Perspective - Organizational Behavior and the Working Poor

The working poor are situated in a very powerful context — the nexus of poverty and low-wage work. Our central premise is that this context represents a “strong situation” that powerfully affects work-related outcomes, but it has been largely overlooked by organization science, even as the working poor comprise a sizable segment of the workforce. In this paper we briefly review categorical, compositional, and relational theories of poverty from other disciplines, and we describe three key mediators from organizational research that may explain how the working poor are adversely affected in terms of job attachment, career attainment, and job performance. Our goals are to encourage further thinking about the working poor among organizational scholars, encourage future research in this domain, and call attention to the need for research-based interventions.