Search

With the aging of the global workforce, it is crucial to deepen our understanding of how to keep older workers healthy, motivated, and productive. In this research, we integrate job design with socioemotional selectivity theory to propose that social job characteristics relate to employee performance differently for older and younger workers. Specifically, in a 3-wave survey (N = 454), we tested employee age as a moderator of the relationships between receiving social support and feedback at work, and performance, as well as giving social support and feedback at work, and performance. The results showed that, in general, both receiving and giving social support and feedback are associated more strongly with the performance of older than younger workers. The findings provide important theoretical implications for the study of aging and work; they also offer practical applications for creating workplaces in which older workers can reap the benefits of social relationships to remain productive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Emerging research demonstrates that female managers who mistreat their subordinates suffer more severe negative consequences than male managers. Researchers presume this is because women (but not men) are penalized for acting incongruently with communality prescriptions (i.e., being insufficiently kind). However, integrating this work with the broader literature on gender and leadership, gendered reactions to mistreatment could also—or alternatively—be explained by incongruence with high agency proscriptions (i.e., being too dominant). We model these mechanisms simultaneously in a moderated mediation model across three studies, and find that employees are less trusting of female than male managers because they interpret interpersonal justice violations from women as incongruent with low agency prescriptions. Our results challenge a prevailing assumption in the mistreatment literature by revealing that female managers suffer more severe relational consequences than male managers because their violation of interpersonal justice is construed as excessively agentic, whereas these behaviors are viewed as similarly contravening communality for both male and female managers. By directly testing and correctly specifying the mechanism through which manager gender can shape social exchange processes in the aftermath of manager mistreatment, our studies have scientific and practical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We draw from theory on motivated reasoning to suggest that men would be more prone toward gender pay gap scepticism (PGS) than women because doing so maintains a valued but illusory belief that society is currently fair. Integrating theory on wisdom and wise reasoning—a self‐transcendent thinking process composed of intellectual humility, contextualism, perspectivism and dialecticism—we also hypothesised that men who engaged in stronger (vs. weaker) wise reasoning about the pay gap would be less prone toward PGS. Two pre‐registered studies (N = 651) supported the predictions: generally, men were more prone toward gender PGS than women, while wise reasoning tended to attenuate scepticism in men. The patterns of effects remained stable when controlling for income, education, political orientation, and perceptions of the effects of COVID‐19 on women's economic and psychological well‐being. Our studies pave the way for interventions that alter how people reason about inequities such as the gender pay gap in an effort to create fairer workplaces and societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When dilemmas require trade-offs between profits and ethics, do leaders high in social dominance orientation (SDO) and followers high in right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) make decisions that are more unethical than those made by others? This issue was explored in 4 studies with female participants performing managerial role-playing tasks. First, dyads comprising a person who was either low or high in SDO and a person who was either low or high in RWA negotiated for a leadership position. People high in SDO were more likely to obtain leader positions than to obtain follower positions. No other effects were significant. Second, leaders high in SDO partnered with an agreeable (confederate) follower made decisions that were more unethical than those of leaders low in SDO. Third, followers high in RWA were more acquiescent to and supportive of an unethical (confederate) leader than were followers low in RWA. Fourth, high SDO leader-high RWA follower dyads made decisions that were more unethical than those made in role-reversed dyads because leaders had more influence. Implications of these results for conceptualizing SDO, RWA, and authoritarian dynamics are discussed. Keywords: social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism, unethical decision making, leadership

Typically, people who strongly endorse the merit principle and believe that outcomes should be given to those most deserving oppose affirmative action (AA) programs that violate this principle. However, how do they respond to AA when faced with a great deal of workplace discrimination? The authors hypothesized that people who care strongly about merit should be motivated to combat discrimination because it biases the assessment of merit. Consequently, these individuals should make concessions for AA. The authors found support for their hypothesis when investigating (a) participants' preexisting perceptions of workplace discrimination and (b) experimentally induced perceptions of discrimination. They discuss the implications of these results for the psychology of meritocracy and for resistance to AA.

Three studies examined whether the concern for justice can be a genuine determinant of attitudes toward affirmative action (AA) or whether justice-based opposition merely masks prejudice. In line with the hypothesis of justice as a cause, we found that, independent of their level of prejudice, people were opposed to AA programs that violate distributive and procedural justice norms, as a result of genuine beliefs in the principles of fairness that the programs violate. Nevertheless, in line with the hypothesis of justice as a rationalization, we also found that people's prejudice level was positively associated with opposition to AA programs that were not explicitly justice violating; moreover, the effect of prejudice was mediated through the tendency to construe these programs as justice violating. The present research has implications for understanding attitudes toward social policies where it is possible that justice concerns could be a genuine source of opposition or a rationalization of prejudice.

The escalation of commitment to a failing course of action is often attributed to self-justification motives that presumably are evoked by personal responsibility for initiating the original action (e.g., B.M. Staw, 1976). Nevertheless, personal responsibility - operationalized as choice - has been confounded with personal justification, which might engender self-presentation concerns. The present laboratory experiment extended past research by examining the impact of choice on escalating commitment with and without justification that was either public or private. Results showed that escalating commitment was not significantly different in conditions of public or private justification but that jusitification was necessary in addition to choice itself. That data suggest that justification of past choices may be necessary for escalating commitment. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

The present study was conducted to examine the dimensionality of overt Type A behaviors elicited in a simulated stressful work environment. University students played a managerial role while being subjected to time and work-load pressures, and completed the Survey of Work Styles (SWS; Jackson & Gray, 1989). Eighteen behaviors, coded by two raters based on audiovisual recordings, yielded relatively high interrater reliabilities. Principal components analysis revealed four primary factors: Hurriedness, Irritability, Tension of the Lower Extremities, and Restlessness. These factors contribute to an understanding of Type A behavior in that they are the first to be derived from a purely observational approach rather than a combination of observational and self-report methods. Consistent with previous research, differential correlations between the factors and the SWS subscales supported a multidimensional interpretation of the Type A behavior pattern. Present findings are compared to those of previous studies of Type A dimensionality.