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Many organizations offer the possibility to work from home, resulting in hybrid workplaces with employees working on- and off-site. While this trend holds many promises, it has also been proposed to constitute a risk to an organization's diversity, as the propensity to work from home may systematically depend on employee demographic characteristics, such as their age. Integrating the age diversity literature with the literature on flexible work arrangements, our study investigates age-related differences in both the availability and the actual usage of working from home. Building on the social identity approach and the organizational climate literature, we develop and test an organizational-level model on both consequences and antecedents of age-related differences in working from home. Findings from a multi-industry study of 12,777 employees and HR managers in 82 German firms show that age differences in the access to working from home are negatively related to employees' collective organizational identification and subsequent organizational performance. Moreover, we can show that an age-inclusive organizational diversity climate prevents age biases in the access to working from home. Contrary to expectations, however, age differences in the usage of working from home had a positive impact on employees' collective organizational identification and thereby indirectly benefitted company performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rising number of work-related mental illnesses, a growing stream of research has examined the role of leaders in promoting employees' psychological well-being in the workplace. While this literature has accumulated valuable insights, the key role of the executive suite in promoting healthy working conditions has been largely neglected thus far. To fill this void, we develop a multilevel theoretical model on how CEOs' health-oriented self-care (i.e., their awareness of, value for, and behavior toward their mental health) is associated with psychological well-being and performance in organizations. Building on social learning and conservation of resources theory, we propose that CEOs' self-care serves as a role model for leaders at lower organizational levels to show health-oriented staff-care toward their followers, thereby negatively relating to employee emotional exhaustion. Due to this indirect link with employee well-being, we suggest that CEO self-care is also positively and indirectly associated with organizational performance. Our assumptions are supported by a multi-industry, multi-source, and multi-level dataset of 96 German organizations. Our findings provide support for a "mutual gains" perspective, suggesting that a strong orientation toward psychological health in an organization's executive suite is positively associated with both, employee well-being and corporate performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many organizations launch multiple change initiatives simultaneously to quickly adapt to dynamic environments. Yet, organizational change research has paid little attention to the consequences of such ""broad"" change that comprises several concurrent change initiatives. To advance understanding of the multilevel consequences of organizational change breadth, we draw from a multisource dataset of 12,976 employees in 97 mid-sized German firms. Building on conservation of resources theory, we develop a multilevel framework of how broad change leads to collective change resistance and, thereby, indirectly impairs post-change organizational performance. To shed light on the underlying micro processes, we examine employee emotional exhaustion as an individual-level mechanism of the consequences of broad change. Moreover, exploiting the unique multilevel nature of our data, we examine how the harmful consequences of broad change can be mitigated: by directly involving individual employees in the change (i.e., individual change involvement); or, irrespective of an employee's individual involvement, by involving a substantial share of employees in the organization as a whole (i.e., collective change involvement). Our study advances research on the macro and micro processes underpinning the consequences of organizational change breadth, and offers a novel perspective on the role of employee involvement as a change management approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The degree to which employees champion the change (i.e., discretionary behaviors used to promote change to others) is an important component of managing organizational change. The broader group context in which championing occurs has been largely absent from extant research on change championing. In this study, we adopt a multilevel perspective of change championing. 267 employees from 69 work groups undergoing an organizational change were surveyed at two points in time. We find that group championing asymmetry (i.e., the degree to which group members differ in their championing) reduces the positive effects of the average level of group championing on implementation effectiveness. We also shed light on the individual-level processes that underlie group championing dynamics. We find that individual championing asymmetry (i.e., the extent to which an individual differs in championing from the group's championing level) influences an individual's cognitive appraisal of (but not emotional responses to) change and later championing. This study contributes to the change championing literature by offering a multilevel perspective on championing dynamics between individuals and groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the increasing usage of information and communication technology (ICT) at the workplace the effects of leaders' after-hours work-related smartphone use on organizational norms and employees' well-being are unclear. Moreover, previous research on ICT usage has focused nearly exclusively on the individual level of analysis. Building on climate models of organizational functioning and the conservation of resources theory, we develop and test an organizational-level model which explains how and when leaders' after-hours work-related smartphone use is likely to influence employees' well-being. We hypothesized a positive indirect relationship via the new construct climate of universal availability which is moderated by employees' collective boundary control. Hypotheses were tested using large-scale survey data from 11,703 employees and 99 HR-representatives collected in 99 German small-and-medium-sized companies from multiple industries. Findings support the assumed relationship: Leaders' after-hours work-related smartphone use affects collective emotional exhaustion through the climate of universal availability. The positive indirect effect is weakened when employees' collective boundary control is high. Critical implications for future theorizing and research on leaders' ICT usage are discussed. Keywords: leadership; technology; electronic communication; well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As organizations strive for more flexibility in their business procedures, decentralized organizational structures have reemerged as a topic of interest in recent years. Yet, despite its long-standing tradition, the literature on the implications of decentralization for organizational performance has remained inconclusive. Our study aims at illuminating prior ambiguous evidence by examining a central individual-level mechanism underlying the relationship. Integrating the perspective of organizational structure as opportunities and constraints with social information processing theory, we argue that transferring decision-making authority to lower organizational levels has a positive effect on employees' emergent leadership, however only to the extent that their direct supervisors act in accordance with decentralized structures. Findings from a multi-level, multi-source field study of 5,816 individuals nested in 145 companies support our predictions that organizational-level decentralization exhibits a positive effect on individual employee's propensity to emerge as an informal leader, but only when the employee's direct supervisor shows high levels of empowering leadership. Individual-level emergent leadership, in turn, aggregates to higher organizational performance. By examining an individual-level mechanism of the decentralization-organizational performance link, our study bridges macro- and micro-perspectives and helps to gain a better understanding of how organizations may reap the benefits of decentralized decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regulatory focus as a motivational mechanism, plays a significant role in determining whether leaders and followers will focus on promotion goals, aspiring to 'keep their head in the clouds' thinking about their ideal self, hopes, and wishes or, alternatively, on prevention goals to 'keep their feet on the ground' thinking about their ought self, demands, expectations and requirements. Focusing on promotion versus prevention goals further affects how leaders and followers behave and what outcomes they achieve. The growth in leadership and followership research that focus on the underlying mechanism of regulatory focus is apparent in many recent studies in the fields of management, I/O psychology, and social psychology. However, most of the studies have overlooked the significant role of the specific context in which the leadership and regulatory focus processes are taking place. For example, what is the type of organization, the organizational culture, or the characteristics of the environment in which the leadership dynamics occur (e.g., dynamic versus stable environment). In this session, we will focus on the association between leadership, followership, and regulatory focus, and the role of context. The symposium consists of five presentations and a concluding discussion by an expert in this field: The first presentation offers a wide systemic conceptual overview of the field and provides a context and time sensitive framework for the study of leadership, followership and regulatory focus. The other four presentations include three field studies and one conceptual paper, each focusing on a specific aspect of the context that delineates the links between leadership and regulatory focus and enables a better understanding of the environment in which the leadership process is more effective. This symposium can advance our knowledge by shielding light on the boundary conditions under which 'keeping the head in the clouds' or 'keeping the feet on the ground' are mostly effective. Where and When? Is It Time Now? A Context and Time Sensitive Framework of Leader-Follower SRF Presenter: Ronit Kark; Bar Ilan U. Presenter: Dina Van Dijk; Ben Gurion U. of the Negev Presenter: Marianna Delegach; Sapir Academic College Promotion and Prevention Leaders: How Store Manager Regulatory Focus affects Store Performance Presenter: Daan Alexander Stam; Erasmus U. Rotterdam Presenter: Marinus B.M. De Koster; - Moving on in a Fitting Way: Regulatory Focus and Employability Behaviors in a Mass Lay-Off Presenter: Melvyn Hamstra; Maastricht U. Presenter: Bert Schreurs; Vrije U. Brussel How CEOs Keep Their Organizations Healthy: A Collective Regulatory Focus Perspective Presenter: Hendrik Huettermann; U. of St. Gallen Presenter: Ronit Kark; Bar Ilan U. Presenter: Heike Bruch; U. of St. Gallen Top Management Team's Collective Regulatory Focus and its Role in Achieving a Competitive Advantage Presenter: Emily Neubert; Indiana U. - Kelley School of Business [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we seek to understand the consequences of demographic faultlines at the organizational level of analysis. Drawing from Subgroup Theory and Optimal Distinctiveness Theory, we suggest a moderated mediation model in which organizational-level demographic faultline strength (based on employees' age and gender) can either have positive or negative or effects on employees' organizational identification. We posit that its consequences for employees' organizational identification depend on identity-based subgroups' departmental diversity, defined as the extent to which identity-based subgroups consist of members from different functional departments. Employees' organizational identification, in turn, is expected to be positively associated with organizational performance and organizational innovation. Multisource field data of 5495 employees in 82 small and medium-sized firms largely supports our theoretical model. Our article challenges our understanding how we think of faultlines by theorizing and demonstrating that organizational demographic faultlines function, in part, differently from what we know from the majority of studies on faultlines at the small-group level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the effects of human resource management on employee well-being has remained limited and yielded inconclusive results. Moreover, prior works remain unclear on whether human resource practices specifically aimed at enhancing employee well-being also benefit organizational performance. Our study contributes to this stream of research by opening the ""black box"" between human resource management, employee well-being, and organizational effectiveness. Building on signaling theory and social exchange theory, we investigate the effects of health-related human resource management (HHRM) on employees' collective well-being (in terms of collective emotional exhaustion and collective engagement) and organizational performance. Results from a multi-source field study of top management team members, HR representatives, and 16,314 employees in 88 organizations show that HHRM has a positive indirect effect on employees' collective well-being which is mediated by a stress-is-enhancing organizational mindset, i.e. employees' shared belief that stress at work can be a source of personal growth, well-being, and performance. In addition, we find that this positive indirect effect of HHRM on collective well-being only exists in organizations with high transformational leadership climate. Finally, by fostering a stress-is-enhancing organizational mindset and collective engagement, HHRM also benefits organizational performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many organizations have seen their workforce become increasingly diverse over the past few decades and a prevalent notion is that this growing diversity gives rise to conflicts within workgroups. However, empirical findings on the association between diversity and conflict in teams are mixed. Therefore, our study provides a comprehensive meta-analysis on the question whether and how diversity and conflict in teams are interrelated. In particular, we examine the associations between different types of diversity (i.e., informational, social category, and value diversity) as well as specific informational and social category diversity attributes (i.e., function, education, organizational tenure, age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and culture) and task, relationship, and process conflict. Moreover, we analyze the influence of both team context (i.e., team type, team size, and team tenure) and methodological moderators (among them study setting, subjects, and organizational level of analysis). Based on 313 effect sizes from 77 studies comprising 6,446 teams, we find small, positive associations of both informational and value diversity with task conflict, all three types of diversity with relationship conflict, and value diversity with process conflict. In addition, moderator analyses reveal several noteworthy contingencies of the diversity-conflict associations. We discuss our findings and implications for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While prior research has related diversity climate to a range of desirable outcomes, much less is known about which factors shape employees' perceptions of organizational diversity-related policies, practices, and procedures. Our study aims at filling this gap in research by examining the interplay of leadership at different organizational levels for fostering diversity climate. Based on a social exchange perspective, we propose that high organizational-level leader-member exchange (LMX) quality--i.e. the degree to which leaders throughout an organization maintain high quality relationships with their followers--promotes employees' positive appraisal of organizational diversity climate. Moreover, we argue that this positive relationship is dependent on the degree to which organizations' top management leadership is perceived to be collective-focused and thereby to favor diversity. Our hypotheses are supported by structural equation modeling analyses in a multi-source dataset of 15,864 employees in 125 companies. Our findings have high practical relevance for organizations as we can show that diversity climate ultimately also enhances organizational performance and reduces employees' turnover intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]