Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology最新文献

Improving inter-agency working across organizations is an important goal across public and private sectors. The UK Emergency Services have spent a decade implementing organizational change to improve interoperability between the Police, Fire and Ambulance Services. JESIP—the group tasked with realising this change—have faced criticism. We evaluated JESIP's efforts by interviewing expert commanders, finding participants supported the principle of change, but issues impeded its implementation. We developed the Principle-Implementation Change Framework for Interoperability (PICI) to describe the gap between change principles and change implementation, identifying the macro-systemic, meso-organizational and micro-psychological processes between them. Key obstacles to implementation included macro-level funding issues, incompatible meso-level organizational structures and strained micro-level peer-to-peer relationships. Participants also reflected on the facilitators of change. At the meso-organizational level, JESIP was perceived to have improved inter-team communication and flexibility. At the micro-psychological level participants described enhanced trust, shared identities and the emergence of a new type of interoperability leader. This study highlights the importance of gaining support for the principle of interoperability while addressing implementation challenges posed by the inherent social complexities involved in this change. Change efforts must be monitored over time, considering the macro, meso and micro-level processes that influence the principle-implementation gap.

Drawing on fairness heuristic theory, we propose that organizational justice serves as a boundary condition determining how employees respond to perceived uncertainty in times of organizational crisis with different types of proactive voice (i.e. prosocial or self-interested). We conducted a three-wave survey study to test our hypotheses with a sample of 401 employee-supervisor dyads during the COVID-19 period. Results demonstrated the employee crisis-related uncertainty perception's positive indirect effect on employee prosocial voice via prosocial motive when organizational justice was higher, and its positive indirect effect on employee self-interested voice via self-interested motive when organizational justice was lower. We then discussed our implications for organizational crisis and employee voice literature.

We introduce Kane's Interpretation Use Argument approach to establishing a measure's validity to organizational scientists and extend it to multilevel constructs. First, we review five types of inferences (i.e., domain description, scoring, generalization, extrapolation and implication) that could be targeted by applied psychologists and management scholars, enumerate the types of analyses that fall under each of the inferences and describe how they help provide a clearer overview to support score use. We apply this framework to organize evidence related to a short and theory-driven scale that measures safety climate by developing six potential factor structures for safety climate scores, along with their meaning and interpretations, selecting items from the SOPS survey and analysing data from the 2021 and 2022 SOPS datasets, two large government surveys from the health care industry (N = 77,674 and 183,573, respectively) that feature a nested data structure on three levels. A shared construct model was the model that received the most empirical support. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of measuring safety climate using shared construct models, the limitations of the SOPS survey, and we trace a map for future efforts to constructing a validity argument.

How employees perceive their leaders' power can influence their view and treatment of organizations. This study examines how employees' perceptions of their leaders' power construal—primarily as responsibility (PaR) or primarily as opportunity (PaO)—influence employee malevolent creativity towards the organization, with organizational conspiracy beliefs mediating this relationship. We hypothesized that when leaders' power is perceived primarily as responsibility, it diminishes employee endorsement of conspiracy beliefs and, in turn, reduces malevolent creativity. Conversely, perceiving leaders' power mainly as opportunity was expected to amplify conspiracy beliefs and subsequently malevolent creativity. Study 1, a three-wave study among employees, showed that increased PaO was positively related to employee malevolent creativity through increased organizational conspiracy beliefs. Moreover, PaR was negatively related to malevolent creativity through organizational conspiracy beliefs. Study 2 (preregistered) experimentally tested these relationships and provided support for all hypotheses. Study 3 (also preregistered) manipulated exposure to organizational conspiracy theories (the mediator) to address the ‘measurement-of-mediation’ issue and found that conspiracy theories increase malevolent creativity. This study demonstrates the adverse consequences of leader's power construal as opportunity through employee's organizational conspiracy beliefs.

The aim of this study was to investigate long-term development in job crafting during the COVID-19 pandemic among employees with and without mental health issues (MHI). Furthermore, this study aimed to explore the role of job resources regarding these changes. We have analysed longitudinal panel data of six waves between 2019 (applied as pre-pandemic baseline) and 2022 from employees in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. Hierarchical linear modelling showed change differences in job crafting: employees with MHI experienced a higher decrease in job crafting during the COVID-19 pandemic compared with employees without MHI. When investigating the specific crafting dimensions, we found that there was a group difference only for crafting for structural resources, but not for crafting for social resources. Moreover, job resources buffered the decrease in job crafting among employees with MHI. Particularly, social support buffered the decrease in crafting for social resources and role clarity buffered the decrease in crafting for structural resources. These results suggest that in times of crisis, strengthening job resources can help employees with MHI maintain their job crafting behaviour.

This study contributes to research on how workplace coaching works by examining learning processes as a mediating mechanism of the impact of problem-specific interventions on goal attainment. This has rarely been investigated. Fifty-five coach–coachee dyads with 51 coaches and 55 coachees participated in the study. Workplace coaching lasted seven to eight coaching sessions in average. Coaches and coachees gave ratings in each session. We analysed this data (NLevel2 = 55, NLevel1 = 335–407) using longitudinal multilevel structural equation modelling accounting for the nested data structure. As expected, coachees' perceived goal attainment increased throughout the coaching process. The results of the study also revealed the mediating role of learning processes in the impact of problem-specific interventions, specifically clarification of meaning and mastery/coping, and, but to a lesser extent, implementation actuation, on goal attainment in coaching. Data for all hypothesised models showed a good or acceptable model fit. In contrast, the model fit was poor, when we explored differential mediation effects, which supported only single-loop learning as a mediator. These results underscore the importance of stimulating learning processes through specific interventions to improve the effectiveness of workplace coaching.

Career advancement offers employee motivation, but what happens when an upward path reaches a plateau? With a three-wave survey of 244 members of 58 work teams, the current study explores how and when career plateaus influence counterproductive work behaviours (CWBs), in accordance with negative reciprocity theory. The results show that at the individual level, individual job content plateaus relate positively to individual CWBs, through individual work alienation; individual task crafting weakens this mediating effect. At the team level, the team hierarchical plateaus relate positively to team CWBs through team work alienation, and team participation in decision-making weakens this mediating effect. This multi-level perspective establishes both theoretical contributions and practical implications.

Work attitude and perceptions surveys are useful to understand workforces and improve employee well-being. However, surveys are often lengthy, leading companies to use less effective methods or measure only a few constructs. Researchers have tried various scale reduction methods, including single-item measures (Matthews et al., Journal of Business and Psychology, 2022), but these and other scale-shortening methods often compromise content validity and reliability. This research tests a novel scale-shortening method called supervised construct scoring (SCS) to create shorter work attitude and perception measures. Despite using only 39% of the original items, SCS scores exhibited nearly equivalent psychometric properties as full-scale scores and superior psychometric properties when compared to single-item measures. SCS represents a paradigm shift in scale shortening, and the new Short Work Attitude and Perception Scales (SWAPS) algorithms are made freely available: https://osf.io/9tueh/?view_only=482dc89e3cbf4c1489e28aabff307caa.

How incentives are perceived by a receiver can determine how they affect their autonomy and intrinsic motivation. Guided by self-determination theory, we investigate the relationship between perceived financial incentive salience (PFIS) and change in intrinsic motivation by focusing on the mediating role of autonomy frustration and the moderating role of task heuristic. To test this model, we utilize a repeated-measure two-wave design in two field studies (n = 169 and 341) under a non-contingent versus contingent pay system. The findings demonstrated that perceived salience is a key determinant behind the undermining effect caused by financial incentives, independently of incentive contingency. In addition, task heuristic and autonomy frustration are crucial factors in understanding the nuances behind the undermining effect. Under both types of incentive systems (a) PFIS had a positive association with autonomy frustration, and (b) PFIS and autonomy frustration both related negatively to intrinsic motivation in high-heuristic tasks. However, the autonomy frustration-intrinsic motivation relationship and PFIS-intrinsic motivation relationship had considerable differences in low-heuristic tasks among non-contingent versus contingent systems. We discuss the implications of the findings for future research on incentive salience and work motivation.

The world of work is replete with daily hassles that make the experience of negative emotions ubiquitous. Conversations between leaders and followers during challenging times are often characterized by negative emotions, and thus, are of central importance in modern organizations. Yet, the intersection of negative emotion, difficult conversations and leader–follower relationships is often ignored, and these topics are treated as separate areas of study. We integrate these various streams with research on asymmetrical leader negative emotion displays to identify when and how difficult conversations laden with negative emotions result in benefits to leader–follower relationships. Using a grounded theory approach, we build a theoretical model based on interviews with 21 leaders and 17 followers describing 166 difficult conversations. Our work depicts specific communication strategies that leaders use to facilitate difficult conversations. These strategies, in turn, create shared meaning and validate followers' feelings during difficult conversations, which allows for beneficial relationship-specific outcomes to ensue. We unpack these findings in the context of the power differential between leaders and followers to advance current thinking on the intersection of negative emotions and communication in leader–follower relationships.