Journal of Applied Psychology最新文献

While personality trait assessments are widely used in candidate selection, coaching, and occupational counseling, little published research has systematically compared occupations in personality traits. Using a comprehensive personality assessment, we mapped 263 occupations in self-reported Big Five domains and various personality nuances in a sample of 68,540 individuals and cross-validated the findings in informant ratings of 19,989 individuals. Controlling for age and gender, occupations accounted for 2%-7% of Big Five variance in both self-reports and informant reports. Most occupations' average Big Five levels were intuitive, replicated across rating methods, and were consistent with those previously obtained with a brief assessment in a different sociocultural context. Often, they also tracked the Occupational Information Network database's work style ratings and clustered along the International Standard Classification of Occupation's hierarchical framework. Finally, occupations with higher average levels of the personality domains typically linked to better job performance tended to be more homogeneous in these domains, suggesting that jobs with higher performing incumbents are often more selective for personality traits. Several personality nuances had intuitive occupational differences that were larger than those of the Big Five domains (explaining up to 12% variance) and replicated well across rating methods, providing more detailed insights into how job incumbents vary in personality. We provide an interactive application for exploring the results (https://apps.psych.ut.ee/JobProfiles/) and discuss the findings' theoretical and practical implications. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

We present a meta-analytic investigation of the theoretical mechanisms underlying why experienced workplace aggression is harmful to the three core performance outcomes (i.e., task performance, citizenship behavior, and deviant behavior). Through a comprehensive literature review of 405 empirical articles, we first extract and identify five prominent theoretical mechanisms: relationship quality, justice perception, psychological strain, negative affect, and state self-evaluation. By synthesizing evidence from these articles, which include 471 unique samples from 36 countries or regions (N = 149,341 participants), we reveal the incremental effects of the five mechanisms, compare their relative strengths for each performance outcome, and examine their cultural contingencies. We find that when the five mechanisms are examined simultaneously, only relationship quality and state self-evaluation show incremental effects across all performance outcomes in the predicted direction. Moreover, the comparative strengths of mechanisms vary across performance outcomes: The impact of workplace aggression on task performance is best explained by the negative affect and state self-evaluation mechanisms, its impact on citizenship behavior is best explained by the relationship quality mechanism, and its impact on deviant behavior is best explained by the negative affect mechanism. Finally, the prominence of some mechanisms is contingent on certain cultural dimensions: The relationship quality mechanism is strengthened by individualism and masculinity, while the state self-evaluation mechanism is strengthened by masculinity. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of our research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Organizations are increasingly expecting individuals to engage in task proactivity, that is, to find better ways of doing their job. While prior research has demonstrated the benefits of task proactivity, little is known about its cognitive costs. To investigate this issue, we build theory on how task proactivity affects end-of-day cognitive performance. We propose that task proactivity involves deviating from established ways of working and engaging in cognitively demanding activities requiring high levels of mental effort, which manifest as an erosion of end-of-day cognitive performance. In two daily diary studies, we found that individuals engaging in task proactivity experience lower end-of-day cognitive performance (Study 1 over five consecutive workdays: n = 163, k = 701; Study 2 with multiple daily assessments over seven consecutive workdays: n = 93, k = 471), even when controlling for task performance (Study 1) and beginning-of-day cognitive performance (Study 2). In two experiments, we then show that simulating task proactivity results in greater mental effort and lower routineness but not in greater ego depletion (Study 3: N = 318 and Study 4: N = 319) or increased self-control demands, -effort, or -motivation (Study 4). This provides support for our proposed cognitive pathway. Our findings enhance our understanding of the cognitively demanding nature of task proactivity and provide empirical support for its cognitive costs using a mental fatigue lens. They also suggest that the impact of a cognitively demanding activity like task proactivity may persist throughout the day and carry over to other tasks involving cognitive performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

General mental ability (GMA) tests have long been at the heart of the validity-diversity trade-off, with conventional wisdom being that reducing their weight in personnel selection can improve adverse impact, but that this results in steep costs to criterion-related validity. However, Sackett et al. (2022) revealed that the criterion-related validity of GMA tests has been considerably overestimated due to inappropriate range restriction corrections. Thus, we revisit the role of GMA tests in the validity-diversity trade-off using an updated meta-analytic correlation matrix of the relationships six selection methods (biodata, GMA tests, conscientiousness tests, structured interviews, integrity tests, and situational judgment tests) have with job performance, along with their Black-White mean differences. Our results lead to the conclusion that excluding GMA tests generally has little to no effect on validity, but substantially decreases adverse impact. Contrary to popular belief, GMA tests are not a driving factor in the validity-diversity trade-off. This does not fully resolve the validity-diversity trade-off, though: Our results show there is still some validity reduction required to get to an adverse impact ratio of .80, although the validity reduction is less than previously thought. Instead, it shows that the validity-diversity trade-off conversation should shift from the role of GMA tests to that of other selection methods. The present study also addresses which selection methods now emerge as most valid and whether composites of selection methods can result in validities similar to those expected prior to Sackett et al. (2022). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

We examine 244 independent tests of interaction effects published in recent issues of four leading journals in the organizational sciences in order to estimate the replicability of reported statistically significant interaction effects. A z-curve analysis (Brunner & Schimmack, 2020) of the distribution of p values indicates an estimated replicability of 37%, although this figure varied somewhat across the four journals. We also find that none of the coded studies reported having conducted a priori power analyses and that only one reported having preregistered their hypotheses-despite longstanding exhortations for researchers to plan their studies to have adequate power and to engage in open science practices. Our results suggest that moderation results that have been reported in these leading journals fail to meet the methodological and statistical burden that would lead us to recommend that scientists and practitioners rely on these findings to inform their research and practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Organizations often need to deal with ambiguous threats, which are complex, unprecedented, and difficult-to-predict events that hold the potential to cause harm. Drawing on the attention-based view of work behavior, we propose that employees do not always remain vigilant to such threats. Consequently, we argue that, in the face of those threats, employees can fail to notice or recognize problems or vulnerabilities in their organizations' work processes or products that can hinder coping. We posit that this effect is, paradoxically, more pronounced when employees are working with trustworthy managers who are perceived as capable and focused enough on the well-being of their units to adequately deal with work challenges. Thereby, we highlight that employees may overlook problems and thus not speak up, precisely when their input is highly desired to address ambiguous threats and can be effectively used by competent and caring managers. Using a combination of field surveys and preregistered experiments, we demonstrate support for our arguments. In the process, we present an alternative attention-based perspective to the voice literature that has so far predominantly focused on cost-benefit-based explanations (i.e., how employees evaluate the perceived costs of speaking up vs. presumed benefits) when describing hurdles to employee voice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Speaking up on social injustices may help create more just and inclusive organizations. Yet, many people choose to remain silent. In this article, we test how managerial silence on injustices can shape impressions of a manager's lack of support for an outgroup. In Study 1, we surveyed employees and found that many noticed their managers' silence and recounted that such silence influenced how they perceived their managers. We then conducted nine experimental studies (Studies 2-6, Supplemental Studies 1-4) to test how observers' perceptions of managers who engage in silence on an outgroup injustice depend on whether managers have spoken up or remained silent in the past. We demonstrate that when a manager engages in selective silence by previously speaking up on an ingroup injustice but remains silent on an outgroup injustice, observers perceive the manager as harboring greater bias and as less supportive of the outgroup than if they remained totally silent on both issues. In contrast, when a manager engages in selective silence by previously speaking up on an outgroup injustice but then remains silent on a second outgroup injustice, observers perceive the manager as generally supportive of social justice and as more supportive of the second outgroup than if they remained totally silent on both issues. We discuss implications for speaking up and remaining silent on injustices in the workplace. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Although punishment deters misconduct, protects employees from harm, and maintains cooperation in organizations, not all leaders punish-some are lenient. Employees keenly watch leaders' responses to misconduct. Leniency is often judged as unfair because it violates moral principles of justice, motivating observers to withhold support to leaders. Our research shifts the conversation to explain how moral consideration of offenders factors into the sensemaking of leaders' leniency that influences observer reactions. Perceptions of offender personal need (distress from the offender's personal life that is outside their control) raise observers' humanitarianism, which is reflected in compassion. Compassion elicited from offender personal need motivates observers to reduce the distress from the situation, lessening the unfairness of the leniency and punitive reactions to the leader. Three experiments demonstrated that leniency elicited unfairness that reduced support to leaders; observers' perceptions of offender personal need moderated the effects of leniency, reducing its unfairness and punitive reactions to leaders. In Studies 2 and 3, we found that compassion mediated the moderating effects of offender personal need. Only distress from personal need that is inflicted onto offenders (i.e., other-inflicted personal need), compared to distress from work performance need (Study 2) and self-inflicted personal need (Study 3), elicited compassion that lessened the unfairness of leniency. Study 3 also showed that self-inflicted personal need elicited contempt for the offender, which mediated the moderating effect of self-inflicted personal need, bolstering the unfairness of leniency and lessening support to lenient leaders. Implications to theory and practice are presented. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).