Browsing by Author "Pychlau, Sophie"

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    Speaking Up About the Forest to Someone Who Only Thinks About the Trees: The Effect of Construal Level Agreement on Supervisor Endorsement of Employee Voice
    (University of Oregon, 2022) Ruble, Amanda; Sessions, Hudson; Baldwin, Dare; Pychlau, Sophie
    Employee voice is a vital part of improving the status quo within organizations. Many changes, whether regarding business culture, organizational structure, or workplace procedures, can only come about if employees speak up. For improvements to arise from employee voice, supervisors generally need to accept and implement employees’ input. The purpose of this research is to determine why employees’ feedback is often poorly received by supervisors, preventing the employee from bringing about positive organizational change. I use construal level theory in this paper to highlight one area that can positively influence supervisors’ reception of employee voice. Construal level theory describes the psychological distance between individuals and their work. In other words, this theory reflects the level of abstractness or concreteness that people have when thinking about the work they perform. I collected the data for this paper through a survey administered to 128 people in management roles. I hypothesized that when a supervisor and an employee’s construal levels are in agreement, whether it be high level or low level, that the supervisor is more likely to endorse instances of employee voice. Both parties’ perceived construal levels were compared to see whether agreement in employee-supervisor construal level was associated with supervisors endorsing their employees’ input. I found that my hypothesis was not supported and agreement in construal levels does not correlate to higher rates of supervisor endorsement of employee voice. Incidentally, I found that employees speaking up at a higher construal level (abstract) is the best predictor of supervisor endorsement. Overall, my research indicates construal level theory is an important tool to understanding supervisors’ receptivity to employee voice and could be further applied to understand workplace communication and employee-supervisor relationships.
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    Understanding Belongingness in the Gig Economy: The Uplifting and Undermining Effects of Online Communities on Lonely Gig Workers
    (University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Pychlau, Sophie; Wagner, David
    All humans have a need to belong and belongingness at work serves important organizational and personal purposes. However, gig workers face significant challenges to experiencing belongingness at work because their work is highly temporary, project-based, and occurs outside the relational scaffold afforded by organizations. Given these challenges, gig workers frequently engage in online communities that serve critical social and information-sharing functions. In this dissertation, I focus on gig workers’ individual behaviors in online communities related to gig work and analyze how these behaviors impede or further belongingness. Integrating the evolutionary model of loneliness and regulatory focus theory, I propose that loneliness at work motivates gig workers to engage in online communities in different ways that can either impede or facilitate belongingness. Specifically, I hypothesize that gig workers feel less belongingness when engaging in lurking behaviors, more belongingness when engaging in contributing behaviors. To offer practical advice on how to increase belongingness, I develop an intervention designed to increase contributing behaviors that enhance belongingness. Ultimately, I suggest that belongingness will affect withdrawal from work. I test my theoretical model in a ten-day experience sampling study (ESM) with 95 gig workers. My dissertation contributes to an understanding of how modern workers experience belongingness outside of organizations and the impact of online communities in this process.