Knowledge that Transforms

Women continue to be underrepresented in numerous occupations and in the highest echelons of many organizations.This may be due, in part, to disadvantages they face in referral-based hiring and promotion processes, as women are less inclined to ask for referrals and less likely to be referred than men for maledominated jobs.We integrate insights from the goal-setting and creativity literatures to propose an intervention to boost referrals of women: requesting a greater target number of referrals (e.g., at least four instead of at least two referrals).This strategy sets a motivating goal to provide more referrals, which should mechanically increase the number of women referred.In addition, requesting more referrals in maledominated contexts may lead to prototype divergence, which should increase the rate at which women are referred as people generate additional recommendations.Across two primary studies (a field experiment and an online experiment) and four supplemental studies (another field experiment and three online experiments; all preregistered, total N = 12,615), requesting double the number of referrals increased the number of women referred by 17%-88%.We found evidence that setting more ambitious referral goals mediated the effect of asking for more referrals on the number of women referred, supporting a goals-based account.However, we found inconsistent support for prototype divergence as a mechanism across our studies.Our work establishes a theoretically motivated intervention organizations can use to bolster women's representation in recruitment pipelines in male-dominated settings, and our full-cycle approach establishes its generalizability across contexts.

Leadership transitions are a fact of organizational life, yet the impact of successors' leadership behavior on organizational outcomes is little understood. Building on change readiness, uncertainty management, and romance of leadership theory and research, we propose a novel theory describing the distinctive effects of successors' versus incumbents' leadership behavior in driving change in collective engagement and organizational performance. We theorize that when employees perceive a great need for organizational change, successors' vision communication and coaching are more likely than incumbents' to yield improvements in collective engagement and organizational performance. But when employees perceive little need for change, successors' vision communication and coaching are more likely than incumbents' to yield declines. To test our model, we conducted a longitudinal, quasi-experimental study of principal succession in a sample of 113 U.S. elementary schools. As predicted, when employees perceived a great need for change, successors' coaching sparked gains in collective engagement and organizational performance. When employees perceived little need for change, successors' coaching backfired, spurring declines in collective engagement and organizational performance. As predicted, the effects of incumbents' coaching were muted. Finally, contrary to our predictions, neither successors' nor incumbents' vision communication drove change in collective engagement and performance. Our theory and findings illuminate the distinctive risks and benefits of successors' leadership behavior in driving change in collective engagement and organizational performance. For good and for bad, successors' coaching changes their organizations in ways that incumbents' leadership does not. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Previous research indicates that employees often believe that it is too risky to voice their concerns about organizational problems; however, prospect theory suggests that people are more willing to take risks when problems are framed in terms of potential losses rather than potential gains. To reconcile these perspectives, we draw on prospect theory and the principle of loss aversion to explain why loss framing (compared to gain framing) will increase employees' willingness to engage in voice behavior. In Study 1, we used a scenario experiment and found that participants who considered potential losses (compared to gains) after writing about a problem at work were more willing to speak up. Further, integrating prospect theory with research on other orientation, we extended these findings in Study 2 by hypothesizing an interaction between loss (compared to gain) framing and collective (compared to self) framing. Using experimental vignette methodology, we found the most voice behavior with framing that highlights potential for collective losses. In Study 3, we conducted a multiwave, multisource survey study using three organizational samples from different industries-health care, consulting, and auditing-and again found that employees were more willing to engage in voice when framing made collective losses salient. Altogether, our three studies integrate prospect theory and research on other orientation to show that framing, particularly in terms of losses and collective outcomes, is an important tool for eliciting employee voice. Theoretical and practical implications of our work, as well as ideas for future research, are also discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Improving job quality through job transitions is crucial in early adulthood. However, young adults without college degrees, particularly those from lower socioeconomic status (SES) families, can struggle to break out of lower quality jobs. Integrating socioeconomic and psychological perspectives, this research examines how family SES impacts job quality improvement through job search among young adults without college degrees when they transition from one job to another. We develop and test a model that explicates how family SES influences job quality improvement through constraints and resources for job search and self-regulated job search processes. Partnering with a Midwest state government agency, we collected data from young job seekers without college degrees through four longitudinal surveys over 6 months. Our findings revealed that job seekers from lower (vs. higher) SES families faced more basic needs constraints and had fewer college degree holders in their job search networks. These factors, in turn, influenced job seekers' wage increase goals and their job search metacognition. We also found that job seekers with higher wage increase goals achieved larger wage improvement between their previous and new jobs, and those who engaged in more job search metacognition were more likely to secure improvements in benefits, find new jobs with promotion opportunities, and perceive improvements in working conditions. These findings extend the literature on job quality, job search, socioeconomic mobility, and inequality and provide practical implications for multiple stakeholder groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Recent research indicates that performance benefits on complex tasks accrue when members with diverse social identities speak up and their voice is enacted-that is, incorporated into the team's approach to the task. In this article, we argue that the cost of not enacting diverse members' voice may extend beyond performance to negatively affect their belonging. Integrating social belonging theory with the literature on gender and voice, we examine the case of women in traditionally male-dominated contexts. Archival data from teams of active-duty Marines (Study 1) and student engineering project teams (Study 2) showed that voice enactment was more strongly associated with women's belonging than men's, and women's belonging was disproportionately harmed when voice enactment was low. A preregistered scenario study set in a male-dominated high-tech organization (Study 3) further showed that these differences were explained by the gender-based voice threat women experience when presented with a voice opportunity. This unique sense of threat amplified the relationship between voice enactment and belonging for women and, by extension, their future voice. A supplemental study showed that the costs in belonging when women's voice was not enacted could be mitigated when the leader framed voice as having value for the group even if it is not enacted. Still, only when voice enactment was high did women's sense of belonging reach parity with that of men, showcasing the power of acting on voice as a way of achieving belonging for all in diverse organizations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

the recovery process unfolds, along with providing practical recommendations for how employees should best recover daily. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

= 144). We then investigated the LLM scores' intrarater reliabilities, test-retest correlations, convergent, discriminant, and criterion evidence of validity, group differences, and measurement bias. We compared this evidence, when possible, to the same evidence for human raters and supervised machine learning models. The results suggest that ensembles of larger, newer LLMs using prompts with detailed construct information hold potential for scoring employment interviews with psychometric properties comparable to or superior to supervised machine learning models and single human raters. We detail the reasons that organizations may want to be cautious in adopting LLMs for scoring high-stakes open-ended assessments, but since organizations have already begun adopting them, we also offer best practice recommendations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

This study investigates the unintended effects of legal changes in shareholder litigation on employee injuries, revealing substantial consequences for employee welfare when restrictions are placed on shareholder litigation. Using a quasi-natural experiment involving the adoption of universal demand laws, we found that this reform, aimed at improving operational efficiency, is associated with a 28% increase in workplace injuries. This increase coincided with a marked surge in managerial focus on firm growth, without a commensurate increase in attention to safety. The association is stronger in lower income counties, highlighting a potential economic redistribution effect that concerns vulnerable employee groups. We also find that female-led firms exhibit minimal increases in injury rates after the adoption, in contrast to male-led firms, indicating that CEO gender moderates the relationship. These findings highlight how regulatory changes may be associated with unintended consequences for employees through shifts in managerial focus. We discuss the theoretical and policy implications of our findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

= 1,476), finding support for our predictions. Participants facing greater pay uncertainty work longer and delay recovery, even when financial rewards for continuing to work become negligible in Studies 1, 2, and 3. In line with scarcity theory predictions, pay uncertainty increases perceptions of financial scarcity (Study 4a) and those facing financial scarcity are less likely to engage in recovery (Study 4b). Together, these results highlight the costs of pay uncertainty while identifying the psychological mechanism underlying that cost. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Motivated by observations that workers from lower social class backgrounds often experience lower career outcomes even after securing desirable jobs, we adopted an abductive approach-combining theory (the newcomer personal capital framework) with qualitative evidence from open-ended accounts (Study 1)-to identify three challenges these workers face after joining organizations as newcomers: limited cultural capital (i.e., institutional knowledge), lower social capital (i.e., social self-efficacy), and lower psychological capital (i.e., distress tolerance). Furthermore, in Study 1, we developed and tested a psychological intervention targeting these challenges and found that it effectively addressed them. In Studies 2 and 3, both preregistered field experiments, we deductively tested whether addressing these challenges would enhance key downstream outcomes. Indeed, for newcomers from lower social class backgrounds, the intervention improved both the experience of the work itself (job engagement) and the organizational social environment (social integration), which, in turn, led to better job performance-although it did not reduce turnover intentions. The intervention offers a scalable, low-cost method to promote the adjustment and career success of upwardly mobile workers from lower social class backgrounds. We discuss implications for understanding sources of class achievement gaps and for the importance of the newcomer adjustment process in promoting socioeconomic mobility in organizations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).