Research in Organizational Behavior最新文献

When tasked with responding to an employee’s offensive remarks, managers face the Confronter’s Quandary: They must decide on an appropriate course of action to balance addressing the employee’s problematic behavior and suspected attitudes (Correction goals) while preserving their working relationship and the offender’s sense of belonging to the organization (Connection goals). This paper proposes a conceptual framework to organize strategies that fall at different levels of this Correction/Connection trade-off: YOU-Strategies focus on the offender and prioritize correction; ME-Strategies focus on the confronter and leverage an existing connection; THEY-Strategies highlight third parties to deemphasize the confronter-offender relationship; and WE-Strategies highlight shared organizational values and norms to affirm group connection in the service of correction. We describe four classes of strategies within each type (sixteen total), we include examples of uses excerpted from a hypothetical online survey, and we illustrate how existing literature can be organized within our framework. At a theoretical level, this YOU-ME-THEY-WE framework should help organize past literature and suggest areas in need of further investigation. At a practical level, it should help would-be confronters gain insight into additional strategies available to them, and orient field researchers designing interventions and testing best practices for confrontation in organizations.

Members of dominant groups can play a critical role as allies to members of marginalized groups in creating more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplaces. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that aspiring allies often fail to advance equity and may sometimes even amplify inequity. To shed light on the causes of—and cures for—ineffective allyship, we apply a relational lens, integrating theories of power, trust, and humility. We propose that power creates a paradox, offering opportunities for allies to help but also creating obstacles to their trustworthiness in the eyes of marginalized group members. We examine how allies can overcome the power paradox and establish trustworthiness through behavioral humility, elevating others’ personal power to most effectively share their positional power. This relational approach sheds light on when and why attempted allyship may elicit backlash, and how allies can translate good intentions into supportive actions.

Decades of research has demonstrated that people can arrive at starkly different perceptions in the same social situations. Divergent perceptions are not inherently dysfunctional. However, if divergent perceptions are not managed effectively, they can have deleterious effects that can undermine functioning in the workplace. Drawing on a motivated cognition perspective, we outline why divergent perceptions may emerge as well as overview the benefits and drawbacks of divergent perceptions in organizational contexts. Next, we highlight the complexities associated with divergent perceptions in the workplace, including why, how, and when divergent perceptions may become dysfunctional. We also showcase theoretical insights from a motivated cognition perspective that can enhance our understanding of how divergent perceptions can be effectively managed. We conclude by outlining key theoretical insights and avenues for future research, including how organizations can use a motivated cognition perspective to manage divergent perceptions related to complex societal issues and issuing a call to adopt a systems approach that recognizes the importance of contextual layers for understanding and effectively managing divergent perceptions in organizations.

Organizational learning research is based on the idea that individuals can learn more together than alone. Network connections between members of an organization allow them to engage in a mutual learning process whereby they share what they discover and potentially learn and improve their performance at a faster rate. Existing research highlights the importance of network structure in facilitating mutual learning, with a centralized network expected to improve learning and performance when the unfamiliar assignment is complex. An example of an unfamiliar complex assignment is new product development. The features of a new product and how those features should be combined are unknown. In a centralized network, members are connected to a focal individual but disconnected from each other. The disconnects facilitate individual search and experimentation, increasing the odds that a superior solution will be discovered. To understand how network centralization affects mutual learning and performance when an unfamiliar assignment is complex, this chapter offers a theory-building exercise. The exercise is motivated by a conflicting empirical result. Recent research indicates that for a complex task, individuals learning in a decentralized network, a network that contains a relatively large number of direct and indirect relationships, can outperform individuals learning in a centralized network. The exercise amounts to puzzling through the empirical results. Putting the pieces together suggests that the requirements for mutual learning can be met in either a centralized or decentralized network. Moreover, communication timing appears to be critical. When communication across relationships is delayed, individuals working in a decentralized network can explore a diverse set of ideas while maintaining the ability to exploit a proven idea. When communication across connections is not delayed, a centralized network produces better outcomes. The results of the theory-building exercise suggest a contingency: the ideal network for a complex assignment could depend on the rate of communication across network connections.

There is an increasingly prevalent expectation in contemporary society that employees be passionate for their work. Here, we suggest that employers and employees can have different understandings of passion that potentially conflict. More specifically, we argue that although employers may often be well-intentioned, their emphasis on employee passion may at times amount to normative control and reflect a means to attain valued work outcomes. In contrast, employees may primarily view their pursuit of passion as an opportunity to self-actualize, and thereby, view passion as an end in itself. We propose that when employees notice that these two understandings of passion diverge, they experience uncertainty in adjudicating which understanding of passion—their own or their employer’s—to privilege. Critically, employees may feel responsible for and subsequently seek ways to reduce this uncertainty, and doing so places added demands that impedes employees’ ability to perform. We discuss why employers may not necessarily recognize how their understanding of passion can create challenges for employees, and examine the difficulties employers face in attempting to resolve the tensions employees experience. Subsequently, we develop an agenda for future research that highlights how individual, organizational, and cultural differences may lead to variation in divergent understandings of passion, and the critical role managers could play in helping address employees’ uncertainty.

Thriving, the psychological experience of both vitality (or energy) and learning, is often elusive. Rather than growing, developing, and feeling energized, workers report stagnation and depletion. While much of the research on thriving at work has focused on what managers can do to promote thriving amongst workers, we highlight the means by which people are empowered to take control of their well-being. Workers can sustain their own thriving through three pathways: (1) by engaging in self-care, (2) creating and maintaining high quality relationships, and (3) building community within and outside the organization. We show that these three pathways are particularly important given the changing nature of more temporary and flexible work arrangements, increases in remote work, and the larger need for community embeddedness to address the many grand societal challenges that confront us.

Despite the centrality of differences as a driver of conflict, most of the empirical research on group conflict has focused on the group as a whole, paying little attention to the differing experiences of individuals during conflict—that is, the ways individuals perceive, make sense of, and emotionally experience a conflict episode. Although people process information about a conflict using the same general cognitive and emotional mechanisms, their personal characteristics (e.g., personality, cultural background), beliefs and motives (e.g., orientation toward conflict), and past experiences will influence how they make sense of what is occurring and their subsequent conflict behavior. Building on recent work that has taken a multi-level approach to understanding team conflict and drawing from related literature in social, cognitive, and personality psychology, we explicate an individual’s psychological experience of a conflict episode as a process by which individuals make sense of and emotionally experience what is happening, develop attitudes towards others in the group, and exchange and integrate knowledge about the conflict and others involved. We argue that a more nuanced understanding of the intraindividual experience of conflict generates important insight into understanding individual conflict behavior, helping us predict how people will behave in conflict situations and how conflict episodes will unfold. We conclude with implications for how to intervene to promote cooperative behavior and positive team outcomes, along with an agenda for future research.

Organizations are transforming as they adopt new technologies and use new sources of data, changing the experiences of employees and pushing organizational researchers to respond. As employees perform their daily activities, they generate vast digital data. These data, when combined with established methods and new analytic techniques, create unprecedented opportunities for studying human behavior at work and have fueled the rise of people analytics as a new institutional field of practice. In this chapter, I describe the emerging field of people analytics and new organizational phenomena that accompany the use of data and algorithms. These practices are affecting how individuals, groups, and organizations function, ranging from decision-making processes and work procedures, to communication and collaboration, to attempts to monitor and control employees. In each of these domains, I describe recent research and propose new research directions. Many of these domains intersect with the emerging field of Computational Social Science, in which disciplinary scholars are applying computational methods to an expanding array of digitized data, pursuing interests that extend far into the organizational domain. Organizational scholars are well-positioned to bridge organizational and disciplinary advances to stay at the forefront of research on the future of work.

Thriving, the psychological experience of both vitality (or energy) and learning, is often elusive. Rather than growing, developing, and feeling energized, workers report stagnation and depletion. While much of the research on thriving at work has focused on what managers can do to promote thriving amongst workers, we highlight the means by which people are empowered to take control of their well-being. Workers can sustain their own thriving through three pathways: (1) by engaging in self-care, (2) creating and maintaining high quality relationships, and (3) building community within and outside the organization. We show that these three pathways are particularly important given the changing nature of more temporary and flexible work arrangements, increases in remote work, and the larger need for community embeddedness to address the many grand societal challenges that confront us.