Journal of Applied Psychology最新文献

Locus of control (LOC) has been recognized as a key individual disposition shaping employee behavior; however, its relationship with risk-taking behaviors such as prohibitive voice remains inconclusive. This research extends the literature by theorizing and testing a U-shaped relationship between LOC and prohibitive voice. Drawing upon the demands-abilities fit framework, we propose that employees with either strongly internal or strongly external LOC perceive lower risk associated with speaking up than those with moderate LOC, resulting in greater engagement in prohibitive voice. Moreover, this mediated U-shaped relationship is more pronounced when team voice climate is low rather than high. Findings from two field studies with a multisource, multiwave design support the proposed moderated mediation model. Overall, this research refines our understanding of why and when employees speak up about problems at work and suggests ways managers can better foster such behavior in situations that feel risky. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

In the study of personnel selection to enhance organizational diversity, Pareto-optimal predictor weights are designed to simultaneously optimize the diversity and job performance of new hires. One aspiration for this approach is to access stronger combinations of diversity and performance outcomes by shifting the diversity-validity trade-off curve outward. The current work examines the role of a particular set of predictors-vocational interests-for their capacity to shift the Pareto trade-off curve outward, creating superior diversity-validity outcome pairings. Empirical results based on meta-analytic estimates suggest that novel diversity benefits (at no loss in terms of validity) can be observed in two sets of scenarios: (a) when selecting on high levels of social or conventional vocational interests (i.e., when individuals enjoy social or conventional tasks) specifically when such interests are relevant to the job, and (b) when selecting on high levels of realistic, investigative, or artistic disinterests (i.e., when individuals find realistic, investigative, or artistic tasks aversive) specifically when such disinterests are relevant to the job. Implications for improving diversity through hiring on vocational interests and vocational disinterests, while simultaneously optimizing on job performance, are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The presence of historically underrepresented minority employees who defy negative stereotypes can have widespread organizational benefits. For example, hiring highly successful women and racial minority employees can reduce stereotypes about their groups, set a precedent for more inclusive norms, and create role models for members of stereotyped groups. Yet, defying stereotypes also makes these employees particularly salient, as their success in organizations conflicts with stereotyped expectations regarding their career outcomes. By integrating insights from the stereotype content model and the process of attribute substitution from dual process theory, we argue that the salience of highly successful women and racial minority employees can ironically have negative secondary consequences for the groups from which they hail. Specifically, we propose that exposure to successful women and racial minorities can lead to inflated perceptions of gender and racial diversity, as the salience of such stereotype defiers is used to evaluate their groups' prevalence. We further suggest that such inflated diversity perceptions can significantly hinder organizational efforts to advance the interests of the historically underrepresented minority groups in question. We test our predictions across four complementary studies: three experiments (including stimuli generated with real data for gender diversity in organizations in the United States) and a study that combines real gender diversity and gender pay gap data from organizations in the United Kingdom with experimental data on diversity perceptions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Organizations have embraced sustainability certifications as a way of demonstrating their prosocial commitments. These certifications are often rigorous and resource-intensive, and yet some certified organizations increase their efforts beyond receiving the certification. To understand why, we revisit the literature on escalation of commitment to theorize the escalation of prosocial commitment. We test our framework by analyzing why B Corporations (B Corps)-businesses that have been certified for their prosocial commitments-would participate in an initiative that challenged them to improve their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices and whether their efforts have any effect. Our framework emphasizes three organization-level drivers of escalation of prosocial commitment: image and identity, internal and external context, and urgency to demonstrate impact. Our findings largely support these drivers. Furthermore, escalation of prosocial commitment leads to improvements in both DEI practices and sustainability practices more generally and has collective spillover benefits, including reduced certification attrition rates and a positive shift in the DEI profiles of new B Corps that certified for the first time after the conclusion of the initiative. We also find a surprising outcome-what we call a paradox of inclusivity: B Corps with less emphasis on DEI practices, despite being strong in other sustainability areas, were more likely to exit the B Corp movement after the initiative. Our research contributes to the escalation of commitment literature, reveals practice implications for certifying bodies and organizations seeking to foster social impact, and offers insights to policymakers about potential levers for remaking capitalism. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

In an effort to extend experiential learning theory to the team level, we develop and test a model capturing and explaining the relative effects of two alternative team learning-based interventions, namely, after-action reviews (AAR) and design thinking (DT; a team problem-solving approach which we argue can be repurposed as a team development intervention). Integrating experiential learning theory with research on episodic team learning, we propose that by engaging the team in a more comprehensive set of experiential learning elements in each performance episode, relative to AAR, DT drives enhanced normative and cognitive team emergent states, and as a result, a greater short-term (i.e., 6-month) improvement in team performance, particularly for teams characterized by greater team task variety. Results from a multiwave field experiment of teams in a manufacturing company largely support this model, indicating that over the 6-month study period: (a) A DT intervention was associated with greater improvement in team performance than that associated with AAR, and (b) these effects are partially explained by differential changes in both team learning climate and transactive memory system specification. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Following through on commitments builds trust. However, blind adherence to a prior course of action can undermine key organizational objectives. How can this challenge be resolved? Four primary experiments and five supplemental experiments (collective N = 7,759, all preregistered) reveal an effective communication strategy: precommitment (i.e., a public pledge to change course conditional on a concrete future state of the world). In the presence (vs. absence) of precommitment, observers deemed decision makers who de-escalated commitment as more trustworthy. This effect held across the roles of the decision makers (entrepreneurs vs. established leaders), the relationship with the decision makers (follower vs. third-party observer), contexts (consumer products vs. infrastructure projects), and measures (perceived integrity vs. incentivized behavior). These benefits for integrity were attenuated when the precommitment was to a vague future action or was not conditional on a concrete future state of the world. Finally, results revealed that precommitment can yield a negative externality: undermining perceived confidence and motivation among followers at a project's inception. Altogether, our work provides a nuanced perspective on a communication strategy decision makers can use to align short-term personal incentives (i.e., reputation management) and long-term organizational incentives (i.e., value maximization). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The question of what assessment centers' measure has remained a controversial topic in research for decades, with a recent increase in studies that (a) use generalizability theory and (b) acknowledge the effects of aggregating postexercise dimension ratings into higher level assessment center scores. Building on these developments, we used Bayesian generalizability theory and random-effects meta-analyses to examine the variance explained by assessment center components such as assessees, exercises, dimensions, assessors, their interactions, and the interrater reliability of AC ratings in 19 different assessment center samples from various organizations (N = 4,963 assessees with 272,528 observations). This provides the first meta-analytic estimates of these effects, as well as insight into the extent to which findings from previous studies generalize to assessment center samples that differ in measurement design, industry, and purpose, and how heterogeneous these effects are across samples. Results were consistent with previous trends in the ranking of variance explained by key AC components (with assessee main effects and assessee-exercise effects being the largest variance components) and additionally emphasized the relevance of assessee-exercise-dimension effects. In addition, meta-analytic results suggested substantial heterogeneity in all reliable variance components (i.e., assessee main effect, assessee-exercise effect, assessee-dimension effect, and assessee-exercise-dimension effect) and in interrater reliability across assessment center samples. Aggregating AC ratings into higher level scores (i.e., overall AC scores, exercise-level scores, and dimension-level scores) reduced heterogeneity only slightly. Implications of the findings for a multifaceted assessment center functioning are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The ability to perceive emotion is traditionally associated with desirable work outcomes. In the present study, we challenge this assumption by examining whether all emotion perception abilities are created equal. Although the ability to perceive positive emotion may be a "blessing" because it allows one to see positive emotions in one's environment, the empathic accuracy model suggests that the ability to perceive negative emotion may be a "curse" because it allows one to see negative emotions in one's environment and, as such, may adversely affect one's attitudes and behaviors at work. Across an experimental design (Study 1), a sample of employed coworker dyads (Study 2), and an experience sampling study (Study 3), we found no support for "the blessing" of the ability to perceive positive emotion, but we did find evidence of the curse of the ability to perceive negative emotion and its harmful effects on how one perceives their coworkers, how one perceives their job, and the extent to which one withdraws from their job. Our findings suggest that emotional contagion is a potential mechanism through which the ability to perceive negative emotion is detrimental to attitudes and behaviors; the more one observes and subsequently feels negative emotions at work, the greater the personal consequences for this ability. To mitigate the adverse effects of this ability, we test and find support for an intervention that instructs employees to focus on positive emotions in their work environment. Implications for future theory and research on emotion perception ability are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).