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.

We develop and test a theory of how managerial endorsement is influenced by how employees voice their ideas – whether they engage in promotive voice, prohibitive voice, or a mix of these two types together. Drawing on research on cognitive fluency resulting from consistency in information, we argue and show that managers are less likely to endorse voice that mixes both promotive and prohibitive elements within the same instance of speaking up, compared to voice that is uniformly promotive or prohibitive. Extending these arguments about cognitive fluency, we further show that endorsement is contingent on whether each uniform type is consistent with managerial regulatory focus. Our findings, based on five studies – a survey study of managers from a wide range of organizations, a field study in a hospital, and three experiments – enrich our theoretical understanding of the cognitive paths through which the type(s) of voice, and whether voice mixes these types, shapes which ideas are endorsed for implementation. They also reveal important implications for managers about why they may systematically gravitate toward (and miss out on) certain ideas when they evaluate employee voice, and for employees about the tactical choices they should use in voicing ideas to their managers.

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.

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.

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.

When giving advice, people seek to inform others, but also help them reach a decision. We investigate how the motivation to help affects the confidence people express when advising others. We propose that assuming the role of advisor instigates a desire to help the advisee decide more easily. This desire in turn leads advisors to communicate higher confidence than they actually feel, provided that the environment is sufficiently certain, and thus the risk of misleading the advisee is low. We test our predictions in five studies, using experimental tasks (Studies 1–3), a survey of experienced professionals (Study 4) and an organizational scenario (Study 5). We find that in high-certainty environments, people convey higher confidence when providing advice than private judgments. This effect is driven by the motivation of advisors to facilitate advisees’ decision making: the higher advisors’ desire to help, the more pronounced the effect on their stated confidence.

To successfully generate creative solutions, teams must reconcile inconsistent perspectives and integrate competing task demands. We suggest that adopting a paradoxical frame - a mental template that promotes recognizing and embracing the simultaneous existence of seemingly contradictory elements - helps teams navigate this process to produce creative ideas, if team members are epistemically motivated. Our results from two laboratory studies (N = 950) suggest that teams that adopt paradoxical frames and have high epistemic motivation develop more creative solutions than teams with paradoxical frames and low epistemic motivation or epistemically motivated teams with frames that only encourage information sharing. Teams with paradoxical frames and high epistemic motivation are more creative because they engage in idea elaboration – they exchange, consider, and integrate diverse ideas and perspectives. By contrast, other teams settle on suboptimal middle-way solutions that do not address task demands. Our research advances knowledge of why and when paradoxical frames benefit team creativity, by unpacking the processes that enable teams to leverage task and team tensions. We show that when teams collectively work through their tensions and elaborate their diverse ideas they become more creative.