Intergenerational variances in Sex role identity of employees and intervening role of Psychological contract on Workplace well being

Abstract

Abstract Gender inequality is an epidemic social justice issue in the world. Gender discrimination is a shameful feature of modern capitalist societies, despite economic improvements and legislation. The psychological processes of gender inequality are under-researched and hence an enhanced contextual understanding about the experiences of work and working of female and male employees, will enable organizations and leadership to understand the determinants of an enabling workplace environment. newlineOrganizations and employers are trying to fix gender and manage the presumed dissimilarity amongst men and women employees. Howsoever, the core of individual identity and sexuality is not biological sex (Bem,1993). Sex role-identity is an excellent explanation of deconstructivism, which would gain if incorporated into a testable theoretical framework to gain insight into employee behaviours at the workplace. I identified large gaps in the sex role-identity management literature, a few theoretical explanations, and even fewer empirically tested models. Thereby, the intention of this study is to test Bem s gender schema theory, using workplace well-being as an outcome of work, working, workplace and employee-employer psychological contract. In view of this, the researcher aimed at understanding how variances in sex-role identity of male and female employees at the workplace relate to workplace well-being, and how psychological contract intervenes between sex role identity and workplace well-being. This study contributes to the expansion of the definition of gender as it evolves in today s context of human resource management, to raise some key questions concerning workplace well-being with positivist, as well as critical paradigms. Firms losing talented women from the workplace in different cultural contexts (Halpern and newlineii newlineCheung, 2011) and the need for equality at the workplace has provided motivation to undertake this study to investigate i) gender and their sex role-identity, ii) psychological contract and iii) workplac