Seminar – The stickiness of work arrangements: A longitudinal study of workers in standard and nonstandard jobs

Professor Elizabeth George, University of Auckland

We use a dynamic, temporal lens to examine how the work arrangements on a given job affect the likelihood of individuals being in different work arrangements in subsequent jobs, and how the accumulation of these experiences predicts markers of career success such as salary and satisfaction. We argue that nonstandard work arrangements vary in their “stickiness.” Transactional arrangements are more “sticky” than developmental arrangements in that movement from nonstandard to standard work is more difficult in the former than the latter. We also expected that they become less sticky when individuals acquire human and social capital from their current and past jobs. A ten-year national longitudinal survey of 10,904 French school-leavers in 1998 supported our hypotheses. We found that over time, being in a transactional nonstandard arrangement in a given job positively predicted the likelihood of an individual being in the same arrangement in the next job. Further, this “sticky” relationship was stronger when the individual acquired firm-specific training from a given job but weakened when the individual had more previous jobs. Experience in developmental nonstandard work generally followed an opposite pattern. Finally, individuals “stuck” in transactional, or who spent more total time in developmental, nonstandard work reported lower salary and career satisfaction at the end of the ten years.

Speaker bio

Elizabeth George (PhD, University of Texas at Austin) is a Professor of Management at the University of Auckland. She has an active research interest in nonstandard work arrangements and diversity in the workplace. Her work has been published in major international academic journals such as Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organization Science, and the Academy of Management Annals. In addition, her research has been used by the International Labor Organization and the US Society for Human Resource Management to help inform public policy and management practice. She served on the Board of Governors and the executive committee of the Managerial and Organizational Cognition and the Organizational Behavior Divisions of the Academy of Management. She is co-editor-in-chief the Academy of Management Annals. She has previously been co-editor in chief of Organizational Psychology Review and associate editor on the Academy of Management Annals, Australian Journal of Management, and Organization Studies. She serves on the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, and Academy of Management Discoveries. She has held academic positions at universities in Asia, Australia, and the United States.