Illusions of Opportunity: Employee Expectations and Workplace Inequality

Employees expect organizations to offer an equitable distribution of rewards in promotion, compensation, and job challenge to those who work hard.\n\nAccording 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. Additional ISBNs 9780875463575Illusions of Opportunity: Employee Expectations and Workplace Inequality is written by Sonia Ospina and published by Cornell University Press. ISBNs for Illusions of Opportunity are 9781501735172, 1501735179 and the print ISBNs are 9780875463568, 0875463568. Additional ISBNs include 9780875463575.