Impacts of Heterogeneous Organizational Backgrounds and Social Norms on Employees' Behaviors in Temporary Organizations: Focusing on Safety Behavior in Construction Projects

临时组织是指一组组织参与者在有限的时间内共同完成一项复杂的任务。随着世界变得更加动态和相互联系，临时组织越来越多地应用于不同的行业，如建筑、电影制作、造船、软件开发、广告、生物技术和时尚。然而，尽管临时组织越来越普遍，但它们仍在努力促进和维持一致的社会规范。与传统的长期组织相比，临时组织的大多数成员拥有不同的组织背景，任期相对较短。本项目将研究如何通过协调临时组织中组织认同的多个焦点，使员工的行为更好地与理想的社会规范保持一致。研究人员将以建筑工人的安全行为作为临时组织中员工行为的案例研究。建筑行业提供了一个特别有用的查询网站，因为它在我们的经济中的核心作用，它广泛使用临时组织，它是世界上最危险的行业之一，以及由工人的不安全行为引起的事故无处不在。该项目将通过描述在组织认同的帮助下，理想的社会规范转化为组织成员行为的机制，扩展临时组织和组织认同的理论。本项目将采用多种实证数据收集方法（如调查、行为经济学实验和行为抽样）和分析，调查多种组织背景和社会规范在形成临时组织员工行为中的作用。此外，研究人员将与行业伙伴合作，进行准现场实验，开发和测试一系列一次性短期管理培训，以促进员工对伞形组织的社会认同，并最终引发员工行为改善的预期变化。研究结果对社会认同理论和组织研究的发展具有重要意义。此外，通过确定有效的管理行动/策略来增加工人的项目识别，该项目将有助于组织行动/策略的发展，可以克服异质组织背景和临时组织中的短期任期问题，这将最终改善员工的行为，如安全。最后，这个项目将为不同群体的学生提供职业发展机会。对学生和专业人士进行有效的社会影响力经营教育，将提高美国产业的竞争力。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

A temporary organization refers to a set of organizational actors working together on a complex task over a limited period of time. As the world has become more dynamic and interconnected, temporary organizations have been increasingly employed across diverse industries like construction, film-making, shipbuilding, software development, advertising, biotechnology, and fashion. Yet despite their increased prevalence, temporary organizations are struggling to foster and maintain coherent social norms. As opposed to traditional, long-term organizations, most members of temporary organizations possess different organizational backgrounds and a relatively short tenure. This project will investigate how employees' behaviors can be better aligned with desirable social norms through the reconciliation of multiple foci of organizational identifications in temporary organizations. The researchers will use construction workers' safety behavior as a case study of employee behavior in a temporary organization. The construction industry provides a particularly useful site for inquiry due to its central role in our economy, its wide use of temporary organizations, its status as among the most dangerous industries in the world, and the pervasiveness of accidents caused by workers' unsafe behaviors.The project will extend theories on temporary organizations and organizational identification by characterizing the mechanisms through which desirable social norms are translated into organizational members' behaviors with the help of organizational identification. The project will incorporate diverse empirical data collection methods (e.g., survey, behavioral economic experiment, and behavior sampling) and analyses to investigate the role of multiple organizational backgrounds and social norms in shaping employee behavior in a temporary organization. In addition, working with the industry partners, the researchers will conduct quasi-field experiments to develop and test a series of one-time, short-term managerial training that can promote employees' social identification with the umbrella organization and ultimately to elicit desired changes in improving employees' behavior. The results will greatly contribute to the advancement of social identity theory and organization studies. Further, by identifying effective managerial actions/strategies to increase workers' project identification, the project will contribute to the development of organizational actions/strategies that can overcome heterogeneous organizational backgrounds and short tenure issues in a temporary organization, which will eventually improve employee behaviors like safety. Finally, this project will provide career development opportunities for diverse groups of students. The effective education of students and professionals for social influence-based management approaches will increase the competitiveness of U.S industries.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.