Knowledge that Transforms

Obesity is a condition that affects much of the world's population and generates substantial costs to organizations and their employees. Multiple scholarly disciplines have generated a significant body of literature on the workplace consequences of obesity. Strikingly, however, the applied psychology and management literatures-a natural home for such research-have largely ignored this topic while embracing related issues like health, wellness, disability, and others. This paper seeks to invigorate organizational research on obesity by collecting, cataloging, integrating, and extending the disparate research streams that have explored the workplace consequences of obesity. To do so, this paper reviews empirical and conceptual studies on the workplace consequences of obesity, identifies weaknesses limiting the field's growth and impact, and builds an integrative theoretical framework that addresses these weaknesses. In doing so, we extend the field's understanding of the processes leading to-and the boundary conditions related to-obesity's influence on work outcomes for employees. Specifically, we broaden the field's focus by looking beyond the psychological processes (primarily stigmatization) that underlie obesity effects to consider the impact of both economic and medical perspectives as well. In all, this review integrates the multidisciplinary obesity literature by challenging the view that obesity effects can be primarily understood through a stigma-based lens. In so doing, we offer contributions not just to the obesity literature, but to related areas of health and social categorizations as well, and hope to revitalize work on a serious issue facing today's organizations and the people who work in them. (PsycInfo Database Record

Previous research shows that unemployment has lasting detrimental effects on individuals' subjective well-being. However, the issue of how well-being evolves after individuals switch back into the labor force has received little theoretical and empirical attention. This study examines the extent to which reemployment restores individuals' subjective well-being following a period of unemployment. Applying fixed effects models to the large-scale longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey, we find that recovery of subjective well-being upon reemployment is fast, complete and enduring, even when individuals take less favorable employment options to return to work. By contrast, transitions into economic inactivity following unemployment are accompanied by persistent scars on subsequent well-being trajectories. This study advances our understanding of well-being development over the entire employment-unemployment-reemployment cycle. (PsycINFO Database Record

We conceptualize generalized exchange orientation, and develop and validate a scale assessing individual orientations toward generalized exchange as well as reciprocal and negotiated exchange for offering a full set of measurements for social exchange orientation. Through 4 phases and using data from 1,408 participants, we established factorial, nomological, discriminant, and incremental validity of the social exchange orientation Scale and examined measurement invariance of the scale between samples from the United States and Japan. First, our findings indicate the newly developed scale for generalized exchange orientation (GEO) is distinct from measures of other forms of social exchange orientation and prosocial orientation. Second, the GEO Scale shows incremental validity as it predicts citizenship behaviors toward individuals above and beyond the key dispositional antecedents known in the literature. Implications and future research on generalized exchange are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Although the importance of organizational justice is without question, our theoretical and empirical knowledge of the justice phenomenon is focused almost exclusively on mean levels of fair treatment, ignoring whether those mean levels are achieved in a consistent or inconsistent manner. This exclusive focus on average levels of justice is not surprising given the implicit assumption in the justice literature that day-to-day variations in justice are glossed over or reinterpreted by individuals. Building upon recent research demonstrating that variability in justice can be as important as average levels of fair treatment, we leverage tenets of uncertainty management theory to provide a conceptual bridge that integrates justice variability into the group engagement model. Our theoretical model proposes justice variability (arising from fluctuations in one's fair treatment over time) negates the very benefits that average levels of interpersonal justice provide. Results of 2, week-long experience sampling studies (one of 111 employees and one of 352 employees nested in 104 groups), used to construct assessments of day-to-day justice variability, largely supported our predictions regarding interactive effects between average levels of justice and justice variability on judgments of pride in the group and, ultimately, cooperative behavior, providing important takeaways for theory, research, and practice. (PsycINFO Database Record

U.S. organizations continue to invest most of their learning budgets in formal training and development programs despite estimates that the majority of learning in the workplace happens informally. In this study we focus on informal field-based learning (IFBL), which represents individuals engaging in self-directed, intentional, and field-based development of their knowledge and skills. We build on the informal learning literature to advance a cross-level model of individual and job-level characteristics as influences on IFBL and subsequent changes in job performance. We tested our model using a sample of 378 health care employees who occupied 47 different jobs. The results showed promotion-focused individuals more readily engaged in IFBL, as moderated by job time pressures. Moreover, engaging in IFBL behaviors positively related to performance improvements in jobs that require greater updating and use of relevant information, as well as in jobs with relatively low decision making and problem-solving requirements. Exploratory subdimensional analyses revealed some interesting countervailing relationships between the feedback-seeking and vicarious-learning elements of IFBL. Results are discussed in terms of contingency relationships associated with IFBL behaviors and different job types, as well as theoretical and practical implications. (PsycINFO Database Record

Surprisingly, in both studies, we found consistent evidence that supportive contributions also enhanced leadership emergence in the idea generation phase, whereas the findings on supportive contributions and leadership emergence in the idea enactment phase were mixed. Overall, our model highlights the importance of integrating dynamic and contextualized aspects of teams into theories of leadership emergence and also sheds new light on the processes underlying emergent forms of leadership in the early phases of the innovation cycle. (PsycINFO Database Record

Research has documented conflicting evidence about the relationship between a leader's unpleasant affective displays and team performance. Drawing on the dual threshold model of anger, we propose a novel explanation for this paradox such that the positive relationship between leaders' unpleasant affect and team performance turns negative at high levels of intensity. We examined our hypothesis in a multilevel field study of 304 halftime locker room speeches involving 23 high school and college basketball teams and a follow-up experiment. Our results show support for the prediction and suggest that the curvilinear effect of leaders' unpleasant affective displays may be explained by team members' redirection of attention and approach, which is positively associated with team members' effort at moderate levels of leader unpleasantness but leads to lower effort at high and low levels of leader unpleasantness. We discuss the theoretical contributions for scholarship on leadership, emotions as social information theory, and practical implications of the results. (PsycINFO Database Record

Recent research on the role of general mental ability (GMA) and specific abilities in work-related outcomes has shown that the results differ depending on the theoretical and conceptual approach that researchers use. While earlier research has typically assumed that GMA causes the specific abilities and has thus used incremental validity analysis, more recent research has explored the implications of treating GMA and specific abilities as equals (differing only in breadth and not subordination) and has used relative importance analysis. In this article, we extend this work to the prediction of extrinsic career success operationalized as pay, income, and the attainment of jobs with high prestige. Results, based on a large national sample, revealed that GMA and specific abilities measured in school were good predictors of job prestige measured after 11 years, pay measured after 11 years, and income 51 years later toward the end of the participants' work lives. With 1 exception, GMA was a dominant predictor in incremental validity analyses. However, in relative importance analyses, the majority of the explained variance was explained by specific abilities, and GMA was not more important than single specific abilities in relative importance analyses. Visuospatial, verbal, and mathematical abilities all had substantial variance shares and were also more important than GMA in some of the analyses. Implications for the interpretation of cognitive ability data and facilitating people's success in their careers are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record

Emotional labor, or regulating emotions as part of one's work role, is needed for performance yet may come with far-reaching costs to employee health and performance. Based on ego depletion theorizing, we propose that on days employees perform more surface acting (i.e., faking positive and hiding negative emotional expressions), they will consume more alcohol later-due to reduced self-control (i.e., depletion). In 2 studies, public-facing employees completed multiple assessments per day for 2 weeks. Study 1 showed that surface acting had no direct or indirect effect on alcohol use via depletion, nor via negative mood as an alternative measure of depletion. Study 2 demonstrated that surface acting directly increased subsequent drinking only for those with high emotional demands, but not through depletion. Across both studies, daily deep acting (i.e., modifying emotions to feel positive) consistently predicted less alcohol consumption, but this did not occur through depletion. Study 2 provided evidence for an alternative, motivational shift explanation-a reduced motive to detach from work after regulating by deep acting-rather than self-control capacity. These findings contribute to debate on ego depletion theory by providing insightful field evidence, while demonstrating when emotional labor is likely to help or harm employees' health. (PsycInfo Database Record

= 1,092 and 578) and different SJTs, personality and cognitive ability were equally important determinants of SJT performance regardless of whether situation descriptions were presented or omitted. The effects of removing situation descriptions on the criterion-related validity of SJT scores differed depending on the breadth of the criteria. For predicting global job performance criteria (in-role performance and organizational citizenship behavior), SJT validity was not significantly affected, whereas it decreased for predicting more specific criteria (interpersonal adaptability, efficacy for teamwork). Finally, the effects of omitting situation descriptions in SJTs on applicant perceptions were either negligible or small. Implications for SJT theory, research, and design are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record