Journal of Applied Psychology最新文献

The powerful effects of electronic word of mouth on employer branding and prehire outcomes suggest a need for employers to formulate effective responses to employer reviews on social media. Using machine learning and text-mining techniques, we identified three distinct types of employer responses to negative reviews (i.e., excuses, apologies, prosocial behavior) and two other types of responses to positive reviews (i.e., ingratiation, exemplification) from a Glassdoor data set. Integrating research on organizational impression management and stereotype content, we developed and tested a theoretical model of response types and their effects on talent attraction across two vignette experiments with undergraduate (Study 1) and working adult job seekers (Study 2). Across both studies, not responding to negative reviews resulted in the worst outcomes for employers. Results demonstrate that the effectiveness of responses differed by the target population; prosocial behavior was most effective among job-seeking professionals, whereas excuse and apology were more effective among students. While exemplification had positive effects in the student sample, neither assertive tactic had a significant effect on hypothesized outcomes in sample of job-seeking professionals. Furthermore, warmth and sincerity, but not competence, mediated the effect of responses on key prehire outcomes of employer reputation, organizational attraction, and job pursuit intentions. Taken as a whole, our study suggests that employer reviews represent both a threat and an opportunity. (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) 2026 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).

Existing research presents mixed perspectives on the impact of abusive supervision climate on team processes and effectiveness. This discrepancy prompts an important question: when, why, and how does abusive supervision climate become more or less detrimental to teams? By integrating the social functional perspective of gossip with recent theoretical advancements on abusive supervision climate, we develop a novel theoretical model to explain how leader-targeted negative team gossip-defined as the extent to which team members share negative evaluations of the leader's behaviors with each other when the leader is absent-can mitigate the adverse effects of abusive supervision climate on teams. Our model posits that leader-targeted negative team gossip serves its social function in two key ways: (a) It diminishes team members' perception of the leader as a role model, thereby reducing the influence of abusive supervision climate on team aggressive behavior, and (b) it fosters perceived similarity among team members regarding their negative attitudes toward the leader, which lessens the impact of abusive supervision climate on team affective trust. We further argue that these buffering effects of leader-targeted negative team gossip have significant downstream implications for team effectiveness, specifically in terms of team performance and team voluntary turnover. Our model was tested using two multiwave, multisource field studies employing a round-robin design, with samples of 111 and 237 work teams, respectively. The results largely supported our model. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent advancements in range restriction (RR) correction research suggest that Case V (Dahlke & Wiernik, 2020; Le et al., 2016) is one of the most accurate approaches to correct for (indirect) RR. However, researchers have had difficulty applying the Case V approach, especially in validation and meta-analytic (including validity generalization) studies, because of the lack of information regarding one of its key components: the RR ratio of the criterion (uY), particularly in the context of job performance ratings. In the present study, we provide a solution to this problem by presenting a mixed approach using Case IV to estimate the uY of job performance ratings, a critical input in implementing Case V correction (by doing so, mixing Cases IV and V). The premise for this mixed approach hinges upon prior findings that Case IV yields the same unbiased estimates as does Case V as long as its "full mediation" assumption is met. The accuracy of the approach is then tested and compared to those of existing RR correction approaches (Cases II, IV, and V) using Monte Carlo simulations covering a wide range of conditions researchers may realistically encounter in their research. We discuss the present study's implications for personnel selection research and practice, along with study limitations and future research directions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Sexual harassment bystander intervention (SHBI) has been deemed critical to addressing persistent incidents in the workplace, yet scholarly knowledge of this behavior remains sporadic and limited. To move this field of research forward, the present study departs from the traditional variable-centered approach and instead adopts a latent profile approach to answer three key questions: (1) Which combinations (profiles) of actions do bystanders take to intervene? (2) When do bystanders intervene with specific profiles of SHBI? and (3) What happens when bystanders intervene with different behavioral combinations? We first developed and validated a scale to measure five distinct SHBI behaviors (i.e., confronting, distracting, supporting, reporting, and discussing) with two scenario-based pilot studies. Then, using this scale and latent profile analysis, we identified three distinctive profiles (i.e., active intervention, low-risk intervention, and no/limited intervention) in a field survey study (N₁ = 381). In two additional field survey studies (N₂ = 312; N₃ = 326), by integrating social cognitive theory with the moral lens, we not only replicated the three similar profiles but also examined antecedents (i.e., organizational norms about sexual harassment and gender, and bystanders' anger, empathy, and harassment-curbing expectancy) and outcomes of the profile memberships (i.e., aggression from the harasser, target gratitude, third-party elevation, and bystander guilt and pride). Overall, this research provides new insights into the nature of SHBI, its distinct patterns in the workplace, and potential organizational practices related to SHBI profiles. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).