Journal of Organizational Behavior最新文献

Being proactive involves taking personal initiative to change a situation or oneself. While research to date has paid considerable attention to the frequency with which individuals engage in proactive behaviors, less attention has been given to the ways in which people act proactively to garner positive outcomes. In this paper, we draw on the conceptualization of wise proactivity developed by Parker, Wang, and Liao in 2019 to construct a measure that captures employees' deliberate and thoughtful consideration of context, others, and self as they proactively initiate and pursue change in the workplace. Through a series of empirical studies, we investigate the key antecedents of wise proactivity, showing that it is predicted by wisdom and political skills. We also examine whether, and through what mechanism, wise proactivity affects the outcome of job performance. We show that wise proactivity predicts job performance above and beyond the frequency with which one engages in proactivity and does so because wise proactivity is perceived of as desirable. Our study highlights the value of shifting the focus in proactivity research and practice to explore how employees can engage in proactive behavior in a wise manner.

Organizations face a persistent challenge: while negative feedback is essential for learning and performance, individuals often avoid giving it because of concerns about damaging workplace relationships. This creates a gap between organizational needs and individual behavior that existing explanations, focusing on how feedback givers assess recipients' emotions and motivations, fail to fully account for. We argue that resolving this challenge requires understanding how the organizational social context shapes whether individuals view negative feedback as merely uncomfortable or as a necessary practice worth the discomfort—a necessary evil. Drawing on the necessary evils literature, we conduct an in-depth qualitative study based on 98 interviews across three global public and private organizations. We identify two mechanisms—organizational authorization and individual imprinting—that shape how individuals engage in negative feedback. Our findings challenge the assumption that strong organizational support is required for negative feedback-giving. Instead, we reveal that individuals imprinted with feedback practices persist in giving negative feedback, even in unsupportive environments, and may even create structures to sustain it. These findings challenge prevailing theories of organizational influence, highlighting how past experiences can override present organizational contexts, and deepen our understanding of how necessary evils operate and persist in organizations.

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.