Illusions of Opportunity : : Employee Expectations and Workplace Inequality / / Sonia M. Ospina.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Ospina, Sonia M.,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©1996
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (288 p.) :; 8 charts/graphs, 26 tables

Employees expect organizations to offer an equitable distribution of rewards in promotion, compensation, and job challenge to those who work hard. According to Sonia Ospina, the realities of the workplace confound that expectation, since organizational practices oflabelling and ranking individuals create inequality. For this reason, Ospina suggests that an appreciation of how employees experience and resolve the contradiction between expectation and reality is prerequisite to understanding work attitudes in contemporary organizations.Illusions of Opportunity documents the pervasiveness of this contradiction by focusing on three groups of workers within a large public organization in a major city. Exploring individual and collective attempts to make sense of reward distribution, Ospina found that each group endorsed a different definition of merit. The definitions represented an attempt on the part of each group to justify the claims of its own members to being organizational citizen who deserved recognition.Drawing on the research traditions of organizational stratification, the social psychology of justice, and organizational behavior, Ospina operates within a conceptual framework that links objective opportunity structures to employees' subjective perceptions of justice. Through this merger of the structural and the subjective, she provides new insights into the social basis of work attitudes.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Tables and Figures -- Preface -- PART I. THE PROBLEM: A PERVASIVE GAP -- 1. Introduction: The Promise of Opportunity and the Experience of Inequality -- 2. Exploring the Nature and Impact of the Gap -- 3. The Organizational Setting -- Part II. REALITIES: DOCUMENTING PATTERNS OF OPPORTUNITY -- 4. Processes: Moving Up, Getting Paid, and Learning from Work -- 5. Outcomes and Outputs: The Consequences of Patterned Opportunity -- 6. Power and the Distribution of Rewards -- PART III. PERCEPTIONS: EXPERIENCING WORKPLACE INEQUALITY -- 7. Perceptions of Opportunity (1): Realities and Myths -- 8. Perceptions of Opportunity (2): Conflicting Definitions of Merit and the Meaning of Work -- 9. The Power of Comparisons: Perceptions of Justice and the Organizational Climate -- PART IV: REACTIONS: THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF WORK ATTITUDES -- 10. Job Satisfaction -- 11. Relative Deprivation, Self-Evaluation, and Work Attitudes -- 12. Conclusions: Reactions to Stratification in the Workplace -- Appendix: Methodological Issues -- Notes -- References -- Subject Index