Only when jobs involved making ethical compromises did women report less interest in the jobs than men.

That’s one finding from a series of recently released studies titled: “Who Is Willing to Sacrifice Ethical Values for Money and Social Status? Gender Differences in Reactions to Ethical Compromises.”

More from the studies conducted by Jessica Kennedy of Wharton and Laura Kray of Berkeley:

* Study 1, when reading decisions that compromised ethical values for social status and monetary gains, women reported feeling more moral outrage and perceived less business sense in the decisions than men.

* In Study 2, we established a causal relationship between aversion to ethical compromises and disinterest in business careers by manipulating the presence of ethical compromises in job descriptions. As hypothesized, an interaction between gender and presence of ethical compromises emerged.

The research points to the very good possibility that women may have more integrity than men.

What does this mean? (more…)

As the economy improves, many workplace experts are predicting a mass exodus of disgruntled employees who’ve been treated unfairly during the economic downturn.

There are early signs of a slight uptick in workers saying “goodbye” to their employers. “The number of quits was 2.1 million in November compared to 1.8 million at the end of the recession in June 2009,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics most recent data.

But I’m here to tell everyone to think before you say “f__k you” to the boss.

After so many companies were laying off workers, slashing wages and benefits, it’s not surprising that some employees feel no obligation to be nice when they head out the door, says David Kaplan, management professor for Saint Louis University. “It’s understandable,” he adds, “because they feel the employer has violated the psychological contract with employees, and they don’t feel they owe them anything.”

Whether it’s giving notice, training your replacement or abiding by noncompete agreements you may have signed, these post-employment niceties that were expected once upon a time are not a given in today’s workplace.

Yes, it sucks to be treated badly but you don’t want to burn your bridges when you leave. I know that sounds like an old-fashioned concept. But I suggest you take your anger out on management privately, after you’ve written a formal letter announcing your departure.

That’s what a good friend of mine did many years ago. (more…)

The Career Diva posts that got the most people reading in 2012 were all about the stupid things employers do.

Here are the top ten posts of the year:

Turns out many of you are upset about performance reviews, and you have good reason to be. The experts say such reviews are arbitrary and utterly useless.

And quite a few of you agreed some human resource departments can be clueless, especially when it comes to employee benefits such as family and medical leave.

Another workplace problem that gets under everyone’s skin is the rise in employers trying to get under your skin and find out how healthy, or unhealthy workers are.

A disturbing trend during 2012 was the growing number of employees holding multiple jobs.

It turns out if you’re a tough white woman or tough black man you can’t get a break.

What got job seekers angry this past year was the endless amount of interviews hiring managers think they need to decide on a candidate.

And women are still facing the perpetual problem of not supporting each other. Who cares how much Kelly Clarkson weighs? Quite a few of us, it turns out.

Employers are still asking job candidates how old they are, and they’re not always breaking the law when they do it.

My standing desk is still my back’s savoir, and a popular topic for many of you.

And finally, the Diva post that got the most readers reading was actually about a story I didn’t write. Lesson for 2013, don’t believe everything you read, especially work-at-home success stories.

Happy New Years everyone!! Looking forward to hearing from you all in the new year with your job/career questions. (careerdiva@verizon.net)

There is no other workplace ritual that inspires dread and disdain like the performance review. For years, I’ve been hearing from employees and managers who just hate the process.

According to a Workforce Management article, most of you don’t even agree with them.

More than half (51 percent) of 631 respondents believe reviews don’t provide accurate appraisals of their work, and nearly one-fourth dread them, according to the 2011 Globoforce Workforce Mood Tracker, a new semiannual online survey conducted by Globoforce, a business software developer with headquarters in Southborough, Massachusetts, and Dublin, Ireland.

I’ve written before about how some management gurus are waging war on the practice, but this morning I got an email from an expert who says employees should welcome reviews. (more…)

When it comes to social media and your career, you should curse at your own risk.

I recently got some interesting statistics on profanity and social networking sites. Turns out 47 percent of Facebook users have cursed on their walls, according to social media tracking company Reppler.

I wasn’t totally surprised having read a lot of cussing on Facebook and Twitter, and maybe having dropped an “F” bomb or two.

The Reppler data also found:

* 80% of our users who have profanity on their Facebook Wall have at least one post/comment with profanity from a friend.
* 56% of the posts/comments with profanity on a user’s Facebook Wall come from friends.
* Users are twice as likely to use profanity in a post on their Facebook Wall, versus a comment. Whereas friends are twice as likely to use profanity in a comment on a user’s Facebook Wall, versus a post.
* The most common profane word is derivations of the “f-word”. The second most common profane word is derivations of the word “sh*t”. ”B*tch” is a distant third.

And guess who curses the most? (more…)

Don’t you hate when people think you did something bad based on how they’d behave in the same situation?

Kids get this all the time. Take me. I wasn’t the greatest teenager, but my dad would always assume I partied too much, or brushed aside my homework because, he’d say, “I know how I was when I was your age.”

Well, sometimes he was totally wrong.

I started thinking about this after I received a survey about how many hiring managers think job applicants are fibbing when it comes to their resumes. But are bosses the real fibbers? (more…)

Carol Bartz, the former CEO of Yahoo!, isn’t holding back about her hatred for her former bosses. And her desire for revenge may end up costing her a $10 million severance package.

She’s gone public with her disdain for Yahoo!’s board and most recently called them all a bunch of “doofuses.” It appears her contract had an “anti-disparagement” clause.

I know you all are giggling a bit right now as I did when I heard her remarks, but is getting back at your bosses because you’re angry they fired you, demoted you, cut your pay, or just generally screwed you over a good idea?

Employees of all ranks have been pretty angry lately. “It’s understandable,” said David Kaplan, management professor for Saint Louis University, “because they feel the employer has violated the psychological contract with employees, and they don’t feel they owe them anything.”

I just wrote about how lots of people are leaving secure jobs for ones they may not like as much or have uncertain futures because they’re so pissed off at their employers. It makes sense. It’s been a crummy few years of cutbacks and generally bad behavior at many companies.

But, and here’s the big but, do you really want to burn the whole house down as you head for the office or factory door? (more…)

Most people who’ve been on the receiving end of a performance review are probably not big fans, even those getting great ones. I think we hate them so much because it reminds us of being in school and getting report cards.

OK, we’re grownups now and it’s time to kill performance reviews — not change them, not do new funky things with them, just kill them. Right?

Noooo, we have to keep reinventing the stupid things.

There’s a story in the Wall Street Journal today on how some companies are now throwing out yearly reviews for more frequent ones. One company is actually doing these every week.

With many younger workers used to instant feedback—from text messages to Facebook and Twitter updates—annual reviews seem too few and far between. So companies are adopting quarterly, weekly or even daily feedback sessions.

I’m all for feedback, but it seems counter productive to be reassessing what employees do over and over again. They were hired to do a job. Are they doing it? Great. If not, then tell them and move on. Why the formalities?

Samuel Culbert, a UCLA professor and management guru, is an anti performance review advocate, and he’s even more extreme than me. He thinks no one other than God should give such reviews. (more…)

Another profitable company with well-compensated executives wants its employees to give a little.

So it should be no surprise that there’s an unusual event going on right now — a massive strike by workers. About 45,000 Verizon workers went on strike this week because contract negotiations have stalled.

I say the event unusual because strikes in the country have been on the decline for years. The number of major U.S. strikes, including those involving 1,000 workers or more, fell to just five in 2009, the lowest level since 1947, when the Department of Labor first began tracking the data.

“The bottom line is that unions know the strike weapon just doesn’t work that well anymore, especially in a tough economy,” said Phillip Wilson, president of the Labor Relations Institute.

But for some reason, Verizon’s workers think it can work, or maybe they’re just so frustrated they don’t know what else to do. You see, the company is quite profitable right now but company officials say they still need major concessions from employees. It’s a familiar story many workers have heard before, especially during this downturn. Workers are seeing their pay and benefits cut, in addition to ongoing furloughs without pay, but all the while the top dogs keep padding their bank accounts.

In the case of Verizon, the top six executives at the company pocketed about $45 million in compensation last year. When you compare that to average wages at the firm for the rank and file that seems pretty extreme during tough economic times. Software engineers at the company, who are not unionized, make about $87,000, and customer service reps, many of which are unionized get $16.64 on average, according to Glassdoor.com.

Executives at Verizon make 20 times more than their top-paid employees, and nearly 60 times more than what their lowest paid workers bring in.

The pay gap between employees and executives has been growing for years now across all industries, but companies still want to extract more and more from the rank and file.

What if there was a company that limited how much more the head honchos could make compared to the little guys and gals? Am I crazy to even suggest this? Did I not have enough coffee this morning? Turns out, there is one such company. (more…)

Social media is a great thing and employers know it. That’s why so many companies are using services such as Twitter and Facebook to get the message out about their products and services; and also getting their own employees to tweet and post comments in an effort to promote their wares.

A reader recently wrote me that he uploaded something personal on his company Facebook page by mistake. He ended up deleting it immediately, but wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t caught his error.

What would have happened? That’s the big question. Employees are sort of in the dark on this because so many employers don’t even have policies regarding social media use. A new study of multi-national employers found that (more…)