Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes最新文献

We integrate theories of conflict expressions and conflict management to examine how the nature of a conflict expression (i.e., the level of entrenchment, subversiveness, ambiguity, and target-directness) influences receivers’ willingness to respond with competitive, integrative, and nonconfrontational behaviors. Specifically, we conducted two policy-capturing experiments through which we examined the effects of distinct facets of a conflict expression on receivers’ conflict management behaviors, while holding all other facets constant, thereby offering causal conclusions on the relative importance of each facet for predicting behavioral reactions. We find that receivers were more likely to respond with competitive (forcing) versus integrative (problem-solving, compromising) or nonconfrontational (yielding, avoiding) behaviors when conflict was expressed unambiguously with high entrenchment and subversiveness. Notably, entrenchment had the strongest influence of any facet on conflict reactions. Overall, we contribute to research by specifying behavioral outcomes of distinct conflict expressions, which likely have important implications for the initiation of conflict spirals.

Workers with lower financial standing face many personal challenges due to the relatively lower level of material resources they have at their disposal. We propose that lower financial standing not just impacts workers themselves, but also engenders discrimination from supervisors. Drawing on social cognition principles, we forward a situational inference perspective whereby supervisors make a naïve inference that workers with lower financial standing pose a higher risk of cheating which leads them to subject such workers to more negative treatment and deprive them of opportunities. We focus on two ubiquitous ways in which organizations constrain cheating behavior: worker surveillance and task allocation. In Studies 1 and 2, we find that workers with lower financial standing are unfairly subjected to higher levels of surveillance due to higher perceived cheating risk. In Studies 3 and 4, we find that such workers are unfairly discriminated against in terms of being assigned tasks that could potentially have direct or longer term career benefits for them, but that entail a risk of cheating, due to higher perceived cheating risk. Furthermore, supervisors’ preference for complex explanation moderates these effects, such that the negative indirect effect is weaker when preference for complex explanation is higher as opposed to when preference for complex explanation is lower (Studies 2 and 4). These findings extend the understanding of challenges faced by workers with lower financial standing and warn that the attempts to constrain cheating, prevalent in modern organizations, can themselves be systematically biased against vulnerable groups.

While revenge is typically thought to serve utilitarian goals (deter future offenses) or as an end in itself (restore fairness, equate suffering), we test whether “belief-based” motives also shape revenge behavior. Across four studies—one observational, two hypothetical choice, and one real choice—we find evidence that avengers want the offender to understand why (and sometimes by whom) they are being punished, even when doing so cannot change the offender’s future behavior. Avengers prefer punishments that allow them to communicate the reason to offenders, and they are willing to compromise on distributive justice to do so. Furthermore, avengers are less motivated to cause suffering if offenders remain ignorant of the reason. We explore reasons beyond deterrence that explain why avengers may care about what offenders believe, and also discuss the implications of these motives for organizations.

We examine the cognitive processes that underpin emotion regulation strategies and their associations with creativity. Building on theories of emotion regulation and creative cognition, we theorize that cognitive reappraisal of emotion-eliciting events is positively associated with creativity because both involve considering new approaches or perspectives. We also predict that reappraisal experience boosts creativity for people prone to thinking conventionally. Three studies support our theory by demonstrating that reappraisal improves cognitive flexibility and enhances creativity for individuals low in openness to experience, independent from the effects of emotions on creativity. Therefore, reappraisal is an effective tool to foster creativity among conventional thinkers. More broadly, the results indicate that emotion regulation processes have downstream consequences on behavior, above and beyond their effects on emotions.

Over the last 20 years, “talent management” has become an increasingly popular descriptor of activities previously referred to as “human resources.” Across five studies (total N = 9,966), we investigate this terminological shift and its organizational consequences. We find that contemporary human resource professionals prefer “talent management” to prior terminology, deeming it more optimistic and motivating. Nevertheless, “talent” is semantically ambiguous. Lay definitions of talent vary in the degree to which it is defined as innate versus learned, and these definitions correspond to differences in growth versus fixed mindsets. By contrast, “skill”—a common synonym for “talent”—more unambiguously signals that ability can change. In decision making scenarios, we found that replacing the word “talent” with “skill” more uniformly evokes a growth mindset about ability, which in turn leads to more optimistic attitudes about persistence after failure and an inclination to direct organizational resources toward employee development. Collectively, these findings show that synonyms for ability differ in the mindsets they evoke and illuminate the trouble with talent terminology in the workplace.

We propose that perceptions of professional women change differently than perceptions of men as they age. Drawing inspiration from intersectionality theory, we examine the interaction of age and gender, finding that professional women are seen as more agentic, but also maximally incongruent with the gender-intensified prescription of being communal, in middle age. Our experiment showed that middle-aged women were perceived as agentic, like men, but also as declining more in warmth between young adulthood and middle age. Our field study also showed that middle-aged professional women are viewed as similarly agentic but less warm than men. Our longitudinal within-person study showed that these perceptions have consequences: Unlike men, middle-aged women (professors) received lower performance evaluations compared to their younger selves. Further, a linguistic analysis showed that middle-aged women professors were acknowledged to be more agentic, but also criticized for violating communal stereotype prescriptions, which mediated the link between age and women’s, but not men’s, performance evaluations.

Systemic bias and discrimination have resulted in some groups benefitting from centuries of advantages and other groups being harmed by centuries of disadvantages in our society. As an institution within our imperfect society, Academe is subject to the same systems of privilege and oppression that differentially drive advancement rates among scholars. In this editorial, we focus attention on the microaggressions and discrimination scholars of color experience in Academe in the United States. Specifically, we take a personal narrative approach to explore several common challenges scholars of color face and provide affirmations to these scholars to counteract the negative effects of these challenges. Finally, we call in allies by providing insights about their critical role in dismantling systemic bias and being a reliable source of support to scholars of color.

We develop and test a holistic model of how team members’ swift judgments about a prospective team member impact their selection decisions and how accurate those judgments are in predicting the prospective member’s performance. Applying the social psychology literature on person perception to the organizational literature on team member selection, we argue that team members’ perceptions of the prospective member’s competence primarily shape their predictions about the prospective member’s task-related performance in the team, whereas perceptions of warmth primarily shape predictions about the prospective member’s interpersonal contextual performance in the team. We further propose that, although team members rely on both performance predictions when choosing a prospective member, predicted task-related performance receives more weight than predicted interpersonal contextual performance, and that the importance of predicted interpersonal contextual performance is elevated when team task interdependence is high. Importantly, we theorize that the predictions about task-related performance show good accuracy, whereas the predictions about interpersonal contextual performance do not, which makes the reliance on the latter erroneous. Across two studies utilizing prospective members’ actual task-related and interpersonal contextual performance (objective and peer-rated), as well as team members’ predictions about such performances, we found support for our predictions. Our research resolves several outstanding puzzles in the literature on person perception, integrates it into organizational research, and offers novel and actionable insights for selecting prospective team members.