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The influence of friends’ person-organization fit during recruitment.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2024
drive social learning and social influence processes for applicants, thus predicting applicant perceptions and behaviors toward recruiting firms. In addition, we posit that the direct and indirect relationships between friends' P-O fit perceptions and applicants' own fit perceptions and job choices with recruiting firms are further strengthened by how centrally connected applicants are within their friend networks. Using a sample of 576 applicant-firm observations from 178 job applicants, we found that friends' P-O fit perceptions are positively related to applicant P-O fit perceptions and job choice decisions. Furthermore, applicants' position in their network-assessed via applicants' outdegree centrality within their friend group-strengthened the relationship between friends' P-O fit and applicant P-O fit as well as with their job choice decisions. Our research provides important theoretical and empirical findings on the influence of applicants' friends during recruitment. (PsycInfo Database Record

Self-promotion in entrepreneurship: A driver for proactive adaptation.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2024
Research in impression management has primarily examined how self-promotion affects one's image, neglecting the potential benefits of feedback on the underlying image that is being impression managed. This study bridges this gap by integrating impression management with social-cognitive theory to explore how self-promotion can enhance feedback from targets, thereby stimulating initiative-taking and proactive adaptation in the actor. Analyzing five-wave monthly survey data from 574 entrepreneurs, I find a positive relationship between self-promotion and experimentation, which positively associates with business-model adaptation. This indirect effect is observed exclusively among entrepreneurs confident in their capabilities, highlighting the critical role of self-efficacy. Furthermore, results from three scenario-based experiments demonstrate that higher levels of self-promotion elicit greater engagement from targets, with responses containing more constructive elements, such as ideas or concerns, thereby supporting my theory. My findings underscore the richer feedback generated from self-promotion, suggesting it plays a critical role in facilitating agentic behavior. This contributes to a more nuanced understanding of self-promotion's impact, proposing new avenues for future studies in impression management and entrepreneurship. (PsycInfo Database Record

Experimental examination of the incentive and sorting effects of pay-for-performance on creative performance.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2024
There is long-standing debate over whether pay-for-performance (PFP) enhances or undermines creative performance. Traditional motivation and revised creativity theories suggest that PFP and intrinsic task interest combine additively to enhance creative performance, whereas cognitive evaluation theory and self-determination theory posit that PFP undermines task interest and thus intrinsic motivation and creative performance. To help resolve these conflicting predictions and provide a more comprehensive understanding of how and when PFP influences creative performance, this study incorporates both the incentive and sorting mechanisms of PFP, varying strengths of PFP, and task autonomy as a key moderator. A novel laboratory experiment was designed to capture key elements of workplace contexts, including in the design of the creative tasks, PFP strengths based on benchmarking of U.S. companies' practices, and allowing subjects to sort into different pay conditions, consistent with the opportunity for mobility in the labor market. The results showed that, through both incentive and sorting mechanisms, high PFP intensity enhanced creative performance more so than low PFP intensity, and both were superior to fixed pay. Importantly, task autonomy positively moderated the PFP-creative performance relationship, such that creative performance under PFP increased much more under higher task autonomy. Finally, the difference in creative performance under PFP versus fixed pay was greater when subjects were allowed to sort into their preferred pay conditions than when they worked only under randomly assigned pay conditions. Theoretical and practical implications and future research directions are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record

Out of sight, out of mind: How high-level construals can decrease the ethical framing of risk-mitigating behavior.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2024
Organizational failures often cause significant harm to employees, the organization itself, and the environment. Investigations of failures consistently highlight how key employees behaved in (perhaps unintentionally) unethical ways that de-prioritized safety, such as investing fewer resources in safety (vs. other priorities) over time. Drawing on these investigations, we suggest a previously underexplored theme could explain why organizational failures persist and why employees did not "see" the potential for their behaviors to cause harm to others: Employees were distanced from where the harm eventually occurred, either in terms of space (e.g., being located miles away from the job site) or time (e.g., making decisions that would not have impacts for months or years). We use construal level theory to investigate how the way employees construe where work occurs-defined as work context construal-influences perceptions of harm and the ethical framing of risk-mitigating behaviors. We hypothesize that high-level (abstract) work context construals (vs. low-level, concrete ones) reduce perceptions of potential harm which, in turn, leads to framing risk-mitigating behaviors as less of an ethical obligation. Six studies-a correlational survey of aviation employees (Study 1), field experiments with offshore drilling employees (Study 2A) and health care workers (Study 2B), a preregistered experiment with nurses (Study 3), and two supplemental studies (Studies 4A/B)-support our hypotheses. We discuss implications of this research for understanding organizational failures, particularly in a world where technology increasingly enables employees to monitor complex and high-risk work occurring many miles away, or on the other side of the world. (PsycInfo Database Record

Disentangling the relational approach to organizational justice: Meta-analytic and field tests of distinct roles of social exchange and social identity.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2024
= 29,868), coupled with one preregistered experience-sampling study with 1,941 cross-day observations over 3 weeks from 147 subordinate-supervisor pairs. Overall, we find that exchange-based mechanisms account for more of the indirect effect of justice on task performance, whereas identity-based mechanisms (particularly interdependent identity) account for more of the indirect effect of justice on counterproductive work behavior. Regarding the indirect effect on organizational citizenship behavior, identity-based mechanisms (particularly positive self-evaluations) and exchange-based mechanisms respectively present great utility between the two studies. By providing nuanced insight into the complementary yet distinct nature of these two prominent mechanisms, our research encourages a more granular theoretical approach for studying organizational justice effects. (PsycInfo Database Record

A stimulus-based model of the team adaptation process: An integrated conceptual review.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2024
As organizations face constant pressures to respond to changing situations and emergent demands, team members are frequently called upon to change their processes and routines and adapt to new ways of working together. In examining adaptation, most researchers have taken a behavior-driven approach where they collapse across the many types of adaptive demands teams face and rely on traditional input-process-outcome frameworks (e.g., Hackman, 1987; McGrath, 1984) to isolate specific behavioral responses. However, this perspective has resulted in several critical limitations. There are key differences in the way teams must collectively respond to different types of adaptive stimuli to be successful, and current research cannot account for or differentiate adaptive demands by stimulus type and needed responses. In this integrated conceptual review, we address these limitations and develop a novel, stimulus-based phase model of team adaptation. We examine studies across our newly developed stimulus detection, urgency identification, and duration assessment phases, and through the team's adaptive response, adaptive performance, and learning from the experience. We integrate research within each phase of the adaptive process, highlighting factors that demonstrate what successful team adaptation "looks like," and describe future avenues of research to address key issues within each phase. (PsycInfo Database Record

A longitudinal meta-analysis of range restriction estimates and general mental ability validity coefficients: Better addressing overcorrection amid decline effects.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2024
² of 42.3% vs. 2.6%), and range restriction corrections are now minimal in about 75% of cases. This drop in correlations appears due to the filtering effects of increased education, both due to the demands of the knowledge economy and credentialism, where organizations are using college or university degrees as a proxy for GMA. Credentialism is an incredibly inefficient form of GMA assessment, suggesting an urgent societal need to incorporate selection fundamentals more broadly. Altogether, these results indicate that labor market dynamics have a deeper impact on personnel selection than typically appreciated, meaning that many of our estimates have and will eventually age out. (PsycInfo Database Record

Euphemism as a powerful framing device that influences moral judgments and punitive responses after wrongdoing.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2024
= 3,081) we find consistent evidence that employing euphemistic labels (relative to their noneuphemistic analogs) reduces the perceived severity of moral transgressions and, as a result, also reduces third-party motivations to punish transgressors. Overt experimental manipulations to reconstrue euphemistic labels into their noneuphemistic forms reduced, but did not entirely eliminate, the effects on moral severity and punishment judgments. Participants did not sufficiently adjust their judgments. These findings underscore the power of simple linguistic manipulations in influencing public opinion, and they have important implications for the possibility of creating a more just and fair society. (PsycInfo Database Record

Jekyll and Hyde leadership: Examining the direct and vicarious experiences of abusive and ethical leadership through a justice variability lens.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2024
experiences of abusive supervision and ethical leadership. Conceptualizing the simultaneous display of abusive and ethical leadership styles as a form of justice variability, we suggest that a direct supervisor's ethical leadership exacerbates, rather than ameliorates, the detrimental effects of his/her abusive supervision on employees' emotional exhaustion and job performance. We further contend that a similar effect exists when employees vicariously experience leadership interactions involving their direct supervisor and higher level manager, whereby higher level managers' ethical leadership exacerbates the negative effects of their abusive supervision toward supervisors on those supervisors' employees' emotional exhaustion and job performance. We draw the contrast between the direct and vicarious experiences by theorizing justice uncertainty and linking-pin effectiveness uncertainty, respectively, as two distinct theoretical mechanisms that explain the two proposed destructive effects. Using a multisource and multiphase lagged field study and two vignette-based experiments, we find general support for our model. Our research advances the theories of justice variability, vicarious leadership and (in)justice, and supervisors' linking-pin role effectiveness. We also offer practical insights for managing "Jekyll and Hyde" leadership across organizational hierarchies. (PsycInfo Database Record

Too much of a good thing? A multilevel examination of listening to music at work.

Journal of Applied Psychology 2024
Music listening has proliferated in the workplace, yet its effects have been overlooked, and classic investigations offer conflicting results. To advance our understanding, we draw from self-regulation and resource allocation theories to suggest that listening to music has curvilinear effects on attentional focus and performance on work tasks and that willpower belief is a key boundary condition. We test these hypotheses across three studies: a pilot study of 108 employees from a software company who took part in a 2-week experience-sampling methodology study and self-rated their music listening and performance, a laboratory study (Study 1) of 252 undergraduate students in which task attentional focus and objective performance on proofreading tasks were captured across repeated trials while listening to music, and a 3-week experience-sampling methodology study (Study 2) of 247 employees that included a within-person manipulation of music listening (little to no music vs. 1 hr longer than usual vs. 3 hr longer than usual), daily self-ratings of task attentional focus and task performance, and weekly coworker ratings of task performance. We find mixed support for our hypotheses. Time spent listening to music exhibited an inverted, U-shaped relationship with self-rated (pilot study) and objective (Study 1) task performance. Individuals with higher willpower belief maintained higher levels of task attentional focus regardless of the amount of music they listened to (Studies 1 and 2), and the curvilinear relationship of reported music listening with self-rated task performance was more pronounced for individuals who believe that willpower is limited (pilot study and Study 2). (PsycInfo Database Record