Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal

Kaupins, Gundars; Park, Susan

2010 Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal

doi: 10.1007/s10672-010-9149-8

Corporate social networking sites provide employees and employers with considerable opportunity to share information and become friends. Unfortunately, American and international laws do not directly address social networking site usage. The National Labor Relations Act, civil rights laws, and various common law doctrines such as employment at-will and defamation provide the pattern for future social networking laws. Ethical considerations such as productivity, security, goodwill, privacy, accuracy, and discipline fairness also affect future laws. Corporate policies on corporate social networking should balance the employer’s and employee’s interests. Existing laws and ethical issues associated with social networking should impact social networking policies related to configuration, communication, discipline, and evaluation of policies. Corporate social networking policies should be business-related, ensure user notification of monitoring, maintain adequate records, and provide for reliable, consistent, and impersonal evaluation of monitoring effectiveness.

Taylor, Susannah; Burke, Lisa; Wheatley, Kathleen; Sompayrac, Joanie

2010 Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal

doi: 10.1007/s10672-010-9164-9

Issues surrounding gender identity in the workplace are sensitive and complex. One of the more challenging scenarios for employers is facilitating the gender transition process. Effectively communicating with co-workers and clients about the change, modifying personnel documents at the appropriate time, and dealing with more mundane issues such as restroom usage and dress code represent the tip of the iceberg. This paper is a comprehensive review of the literature to help employers aptly manage the transition process, so as to retain employees’ sense of fair treatment and acceptance at work.

Mellor, Steven; Kath, Lisa

2010 Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal

doi: 10.1007/s10672-010-9154-y

We modeled a macro-level relationship at a micro-level level to examine the effectiveness of anti-unionism in psychological terms. We reasoned that fear of reprisal for disclosing union interest in the work environment was an affective response to perceived anti-unionism and hypothesized that fear of reprisal would disrupt the prediction of expression of this interest among nonunion employees (N = 1,010). With financial strain as a predictor of interest and fear of reprisal as a moderator, disruption was found. The results of the model are discussed in terms of the unintended consequences of anti-unionism, which, we argue, can include stress effects among employees and healthcare cost effects among employers.

Hall, Angela; Ferris, Gerald

2010 Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal

doi: 10.1007/s10672-010-9148-9

Accountability is a foundational element of every organization, and it exists at multiple of levels. Every organization, regardless of size, has accountability mechanisms. However, the formal accountability mechanisms adopted by an organization are subject to the interpretations of individual organizational actors. As such, individuals facing ostensibly similar formal organizational accountability systems may feel or experience different levels of accountability. This distinction is critical because it is the perception of reality (i.e., as opposed to reality itself) that drives individual behavior. In this paper, we examined the relationship between accountability and a key organizational outcome—extra-role behaviors. Our results partially support the notion that some level of accountability is essential, but that the relationship between accountability and extra-role behaviors is non linear in nature, assuming a U-shaped form. Implications of these results are discussed.