Applying the Theory of Work Adjustment to Latino Immigrant Workers: An Exploratory Study

Transnational sensemaking narratives of highly skilled Canadian immigrants' career change

Purpose

The authors answer calls for research on the experiences of international professionals' career transitions by investigating how highly skilled immigrants make sense of their career changes in the host country's labor market.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors report on a qualitative, inductive and elaborative study, drawing on sensemaking theories and career transitions literature and nine semi-structured reflective interviews with highly skilled Canadian immigrants.

Findings

The authors identified four career change narratives: mourning the past, accepting the present, recreating the past and starting fresh. These narratives are made sense of in a transnational context: participants contended with tensions between past, present and future careers and between relevant home and host country factors affecting their career decisions. Participants who were mourning the past or recreating the past identified more strongly with their home country professions and struggled to find resources in Canada. In accepting the present and starting fresh, participants leveraged host country networks to find career opportunities and establish themselves and their families in the new environment.

Originality/value

A transnational ontology emphasizes that immigrants' lives are multifaceted and span multiple national contexts. The authors highlight how the tensions between the home and host country career contexts shape immigrants' sensemaking narratives of their international career change. The authors encourage scholars and practitioners to take a transnational contextual approach (spatial and temporal) to guide immigrants' career transitions and integration into the new social environment.

Workplace Sexual Harassment and Vulnerabilities among Low-Wage Hispanic Women

Workplace sexual harassment is particularly widespread in industries with many low-wage jobs where Hispanic women are likely to work. This qualitative study examines the experiences of Hispanic women in low-income jobs to identify workplace sexual harassment situations, support seeking actions, barriers to report, and forms of retaliation. A qualitative research design with one-on-one structured interviews provided an in-depth understanding of the experiences of Hispanic women in low-wage jobs regarding workplace sexual harassment situations and potential contributing factors. Second, a conceptual framework is proposed to integrate the reported organizational factors and social vulnerabilities that interact, eroding the individual's ability to cope effectively with workplace sexual harassment. These include organizational resources for preventing and reporting, community and family resources for support, and health effects attributed to sexual harassment. Workplace sexual harassment was described by participants as escalating over time from dating invitations, sex-related comments, unwanted physical contact to explicit sexual propositions. Temporary workers reported being very often subject to explicit quid pro quo propositions. While these patterns might not differ from those reported by other groups, work organization factors overlap with individual and social characteristics of Hispanic women in low-income jobs revealing a complicated picture that requires a systems approach to achieve meaningful change for this vulnerable population.

Person–job fit and job involvement: the curvilinear effect and the moderating role of goal orientation

Purpose

Job involvement is an important predictor of how well employees perform and feel at work. However, despite fruitful findings, little is known about how person–job (P–J) fit affects job involvement.

Design/methodology/approach

This study used a cross-sectional design and collected data from 375 employees and 50 managers. Multivariate regression was applied to test the moderated curvilinear model.

Findings

This study found an inverted U-shaped relationship between P–J fit and job involvement. For employees with a strong performance goal orientation, maximum job involvement occurred at a higher level of P–J fit, whereas for employees with a strong learning goal orientation, maximum job involvement occurred at a moderate level of P–J fit.

Practical implications

Managers should be aware that solely maximizing fit may not constantly yield positive outcomes, and that ignoring differences in employee needs and goals may be counterproductive.

Originality/value

The study challenges the conventional wisdom that a high P–J fit is always productive by showing that a high fit may sometimes jeopardize job involvement, particularly for certain employees.

Exploring the Odds: Gender Differences in Departing the Engineering Profession

Women’s departure or nonentrance into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics professions, particularly engineering, has been a lively source of scholarly inquiry for the past three decades. Much of the literature in this area has been with solely female samples of participants, begging the question as to whether or not men and women either choose to leave the profession or not enter for the same or similar reasons. This present study collected a large sample of men ( n = 1,273) who had either left or never entered the engineering profession and compared their responses to a large sample of women ( n = 1,235) on a set of categorical response variables. Using the perspective of the Theory of Work Adjustment, our results suggest that there are gender differences in reasons for departure, raising the possibility that engineering climates differentially reinforce needs for men and women. Implications of this research are discussed.

Exploring workplace TB interventions with foreign-born Latino workers

BACKGROUND

Persons born outside the United States are more likely to be diagnosed with tuberculosis disease (TB) than native-born individuals. Foreign-born Latinos at risk of TB may be difficult to reach with public health interventions due to cultural and institutional barriers. Workplaces employing large concentrations of foreign-born Latinos may be useful locations for TB interventions targeting this high-risk population.

METHOD

This study used a two-phase approach to investigate the feasibility of workplace TB interventions. The first phase investigated employer knowledge of TB and receptiveness to allowing TB interventions in their businesses through 5 structured interviews. The second phase investigated foreign-born workers' knowledge of TB and their receptiveness to receiving TB interventions in their places of employment through 12 focus groups stratified by gender and education.

RESULTS

Phase 1: Only 1 of the 5 employers interviewed had a high level of knowledge about TB, and three had no knowledge other than that TB was a disease that involved coughing. They were receptive to workplace TB interventions, but were concerned about lost productivity and customers finding out if an employee had TB. Phase 2: There was no observed differences in responses between gender and between the bottom two education groups, so the final analysis took place between a gender-combined lower education group and higher education group. The higher education group tended to have knowledge that was more accurate and to view TB as a disease associated with poverty. The lower education group tended to have more misconceptions about TB and more often expressed concern that their employers would not support worksite interventions.

CONCLUSIONS

The results from both phases indicate that more TB education is needed among both foreign-born Latino workers and their employers. Obstacles to implementing workplace TB interventions include knowledge, potential productivity loss, employer liability, and perceived customer response.

Undocumented status as a social determinant of occupational safety and health: The workers' perspective

BACKGROUND

Undocumented immigration to the United States has grown dramatically over the past 25 years. This study explores undocumented status as a social determinant of occupational health by examining its perceived consequences on workplace safety of Latino immigrants.

METHODS

Guided by the Theory of Work Adjustment, qualitative analysis was conducted on transcripts from focus groups and individual interviews conducted with a convenience sample of Latino immigrant workers.

RESULTS

Participants reported that unauthorized status negatively impacted their safety at work and resulted in a degree of alienation that exceeded the specific proscriptions of the law. Participants overwhelming used a strategy of disengagement to cope with the challenges they face as undocumented immigrants.

CONCLUSION

This study describes the complex web of consequences resulting from undocumented status and its impact on occupational health. This study presents a framework connecting the daily work experiences of immigrants, the coping strategy of disengagement, and efforts to minimize the impact of structural violence.

Integrating the Theory of Work Adjustment and Attachment Theory to Predict Job Turnover Intentions

In this study, we integrated research on the Minnesota Theory of Work Adjustment (TWA) and Attachment Theory to test a model predicting turnover intentions among 131 working adults in a variety of industries. Consistent with TWA, the results revealed that needs–supplies (N-S) fit was positively related to job satisfaction and that job satisfaction partially mediated the relationship between N-S fit and turnover intentions from the current job. Anxious and avoidant attachment did not have direct effects on TWA constructs, but the relationship between fit perceptions and job satisfaction was moderated by avoidant attachment such that the relationship was weaker for highly avoidant employees. We discuss the implications of these results for future vocational research on work adjustment and the effects of attachment dynamics in the workplace.