Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes最新文献

People who are judged negatively by others (e.g., as low in competence) often face a dilemma: They may want to self-promote (to improve others’ impressions of them), but worry their claims may not seem believable. We term this type of situation the “credibility dilemma,” and investigate how people can self-promote most effectively in such cases. In particular, we examine the impact of explicitly acknowledging one’s perceived lack of credibility while self-promoting (e.g., “I’m not that smart, but…” or “I know this may seem hard to believe, but…”). Across ten studies, we find that credibility disclaimers improve perceptions of the self-promoter (compared to self-promoting without them) by increasing perceptions of the speaker’s self-awareness and sincerity. In contrast, credibility disclaimers are ineffective (and sometimes backfire) when the speaker is already perceived as credible. Our findings suggest that common advice to avoid drawing attention to one’s flaws may sometimes be unwarranted.

Organizational secrecy is central to national security, politics, business, technology, healthcare, and law, but its effects are largely unknown. Keeping organizational secrets creates social divides between those who are required to keep the secret and those who are not allowed to know it. We demonstrate that keeping organizational secrets simultaneously evokes feelings of social isolation and status, which have opposing effects on employee well-being. Specifically, organizational secrecy harms hedonic well-being through increased work stress, yet enhances eudaimonic well-being through increased meaningfulness of work. Work stress and meaningfulness, in turn, have opposing effects on overall job satisfaction. These effects emerged across five main studies and two supplemental studies using correlational and experimental methods, spanning numerous empirical contexts (N = 12,211). Moreover, we replicated these effects using multiple operationalizations of our constructs and when accounting for important control variables.

This paper delineates cultural tightness into formal versus informal aspects to depict the strength of norms and the extent of sanctions emanating from both formal and informal norms. Organizations with high formal cultural tightness regulate behaviors through explicit written norms and official sanctions, whereas those with high informal cultural tightness regulate behaviors through uncodified norms, collective beliefs, and informal social sanctions. Through a field study across 14 diverse companies in two countries (Malaysia and the Philippines) and two experiments involving participants from the United States, we found that perceived informal cultural tightness consistently exerts a more significant impact on stifling employee creativity than perceived formal cultural tightness. Additionally, we discovered that these two aspects of cultural tightness also potentially interact to influence employee creativity. Lastly, we identified promotion-focused (but not prevention-focused) self-regulation as a likely mechanism through which informal cultural tightness affects employee creativity. These findings contribute to cultural tightness-looseness theory and research on how organizational culture affects employee creativity.

We invoke leader categorization theory and labeling theory to examine the circumstances under which individuals come to perceive their managerial leaders as “abusers” or “tough love” bosses. In a field study, we show that leader performance moderates the relationship between a leader’s abusive supervision and the degree to which their followers label them as an abuser or a tough love leader. Heightened leader performance lowers the willingness to label the leader as an “abuser” while increasing one’s labeling the leader as a “tough love” boss. This study also documents that leader performance moderates the indirect effect between abusive supervision and upward hostility (through abuser labeling) and the indirect effect between abusive supervision and positive career expectations (through tough love labeling). In a follow-up experiment, we again document that leader performance moderates the relationship between abusive supervision and the degree to which followers label their leaders as an abuser. Additionally, we provide support for a moderated indirect effect on a range of negative behavioral outcomes directed toward the leader through abuser labeling. We discuss the studies’ implications for theory, future research, and practice pertaining to abusive supervision.

Allyship is an important topic of growing interest in research and practice for management and organizations. However, research is still in its infancy, often fragmented across disciplines, and lacking conceptual clarity. The purpose of this special issue, “Allyship, Advocacy, and Social Justice to Support Equality for Marginalized Groups in the Workplace” is to enhance understanding of allies and allyship. We argue that allyship is a mechanism for centering social justice, reducing discrimination and inequality, and improving intergroup dynamics, inclusion, social cohesion, well-being, and organizational effectiveness. We note the importance of distinguishing between conceptualization of who is an ally and the different types of allyship in a brief review of the foundational grounding of the research stream. Next, we examine findings and insights from the eight papers in the special issue, examining how they move the field forward. These articles provide a springboard for understanding how to define, measure, and evaluate allyship, and for identifying key dynamics (e.g., marginalization, dominance, identity motivations), antecedents, consequences, contexts, and boundary conditions. We conclude by identifying future research opportunities that leverage this special issue’s content and gaps to address. We believe that improving understanding of how to be an ally, what they do, and the conditions under which allyship is effective, is valuable for enhancing social relationships between and within marginalized and dominant groups in organizations and society.

People are constantly subject to various types of informational social influences, such as others’ opinions and advice. A tacit assumption in the advice-taking literature is that decision makers treat others’ opinions and advice equally. In this paper, we challenge this assumption by examining the differential effects of advice versus others’ opinions on people’s judgments. Across six preregistered experiments (N = 3,411), we found that participants placed greater weight on and paid more for others’ estimates when presented as advice than when presented as opinions. This advice framing effect substantially reduced egocentric discounting and held across various types of judgments, and for both good and ecological advice. We propose that the advice framing effect stems from higher helping intentions and thereby trustworthiness ascribed to the source of advice (vs. opinions). Both mediational analyses and experimental evidence support this model. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

Dominant group members have different reasons for identifying themselves as allies to marginalized groups. How might these reasons relate to allies’ effectiveness? We use Schwartz’s values theory to integrate disparate work, focusing on two values that can underlie allyship: self-transcendence, or enhancing the welfare of others, and self-enhancement, or personal status and esteem. Across three yoked experiments (N = 3016), we tested how values relate to allies’ intentions, behavior, and persuasiveness. Phase A of each study sampled self-identified allies (e.g., towards LGBTQ+ people, Black people, women). Both self-transcendence and, less consistently, self-enhancement predicted increased activism intentions; only self-transcendence predicted petition-signing behavior. Phase B sampled new participants, who viewed advocacy statements generated by allies in Phase A. We found that ally values affected audience reactions: ally self-transcendence was associated with greater persuasiveness, while self-enhancement was associated with lower persuasiveness. Although both values can generate ally engagement, self-transcendence may promote greater ally effectiveness.

Via three studies (two experiment-based and one critical incident-based) we test when and why a social justice appeal garners more support when delivered by a disadvantaged group advocate (DGA) versus by an ally—that is, by someone who does versus does not belong to the marginalized group named in the appeal, respectively. As hypothesized, significantly more support was shown for a social justice appeal by a DGA (rather than an ally) when receivers identified strongly with the disadvantaged group; and this pattern reversed when this identification was weak. Also as predicted, this interaction-effect was mediated by receivers’ perceptions of their similarity with the advocate, the appeal’s credibility, and by their feelings of empathy. Our findings point to the need to broaden theorizing beyond demographic influences on how persuasive a DGA versus an ally will be and the importance of considering appeal-receiver identification when choosing an advocate.

Allyship is typically considered a positive relationship between marginalized individuals and their relatively more privileged allies. Yet, this flattened, unidirectional, and single-identity view of allyship prohibits us from capturing the nuances and inherent power struggles embedded in the allied relationship. Our study aims to expand our understanding of how and whether allyship across multiple levels of difference helps dismantle oppressive structures or maintains power inequalities in organizations. Integrating current allyship research with intersectionality theory, we conduct an inductive qualitative study of allied relationships between professional women of color in Canada (n = 30) and their nominated allies (n = 30). We find that power schemata, or cognitive and emotional framing of systems of power in allied relationships affect allyship behaviors, such that power cognizance is key for effective allyship to occur. We identify three dimensions of allyship behaviors that emerge from these power considerations —(de)centering, (dis)respecting, and (in)action – which vary in terms of expected allyship by women of color and enacted allyship by their allies. Integrating power schemata and allyship dimensions, we identify three types of allied relationships for women of color at work, varying in effectiveness. We identify ongoing learning as a mechanism to move towards power-cognizance and therefore more effective allyship. Women of color emerge as the most effective allies in our study, highlighting that marginalized individuals can not only be allies, but that they play a crucial role in their own liberation. Based on these findings, we develop our intersectional theory of relational allyship for women of color at work.

Recognizing that postpartum mothers’ organizational reentry is fraught with physical, emotional, and psychological challenges, we explored the specific behaviors that coworkers and managers can enact to support and advocate for working mothers during their reentry process—behaviors we conceptualize as postpartum allyship. In Study 1, we adopted a qualitative approach to gain insight into the forms of allyship that working mothers found valuable. We then build upon these findings in Study 2 by developing and validating a scale of postpartum allyship. Finally, in Study 3, integrating emergent themes from our qualitative data with tenets of the social cognitive model of career self-management (Lent and Brown, 2013, Lent and Brown, 2019), we use our newly-developed measure in a time-lagged study focused on the cognitive, affective, and behavioral impact of postpartum mothers’ experiences of allyship. Results indicated that postpartum allyship experiences bolster work-motherhood self-efficacy and reduce guilt which, in turn, yield important implications for working mothers’ turnover intentions, work-family capital, and postpartum depressive symptoms. Combined across our studies, the current research illuminates the critical impact of allies’ support and advocacy for postpartum mothers during reentry.