Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes最新文献

Although holding oneself accountable is deemed important for effective leadership, CEOs tend to demonstrate a self-serving tendency when reporting their company’s performance to the financial community. Leaders do so by providing internal accounts for favorable performance and external accounts for unfavorable performance. The effects of this strategy on the financial community’s judgments of a company’s value, however, is frequently mixed. Guided by the actor-observer perspective, we propose that observers (i.e., analysts) are likely to provide higher forecasts for firms whose CEOs attribute unfavorable organizational outcomes to internal factors and favorable outcomes to external factors. Integrating this conceptual perspective with attribution theory, we predicted that CEO accounts will have a stronger influence on analysts’ forecasts when the company performs unfavorably versus favorably. Results of archival data analysis (N = 35,676 quarterly earnings conference calls) generally supported our hypothesis, and were then replicated in a pre-registered follow-up field experiment (Study 2; N = 307), showing that analysts’ perceptions of the leader’s integrity mediated the effects of CEO accounts on analysts’ evaluation of the company. The mediating role of leader integrity was only significant when the company performed unfavorably (versus favorably). The present research adds to theory on causal accounts and perceived leader integrity, while offering guidance on how leaders’ accounts can relate to observers’ evaluations of those leaders and their companies.

When facing decisions, managers and employees often seek coworker support. They may ask for advice, retaining decision responsibility, or delegate, transferring decision responsibility. Prior work shows that people who seek decision support via delegation expect to avoid the burdens of decision responsibility, like regret and blame. But might these anticipated benefits sometimes come at an interpersonal cost? Drawing from fairness theory, we hypothesize and find that decision support providers often respond to delegators (versus advice seekers) with reduced willingness to help them with future decisions or hire them, perceiving those seeking to offload decision responsibility as less fair. This interpersonal penalization is attenuated when the potential for perceived unfairness is reduced: when decision responsibility transfer is perceived as less likely to make the support provider worse off (when the decision involves allocating desirable outcomes to others) or more legitimate (when the decision lies within the scope of the helper’s role).

Mindfulness is known to temper negative reactions by both victims and perpetrators of injustice. Accordingly, critics claim that mindfulness numbs people to injustice, raising concerns about its moral implications. Examining how mindful observers respond to third-party injustice, we integrate mindfulness with deontic justice theory to propose that mindfulness does not numb but rather enlivens people to injustice committed by others against others. Results from three studies show that mindfulness heightens moral outrage in witnesses of injustice, particularly when the injustice is only moderate. Although these findings did not replicate with a mindfulness induction, post-hoc analysis in a fourth study reveals that measured state mindfulness perhaps heightens moral outrage when observers have a weak deontic justice orientation. In documenting this moral enlivening effect, we demonstrate that mindfulness – measured as a state or trait – leads people to exact greater deontic retribution against perpetrators of third-party injustice.

Power has been shown to liberate actors from situational influences that harm creativity because they elicit conformity. However, the workplace creativity literature recognizes that situational factors can also promote creativity. In this paper, we combine these findings and investigate whether this means that low-power actors benefit more from creativity-enhancing situational factors. Specifically, we test how power attenuates the impact of diversity in an actor’s environment on individual inspiration and creativity. Data from two large survey studies and one archival study provide converging evidence for the proposed contingent benefits of diversity for low-power actors’ inspiration and creativity. Together, the results of these studies demonstrate that low power may render individuals more receptive to social influences conducive to creativity, such as diversity, thereby facilitating individuals’ feelings of inspiration and displayed creativity.

Popular press and theoretical conjecture imply that curiosity is not just an individual motivation but also an enabler of collective actions. This study seeks to explicate curiosity as a catalyst for collective actions by examining team supervisors’ trait curiosity. We test the idea that trait curiosity predisposes team supervisors to manipulate team-level task structures, which primes certain forms of team regulatory focus and eventually affects team innovation. Two studies using the interest/deprivation (I/D) taxonomy of curiosity revealed that, by predisposing supervisors to create more learning demand, I-type curiosity primes team promotion focus, which facilitates both radical and incremental team innovation. By predisposing supervisors to create more problem-solving demand, d-type curiosity arouses team prevention focus, which facilitates team incremental innovation but hinders radical innovation. The effect of supervisor curiosity is evident only when supervisors have high task authority. This study uncovered a powerful property of curiosity, demonstrating its promising contributions to organizational life.

The present research compares the influence of diversity ideologies on race and gender relations. In contrast to research suggesting that an identity-aware ideology (i.e., multiculturalism or race-awareness) predicts more support for racial equality than does an identity-blind one (i.e., colorblindness or race-blindness), this paper suggests that the opposite is true for gender. Six studies demonstrate that an identity-aware ideology (compared to an identity-blind one) highlights unique types of race and gender differences, leading to divergent outcomes for race and gender inequality. While race-awareness highlights external, opportunity-based differences, promoting support for policies that combat systemic inequality (e.g., affirmative action), gender-awareness highlights internal, biology-based differences, reifying gender-essentialism, broadly, and gender stereotypes, in particular. Together, this work suggests that the beneficial effects of identity-aware ideologies previously found for race may not be effective for gender. Ultimately, it warns against one-size-fits-all approaches to diversity and offers practical implications for diversity science.

Like most literatures as they mature, the creativity literature has become—ironically—less creative. We spearheaded this special issue to encourage the bold new ideas we need to revitalize research on creativity in organizations and expand our capacity to build knowledge on this important topic. The ten articles included in the special issue inject a big dose of novelty into the creativity literature. We discuss the novel contributions of each article and how scholars can continue making research on creativity more creative.

We propose that moral character beliefs influence medical treatment choices. In comparison to behavioral treatments, medication is believed to be an “easy way out,” showing a lack of willpower and, therefore, a lack of moral character. These beliefs lower the appeal of medication treatments relative to behavioral treatments. Reducing the impact of moral beliefs moderates this effect. Specifically, the preference for behavior over medication attenuates when treatment choice is framed as “just a preference” and therefore irrelevant to moral character inferences. Finally, we find that when medication is the more effective option, it is no longer viewed as showing worse moral character. This is because two competing indirect effects occur: Medication is still viewed as showing worse willpower than (ineffective) behavior which shows worse moral character, but it is also viewed as creating better outcomes which shows better moral character. Our findings highlight the importance of moral identity in health decision-making.

How do creative workers make ideas perceived as tainted acceptable to others? Using a qualitative, inductive study of the emerging entomophagy market – using insects as a source of food for humans – and the Circular Economy – using waste, pollution, and other tainted resources as raw materials for new products – we introduce a new form of creativity we label dirty creativity. Our findings demonstrate that creative workers use two sets of tactics to make dirty creativity more acceptable: relocating dirt (locating the stigma within a network of common ideas) and recasting dirt as value (extolling features of dirty that redeem the value of the material). Our inductive theory reveals that creative workers champion their products by drawing attention to the dirtiness while simultaneously mitigating the ramifications of doing so. In doing so, our research advances theory and research on creativity by shifting the locus of creative work from the early stages of idea generation to the intermediate phase of idea championing and by highlighting the importance of dirty creativity and the effort needed to shape dirty creativity into acceptable designs.