Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes最新文献

Normative standards refer to ideals to which people, products, and organizations are held. The present research (N = 2,224) investigates a novel construct—the breadth of normative standards, or the number of criteria that normative standards need to meet. Using archival and primary data in both organizational and consumer contexts, Studies 1–2 found that Indians’ and Singaporeans’ normative standards in several domains (e.g., a good job, a good body wash) needed to satisfy more criteria than those of Americans and the British. Using incentive-compatible designs, Studies 3–5 identified two downstream consequences of broader normative standards; decision-makers with broader standards pay greater attention to detail when evaluating others’ work, and people with broader standards search for more options, even at a cost, before making a choice. This research complements past work on norms as prevalent behaviors, values, and attitudes by examining norms as standards, and documents consequences of the breadth of normative standards for employees and organizations.

Creativity depends on individuals’ willingness to invest in their novel ideas early in the creative process. Burgeoning research on idea evaluation suggests that while people can identify their novel ideas, they may reject them because they are risky and uncertain. Selecting novel ideas is crucial at the earliest phase of the creative process, in which individuals may evaluate several generated ideas to identify those they want to develop and share with others. To uncover when and why people select these ideas, we develop and test theory on the early-stage selection of novel ideas. Integrating theory from attachment, self-construal, and creativity we posit that creators can become attached to, and therefore select their early-stage novel ideas when the idea features affirm core aspects of their self. Individuals with an independent self-construal wish to affirm their unique identity and idiosyncratic agenda and thus are more likely to feel attached to, and select their novel ideas. In contrast, individuals with an interdependent self-construal are less likely to become attached to novel ideas, because these ideas do not validate their self. Findings from a field study on three early-stage hackathons and three experiments support our theory. Our research points to idea attachment as a new mechanism that explains when and why creators embrace early-stage novel ideas.

The importance of creativity to organizations is significant, ergo, scholars have begun to investigate how sensory elements in the workplace might impact creative performance. Our research examines effects of the sensory experience of taste, specifically sweetness, on creativity. Using a range of real taste tests and imagination tasks, we demonstrate that sweet taste facilitates creative performance. We argue that this is because sweet taste, as a positive implicit affective cue, increases cognitive flexibility and creativity independent of the elicitation of positive emotions. However, when the positive associations of sweet taste are externally overridden, such as when health risks are made salient, the positive impact of sweet taste on creativity is attenuated. We further demonstrate that sensory experience of sweetness increases performance on related tasks that require cognitive flexibility, but does not increase performance on non-creative tasks.

How curiosity affects other employees—the social side of curiosity at work—is understudied but meaningful given that social learning theory suggests that when leaders display curiosity, it signals to followers that the environment is safe for taking risks associated with being inquisitive at work. At the same time, because displays of curiosity are communal in nature, social role theory and the communality-bonus effect combine to indicate that curiosity’s effects should be stronger for followers of male leaders versus followers of female leaders. Here, we integrate these social theories to explain how and when leader displays of curiosity will increase follower perceptions of psychological safety and subsequent voice. We test and find support for these predictions across four samples of leader-follower dyads, thereby broadening our understanding of the social implications of curiosity at work, demonstrating how curiosity contributes to leader effectiveness, and highlighting how gender shapes the effects of curiosity.

Setting ambitious goals is a proven strategy for improving performance, but we suggest it may have interpersonal costs. We predict that relative to those with moderately ambitious goals, those with highly ambitious goals (and those with unambitious goals) will receive more negative interpersonal evaluations, being seen as less warm and as offering less relationship potential. Thirteen studies including nine preregistered experiments, three preregistered replications, and one archival analysis of graduate school applications (total N = 6,620) test these hypotheses. Across career, diet, fitness, savings, and academic goals, we found a robust effect of ambition on judgments, such that moderately ambitious goals led to the most consistently positive interpersonal expectations. To understand this phenomenon, we consider how ambition influences judgments of investment in one’s own goals as opposed to supportiveness for other people’s goals and explore expectations about goal supportiveness as one mechanism through which ambition may influence interpersonal judgments.

How do individuals react to the sudden public moralization of their work and with what consequences? Extant research has documented how public narratives can gradually moralize societal perceptions of select occupations. Yet, the implications of how workers individually respond and form self-narratives in light of—or in spite of—a sudden moralizing event remain less understood. Such an understanding is even more critical when workers are weakly socialized by their organization, a situation increasingly common today. During the COVID-19 pandemic, radically shifting public narratives suddenly transformed grocery delivery work, previously uncelebrated, into highly moralized “heroic” pursuits. Drawing on interviews (n = 75), participant artifacts (n = 85), and archival data (e.g., newspaper articles), we find that these workers (here, shoppers on the platform organization Instacart), left mainly to themselves, exhibited varying responses to this moralizing and that their perceived relations to the organization, customers, and tasks shaped these responses. Surprisingly, those who facilely adopted the hero label felt morally credentialled, and they were thus likely to minimize their extra-role helping of customers and show low commitment to the organization; in contrast, those who wrestled with the hero narrative sought to earn those moral credentials, and they were more likely to embrace extra-role helping and remain committed to moralized aspects of the work. Our study contributes to literatures on the moralization of work and narratives by explaining why some workers accept a moralized narrative and others reject or wrestle with it, documenting consequences of workers’ reactions to such narratives, and suggesting how a moralized public narrative can backfire.

To understand who initiates social sexual behavior (SSB) at work, we examine the strength of individuals’ social sexual identity (SSI), a self-definition as a person who leverages sex appeal in pursuit of personally valued gains. Using a social-cognitive framework that explores the intersection of personality, motivation, and situations, six studies (N = 2,598) establish that SSI strength is a novel predictor of SSB, including sexual harassment, and SSI strength mediates gender differences in SSB tendencies. We find that men’s (but not women’s) propensity to initiate SSB increases when pursuing self-enhancement goals (e.g., a powerful image), and these gender differences are mediated by momentary SSI strength. By contrast, the adoption of self-transcendence (e.g., affiliation) goals mitigates gender differences in SSB. Together, these findings illustrate the central role of the self-concept in explaining why and when gender differences emerge in patterns of SSB.

Service employees encounter frequent mistreatments on the job, and these mistreatments can occur unexpectedly. Despite the overall favorable impact of positive affect on coping with negative events, we argue that it could create an expectancy disconfirmation for service employees when they face customer mistreatment. Drawing from expectancy disconfirmation theory, we predict that such expectancy disconfirmation heightens service employees’ need for self-regulation and thus consumes self-control resources. Using a total of 791 service professionals in both online and field (i.e., e-commerce firms in China and a hotel in India) experiments, we found that positive expectancy disconfirmation was positively related to self-control depletion, which led to greater subsequent perceived mistreatment by customers and need for psychological detachment from work (Study 1 and 2). Furthermore, we identified expectation of customer mistreatment as a boundary condition that attenuated the relationship between expectancy disconfirmation and self-control depletion (Study 3 and 4). We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our work.

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.