Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes最新文献

Research on verbal probabilities and standard scales issued by national and international authorities suggest that only events with probabilities above 60% should be labelled “likely”. We find, however, that when people apply this term to continuous variables, like expected costs, it describes the most likely (modal) outcome or interval, regardless of actual probabilities, which may be quite small. This was demonstrated in six studies in which lay participants (N = 2,228) were shown probability distributions from various domains and asked to generate or to select “likely” outcome intervals. Despite having numeric and graphically displayed information available, participants judged central, low-probability segments as “likely” (as opposed to equal or larger segments in the tails) and subsequently overestimated the chances of these outcomes. We conclude that high-probability interpretations of “likely” are only valid for binary outcomes but not for distributions of graded variables or multiple outcomes.

Creativity and innovation are often considered to be essential characteristics of effective organizations. However, recent experimental research suggests that individual-level creativity in the workplace is not always perceived positively because of the uncertainty inherent in creative ideas. Although this research has advanced our understanding of perceptions of individual creativity in organizations, less is known about whether this creativity bias holds in real world contexts and, if so, whether there are organizational consequences. In this paper, we examine the organizational implications of executives’ use of words related to creativity and innovation (i.e., creativity-speak) during quarterly earnings calls. We predict that due to the association between creativity and uncertainty, market reactions to creativity-speak will be negative. However, we also predict that these same discussions of creativity will be associated with higher firm financial performance. We find support for our predictions, and additionally find that the creativity bias can be ameliorated through executives’ use of a positive tone when discussing creativity and innovation. Our study has a number of theoretical implications for the study of creativity, innovation, and executive communication.

Building on perspectives highlighting the social nature of workplace creativity, we argue that being in a creative mindset will highlight the value that co-workers provide to the creative process. This heightened awareness of co-workers as being integral to the creative process increases social closeness with these co-workers, subsequently reducing instigated rudeness towards, as well as perceived rudeness from, those co-workers. In four studies (both in the field as well as in the lab), we find support for these theoretical predictions. Our work also identifies when and for whom these effects are likely to be strongest, indicating that the effect of being in a creative mindset on social closeness is stronger in contexts characterized by high (vs. low) psychological safety, and weaker for employees high (vs. low) in dispositional creativity. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.

Intergroup conflict profoundly affects the welfare of groups and can deteriorate intergroup relations long after the conflict is over. Here, we experimentally investigate how the experience of an intergroup conflict influences the ability of groups to establish cooperation after conflict. We induced conflict by using a repeated attacker-defender game in which groups of four are divided into two ‘attackers’ that can invest resources to take away resources from the other two participants in the role of ‘defenders.’ After the conflict, groups engaged in a repeated public goods game with peer-punishment, in which group members could invest resources to benefit the group and punish other group members for their decisions. Previous conflict did not significantly reduce group cooperation compared to a control treatment in which groups did not experience the intergroup conflict. However, when having experienced an intergroup conflict, individuals punished free-riding during the repeated public goods game less harshly and did not react to punishment by previous attackers, ultimately reducing group welfare. This result reveals an important boundary condition for peer punishment institutions. Peer punishment is less able to efficiently promote cooperation amid a ‘shadow of conflict.’ In a third treatment, we tested whether such ‘maladaptive’ punishment patterns induced by previous conflict can be mitigated by hiding the group members’ conflict roles during the subsequent public goods provision game. We find more cooperation when individuals could not identify each other as (previous) attackers and defenders and maladaptive punishment patterns disappeared. Results suggest that intergroup conflict undermines past perpetrators’ legitimacy to enforce cooperation norms. More generally, results reveal that past conflict can reduce the effectiveness of institutions for managing the commons.

As the demand for creativity grows, the vulnerability of ideas to theft becomes increasingly salient. Knowledge workers are keenly aware of idea theft and nearly one-third report having co-workers who steal ideas. However, the severity of consequences people face for stealing ideas is unclear. In this article, I investigate the interpersonal consequences of stealing ideas compared to stealing money. Across a series of experiments, I found that idea thieves are judged to have worse character than money thieves, and that individuals are less willing to offer them co-worker support. Further, I found that stronger internal attributions for idea theft behaviors drive this effect. Furthermore, I tested and found no evidence supporting value as an alternative explanation. Lastly, I found that individuals are judged more negatively for stealing creative (vs. practical) ideas. Taken together, these findings suggest that idea theft has significant interpersonal consequences with negative implications for co-worker dynamics.

The most popular ways of holding wealth include tangible investments such as real estate and gold, and intangible investments such as stocks and mutual funds. Five experiments revealed a tangibility bias whereby the tangibility of an investment or tangibility cues linked to an investment provides a false sense of financial safety. When focusing on avoiding risk, investors indicated a higher willingness to sell the stocks of companies that invest in intangible versus tangible assets (Study 1). The greater perceived permanence of tangible versus intangible assets appeared to underlie the difference in market risk assessments. Respondents judged the same asset as riskier when it was framed as intangible (Study 2), and differences in perceived permanence mediated this effect. Increasing perceived permanence independently of tangibility led to lower market risk assessments of commodity futures (Study 3). Tangibility prompts that leave asset tangibility unchanged were sufficient to lower risk judgments (studies 4 and 5). The differences in market risk assessments were not due to a general preference for tangible assets (Study 4) or differences in familiarity, complexity, or understanding of the asset types (studies 2 and 5).

Retirement means relinquishing the daily structure that work provides and the career-dependent meanings that it offers life narratives. The retirement transition can therefore involve contemplating both how to spend newly-freed daily time and the implications of retirement for one’s life narrative. We investigate how American professionals construe their working and retirement lives, in a qualitative study drawing on 215 interviews with 120 participants, including 12 interviewed longitudinally throughout their years-long retirement transitions. We identify two orthogonal dimensions for contemplating the work and retirement domains of one’s life – global and quotidian life construal – and four basic modes of cognition that arise from variability across these dimensions. We induce a theoretical model describing how construal of working life prefigures construal of retirement life, which then shapes the retirement life experience. This study contributes to construal level theory, narrative psychology, and the literatures on retirement transitions and the meaning of work.

In this research, we explore how employees’ self-reflections following a failed attempt to help a coworker shape future helping intentions and behaviors. Specifically, we propose a dual-process model of parallel affective and cognitive pathways to delineate how, and why, reflecting on an interpersonal helping failure with self-compassion would result in countervailing effects on future helping. Whereas self-compassion reduces employees’ future helping via the alleviation of guilt (affective mechanism), it also increases employees’ future helping via the facilitation of helping self-efficacy (cognitive mechanism). We further draw on theories of attribution to propose that these effects depend on who was at fault for the helping failure, such that the effects are strengthened when coworker blame attribution is low. Results across four studies improve our understanding of the phenomenon of interpersonal helping failures, and the role of employee self-reflection in shaping the impact of these failures on future intentions and behavior.

The peak-end rule (Fredrickson & Kahneman, 1993) asserts that, when people retrospectively evaluate an experience (e.g., the previous workday), they rely more heavily on the episode with peak intensity and on the final (end) episode than on other episodes in the experience. We meta-analyzed 174 effect sizes and found strong support for the peak-end rule. The peak-end effect on retrospective summary evaluations was: (1) large (r = 0.581, 95% Confidence Interval = 0.487–0.661), (2) robust across boundary conditions, (3) comparable to the effect of the overall average (mean) score and stronger than the effects of the trend and variability across all episodes in the experience, (4) stronger than the effects of the first (beginning) and lowest intensity (trough) episodes, and (5) stronger than the effect of the duration of the experience (which was essentially nil, thereby supporting the idea of duration neglect; Fredrickson & Kahneman, 1993). We provide a future research agenda and practical implications.

We perform the first tests of individual-level preferences for “blinding” in decision making: purposefully restricting the information one sees in order to form a more objective evaluation. For example, when grading her students’ papers, a professor might choose to “blind” herself to students’ names by anonymizing them, thus evaluating the papers on content alone. We predict that curiosity will shape blinding preferences, motivating people to seek out (vs. be blind to) irrelevant, potentially biasing information about a target of evaluation. We further predict that decision frames that reduce or satisfy curiosity about potentially biasing information will encourage choices to be blind to that information. We find support for these hypotheses across seven studies (N = 4,356) and multiple replications (N = 9,570), demonstrating consequences for bias and accuracy across a variety of evaluation contexts. We discuss implications for research on mental contamination as well as the “dark side” of curiosity.