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Beyond the first choice: The impact of being an alternate choice on social integration and feedback seeking.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2023 open access
Existing work on newcomer adjustment and socialization typically assumes that selected employees are the first choice for a role or job. However, this is not always the case. To address this oversight, we introduce and examine the phenomenon of alternate choices: Employees who are selected for a role but perceive or discover that they were not the first choice. Drawing on social identity theory, we contend that alternate choices seek less feedback directly from others due to experiencing less social integration and examine whether leader inclusion offsets these effects. Our studies cycling between experimental and field survey designs support the proposed theory. Taken together, we illuminate how selection processes and decisions made before role entry can impact employees' subsequent work experiences and behavior after they enter the role, providing insights for theory and research on socialization, feedback seeking, and inclusion at work. (PsycInfo Database Record

A study of new labor market entrants’ job satisfaction trajectories during a series of consecutive job changes.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2023 open access
Previous research on the psychological effect of job change has revealed a honeymoon-hangover pattern during the turnover process. However, there is a dearth of evidence on how individuals react and adapt to multiple job changes over their working lives. This study distinguishes adaptation to a single job change in the short term from adaptation to the process of job change in the long term. Drawing on two large-scale, long-running panel data sets from Britain and Australia, it examined how job satisfaction trajectory evolved as individuals made a series of consecutive job changes since they first entered the labor market. Our fixed effect analyses show that in both countries, individuals experienced a stronger honeymoon effect with each successive job change, before gradually reverting to their baseline job satisfaction. In short, the amplitude of the honeymoon-hangover effect increased across multiple job changes. By distinguishing "adaptation to change" from "change in adaptation," this study generates original insights into the role of job mobility in facilitating career development and extends set point theory from understanding the impact of single life events to recurring life events. (PsycInfo Database Record

The easy addendum effect: When doing more seems less effortful.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2023 open access
and demonstrate that it is less likely to occur when an overall activity is conceptualized as consisting of a single category rather than two distinct categories-that is, a set of difficult tasks followed by a set of easy tasks. We further show downstream consequences of this effect-through lower perceived difficulty, the easy addendum effect can lead to greater satisfaction, persistence, and more tasks performed overall. (PsycInfo Database Record

Crossing the domain: Unintended consequences of safety and service climates.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2023 open access
Domain-specific roles of service climate and safety climate are well-established, but little is known about their cross-domain roles. In this study, we examined the cross-domain main roles of service climate (on safety performance) and safety climate (on service performance) and their joint roles in predicting service and safety performance. Drawing on the exploration-exploitation framework, we further introduced team exploration and team exploitation as explanatory mechanisms for the cross-domain relationships. We conducted two multiwave, multisource field studies using nursing teams in hospitals. Results from Study 1 showed that service climate had a positive relationship with service performance but a nonsignificant relationship with safety performance. Safety climate, though, had a positive relationship with safety performance but a negative relationship with service performance. Study 2 found support for all main relationships and also revealed that safety climate moderated the indirect relationships that service climate had with safety and service performance through team exploration. Moreover, service climate moderated the indirect relationships that safety climate had with service and safety performance through team exploitation. We extend the climate literature by uncovering the missing cross-domain relationships between service and safety climates. (PsycInfo Database Record

Reciprocal relationships between narcissism and agentic versus communal work activities across the first 6 years of the career.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2023 open access
The vast majority of studies on trait narcissism have adopted a static unidirectional approach, documenting the mainly detrimental effects of this trait on a variety of work outcomes. The present study contributes to this literature by adopting a novel bidirectional perspective, investigating how trait narcissism shapes and is shaped by our experiences at work. Specifically, this study examines how trait narcissism develops during the first 6 years after the transition from college to work, and how agentic versus communal work demands may either enhance or diminish the development of this trait. Reciprocal relationships between narcissism and subjective and objective work activities are examined in a sample of 1,513 college alumni who were assessed four times across a time period of 6 years. Both selection (i.e., narcissism shapes work activities) and socialization effects (i.e., narcissism is shaped by work activities) were examined using bivariate latent change score models. Results showed that trait narcissism prior to the college-to-work transition positively predicted the selection of agentic work activities at the beginning of the career, but not future changes in these activities. Importantly, the results regarding socialization effects indicated that engagement in communal activities, particularly those that require relating with others at work (e.g., to help them), diminished trait narcissism over time. (PsycInfo Database Record

Improving our understanding of predictive bias in testing.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2023 open access
Predictive bias (i.e., differential prediction) means that regression equations predicting performance differ across groups based on protected status (e.g., ethnicity, sexual orientation, sexual identity, pregnancy, disability, and religion). Thus, making prescreening, admissions, and selection decisions when predictive bias exists violates principles of fairness based on equal treatment and opportunity. First, we conducted a two-part study showing that different types of predictive bias exist. Specifically, we conducted a Monte Carlo simulation showing that out-of-sample predictions provide a more precise understanding of the nature of predictive bias-whether it is based on intercept and/or slope differences across groups. Then, we conducted a college admissions study based on 29,734 Black and 304,372 White students, and 35,681 Latinx and 308,818 White students and provided evidence about the existence of both intercept- and slope-based predictive bias. Third, we discuss the nature and different types of predictive bias and offer analytical work to explain why each type exists, thereby providing insights into the causes of different types of predictive bias. We also map the statistical causes of predictive bias onto the existing literature on likely underlying psychological and contextual mechanisms. Overall, we hope our article will help reorient future predictive bias research from whether it exists to the why of different types of predictive bias. (PsycInfo Database Record

Expanding the pie or spoiling the cake? How the number of negotiation issues affects integrative bargaining.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2023 open access
= 38,063/21,271 negotiations for joint gains/impasse rates). Moreover, we investigated whether factors related to how negotiators subjectively deal with the increased complexity associated with higher numbers of issues moderate the number-of-issues effect on joint gains. Multilevel analyses revealed no significant number-of-issues effect on joint gains up to a threshold of 3 issues but a negative effect for negotiations involving more than 3 issues. By contrast, we did not find a number-of-issues effect on impasse rates. Moreover, we did not obtain evidence for moderation effects. Findings are discussed with respect to their theoretical and practical implications. (PsycInfo Database Record

When does paternalistic control positively relate to job satisfaction and citizenship behavior in Taiwan? The role of follower expectation.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2023 open access
Although prior research predicts mainly that followers expect leaders to exert less paternalistic control (such as emphasis on discipline, didactic instruction, and belittling followers), we argue that such an expectation may not be stable overtime or across settings. Based on the connectionist perspectives of implicit leadership theories, we propose a follower expectation model of paternalistic control, in which followers compare their perceived with expected levels of paternalistic control. Two inconsistent conditions-insufficient and excessive control-are identified, and the consistency between perceived and expected paternalistic control is predicted to relate to favorable follower outcomes. We examine this model by conducting two daily experience sampling studies in Taiwan. Our findings indicate that insufficient control is as unfavorable as excessive control in lowering followers' job satisfaction and citizenship behavior, and this pattern is particularly salient in terms of emphasis on discipline and the belittling of followers. A supplemental, qualitative analysis additionally demonstrated the conditions under which the expectation-perception consistency regarding belittling followers relates to favorable follower responses. (PsycInfo Database Record

A breath of toxic air: The relationship between appraised air pollution, abusive supervision, and laissez-faire leadership through the dual-mediating pathways of negative affect and somatic complaints.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2023 open access
Air pollution has become a global public health hazard leading to debilitating effects on physical, mental, and emotional health. Management research has just begun to explore the effects of air pollution on employees' work life. Drawing from the transactional theory of stress (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) and crossover theory (Westman, 2001), we argue that appraisal of air pollution is an important factor that influences leaders and their behavior with subordinates. Specifically, we propose that when leaders appraise severe air pollution, they are more likely to behave abusively toward their subordinates and engage in laissez-faire leadership. We also propose that this relationship is mediated by leaders' experience of somatic complaints and negative affect. We test our model using an experience sampling study in India of leaders and followers who were located in different cities from each other. Overall, our results highlight how air pollution appraisals can harm not only the leader experiencing the pollution but also subordinates of those leaders. In other words, our counterintuitive finding is that subordinates may be harmed by air pollution to which they are not even directly exposed. (PsycInfo Database Record

Correcting for range restriction in meta-analysis: A reply to Oh et al. (2023).

Journal of Applied Psychology 2023 open access
Oh et al. (2023) question a number of choices made in our article (Sackett et al., 2022); here we respond. They interpret our article as recommending against correcting for range restriction in general in concurrent validation studies; yet, we emphasize that we endorse correction when one has access to the information needed to do so. Our focus was on making range restriction corrections when conducting meta-analyses, where it is common for primary studies to be silent as to the prior basis for selection of the employees later participating in the concurrent validation study. As such, the applicant pool information needed for correction is typically not available. Sackett et al. (2022) highlighted that in many situations, range restriction will be small; so, the inability to correct for it results in only a modest underestimate of validity. Oh et al. mention settings that would result in substantial range restriction; here, we present our rationale as to why we view such settings as uncommon rather than as making up the bulk of the studies contributing to meta-analyses. (PsycInfo Database Record