Are "outsiders" in? Exploring the impact of outsourced workers' perceived insider status and job value status on job performance.

Introduction: Outsourcing, one of the nonstandard employment forms, has been increasingly popular with a wide variety of industries and employers. However, much less is known about its consequences at the employee level, especially relative to standard-employed colleagues. Drawing on social categorization theory and the human resource architecture model, the study was to investigate how outsourced (vs. standard) employment form impacts employees' perceived insider status and then job performance, as well as the moderating role of job value status. Methods: To examine these effects, we collected two-wave and multi-source questionnaires from a sample of 147 outsourced employees, 279 standard employees, and their immediate supervisors. And interviews with 31 employees, their supervisors, and human resources personnel provided further support for our findings. Results: The results showed that relative to standard employees, outsourced employees were lower in perceived insider status and indirectly worse in job performance. Furthermore, both the comparative effects were stronger among core-status than peripheral-status employees. Discussion: Our study contributes to outsourcing and widely nonstandard employment literature, bringing the research focus from employers to outsourced employees' psychological and behavioral consequences. Also, we extended literature on the human resource architecture, through a deeper investigation on the issue of employment form-job value status (mis)matching as well as its impacts on employees.

Corporate Sustainability Paradox Management: A Systematic Review and Future Agenda.

Increasing evidence suggests that corporate sustainability is paradoxical in nature, as corporates and managers have to achieve economic, social, and environmental goals, simultaneously. While a paradox perspective has been broadly incorporated into sustainability research for more than a decade, it has resulted in limited improvement in our understanding of corporate sustainability paradox management. In this study, the authors conduct a systematic review of the literature of corporate sustainability paradox management by adopting the Smith-Lewis three-stage model of dynamic equilibrium. The results reveal the following: (1) Both environmental and cognitive factors manifest tensions arising from the sustainability paradox. (2) While both proactive and defensive strategies are adopted to manage the tensions embedded in the corporate sustainability, the proactive strategy is more extensively studied in the current literature. (3) Management strategies of corporate sustainability paradox are characterized as multi-level, multi-stage, and dealing with multiple paradoxes. (4) Proactive strategies enable organizations to enjoy short-term and long-term sustainability benefits. The authors call for further research explicitly addressing the following areas: (1) the paradoxical nature of corporate sustainability management; (2) corporate sustainability paradox management of for-profit organizations; (3) the micro-foundations of corporate sustainability paradox management; (4) defensive strategies and new proactive strategies; and (5) a unified standard of sustainability outcomes. The practical implications of this review are then elaborated. In practice, the results imply that organizations would best manage the corporate sustainability paradox by understanding the paradox and its equilibrium stages. This review and proposed research agenda are expected to deepen interdisciplinary knowledge and set the stage for interested scholars to undertake in their future inquiries.