Knowledge that Transforms

Using role theory as the overarching framework, we propose that employees' voice has contrasting relationships with the traits of duty orientation, or employees' dispositional sense of moral and ethical obligation at the workplace, and achievement orientation, or the extent of their ingrained personal ambition to get ahead professionally. Using data from 262 employees and their managers, we demonstrate that duty and achievement orientations are, respectively, positively and negatively related to voice through their impact on voice role conceptualization or the extent to which employees consider voice as part of their personal responsibility at work. Further, we delineate how employees' beliefs about their efficacy to engage in voice and judgments about psychological safety in the organization can moderate these relationships. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory and practice.

Complex contexts and environments require leaders to be highly adaptive and to adjust their behavioral responses to meet diverse role demands. Such adaptability may be contingent upon leaders having requisite complexity to facilitate effectiveness across a range of roles. However, there exists little empirical understanding of the etiology or basis of leader complexity. To this end, we conceptualized a model of leader self-complexity that is inclusive of both the mind (the complexity of leaders' self-concepts) and the brain (the neuroscientific basis for complex leadership). We derived psychometric and neurologically based measures, the latter based on quantitative electroencephalogram (qEEG) profiles of leader self-complexity, and tested their separate effects on the adaptive decision-making of 103 military leaders. Results demonstrated that both measures accounted for unique variance in external ratings of adaptive decision-making. We discuss how these findings provide a deeper understanding of the latent and dynamic mechanisms that underpin leaders' self-complexity and their adaptability.

Historically, organizational and personality psychologists have ignored within-individual variation in personality across situations or have treated it as measurement error. However, we conducted a 10-day experience sampling study consistent with whole trait theory (Fleeson, 2012), which conceptualizes personality as a system of stable tendencies and patterns of intraindividual variation along the dimensions of the Big Five personality traits (Costa & McCrae, 1992). The study examined whether (a) internal events (i.e., motivation), performance episodes, and interpersonal experiences at work predict deviations from central tendencies in trait-relevant behavior, affect, and cognition (i.e., state personality), and (b) there are individual differences in responsiveness to work experiences. Results revealed that personality at work exhibited both stability and variation within individuals. Trait measures predicted average levels of trait manifestation in daily behavior at work, whereas daily work experiences (i.e., organizational citizenship, interpersonal conflict, and motivation) predicted deviations from baseline tendencies. Additionally, correlations of neuroticism with standard deviations in the daily personality variables suggest that, although work experiences influence state personality, people higher in neuroticism exhibit higher levels of intraindividual variation in personality than do those who are more emotionally stable.

The present study aims to explain the processes through which family-supportive organizational perceptions (FSOP) relate to employee affective commitment. We suggest multiple mechanisms through which this relationship transpires-(a) the focal employee's experience of work-to-family conflict and enrichment and (b) the attitudes of the employee's spouse/partner. Hypotheses are tested with data from 408 couples. Results suggest that employee FSOP is positively associated with employee commitment through both employee work-to-family experiences and partner attitudes. FSOP was positively related to employee work-to-family enrichment, which was positively associated with employee affective commitment. FSOP was negatively associated with employee work-to-family conflict, which related to a partner's more positive attitude toward the employee's work schedule and higher commitment to the employee's firm. Partner commitment was positively and reciprocally related to employee affective commitment. These relationships partially mediated the FSOP-employee affective commitment relationship and varied as a function of parental status and single- versus dual-earner couple status but not as a function of employee gender. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Supervisors' perceptions of how fairly they are treated by their own supervisors can influence their subordinates' perceptions, attitudes, and behavior. We present a moderated mediation model that demonstrates how work group structure can enhance or constrain these effects. Results show supervisors' perceptions of the fairness of the interactional treatment they receive relate to their subordinates' perceptions of interactional justice climate, and this relationship is stronger in work groups with more organic structures. Furthermore, consistent with the moderated mediation prediction, interactional justice climate mediates the relationship between supervisors' perceptions of interactional justice and outcomes when work group structures are more organic. We discuss the implications of the findings for research on justice and trickle-down effects.

Incivility between customers and employees is common in many service organizations. These encounters can have negative outcomes for employees, customers, and the organization. To date, researchers have tended to study incivility as an aggregated and accumulated phenomenon (entity perspective). In the present study, we examined incivility as it occurs during a specific service encounter (event perspective) alongside the entity perspective. Using a mixed-method multilevel field study of customer service interactions, we show that individual customer incivility encounters (i.e., events) trigger employee incivility as a function of the employee's overall accumulated impression of the (in)civility in his or her customer interactions, such that the effects are more pronounced among employees who generally perceive their customer interactions to be more versus less civil. We also find that these interactive effects occur only among employees who are lower (vs. higher) in negative affectivity. Our results show that, in order to expand the understanding of customer incivility, it is important to study the incivility encounter, the social context in which negative customer interactions occur, and individual differences.

Integrating theories of proactive motivation, team innovation climate, and motivation in teams, we developed and tested a multilevel model of motivators of innovative performance in teams. Analyses of multisource data from 428 members of 95 research and development (R&D) teams across 33 Chinese firms indicated that team-level support for innovation climate captured motivational mechanisms that mediated between transformational leadership and team innovative performance, whereas members' motivational states (role-breadth self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation) mediated between proactive personality and individual innovative performance. Furthermore, individual motivational states and team support for innovation climate uniquely promoted individual innovative performance, and, in turn, individual innovative performance linked team support for innovation climate to team innovative performance.

In employee selection and academic admission decisions, holistic (clinical) data combination methods continue to be relied upon and preferred by practitioners in our field. This meta-analysis examined and compared the relative predictive power of mechanical methods versus holistic methods in predicting multiple work (advancement, supervisory ratings of performance, and training performance) and academic (grade point average) criteria. There was consistent and substantial loss of validity when data were combined holistically-even by experts who are knowledgeable about the jobs and organizations in question-across multiple criteria in work and academic settings. In predicting job performance, the difference between the validity of mechanical and holistic data combination methods translated into an improvement in prediction of more than 50%. Implications for evidence-based practice are discussed.

We examined emotional stability, ambition (an aspect of extraversion), and openness as predictors of adaptive performance at work, based on the evolutionary relevance of these traits to human adaptation to novel environments. A meta-analysis on 71 independent samples (N = 7,535) demonstrated that emotional stability and ambition are both related to overall adaptive performance. Openness, however, does not contribute to the prediction of adaptive performance. Analysis of predictor importance suggests that ambition is the most important predictor for proactive forms of adaptive performance, whereas emotional stability is the most important predictor for reactive forms of adaptive performance. Job level (managers vs. employees) moderates the effects of personality traits: Ambition and emotional stability exert stronger effects on adaptive performance for managers as compared to employees.

Teams are formed to benefit from an expanded pool of expertise and experience, yet 2 aspects of the conflict stemming from those core differences will ultimately play a large role in determining team viability and productivity: conflict states and conflict processes. The current study theoretically reorganizes the literature on team conflict--distinguishing conflict states from conflict processes--and details the effects of each on team effectiveness. Findings from a meta-analytic cumulation of 45 independent studies (total number of teams = 3,218) suggest states and processes are distinct and important predictors of team performance and affective outcomes. Controlling for conflict states (i.e., task and relationship conflict), conflict processes explain an additional 13% of the variance in both team performance and team affective outcomes. Furthermore, findings reveal particular conflict processes that are beneficial and others detrimental to teams. The truth about team conflict: conflict processes, that is, how teams interact regarding their differences, are at least as important as conflict states, that is, the source and intensity of their perceived incompatibilities.