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With rapid advancements in machine learning, we consider the epistemological opportunities presented by this novel tool for promoting organizational theory. Our paper unfolds in three sections. We ...

We propose that exposure to moral identity symbolization (i.e., outwardly projected displays of one’s morality) leads observers to increase their helping behavior because they perceive the symbolizer as more scrutinizing of their moral characters, especially when observers expect or have an ongoing relationship with the symbolizer. We further propose that the effect of moral identity symbolization on observer behavior is diminished when symbolization involves behaviors that threaten the autonomy of observers (i.e., moral proselytizing). Empirical data from four studies, consisting of field surveys and experiments, supports our hypotheses. Taken together, this research suggests that moral identity symbolization in the workplace leads to helping behavior in observers as a function of heightened perceptions of moral scrutiny, but that such outward display of morality is only related to helping behavior when the symbolizers avoid proselytizing and when there is an ongoing relationship between the observers and the symbolizers.

Organizational scholars frequently rely on experiments using human confederates or descriptions of vignette characters to study a range of phenomena. Although experiments with confederates allow for realism and rigor, human confederates have several critical limitations. We present a novel and efficient alternative: the use of responsive electronic confederates for manipulating constructs in dyadic, group, and team contexts. Specifically, we (a) define electronic confederates in an organizational research context, identify their optimal qualities, and review studies that have used them; (b) discuss challenges of utilizing human confederates and how electronic confederates may address these; (c) identify boundary conditions around using electronic confederates and, within these conditions, identify the many types of inquiry that can be aided by electronic confederates; (d) discuss validation strategies for electronic confederates, while increasing their believability to study participants; (e) provide materials for two versions of an adaptable research platform involving electronic confederates; and (f) identify future opportunities for developing novel tools for behavioral research. Our article thus provides a toolkit for organizational researchers that empowers them to utilize electronic confederates in their own research.

To function optimally, most workgroups need an interdependent mix of members in strategically core and noncore roles who work effectively together. However, whereas researchers have investigated the contributions of star performers and strategically core group members, relatively little is known about individuals in noncore roles and how they may facilitate group functioning and contribute to the relational climate of organizations. In this paper, we develop a multi-level, bottom-up model that explains two paths through which employees in noncore roles facilitate the dissemination of relational coordination in organizations. We leverage insights from self-categorization theory and relational coordination theory to explain different ways in which noncore role incumbents attempt to enact their noncore role identities. Then, we describe how the relational stances of those occupying core roles can enable or hinder the identity validation of those in noncore roles, and how validating the role-based identities ...

Sexual behavior represents relatively common and mundane home-life behavior, with demonstrated impact on both mood and general physical and psychological well-being. Integrating emergent research on sex and mood with theory on work-life enrichment, we propose a novel model demonstrating the effects of sexual behavior at home on next-day job satisfaction and job engagement as a function of positive affect. Using a 2-week daily diary study of married, employed adults, we found that (a) when employees engaged in sex at home, they reported increased positive affect at work the following day, independent of the effects of marital satisfaction; (b) sex at home increased both daily job satisfaction and daily job engagement as a function of increased positive affect; and (c) daily work-to-family strain-based conflict significantly reduced the likelihood of engaging in sex at home that evening. Accordingly, we extend theory on work-life enrichment by demonstrating the import of seemingly banal behavior on daily work life, with implications for work-life impingement.

Contains fulltext : 228242.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Drawing on the concept of a gale of creative destruction in a capitalistic economy, we argue that initiatives to assess the robustness of findings in the organizational literature should aim to simultaneously test competing ideas operating in the same theoretical space. In other words, replication efforts should seek not just to support or question the original findings, but also to replace them with revised, stronger theories with greater explanatory power. Achieving this will typically require adding new measures, conditions, and subject populations to research designs, in order to carry out conceptual tests of multiple theories in addition to directly replicating the original findings. To illustrate the value of the creative destruction approach for theory pruning in organizational scholarship, we describe recent replication initiatives re-examining culture and work morality, working parents’ reasoning about day care options, and gender discrimination in hiring decisions. Significance statement It is becoming increasingly clear that many, if not most, published research findings across scientific fields are not readily replicable when the same method is repeated. Although extremely valuable, failed replications risk leaving a theoretical void - reducing confidence the original theoretical prediction is true, but not replacing it with positive evidence in favor of an alternative theory. We introduce the creative destruction approach to replication, which combines theory pruning methods from the field of management with emerging best practices from the open science movement, with the aim of making replications as generative as possible. In effect, we advocate for a Replication 2.0 movement in which the goal shifts from checking on the reliability of past findings to actively engaging in competitive theory testing and theory building. Scientific transparency statement The materials, code, and data for this article are posted publicly on the Open Science Framework, with links provided in the article. 19 p.

Although episodes of workplace incivility can lead to deleterious personal and performance outcomes, we suggest that differences in how incivility is experienced (i.e., as a singled-out target, or in the company of another who is also treated uncivilly) can have significant impact on the cognitions and behaviors that follow uncivil treatment. Drawing from Sociometer Theory, we test the notion that sharing the experience of incivility with another target can greatly diminish individual-level harm, and demonstrate that causal beliefs related to self-blame mediate consequent downstream effects. Using an experimental design within a team task environment, we found that experiencing incivility from a team member increased participants’ rumination about mistreatment, task-related stress levels, and psychological withdrawal behavior. Moreover, we found support for conditional indirect effects, such that viewing mistreatment of a fellow team member at the hands of the same uncivil team member (shared incivility) attenuates the harmful effects of incivility, by reducing self-blame.

The purpose of this symposium is to explore the social dynamics of social identity transitions. To this end, the symposium will include the presentation of four papers which illustrate how social m...

Decision making processes and consequent policy decisions of top management teams often have tremendous impact on employee careers and wellbeing, but the difficulty of accessing executive decision making has made studying such processes especially difficult. Whereas scholars have often relied on their own professional networks to gather small samples of executives or leveraged proxy measures compiled from publicly-available documents, we propose and demonstrate an alternative approach which we term Experimental Shareholder Activism (ESA). ESA allows researchers to directly study executive leadership via the shareholder proposal process—under Rule 14a-8—by purchasing relatively small amounts of stock in a company, and experimentally manipulating features of shareholder proposals to elicit responses from key stakeholders within the company. This approach allows for the direct examination of executive decision making with the benefit of quasi-experimental design. We describe the method, identify vocational and career-relevant areas of inquiry best suited to ESA, and discuss manipulations readily embedded in shareholder proposals. We then provide a toolkit for scholars interested in studying executive decision making on employee career and Human Resource-related outcomes, and demonstrate the viability of such an approach via a pilot experiment.

Previous research has identified many positive outcomes resulting from a deeply held moral identity, while overlooking potential negative social consequences for the moral individual. Drawing from Benign Violation Theory, we explore the tension between moral identity and humor, and the downstream workplace consequence of such tension. Consistent with our hypotheses, compared with participants in the control condition, participants whose moral identities were situationally activated (Study 1a) or chronically accessible (Study 1b) were less likely to appreciate humor and generate jokes others found funny (Study 2), especially humor that involved benign moral violations. We also found that participants with a strong moral identity do not generally compensate for their lack of humor by telling more jokes that do not involve moral violations (Study 3). Additional field studies demonstrated that employees (Study 4) and leaders (Study 5) with strong moral identities and who display ethical leadership are perceived as less humorous by their coworkers and subordinates, and to the extent that this is the case are less liked in the workplace. Study 5 further demonstrated two competing mediating pathways-leaders with strong moral identities are perceived as less humorous but also as more trustworthy, with differentiated effects on interpersonal liking. Although having moral employees and leaders can come with many benefits, our research shows that there can be offsetting costs associated with an internalized moral identity: reduced humor and subsequent likability in the workplace. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Introverted individuals may experience and evaluate their dyadic work relationships differently than extraverts. In two studies, we investigated the interaction effect of an individual’s and observ...

While the study of lying within organizations typically has focused on lies told for rational-instrumental purposes (such as lying for economic gain within negotiations), we argue that lying is a relatively common social-functional behavior embedded within ongoing workplace relationships. Drawing from social identity theory, we develop a theory of lying as a socially motivated behavioral response to identity threats at the personal, relational, or collective levels of identity in organizational life. Specifically, we propose that perceived identity threats undermine the unique fundamental identity motives at each level of self, and that as threat sensitivity and threat intractability increase, individuals become more likely to use lying as a threat management response in their interactions with other organizational members. Further, we propose that identity-based characteristics of organizational members with whom threatened individuals interact (i.e., the audience) determine the likelihood that lying wil...

Compared to macro-organizational researchers, micro-organizational researchers have generally eschewed archival sources of data as a means of advancing knowledge. The goal of this paper is to discuss emerging opportunities to use archival research for the purposes of advancing and testing theory in micro-organizational research. We discuss eight specific strengths common to archival micro-organizational research and how they differ from other traditional methods. We further discuss limitations of archival research, as well as strategies for mitigating these limitations. Taken together, we provide a toolkit to encourage micro-organizational researchers to capitalize on archival data.

The role of moral intuition (i.e., a set of implicit processes which occur automatically and at the fringe of conscious awareness) has been increasingly implicated in business decisions and (un)ethical business behavior. But troublingly, because implicit processes often operate outside of conscious awareness, decision makers are generally unaware of their influence. We tested whether subtle contextual cues for identity can alter implicit beliefs. In two studies, we found that contextual cues which nonconsciously prime moral identity weaken the implicit association between the categories of “business” and “ethical,” an implicit association which has previously been linked to unethical decision making. Further, changes in this implicit association mediated the relationship between contextually primed moral identity and concern for external stakeholder groups, regardless of self-reported moral identity. Thus, our results show that subtle contextual cues can lead individuals to render more ethical judgments, by automatically restructuring moral intuition below the level of consciousness.

Truthfulness and accuracy are critical for effective organizational functioning, but dishonesty (in the form of lying, misrepresentation, and fraud) continue to be pervasive in organizational life. Workplace dishonesty is an inherently unique behavior that should be distinguished from broader categories of unethical workplace behavior and organizational deviance, in that dishonesty is an overt social behavior—that is, requiring an audience to exist as a behavior. Compared to stealing or cheating, dishonest acts require knowing fabrication of false information, intended to deceive an anticipated audience. Thus, considering the overt social aspect of dishonesty (compared to the relatively clandestine behaviors of cheating and stealing) may add conceptual clarity to the construct of workplace dishonesty, which is surprisingly absent from extant literature. The potential audience for dishonest acts in the workplace is notably critical, in that dishonest organizational actors generally anticipate characteristics of the audience (in terms of relationship closeness, as well as expertise and motivation to evaluate the claim) and likely adapt and tailor their dishonesty accordingly. Historically two underlying paradigms have been used to study workplace dishonesty: the rational actor (economic) paradigm and the behavioral ethics (psychological) paradigm, but an emerging and nascent third paradigm (the social actor paradigm) may offer new opportunities for understanding antecedents of workplace dishonesty that do not occur exclusively for self-interested reasons. This novel paradigm suggests here important areas of inquiry related to the aftermath of workplace dishonesty: when will workplace dishonesty be detected in social interactions; what are the social and relational consequences of discovering dishonesty; how are dishonest actors likely to behave in the aftermath of their dishonest actions. Finally, two varying discrepancies relevant to workplace dishonesty should accordingly be considered when predicting subsequent behavior of the dishonest actor: the magnitude of the discrepancy between the truth and the fabrication, and the temporal discrepancy between the trigger event and dishonest act.

In contrast to other well-known cognitive models of moral decision-making, social cognitive theory posits that individuals can disengage from their own moral standards thereby allowing themselves to commit immoral acts. While previous research largely supports the general premise of moral disengagement, we suggest that direct tests of moral disengagement processes and the commensurate diminished role of moral knowledge are conspicuously absent. In five studies, we use multiple methods to capture both knowledge of the immorality of an act and theorized in situ processes of moral disengagement. Ultimately, we find no evidence of the proposed processes associated with moral disengagement. Furthermore, our data suggests that moral knowledge is a key driver of moral behavior in everyday situations and is not easily set aside. We conclude by discussing the implications of this research for theory and practice.

Behavioral Ethics has come to be viewed as a legitimate sub-field of Organizational Behavior only recently. To date, the field has largely focused on a critical but relatively narrow set of depende...

Researchers in organizational behavior frequently rely on experiments using human confederates to study a range of phenomena. Although experiments with confederates allow for realism and rigor, the...

It is well understood that moral identity substantially influences moral judgments. However, occupational identities are also replete with moral content, and individuals may have multiple occupatio...

Summary Job attitudes, as indicators of well-being, vary within individuals across cognitive processes and not just time. Research on employee well-being has relied primarily on self-reported measures of explicit job and life attitudes. Our work takes a different perspective on this issue by examining the role of implicit attitudes regarding one’s organization, coworkers, and supervisor as indicators of well-being. Implicit attitudes are automatic, introspectively inaccessible, and predict behavior in socially sensitive contexts in which selfreport measures may be impaired by impression management. The results of a field study demonstrate that implicit and explicit job attitudes reflect relatively independent intra-individual processes. Additionally, this study demonstrates that job performance and citizenship behaviors are best predicted by a combination of implicit and explicit job attitudes, and that a dissociation between implicit and explicit attitudes impacts organizational identification. We conclude with a discussion of how capturing implicit cognition in the workplace can better describe and subsequently help improve employee well-being. Copyright # 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We examined whether and how various biases may influence customers’ satisfaction evaluations and produce discriminatory judgments for minority and female service employees. We argue that customer satisfaction evaluations are biased because they are anonymous judgments by untrained raters that usually lack an evaluation standard. Laboratory and field samples provide disturbing evidence generally confirming our arguments and suggesting that the presence of nonwhite and women service employees may produce lower aggregated customer satisfaction evaluations that may ultimately hurt individuals and organizations financially.

We empirically examine the reflexive or automatic aspects of moral decision making. To begin, we develop and validate a measure of an individual's implicit assumption regarding the inherent morality of business. Then, using an in-basket exercise, we demonstrate that an implicit assumption that business is inherently moral impacts day-to-day business decisions and interacts with contextual cues to shape moral behavior. Ultimately, we offer evidence supporting a characterization of employees as reflexive interactionists: moral agents whose automatic decision-making processes interact with the environment to shape their moral behavior.

The current article presents a systematic approach to theory pruning (defined here as hypothesis specification and study design intended to bound and reduce theory). First, we argue that research that limits theory is underrepresented in the organizational sciences, erring overwhelmingly on the side of confirmatory null hypothesis testing. Second, we propose criteria for determining comparability, deciding when it is appropriate to test theories or parts of theories against one another. Third, we suggest hypotheses or questions for testing competing theories. Finally, we revisit the spirit of ‘‘strong inference.’’ We present reductionist strategies appropriate for the organizational sciences, which extend beyond traditional approaches of ‘‘critical’’ comparisons between whole theories. We conclude with a discussion of strong inference in organizational science and how theory pruning can help in that pursuit.

The authors examined whether the performance-cue bias can be reduced by relying on groups as raters. Study participants (N = 333) were provided with feedback regarding the performance of a workgroup and, after observing the group, assigned to an individual or group rater condition to complete a behavioral rating instrument. Results revealed that when provided with positive (vs. negative) feedback, individuals attributed more effective and fewer ineffective behaviors to the workgroup; however, group ratings were unaffected by the feedback. In addition, feedback biased the decision criteria and false alarm rates of individuals but not of groups. Discussion of when groups may attenuate versus amplify bias in performance appraisal judgments emphasizes 2 key elements-bias magnitude and task perception.

International audience; Accumulated evidence from social and cognitive psychology suggests that many behaviors are driven by processes operating outside of awareness, and an array of implicit measures to capture such processes have been developed. Despite their potential application, implicit measures have received relatively modest attention within the organizational sciences, due in part to barriers to entry and uncertainty about appropriate use of available measures. The current article is intended to serve as an implicit measurement "toolkit" for organizational scholars, and as such our goals are fourfold. First, we present theory critical to implicit measures, highlighting advantages of capturing implicit processes in organizational research. Second, we present a functional taxonomy of implicit measures (i.e., accessibility-based, association-based, and interpretation-based measures) and explicate assumptions and appropriate use of each. Third, we discuss key criteria to help researchers identify specific implicit measures most appropriate for their own work, including a discussion of principles for the psychometric validation of implicit measures. Fourth, we conclude by identifying avenues for impactful "next-generation" research within the organizational sciences that would benefit from the use of implicit measures.

We examine employee evening marital sexual behavior as an antecedent to next-day job satisfaction and job engagement. Drawing from theory on affective spillover and work to family conflict (WFC), o...

Although experiencing rudeness in the workplace leads to multiple deleterious personal and performance outcomes, surprisingly few studies have directly examined the underlying mediating mechanisms ...

Previous research demonstrates that employees often engage in self-promotion for instrumental purposes; primary among these is the shaping of others’ views in a manner that achieves desired outcomes including higher compensation. Drawing from the meaning maintenance model (MMM) of motivation, we demonstrate that self-promotion may be better explained through dual complementary motives of self-enhancement and reality-cogency, for the purposes of understanding the world as orderly and establishing one’s own valued place within it. We argue that although self-promotion can be used instrumentally to better one’s own standing, when meaning frameworks are violated by inconsistencies between performance and compensation, organizational actors attempt to restore meaning via self-promotion. Accordingly, using a multi-year archival study and two laboratory experiments, we demonstrate that the causal effect of overcompensation on self-promotion is even greater than the effect of self-promotion on overcompensation. F...

The effects of interactions between peers and individuals personality traits on individuals’ performance were investigated in two studies. Study 1 results showed that introverts evaluated extraverted and disagreeable peers’ performance as lower than those of introverted. Study 2 replicated the results of Study 1 using a controlled experimental design, and also showed that interactions with extraverted and disagreeable peers enhanced negative arousal among introverts but not among extraverts. In turn, attributions and negative arousal mediated the relationships between agreeableness and extraversion of peers and their performance ratings given by introverts. Overall, the results supported the tenants of arousal theory that introverts are more reactive to stimuli than extraverts and demonstrated the potential importance of interactions between peers’ personality traits in affecting individuals’ work outcomes.

Recent ethical scandals have reaffirmed the need for scholarly inquiry in the field of behavioral ethics (Trevino, Weaver, & Reynolds, 2006). Since the publication of seminal work (Trevino, 1986), ...