she was turned down for the job. She said she called them to find out what had happened, at which point they disclosed that they had looked at her Facebook profile and saw pictures of her binge drinking with her friends. This behavior was inconsistent with the kind of values they promoted at the camp, and they decided that she would not be a good fit with the camp.

This anecdote got us thinking. In essence, the camp’s decision was based on a new variety of selection technique, one that we have not really addressed yet as a field. Specifically, the use of the Internet to screen job applicants as a kind of background check was a new approach. Of course, selection experts have been discussing using the Internet for submitting applications and resumés, as well as for selection testing (with its issues of test security, measurement equivalence, etc.), but little or nothing in I-O psychology has been done on the topic of screening job applicants on the basis of what is available on the Internet about them. Some initial work has been done in the measurement of personality from webpages (e.g., Gosling, Ko, Manarelli, & Morris, 2002; Marcus, Machilek, & Schütz, 2006; Vazire & Gosling, 2004), and a number of court cases have appeared in the press on Internet background checks for employment (e.g., Mullins v. Department of Commerce, 2007; Spanierman v. Hughes, 2008; Pietrylo v. Hillstone Restaurant Group, 2009). Practitioner websites and blogs started paying attention to this phenomenon as well (e.g., Fishman & Morris, 2010; Kowske & Southwell, 2006; Rosen, 2010; Juffras, 2010). The Society for Human Resource Management has been keeping track of the use of the Internet for screening candidates since at least 2006 (SHRM, 2008), and the trend has been growing. But 5 years ago in much of the I-O and management academic literature, this intriguing and disturbing new trend was strangely absent.

See on www.siop.org