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Frické, Pascale Haworth

University of British Columbia

Extant research on how employees and audiences understand and evaluate occupations encounters multiple challenges, including a narrow focus on group-level processes within occupational communities that often neglects employees’ daily work experiences and a lack of theoretical and methodological diversity. This dissertation comprises three papers that address these challenges and offer novel insights into how employees assess and find meaning in their occupations, as well as how they are affected by others’ evaluations of their occupations. The first paper employs qualitative methods to examine how occupational ideologies shape employees’ understandings of their work. Management scholars traditionally conceptualize occupational ideologies as a positive resource for work meaningfulness. In contrast, this study reveals that occupational ideologies can be untethered from daily work realities, producing a disconnect that threatens, rather than enhances, employees’ experience of work meaningfulness. It further develops a process model to understand how employees negotiate this disconnect, thereby advancing the literatures on occupational ideologies and meaningful work. The subsequent papers pivot to exploring audience evaluations of occupations and their impact on employees. The literature on social evaluations of occupations concentrates on employees’ reactions to situations when a critical mass of outsiders share a negative or positive view of their occupation, and, in particular, whether employees accept or reject these evaluations. This approach overlooks two crucial details. First, employees’ work experiences are more directly shaped by explicit outsider evaluations than by overarching societal attitudes. Second, the impact of these evaluations extends beyond employees’ mere acceptance or rejection of them and their associated identity work. Consequently, the second paper develops two measurement scales for employees to quantify their exposure to enacted negative occupational evaluations (NOE) and positive occupational evaluations (POE), creating a basis for novel discussions to arise about the effects of these explicit evaluations on employees. The third paper investigates the effects of NOE and POE on employees through a multi-wave field survey with a Canadian police union. By exploring the interplay between social anxiety with outsiders and employees’ acceptance and rejection of occupational evaluations as (in)appropriate, this paper clarifies the processes through which NOE and POE influence important employee behaviors.

Text

2024-04-11

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87762

Business Administration - Organizational Behaviour and Human Resources

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/