Tracy Dumas

• The Ohio State University

Existing research has shown that positive family experiences can affect work positively. In this article, however, we consider how family may enhance work even when family experiences are not explicitly positive. We draw on boundary theory and cognitive psychology's current concerns theory to evaluate how employees' family structures and associated...

In this paper we explore the question of how an employee's family role identification, as driven by family structure (marital and parental status combined), affects their leadership behaviors at work. Using survey data from working professionals and executives pursuing a Master of Business Administration degree (MBA), we found that, as expected, th...

When employees feel that their values do not match those of the organization, they often respond by pretending to fit in. We examine how leader integrity influences the tendency to create facades of conformity, proposing that employees will actually fake more when leaders are principled. In a laboratory experiment (Study 1), undergraduate students...

Theories of status rarely address "unearned status gain," defined as an unexpected and unsolicited increase in relative standing, prestige, or worth attained not through individual effort or achievement but from a shift in organizationally valued characteristics. We build theory about unearned status gain drawing from a qualitative study of 90 U.S....

Both scholarly literature and popular accounts suggest that modern organizational practices have moved toward encouraging employees to “integrate” or blur the boundary between their personal and professional domains, for example, through self-disclosure at work, company-sponsored social activities or providing onsite child care. Concurrently, an id...

Theories of status rarely address unearned status gain—an increase in relative standing, prestige or worth attained due not from individuals’ precipitating increase in effort or achievement but rather from a change in organizationally valued characteristics. We introduce a model of unearned status gain drawing from a qualitative study of 90 U.S.-ba...

Using survey data from two distinct samples, we found that reported integration behaviors (e.g., attending company parties, discussing nonwork matters with colleagues) were associated with closer relationships among coworkers but that this effect was qualified by an interaction effect. Racial dissimilarity moderated the relationship between integra...

People who are demographically different from one another face a fundamental challenge in developing high-quality relationships in organizations. We build theory about how the status differences that often accompany demographic characteristics can hinder this development through their influence on disclosure of personal information. We theorize abo...

Many organizational efforts to improve co-worker relationships entail inducing employees to bring their “whole selves” into the workplace, which for employees often means disclosing personal experiences at work. Several psychological theories suggest that increased self-disclosure will lead to better relationships in organizational work groups. How...

We investigated the interactive affects of temporal flexibility and family configuration on work engagement. In contrast to ideal worker ideologies and depletion perspectives, results based on a survey methodology suggest that single workers are the least engaged in comparison to workers with other family configurations. In addition, our results su...

As workers strive to manage multiple roles such as work and family, research has begun to focus on how people manage the boundary between work and nonwork roles. This paper contributes to emerging work on boundary theory by examining the extent to which individuals desire to integrate or segment their work and nonwork lives. This desire is conceptu...

Organizations often reach beyond the boundary of the firm into the non-work lives of their employees in efforts to integrate them into the organization and increase their satisfaction and commitment. Our study challenges the assumption that integrating employees into the organization necessarily increases their job satisfaction and commitment to th...