Journal of Organizational Behavior最新文献

Recent research in organizational behavior has begun to focus on the role of daydreaming in the workplace, which refers to the spontaneous shift of attention from the external environment to internally generated thoughts. Emergent research suggests that daydreaming evolving from cognitive demands at work may serve as a precursor to creativity. However, despite this incipient interest, whether, how, and why different forms of cognitive demands lead to discrete forms of daydreaming and, therefore, creative outcomes in organizations remain in their early stages. Drawing on the Situation-Based Contingency of the Personality Manifestation Model, we propose that personality states, specifically openness to experience and neuroticism, have a pivotal role in explaining the effects of problem-solving and monitoring demands on problem-constructive daydreaming and guilt and fear-of-failure daydreaming, which, in turn, have varying effects on creative thinking. Our hypotheses were tested using data from a daily diary study conducted over one workweek with professional employees across diverse organizations. This study contributes to the emerging literature on daydreaming and personality states in organizations by illuminating their role in fostering creativity within the workplace.

Research on leader humility clearly attests to its positive consequences for followers' work-related outcomes, yet we have only limited knowledge about the antecedents that facilitate leaders expressing humility. Drawing from theoretical works on leadership and power, we posit that leaders' personal sense of power and their psychological closeness to their team constitute important antecedents of leader humility. Specifically, we reason that the impact of supervisors' sense of power on humble leader behavior is qualified by how psychologically close to their subordinates the supervisors deem themselves to be. We investigate the ramifications of this interaction for leader effectiveness by assessing its indirect effects on subordinates' job engagement and trust (via leader-expressed humility). We test our notions using data from 69 supervisors and their 210 direct subordinates from various organizations and industries in a multi-level, multi-source study. Results indicate that supervisors' sense of power relates positively to expressed humility for supervisors who report being close to their team but negatively for supervisors who do not feel close. Results also support our conditional-indirect-effects hypotheses involving job engagement and trust as work-related outcomes. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications for supervisors with a relatively low or relatively high personal sense of power.

Crisis leadership has been a topic of interest for nearly a century. Recent works present an idealized, gendered template for such leadership by casting men as masculine protectors or superheroes and women as feminine nurturers or selfless, relational superwomen. Whereas the deductive evidence for such effects is mixed at best, our work examines if these idealized prototypes reflect the current realities of enacting leadership during a crisis. We studied both male and female leaders, inductively, over an 8-week period during the COVID-19 pandemic. Contrary to a majority of previous leadership studies that suggest prescriptive remedies for alleviating crises, such as charisma, inspiration, or empathy, we change the scholarly conversation in crisis leadership by rejecting idealized leadership templates, which implicitly or explicitly assume leaders have agency. Instead, we found gender similarities in how both women and men enacted leadership in their roles by being distinctly human: replete with doubts about their agency and engaging with emotions, but moving forward nonetheless. Interestingly, gender differences emerged at a granular level in how men and women enacted leadership: men seemed to mirror the leader prototype, whereas women adapted their leadership tactics in response to contextual cues. Taken together, these findings call for redirecting the scholarly conversation in crisis leadership toward a dualism—gender similarities and differences can occur simultaneously in leader roles. Intriguingly, and breaking with past reviews on crisis leadership, there were no super(wo)men in these findings; rather they point at a complex yet parsimonious theoretical explanation for how crisis leadership unfolds. We discuss the implications of this theoretical exploration for future empirical work.

Personality research suggests that individuals tend to develop more homogeneous—or similar—personalities within, rather than between, occupations due to attraction and selection, attrition, and socialization effects. We expand this perspective using a distance-based methodological approach that relates similarities between combinations of individuals' personality traits to similarities between their occupations. Leveraging German panel data tracing individuals' careers from 2005 to 2017, we test how attraction and selection, attrition, and socialization effects contribute to the emergence of similar personalities in similar occupations over time. Our results reveal that individuals with more similar Big Five personality traits join more similar occupations, whereas those with personalities less similar to those of other occupational incumbents are more likely to leave the occupation. Moreover, individuals staying in more similar occupations develop more similar personalities. These findings enhance our understanding of the intricate interplay between individuals' personalities and occupations, providing evidence that similar personality traits emerge not only within the same occupation but also between similar occupations over time.

Although women's outsized share of household labor and subsequent career disadvantages are well-documented, the impact of income arrangements within dual-earner couples has been underexplored in the context of the work–family dynamic. Drawing upon resource and gender construction theories, we examine how income dynamics within male–female dyads can differentially affect each partner's career success via unpaid home labor. Using multilevel polynomial regression on a longitudinal sample of 7252 dual-earner couples over a 22-year period from the Household, Income, and Labor Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, we demonstrate that the interplay of income within these dyads differentially shapes partners' household labor, ultimately influencing female (but not male) career promotion. Specifically, women face a lower likelihood of promotion when in male- and female-breadwinning arrangements compared with dual-breadwinning arrangements with minimal resource differentials, partly due to the increased household labor. Among dual-breadwinning arrangements, we find that female partners have a higher chance of promotion when male partners have similarly high (versus low) income levels, due to reduced household labor. Our supplementary analysis uncovers that work centrality accounts for the gendered impact of household labor on promotion while also illustrating how the effect of income arrangements evolves over 22 years. Overall, our findings provide new revelations on how breadwinning arrangements within couples can reinforce or hinder women's career advancement, while largely leaving men's careers unaffected, through the gendered spillover effect of unpaid household labor.

How employee silence—the act of withholding thoughts, suggestions, and ideas about important work issues—is impacted by a major organizational change such as a change in leadership (i.e., leader succession) has been severely underexplored. In this study, we conducted a quasi-experimental field study with a total of 107 bank branches across four survey time points (with approximately half of the branches experiencing a leader succession) to investigate how silence is impacted before and after a leadership change. We also examine how new and former leaders' secure-base support (support that provides a secure and safe base for subordinates to explore new changes and opportunities) can make a key difference in breaking subordinate silence during leader succession. We found that leader succession reduced subordinate silence, such that subordinates were less likely to withhold important ideas/thoughts/information from their new leader compared to their former leader. This effect was strongest when the new leader showed high leader secure-base support, and the former leader exhibited low leader secure-base support. Our insights extend knowledge of followership theory in the context of leadership succession and subordinate silence behaviors and the important role of new and former leaders' secure-base support in reshaping patterns of silence.