Journal of Organizational Behavior最新文献

Drawing on uncertainty management theory, we propose that employees' uncertainty is a distinct key mechanism explaining the relationship between ethical leadership and employees' organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). We contend that ethical leadership, by promoting a work environment governed by moral principles, reduces employees' sense of uncertainty and thereby fosters their OCB. However, we suggest that leaders' close monitoring, which ethical leaders may utilize to be informed about employees' adherence to their moral standards, nullifies these positive implications of ethical leadership. To test these contentions, we conducted an online vignette study (Study 1) and a field study (Study 2). In Study 1, we found a significant and negative main effect of ethical leadership on employees' uncertainty, but this effect was negated when leaders' close monitoring was high. In Study 2, we replicated the findings—ethical leadership was negatively related to employees' uncertainty and this relationship became nonsignificant when leaders' close monitoring was high. In addition, uncertainty was negatively related to employees' OCB toward the organization (OCBO) but not their OCB toward individuals (OCBI). Consequently, uncertainty mediated the relationship between ethical leadership and OCBO, and this mediation was moderated by close monitoring. However, such mediation and moderated mediation did not occur for OCBI. Taken together, our research reveals that close monitoring is not a viable strategy to be implemented alongside ethical leadership for managing employees' uncertainty and fostering their OCB.

The assumption of Confucian traditions being a handicap for East Asians when adapting to a modernizing world has been subject to challenge because of the rapid development of East Asian societies, which has prompted researchers to seek a culturally compatible perspective for understanding the foundations of East Asian modernization. This paper built a hypothetical model for indigenous theoretical resources. In The Analects, Confucius offered propositions on the links between leaders' Junzi personality (i.e., Confucian ideal personality traits) and leadership effectiveness, as well as the mediating roles of leadership styles. To test our hypotheses, we conducted two studies involving 513 supervisor–subordinate dyads in China. Study 1 indicated that Junzi personality had a significantly positive effect on leadership effectiveness and that such significance remained even after controlling for the Big Five personality traits. It also examined the incremental value and relative importance. Study 2 showed that ethical and transformational leadership mediated the effect of Junzi personality on leadership effectiveness measured two months later. In both datasets, leaders with higher Junzi personality scores assigned higher self-ratings on performance, and their subordinates perceived higher leadership effectiveness, felt higher job satisfaction, and displayed lower turnover intentions.

Previous research on the motivational factors of safety performance has predominantly focused on one's willingness to directly enact safety behaviors or safety-specific motivation. The current study extends beyond this view and examines an additional motivational force, altruistic motivation, as a main predictor of employees' safety performance at both individual and team levels. Further, we provide that servant leadership serves as a critical precursor of employee altruistic motivation. A sample of 416 nurses in 42 workgroups and their respective supervisors from a hospital in China completed a two-wave survey. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to analyze the data. The results indicated that altruistic motivation was positively related to safety performance at both individual and team levels, with a stronger effect at the team level, supporting a proportional theory of homology. Multilevel mediation results showed that servant leadership was positively related to altruistic motivation, which in turn positively led to safety performance at both individual and team levels. These findings highlight both the theoretical and practical importance of encouraging altruistic motivation to improve workplace safety.

Decades of research have shown that abusive supervision hurts employees' well-being. However, little is known about whether employees can recover from abuse during their leisure time. Building on the perspective of recovery paradox and the conservation of resources (COR) theory, we theorize that as an intense social stressor, daily abusive supervision depletes employees' resources and triggers their need for recovery, which in turn reduces physical and social recovery activities but increases low-effort activities. We also propose that employees' extraversion influence employees' choices of recovery activities when facing a paradoxical recovery situation (i.e., feeling too exhausted to engage in active recovery activities. To test our hypotheses, we employed the experience sampling method to collect 1511 daily responses from 203 full-time employees. The results of the multilevel path analyses indicated that (a) abusive supervision increased employees' need for recovery, which in turn increased next-day positive moods via facilitating low-effort activities, and reduced next-day positive moods via inhibiting social activities; and (b) these indirect effects were strengthened for employees with lower (vs. higher) extraversion. Theoretical and practical implications are further discussed.