Knowledge that Transforms

To better understand how the social context affects self-regulation, we present 4 studies investigating how the perceived relative status of a goal audience influences goal commitment. As a set, these studies use different samples and methods to examine this phenomenon across a variety of contexts, goals, and audiences. Results are highly consistent, supportive of our hypotheses, and demonstrate that it matters to whom goals are made known. Specifically, the perceived relative status of the goal audience is positively related to goal commitment, and downstream performance, via evaluation apprehension. Our findings highlight that it is not enough for goals to be made known to facilitate commitment but that they should be made known to someone perceived as having higher status. Together, these results help to clarify when and how it is beneficial to make goals known to others, provide a greater understanding of social influences on self-regulation, and yield implications for performance management practices aimed at facilitating goal commitment, motivation, and performance. (PsycINFO Database Record

Although leaders spend considerable time helping followers with personal problems, little research has investigated how such helping acts may impact leaders themselves. Drawing from affective events theory and the helping literature, we examine how responding to followers' help requests with personal problems influences leaders' own affect. As expected, we found that helping followers with personal problems was associated with an increase in leaders' negative affect. The strength of the association between personal helping and negative affect, however, depended on the day and on the leader. Specifically, personal helping increased negative affect less on days when leaders perceived their prosocial impact of personal helping to be high (vs. low). On the other hand, personal helping increased negative affect more on days when leaders also helped with task-related problems. Furthermore, at the between-person level, leaders with high (vs. low) managerial experience were less affected by personal helping. In exploratory analyses, we also investigated how followers reacted to leaders' helping. We found that whereas leader task-related helping was associated with follower perceptions of leader work engagement, leader personal helping was not. Additionally, helping with personal problems detracted from followers' increased perceptions of work engagement derived from leaders' task-related helping. Specifically, followers rated leaders who helped with task-related problems as more engaged on days when these leaders provided less (vs. more) personal helping. We discuss implications for research on helping and leadership. (PsycINFO Database Record

they believe their supervisor acted fairly in the first place. To do so, we consider how employee attributions of supervisor motives for fair treatment influence the cognitive and affective mechanisms by which fair treatment influences employee reactions to fairness. Drawing from the justice actor model, we focus on both cognitive (establishing fairness, identity maintenance, and effecting compliance) and affective (positive affect) motives underlying supervisors' fair treatment. Relying on theory and research on motive attribution and leader affect, we develop predictions for how employees' perceptions of these motives as a result of short-term exchanges over time influence supervisor-directed citizenship behavior through both cognitive (trust in the supervisor) and affective (positive affect) mechanisms. Our experience sampling study of 613 weekly fair events (from 171 employees) largely supported our predictions, demonstrating that attribution of supervisor motives is a meaningful component of an employee's justice experience. (PsycINFO Database Record

Multiple team membership is common in today's team-based organizations, but little is known about its relationship with collective effectiveness across teams. We adopted a microfoundations framework utilizing existing individual- and team-level research to develop a higher-level perspective on multiple team membership's relationship with performance of entire units of teams. We tested our predictions with data collected from 849 primary care units of the Veterans Health Administration serving over 4.2 million patients. In this context, we found multiple team membership is negatively associated with unit performance, and this negative relationship is exacerbated by task complexity. (PsycINFO Database Record

We propose and test a Resource-Based Spillover-Crossover-Spillover Model (RB-SCSM) of how an employer's provision of family support resources to an employee ultimately relates to his or her partner's improved experiences at his or her work as part of a mesosystem-to-mesosystem resource transmission process. Based on a dyadic examination of 262 full-time dual-earner couples, consistent with prior research, we found that when employees perceive their organization is family supportive, they experience less work-to-family conflict, and in turn, less burnout. Building on these individual-level effects in novel ways, we demonstrate that when an employee reports less burnout, their partner perceives the employee as less burned out. Moreover, when partners perceive less employee burnout, they perceive the employee provides more emotional support for the partner's work, directly and indirectly through the family overload that the partner experiences. Finally, when the partner receives more family support for his or her work, this spills over to and is related to the partner's greater investment in his or her relationships at work. Thus, our findings empirically demonstrate a resource-based transmission from one organization to another through dynamics occurring in the family. Suggestions for practical implementation are provided, as are suggestions for future theoretically grounded research. (PsycInfo Database Record

Drawing from the group engagement model of justice, we examine how and when higher abusive supervision relates to fewer safety behaviors and worse safety performance. In Study 1, a 2-wave survey study of 468 manufacturing technicians, we found that belongingness need satisfaction mediated the negative relationship between abusive supervision and safety behavior. In Study 2, a multiwave survey study of 589 airline pilots, we found that safety behavior mediated the adverse relationship between abusive supervision and downstream objective safety performance. Higher trait social standing uncertainty was associated with a stronger adverse relationship between abusive supervision and safety. Indirect relationships of abusive supervision with safety behavior (Study 1) and safety performance (Study 2) were stronger among individuals with higher social standing uncertainty. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings for managing abusive supervision and safety at work. (PsycINFO Database Record

Why do employees perceive that they have been treated fairly by their supervisor? Theory and research on justice generally presumes a straightforward answer to this question: Because the supervisor adhered to justice rules. We propose the answer is not so straightforward and that employee justice perceptions are not merely "justice-laden." Drawing from theory on information processing that distinguishes between automatic and systematic modes, we suggest that employee justice perceptions are also "ethics-laden." Specifically, we posit that employees with more ethical supervisors form justice perceptions through automatic processing with little scrutiny of or attention paid to a supervisor's justice acts. In contrast, employees with less ethical supervisors rely on systematic processing to evaluate their supervisor's justice enactment and form justice perceptions. Thus, we propose that ethical leadership substitutes for the supervisor's justice enactment. Our results demonstrate support for the interactive effect of supervisor justice enactment and ethical leadership on employee justice perceptions, and we further demonstrate its consequences for employees' engagement in discretionary behaviors (citizenship and counterproductive behaviors). Our findings highlight an assumption in the justice literature in need of revision and opens the door to further inquiry about the role of information processing in justice perceptions. (PsycINFO Database Record

Research has long emphasized that being trusted is a central concern for leaders (Dirks & Ferrin, 2002), but an interesting and important question left unexplored is whether leaders feel trusted by each employee, and whether their felt trust is accurate. Across 2 field studies, we examined the factors that shape the accuracy of leaders' felt trust-or, their trust meta-accuracy-and the implications of trust meta-accuracy for the degree of relationship conflict between leaders and their employees. By integrating research on trust and interpersonal perception, we developed and tested hypotheses based on 2 theoretical mechanisms-an external signaling mechanism and an internal presumed reciprocity mechanism-that theory suggests shape leaders' trust meta-accuracy. In contrast to the existing literature on felt trust, our results reveal that leader trust meta-accuracy is shaped by an internal mechanism and the presumed reciprocity of trust relationships. We further find that whether trust meta-accuracy is associated with positive relational outcomes for leaders depends upon the level of an employee's actual trust in the leader. Our research contributes to burgeoning interest in felt trust by elucidating the mechanisms underlying trust meta-accuracy and suggesting practical directions for leaders who seek to accurately understand how much their employees trust them. (PsycInfo Database Record

The consensus in the emotional labor literature is that surface acting is "bad" for employees. However, the evidence on which this consensus is based has been derived from contexts emphasizing the display of positive emotions, such as customer service. Despite the acknowledgment that many contexts also require the display of negative emotions, scholarly work has proceeded under the assumption that surface acting is harmful regardless of the valence of the emotion being displayed. In this study, we take a hedonic approach to well-being and challenge the consensus that surface acting is bad for employees by examining its effects on changes in emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction, through changes in positive and negative affect, for both positive and negative emotional displays. Using a within-person approach, we focus on managers, whose occupation calls for displays of both positive and negative emotions. Our 3-week, experience-sampling study of 79 managers revealed that faking positive emotions decreases positive affect, which harms well-being more than authentically displaying such emotions. In contrast and counter to what the extant literature would suggest, faking negative emotions decreases negative affect and increases positive affect, which benefits well-being more than authentically displaying such emotions. We further integrate construal level theory with hedonic approaches of emotion to identify trait construal level as an important boundary condition to explain for whom surface acting is harmful versus beneficial. (PsycINFO Database Record

We examine the effectiveness of economic and moral language used by employees when selling social issues to management. In contrast to prior work finding that employees believe it is best to use economic language to influence management to address social issues, we draw on the issue selling, persuasion, and behavioral ethics literatures to demonstrate that moral language is actually most influential-especially when the language is framed to align with the organization's values and/or mission. The results from a combination of 3 field survey studies and 1 experimental vignette study provide support for this hypothesis. In addition, we find support for obligation (i.e., manager's anticipated guilt), rather than inspiration (i.e., manager's prosocial motivation), as a mediator of this interactive effect. We discuss implications for literatures on issue selling, persuasion, and behavioral ethics. (PsycINFO Database Record