Research in Organizational Behavior最新文献

A rich body of research throughout the social sciences demonstrates that bias—people’s tendency to display group-based preferences—is a major obstacle in the way of promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. The current article moves beyond the single-level focus of prior theories of workplace bias to propose a novel theoretical model that conceptualizes workplace bias as a multilevel cycle. First, we discuss the theoretical foundations of our bias cycle theory and describe why understanding the nature of workplace bias—and effectively reducing it—requires considering the reciprocal influences of both individual and organizational levels of the cycle. Specifically, we describe how workplace bias operates as a cycle and then propose that successfully reducing workplace bias requires multilevel interventions that interrupt bias across both the individual and organizational levels of the cycle. Second, because workplace bias is reproduced through both of these levels, we review and bring together literatures that are often considered separately: psychology research on reducing bias at the individual level and sociology and management research on reducing bias at the organizational level. Third, we use our bias cycle theory to formulate general principles for determining how to begin and how to pair interventions across levels. Finally, we conclude by discussing our theoretical contributions and outlining directions for future research.

Organizational culture profoundly influences how employees think and behave. Established research suggests that the content, intensity, consensus, and fit of cultural norms act as a social control system for attitudes and behavior. We adopt the norms model of organizational culture to elucidate whether organizational culture can influence how employees experience emotions. We focus on a pervasive emotion, anxiety. We propose four important pathways that link organizational culture with anxiety. First, we propose that when norm content is result-oriented, employees must strive for challenging goals with specific targets under time pressure, and are more likely to experience anxiety. Second, when norm intensity is weak, employees do not internalize norms and they engage in deviant behaviors that increase uncertainty and promote anxiety. Third, a lack of consensus about norms commonly creates conflict between factions within an organization and increases anxiety. Fourth, when there is a mismatch between employees’ values and organizational norms and values, the misfit engenders anxiety. Taken together, different features of organizational cultural norms can independently and multiplicatively influence the magnitude of anxiety, which has constructive or destructive effects on performance.

Consent is central to many organizational interactions and obligations. Employees consent to various terms of employment, both formal (contractual obligations) and informal (extra-role responsibilities, interpersonal requests). Yet consent has traditionally been considered a legal matter, unrelated to organizational behavior. In this article, we make a case for why, and how, organizational behavior scholars should undertake the study of consent. We first review scholarship on the legal understanding of consent. We argue that the traditional legal understanding is an incomplete way to think about consent in organizations, and we call for a more nuanced understanding that incorporates psychological and philosophical insights about consent—particularly consent in employer-employee relationships. We then connect this understanding of consent to traditional organizational behavior topics (autonomy, fairness, and trust) and examine these connections within three organizational domains (employee surveillance, excessive work demands, and sexual harassment). We conclude with future directions for research on consent in organizations.

The subjective meanings employees assign to their understandings of themselves, others, and their environments influence an array of important work attitudes and behaviors. We review theory and research on wise interventions that illustrate three fundamental motives that underlie this subjective meaning-making process: the need to understand, the need for self-integrity, and the need to belong. Understanding how employees respond to organizational contexts that call into question or threaten these fundamental motives can potentially enable both organizations and their employees to achieve their goals better. Prior research has shown that wise interventions can bring about long-term beneficial outcomes in the domains of academic performance, stress and health, relationship satisfaction, and conflict reduction. We seek to integrate wise interventions and organizational behavior to explore where, when, and how addressing the fundamental needs of understanding, self-integrity, and belonging can lead to behaviors and attitudes that are beneficial for employees and employers alike. We examine when employees’ subjective meanings are likely to be amenable to influence by wise interventions, such as during key transition points that may be person-centered (e.g., when employees take a new job) or organization-centered (e.g., the introduction of organizational change). We review interventions that have occurred within organizational settings and consider how interventions tested in other contexts (e.g., education) may be applied to organizations. A potentially fruitful liaison awaits organizational behavior researchers interested in the application of wise interventions.

Grit—the tendency to pursue especially long-term goals with both passion and perseverance—has been shown to predict high achievement in a range of individual performance domains. We make a case for introducing the concept of grit to the organizational behavior literature. To begin, we elaborate the conceptual foundations of grit, highlighting ways in which grit differs from related traits and situating grit in the broader literature on goal pursuit. We then discuss three organizational antecedents—leadership, culture, and job design—that can encourage grit at work. Next, we discuss how and under what circumstances encouraging grit can improve workplace outcomes such as employee retention, work engagement, and job performance. We conclude with suggestions for future research at the intersection of psychology and organizational behavior.

The goal of the current manuscript is to embed the theory of mindsets about malleability in workplace contexts. We first define fixed-growth mindsets and the methods that have to date been used to study them. We then briefly review the domains in which mindsets have been documented to shape outcomes meaningfully, linking each to exciting research questions that we hope will soon be studied in workplace contexts. We also highlight some of the fascinating, new questions scholars can study by considering how mindsets might shape outcomes across a diversity of workplaces (e.g., the workforce of low wage and vulnerable populations). We further propose that studying mindsets in workplace contexts can develop mindset theory. We first ask whether workplace contexts provide opportunities to test for moderation on mindset expression. Second, we see opportunity for studying moderation of mindset processes – evaluating whether the psychological processes through which mindsets shape outcomes may differ based on contextual factors that vary across workplaces. We argue that investigating these possibilities will advance both the theory of mindsets about malleability and the study of human flourishing in the workplace. We invite scholars to join us in this endeavour.

In this article we introduce and propose a research agenda on tryouts, a hiring arrangement in which individuals spend time in organizations performing job-related work prior to the chance to become regular, full-time employees. We define tryouts as a construct and discuss how tryouts differ from traditional, direct hiring. We provide a typology of alternative hiring arrangements that serve as tryouts and evidence for their utilization. We theorize that tryouts stem from changes in the nature of work, organizations, and labor markets in the 21st century. For labor market researchers, we raise questions about not only the consequences of tryouts—such as who is hired, what kinds of jobs they lead to for workers, and the social and economic awards attached to such jobs—but also about the motivations of individuals who engage in tryouts, how these motivations (and the consequences of tryouts) differ across demographic groups, and how tryouts may create multi-tiered hiring systems. For organizational scholars, we suggest that tryouts update theoretical conceptualizations of hiring, and lead organizational behaviors to commence during hiring that demand further attention. While worthy of study in their own right, we also discuss reasons that tryouts offer an “ontological laboratory” for assessing theories on organizations, labor markets, and the origins and remediation of workplace inequality.