Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes最新文献

People often take great satisfaction in their professional and personal accomplishments. Previous research suggests that sharing these pride experiences enhances impressions of one’s competence. However, this past work has examined pride in contexts where others’ reactions were absent, unlike most workplaces and performance-oriented settings where diverse reactions to similar achievements occur. I argue that what pride signals about a person’s competence depends on how others respond to similar successes. Specifically, expressing pride in a performance signals lower competence when others do not share the same prideful reaction. Nine preregistered studies support this prediction. The results also showed that expressing pride in a performance indicates that the performance is close to one’s peak ability. This inference about someone’s performance potential helped explain why expressing pride can signal lower competence. Overall, this work shows that pride is not an unconditional indicator of competence but rather contingent on the emotional responses of others.

Recognizing one’s ignorance is a fundamental skill. We ask whether superior background knowledge or expertise improves the ability to distinguish what one knows from what one does not know, i.e., whether expertise leads to superior meta-knowledge. Supporting this hypothesis, we find that the more a person knows about a topic, the less likely they are to “overclaim” knowledge of nonexistent terms in that topic. Moreover, such expertise protects against overclaiming especially when people are most prone to overclaim – when they view themselves subjectively as experts. We find support for these conclusions in an internal meta-analysis (17 studies), in comparisons of experts and novices in medicine and developmental psychology, and in an experiment manipulating expertise. Finally, we find that more knowledgeable people make knowledge judgments more automatically, which is related to less false familiarity and more accurate recognition. In contrast, their less knowledgeable peers are more likely to deliberate about their knowledge judgments, potentially thinking their way into false familiarity. Whereas feeling like an expert predisposes one to overclaim impossible knowledge, true expertise provides a modest protection against doing so.

While neuroticism is known to change throughout people’s lives, the specific causes of these changes remain poorly understood. One underexplored question is whether specific professions and associated job characteristics can foster neuroticism. Drawing on Cybernetic Big Five Theory (CB5T), we propose business-to-business (B2B) sales jobs entail frequent experiences of uncertainty, which over time increase salespeople’s neuroticism. Four studies with ∼1,700 B2B salespeople and ∼24,000 non-B2B-salespeople provide evidence that working in B2B sales jobs is positively associated with neuroticism. B2B sales job characteristics that are related to uncertainty and thus potentially explain the positive association of sales and neuroticism are complex customer needs, long sales cycles, complex sales targets, tough customer negotiations, and high shares of incentives in compensation plans. These results contribute to establishing CB5T as an explanatory framework for changes in neuroticism within the work environment. They also offer important implications for employees and managers.

Goals are an important motivational tool, and goal setting plays a critical role in both the process and outcomes of goal pursuit. But while the literature on goal setting has largely focused on specific goals, emphasizing their benefits relative to “do your best” goals, an important alternative has largely been overlooked: range goals. Contributing to this gap, we propose a novel conceptualization of range goals as dual reference points, emphasizing the role of the two range endpoints as discrete targets during goal pursuit. In this research, we develop and empirically validate two key propositions: (1) that a range goal’s lower and upper endpoints serve as distinct reference points, and (2) that individuals can flexibly direct (and change) their focus between these two endpoints during goal pursuit. Building on these propositions, we predict and test a series of implications for managing range goal pursuit (e.g., timing feedback messages or structuring complex goal tasks to enhance performance), finding that range goal performance is greatest when positive or encouraging cues occur around the range’s lower endpoint. Finally, contrasting these insights with related findings in the context of specific goals, we test and discuss implications for goal setting (i.e., choosing to set a range vs. specific goal for a particular application). Six main empirical studies (plus five supplemental and one pilot study) support our conceptualization of range goals as dual reference points, shedding light on when and why range goals are a particularly effective motivational tool.

The details of a decision context — including the set of alternatives being offered — can considerably influence the judgments and choices that people make. For instance, people’s decisions are often influenced by the presence of a dominated option (one that is objectively inferior to one of the alternatives) in a choice set. In studying such “context effects,” previous research has focused on how the composition of a choice set affects people’s choices and the way they attend to options and weigh attributes. We take a complementary approach. Here, we propose that the composition of a choice set may be interpreted as signaling information about the choice architect who curated the choice set. Further, we hypothesize that these social inferences can systematically influence decisions. Across seven experiments (N = 3328) using vignette studies and incentive-compatible economic games, we focus on one example of this more general phenomenon, showing that the inclusion of a dominated option can engender distrust in the choice architect. This distrust in turn leads to greater preference for other choice providers. By investigating the social implications of dominated options, we uncover novel psychological and behavioral consequences of choice set composition. We close by considering broader theoretical and practical implications regarding social inferences from choice context.