New Adversities, New Strategies?: How to Create a Better World During Adverse Times

Adversity is a common occurrence in organizational life. Challenging, unexpected events can undermine organizational functioning and disrupt performance. A large portion of research on this topic, within management literatures, focuses on adversity faced by organizations as an entity. However, adversity also has a significant, debilitating impact on employees, hindering their ability to go about their daily work. Yet surprisingly few efforts are made to identify how employees face, manage, prepare for, and potentially grow from their adverse work experiences. In supporting the conference theme of “Creating a Better World” this symposium brings together international experts to build and test new theoretical insights about how experiences of adversity are managed at work. Four presentations introduce novel contexts for the study of adversity at work (teams and team performance, employee perceptions of customer-related safety behavior, work-life inclusion inequality and perceptions of unfairness), exploring sources of adversity both outside (e.g., COVID-19) and within (e.g., work-life inequality) organizations. Reactions to adversity are captured at individual, team, customer and climate level, with each paper integrating research on adversity with theories from wider management literatures (e.g., self-expansion theory, Conservation of Resources theory, regulatory theory) and empirically testing propositions based on these theories. We aim to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of this topic so that our findings can be of value to employees who have endured harm, to organizations who can be better positioned to support their human capital, and to scholars within organizational behavior, conflict management and human resources through fostering new avenues of research. The Effects of team Disclosure and Team Cohesion on Resilient Team Performance Presenter: Cody Bradley; U. of Arkansas Presenter: Adam C. Stoverink; U. of Arkansas Presenter: Marilla Kingsley; U. of Arkansas Regulatory Focus and Employee Reactions to Unsafe Customer Behavior Presenter: Maureen L. Ambrose; U. of Central Florida Presenter: David X.H. Wo; Iowa State U. Presenter: Jake Telkamp; Iowa State U. U.S. Faculty Work-Life Inclusion and Blurring Boundaries in the Overwork University Presenter: Ellen Ernst Kossek; Purdue U. Presenter: Tammy D. Allen; U. of South Florida Presenter: Todd Bodner; Portland State U. Presenter: Benjamin R. Pratt; U. of Central Oklahoma Presenter: Matthew Piszczek; Wayne State U. Presenter: Anthony Misisco; Michigan State U. The Nature and Consequences of Talking about Injustices at Work Presenter: Rashi Dhensa-Kahlon; Birkbeck, U. of London Presenter: Jacqueline A-M. Coyle-Shapiro; London School of Economics