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A dual-process theory perspective to better understand judgments in assessment centers: The role of initial impressions for dimension ratings and validity.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2018
Insight into assessors' initial impressions has the potential to advance knowledge on how assessors form dimension-based judgments and on possible biases in these ratings. Therefore, this study draws on dual process theory to build and test a model that integrates assessors' dimension ratings (i.e., systematic, slow, deliberate processing mode) with their initial impressions (i.e., intuitive, fast, automatic processing mode). Data collection started with an AC where assessors provided ratings of assessees, and an online survey of assessees' supervisors who rated their job performance. In addition, two other rater pools provided initial impressions of these assessees by evaluating extracted 2-min video clips of their AC performance. Initial impressions from both of these samples were positively related to assessors' dimension ratings, which supports assumptions from dual process theory and might explain why assessors' dimensional ratings are often undifferentiated. Initial impressions did not appear to open up the doors for biases and stereotypes based upon appearance and perceptions of liking. Instead, assessors picked up information that assessees transmitted about their personality (i.e., Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability). Implications for further research on initial impressions and AC dimension ratings are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Prosocial response to client-instigated victimization: The roles of forgiveness and workgroup conflict.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2018 open access
We investigate forgiveness as a human service employee coping response to client-instigated victimizations and further explore the role of workgroup conflict in (a) facilitating this response, and (b) influencing the relationship between victimization and workplace outcomes. Using the theoretical lens of Conservation of Resources (Hobfoll, 1989), we propose that employees forgive clients-especially in the context of low workgroup conflict. From low to moderate levels of client-instigated victimization, we suggest that victimization and forgiveness are positively related; however, this positive relationship does not prevail when individuals confront egregious levels of victimization (i.e., an inverted-U shape). This curvilinear relationship holds under low but not under high workgroup conflict. Extending this model to workplace outcomes, findings also demonstrate that the indirect effects of victimization on job satisfaction, burnout, and turnover intentions are mediated by forgiveness when workgroup conflict is low. Experiment- and field-based studies provide evidence for the theoretical model. (PsycINFO Database Record

Exploring the relative importance of normative and distinctive organizational preferences as predictors of work attitudes.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2018
preferences. Here, we show how these two normative and distinctive P-O fits can be differentiated and related to an individual's attitudes about their organization experience. Utilizing data from 723 participants from four samples, we show that the degree to which an individual's description of their organizational culture corresponds to the normative ideal organizational culture may account for nearly all of the large associations regularly found between overall P-O fit indices and positive workplace attitudes. In contrast, the degree of fit between an individual's work environment and their distinctive or idiosyncratic preferences may play a relatively small role in predicting the positive workplace attitudes. We discuss broader implications for the design of organizational cultures and the more general understanding of the nature of P-O fit. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

It’s about time – A longitudinal adaptation model of high-performance work teams.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2018
Work teams have become an essential part of organizations, but how implementation of work teams influences performance outcomes over time still remains unclear. This study aims to explore this issue by examining implementation of high-performance work teams (HPWTs) in a manufacturing context. We draw upon team development and adaptation literature and organizational change literature to propose a 2-phase adaptation model whereby the growth rates of performance outcomes initially decline after implementation of HPWTs and later increase and become higher than the rates before implementation. Over a 4-year period, a field quasi-experiment was conducted in 20 plants producing automation and control equipment for a Fortune 500 firm and collected monthly data regarding plant-level labor productivity and inventory turnover before and after implementation of HPWTs. Results based on piecewise growth modeling indicate that the growth rate of labor productivity declines immediately after conversion to HPWTs and recovers to the original level but not higher, whereas the growth rate of inventory turnover does not decline significantly but shows a long-term improvement. We discuss the effects of HPWT implementation on the 2 dependent variables and provide implications for practices and future research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Making stronger causal inferences: Accounting for selection bias in associations between high performance work systems, leadership, and employee and customer satisfaction.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2018 open access
We develop competing hypotheses about the relationship between high performance work systems (HPWS) with employee and customer satisfaction. Drawing on 8 years of employee and customer survey data from a financial services firm, we used a recently developed empirical technique-covariate balanced propensity score (CBPS) weighting-to examine if the proposed relationships between HPWS and satisfaction outcomes can be explained by reverse causality, selection effects, or commonly omitted variables such as leadership behavior. The results provide support for leader behaviors as a primary driver of customer satisfaction, rather than HPWS, and also suggest that the problem of reverse causality requires additional attention in future human resource (HR) systems research. Model comparisons suggest that the estimates and conclusions vary across CBPS, meta-analytic, cross-sectional, and time-lagged models (with and without a lagged dependent variable as a control). We highlight the theoretical and methodological implications of the findings for HR systems research. (PsycINFO Database Record

Honor among thieves: The interaction of team and member deviance on trust in the team.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2018
In this article, we examine member trust in deviant teams. We contend that a member's trust in his or her deviant team depends on the member's own deviant actions; although all members will judge the actions of their deviant teams as rational evidence that they should not be trusted, deviant members, but not honest members, can hold on to trust in their teams because of a sense of connection to the team. We tested our predictions in a field study of 562 members across 111 teams and 24 organizations as well as in an experiment of 178 participants in deviant and non-deviant teams. Both studies show that honest members experience a greater decline in trust as team deviance goes up. Moreover, our experiment finds that deviant members have as much trust in their deviant teams as honest members do in honest teams, but only in teams with coordinated rather than independent acts of deviance, in which deviant members engage in a variety of ongoing dynamics foundational to a sense of connection and affective-based trust. (PsycINFO Database Record

How role jugglers maintain relationships at home and at work: A gender comparison.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2018
We examined how demands and resources in a role relate to the quality of relationships in another role. In Study 1, 26 cohabiting dual-earner couples reported on five consecutive days about their work demands and work resources, emotional support they provided to the spouse, and relationship quality among family members. Dyadic data analysis revealed that husbands' work demands were negatively related to family relationship quality through reduced emotional support provided to their wives. Wives' work resources were positively related family relationship quality through enhanced emotional support provided to their husbands. In Study 2, we explored whether the same gender pattern existed in the home-to-work direction. Sixty-four coworker dyads reported on five days about their home demands and resources, emotional support provided to their coworker, and relationship quality among team members. For male employees, home demands were negatively related to team relationship quality through reduced emotional support they provided to their coworker. For female employees, home resources were positively related to team relationship quality through enhanced emotional support they provided to their coworker. The findings suggest that relative to men, women prevent role demands from reducing the support they provide in another role and use role resources to enhance the support they provide in another role, thereby strengthening relationship quality in that role. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

The downside of downtime: The prevalence and work pacing consequences of idle time at work.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2018
Although both media commentary and academic research have focused much attention on the dilemma of employees being too busy, this paper presents evidence of the opposite phenomenon, in which employees do not have enough work to fill their time and are left with hours of meaningless idle time each week. We conducted six studies that examine the prevalence and work pacing consequences of involuntary idle time. In a nationally representative cross-occupational survey (Study 1), we found that idle time occurs frequently across all occupational categories; we estimate that employers in the United States pay roughly $100 billion in wages for time that employees spend idle. Studies 2a-3b experimentally demonstrate that there are also collateral consequences of idle time; when workers expect idle time following a task, their work pace declines and their task completion time increases. This decline reverses the well-documented deadline effect, producing a deadtime effect, whereby workers slow down as a task progresses. Our analyses of work pace patterns provide evidence for a time discounting mechanism: workers discount idle time when it is relatively distant, but act to avoid it increasingly as it becomes more proximate. Finally, Study 4 demonstrates that the expectation of being able to engage in leisure activities during posttask free time (e.g., surfing the Internet) can mitigate the collateral work pace losses due to idle time. Through examination and discussion of the effects of idle time at work, we broaden theory on work pacing. (PsycINFO Database Record

The paradox of agency: Feeling powerful reduces brokerage opportunity recognition yet increases willingness to broker.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2018 open access
Research suggests positions of brokerage in organizational networks provide many benefits, but studies tend to assume everyone is equally able to perceive and willing to act on brokerage opportunities. Here we challenge these assumptions in a direct investigation of whether people can perceive brokerage opportunities and are willing to broker. We propose that the psychological experience of power diminishes individuals' ability to perceive opportunities to broker between people who are not directly connected in their networks, yet enhances their willingness to broker. In Study 1, we find that employees in a marketing and media agency who had a high sense of power were likely to see fewer brokerage opportunities in their advice networks. In Study 2, we provide causal evidence for this claim in an experiment where the psychological experience of power is manipulated. Those who felt powerful, relative to those who felt little power, tended to see fewer brokerage opportunities than actually existed, yet were more willing to broker, irrespective of whether there was a brokerage opportunity present. Collectively, these findings present a paradox of agency: Individuals who experience power are likely to underperceive the very brokerage opportunities for which their sense of agency is suited. (PsycINFO Database Record

Issues in solving the problem of effect size heterogeneity in meta-analytic structural equation modeling: A commentary and simulation study on Yu, Downes, Carter, and O’Boyle (2016).

Journal of Applied Psychology 2018 open access
Meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) is becoming increasingly popular for testing theoretical models from a pool of correlation matrices in management and organizational studies. One limitation of the conventional MASEM approaches is that the proposed structural equation models are only tested on the average correlation matrix. It remains unclear how far the proposed models can be generalized to other populations when the correlation matrices are heterogeneous. Recently, Yu, Downes, Carter, and O'Boyle (2016) proposed a full-information MASEM approach to address this limitation by fitting structural equation models from the correlation matrices generated from a parametric bootstrap. However, their approach suffers from several conceptual issues and technical errors. In this study, we reran some of the simulations in Yu et al. by correcting all of the errors in their original studies. The findings showed that bootstrap credible intervals (CVs) work reasonably well, whereas test statistics and goodness-of-fit indices do not. We advise researchers on what they can and cannot achieve by applying the full-information MASEM approach. We recommend fitting MASEM with the two-stage structural equation modeling approach, which works well for the simulation studies. If researchers want to inspect the heterogeneity of the parameters, they may use the bootstrap CVs from the full-information MASEM approach. All of these analyses were implemented in the open-source R statistical platform; researchers can easily apply and verify the findings. This article concludes with several future directions to address the issue of heterogeneity in MASEM. (PsycINFO Database Record