مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 مجله اسکاندیناویایی مدیریت – Scandinavian Journal of Management

Research into gender and organizations has shown up to now a persistence of gender inequality (e.g., Calás, Smircich, & Holvino, 2014). Studies for the most part have concentrated on permanent, or line, organizations. Might examining temporary organizations instead make a difference? Projects, the most prominent type of temporary organization (Turner & Müller, 2003), have unique features distinguishing them from permanent/line organizations, in particular temporality and certain termination; a team structure; and a complex, nonrepetitive task (Bakker, 2010; Lundin & Söderholm, 1995; Söderlund, 2011). Projects are embedded in a context of organizational and social structures and relationships as well as in a historic sequence of events (Engwall, 2003; Sydow, Linkvist, & DeFillippi, 2004). Because of their flatter structures, more decentralized decision making, and higher employee autonomy, projects have been argued to be more gender-neutral than permanent organizations and to offer more employment and promotion opportunities to women (e.g., Ferguson, 1984; Fondas, 1996; Savage & Witz, 1992). Thus, for research referring to temporary organizations it would be of no surprise if the mechanisms of gender role creation and enactment were somewhat different compared to permanent organizations—not least because of distinctive mechanisms of human information processing in the face of temporality (Bakker, Boroş, Kenis, & Oerlemans, 2013). Yet still, gender oriented studies underline that men predominantly conduct and manage project-based work (e.g., Henderson, Stackman, & Koh, 2013; Legault & Chasserio, 2012; Ojiako et al., 2014). Moreover, Henderson and Stackman (2010) note that women work both as project managers and team members twice as much as men on smaller projects with lower budgets. Against this background, for gender researchers a reproduction of typical gender roles and relations would be less surprising than a clear break with gender roles and hierarchical relations in temporary organizations. Thus, we are facing a tension between the research streams on temporary organizations on the one hand and gender-related research on the other. To explore this tension, it is necessary to focus more on informal processes and shape our view to the more subtle characteristics of temporary organizations. This will help to expose what is actually happening instead of what is supposed to happen (per prescriptive project management approaches). In particular, it is necessary to go beyond a differentiation between men and women (i.e., a reduction to the control and dummy variable ‘sex’), but to take in a consideration of typical gender segregations in terms of gendered project roles and their effects.

To dig more deeply into these relationships and potentially find opportunities to diminish gender inequalities, we focus in our study on cooperative behaviors and their impacts on potentially gendered reward structures. Thereby we do not only compare men and women and their assumed gender-(in) congruent behaviors (e.g., Triana, 2011), but also men and women in gender (in) congruent project roles.

Temporary organizations and in particular projects rely on discrete cooperative behaviors of individuals (project citizenship behavior [PCB]). These behaviors are performed voluntarily, in that they are beyond the scope of a work contract, and are supposed to accomplishcomplexandnonrepetitivetasks.Atthesame time,these behaviors may be inevitable, because tasks blur organizational boundaries and in an interorganizational setting, legal agreements are not specific enough to clearly allocate all duties to individual organizations (Autry, Skinner, & Lamb, 2008; Braun, Ferreira, & Sydow, 2013; Braun, Müller-Seitz, & Sydow, 2012). The research tradition on such cooperative efforts ofindividuals tracks back to the 1980s when the construct of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) was introduced (Organ, 1988; Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Paine, & Bachrach, 2000). Organ (1988) defines OCB as ‘individual behavior that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, and that in the aggregate promotes the effective functioning oftheorganization’.Previous studies provethat OCB not only enhances the effectiveness of organizations (Organ, Podsakoff, & MacKenzie, 2006; Podsakoff, Ahearne, & MacKenzie, 1997),but alsopromotes social capital andthe stability andquality of relationships, by, for instance, increasing liking and trust among coworkers (Bolino, Turnley, & Bloodgood, 2002). Corresponding studies on temporary organizations have shown that PCB may increase the effectiveness of this type of organization in analogous ways (Braun et al., 2013). OCB and PCB respectively enhance not only organizational and project outcomes, but also individual work and employment outcomes, for instance through performance evaluationsandrewards (e.g.,Allen&Rush,2001;Kiker&Motowidlo,1999; Podsakoff, Whiting, & Podsakoff, 2009).