The Nature of Social Theory

Category: Nature, Social Theory
Last Updated: 17 May 2021
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Table of contents

Motivating employees to give feedback on goals, objectives and operations of the organization. Developing a worker-advising program that provides ideas for motivating the workforce. Developing tutorial and training programs through dialogue, information sharing and feedback. We discuss the nature of social theory throughout this paper. Here, we simply note its foundational assumption that 'there is potential for mischief when the interests of owners and 1 For example, many of the criticisms of appraisal interviews focus on the perceptual biases that people bring to them.

These include the halo error, the crony effect, the doppelganger effect and the Veblen effect. They are discussed by (Grint, 1993) and (Roberson et al 2007), among many others. We do not suggest that these problems can be explained primarily by the influence of agency theory  those of managers diverge.

In those circumstances managers may be able to extract higher rents than would otherwise be accorded them by owners of the firm' (Dalton,, 2007). As this paper focuses on two types of employees temporary and Permanent. An employment situation, where an employee is expected to remain in a position for a certain period of time. Temporary employees may have the opportunity to achieve permanent employment status after the time period has lapsed; Temporary workers may also be referred to as seasonal employees or temps. Employment term may be based on the completion of a project, the availability of funding, or other circumstances (Bloch, 1995).

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Many of the studies have different perceptions when defining of temporary employees. For example, temporary employees have been called as "flexible staffing employees" (Houseman, 2001), "contingent workers" (Blank, 1998), and "non-standard workers" (Kalleberg et al., 1997). A study by Feldman (1995) defines temporary employees as persons who are hired for a finite period on a needed basis.

Polivka and Nardone (1989: 11) provided more understanding on defining temporary employees: they classified temporary employees as "individuals who do not have an explicit or implicit contract for long-term employment or have one in which the minimum hours of work can different in non-systematic way". A permanent employee differs from a term or temporary employee, both of which have a pre-determined period of employment (Gallagher, 2002). Permanent employees, regular employees or the directly employed, work for an employer and are paid directly by that employer. Permanent (regular) employees do not have a predetermined end date to employment.

In addition to their wages, they often receive benefits like subsidized health care, paid vacations, holidays, sick time, or contributions to a retirement plan. Permanent employees are often eligible to switch job positions within their companies. (Peck, 2000) Even when employment is "at will", permanent employees of large companies are generally protected from abrupt job termination by severance policies, like advance notice in case of layoffs, or formal discipline procedures.

They may be eligible to join a union, and may enjoy both social and financial benefits of their employment (Cranford, 2003) Social Exchange Theories According to De Cuyper et al. (2008), there is no available theoretical framework to check the effects of short term employment. ON the other side, general psychological theories offer a good starting point for the analyses, although these have mostly been developed against the scenery of the permanent employment relationship.

These can be divided in two main groups: work stress models, and social comparison or social exchange theories. The social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954) is the idea that there is a drive within individuals to look to outside images in order to evaluate their own opinions and abilities. These images may be a reference to physical reality or in comparison to other people. People look to the images portrayed by others to be obtainable and realistic, and subsequently, make comparisons among themselves, others and the idealized images. In his initial theory, Festinger hypothesized several things. He indicated that humans are compelled to appraise themselves by probing their opinions and abilities in assessment of others.

He further said that the inclination to evaluate oneself with some other specific other person decreases as the differentiation between his opinion or ability and the other's own become more deviating. He also hypothesized that there was an upward drive towards achieving greater abilities, but that there are non-social restraints which make it nearly impossible to change them, and that this was largely absent in opinions (Festinger, 1954).

The individuals who are similar were better in generating accurate evaluations of abilities and opinions.Work stress models helps us to explain the consequences of short term employment by defining specific characteristics that make short term workers more vulnerable to suffer work related stress (see De Cuyper et al., 2008). There are three related variables. First, contractual employees are peripheral to the organization, meaning that they are not the main important concern of the employers regarding different aspects such as benefits, wages, promotion or further training. This thought is advanced in theories such as the Flexible Firm model (Atkinson, 1984, cited in Valverde et al., 2000) and the Dual Labour Market model.

The resulting bad working conditions for the contractual employees can cause a consequence, a decrease in the worker's welfare and performance appraisal at the workplace (Rousseau & Libuser, 1997). Therefore contractual workers have fewer possibilities for deciding how to perform their work, to use specific skills or to make any other kind of decisions within the workplace (De Witte & Näswall, 2003).

In addition, since contractual employees are new members of the organization, they have to understand processes and aspects of the organization growing another potential source of stress (see De Cuyper et al., 2008). The lack of support from partners, supervisors or even the coworkers (De Witte & Näswall, 2003) can also be a part of stress and strain to wellbeing. The third component is the lack of control that contractual employees experience regarding the demands of the employer (or employers)

Gap Analysis

Built up conceptual model where two impacting components performance appraisal was the independent variable and perceived whereas the dependent variable was organization commitment. They have proposed that relationship of these influencing factors on is researched as empirically/quantitatively. They have utilized case study based approach to create this model. They have proposed that by utilizing the questionnaire on a Lickert Scale, data should be gathered and on the basis of the response from the respondents, results should be analyzed statistically so that the true outcome can be achieved.

Research Gap

Shockingly very little examination has been on performance appraisal politics and organizational commitment A little work is done to characterize connection among organizational commitment and performance appraisal politics but work is done on performance appraisal that incorporate fairness element (Linde, 2015).

In fast changing environment and economy, performance appraisal is very essential component. Our studies can be conducted on other industries in Pakistan to explore the effects of PAP on OC that attract to understand the employment relationship (Arshad, Masood,Amin 2013).

Surprisingly, very a few researches have been done study on how this performance appraisal effects on long term and short term employees. Early studies on performance appraisal were only directed towards the whole employees without focusing on segmentation of both the long and short term employees.

Hypotheses

  • H1 : Performance appraisal politics has insignificant impact on permanent employee's organizational commitment.
  • H2 : Performance appraisal politics has insignificant impact on contractual employee's organizational commitment.

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The Nature of Social Theory. (2018, Apr 25). Retrieved from https://phdessay.com/the-nature-of-social-theory/

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