Knowledge that Transforms

By considering moral emotions in light of a team context, we offer a new way of thinking about the socially embedded nature of moral emotions and how they influence various types of ethical behaviors in teams. To achieve this goal, we review the key literature on moral emotions within teams. We integrate this literature with Bandura's (1991, 2002, 2008) theory of moral thought and action, coupled with the social functional account of emotions (Keltner & Haidt, 1999) to examine how team norms are connected, through their influence on individual team members' moral emotions, to ethical behavior within team contexts. This review and integration highlights how team norms regarding moral approbation and moral perspective taking influence members' proscriptive (e.g., fear, guilt, shame, embarrassment) and prescriptive (e.g., sympathy/compassion, pride) moral emotions. In turn, each of these moral emotions has unique action tendencies linked to 1 or more of 3 different types of ethical behaviors witnessed in teams: compliance behaviors, humanistic behaviors, and supererogatory behaviors. (PsycInfo Database Record

= 218, Study 2), participants scored higher on enriching task allocation and enriching work strategy selection if they had expertise as an industrial/organizational psychologist and if they had high autonomy in their own job. Explicit knowledge about work design predicted lower scores on person-focused strategy selection, and mediated the effects of professional expertise on this outcome. Individuals high in openness values scored higher on enriching work strategy selection, and those high in conservation values scored lower on enriching task allocation. These findings were replicated in Study 3 among working professionals (N = 602). We then showed that openness to change values predicted enriching work strategy selection via the more proximal processes of valence (valuing intrinsic work characteristics) and affect (positive affect when enriching others' work). This article opens up a new area of inquiry: how and why individuals design work for others in the way they do. (PsycINFO Database Record

Research has offered a pessimistic (although limited) view regarding the effectiveness of ethical champions in teams and the social consequences they are likely to experience. To challenge this view, we conducted two multimethod (quantitative/qualitative) experimental studies in the context of entrepreneurial team decision-making to examine whether and how an ethical champion can shape team decision ethicality and whether ethical champions experience interpersonal costs. In Study 1, we found that confederate ethical champions influenced team decisions to be more ethical by increasing team ethical awareness. Focusing on the emotional expressions of ethical champions, we found that sympathetic and angry ethical champions both increased team decision ethicality but that angry ethical champions were more disliked. Analysis of team interaction videos further revealed moral disengagement in team discussions and the emergence of nonconfederate ethical champions who used business frames to argue for the ethical decision. Those emergent phenomena shifted our focus, in Study 2, to how ethical champions framed the issues and the mediating processes involved. We found that ethical champions using ethical frames not only increased team ethical awareness but also consequently reduced team moral disengagement, resulting in more ethical team decisions. Ethical champions using business frames also improved team decision ethicality, but by increasing the perceived business utility of the ethical decision. (PsycINFO Database Record

= 312,987) of work ability's correlates and potential moderators of these relationships. Taken together, we found consistent negative relationships between job demands and work ability, and consistent positive relationships between job and personal resources and work ability. Work ability was also associated with important job outcomes including job attitudes and behaviors such as absenteeism and retirement. Measures of work ability that include both perceived and objective components generally showed stronger relationships than did exclusively perceptual measures, and occupation type was a significant moderator of certain relations between work ability and its correlates. We supplemented this meta-analysis with a primary data collection to examine differences between perceived work ability and the conceptually similar variables of self-efficacy and perceived fit, demonstrating that perceived work ability can explain incremental variance in job- and health-related variables. Our discussion focuses on the value of the work ability construct for both research and practice and future directions for work ability research. (PsycInfo Database Record

An unintended side effect of the goal-setting literature's focus on cognitive dynamics has been an insufficient acknowledgment of how employees affectively experience high-performance goals. This is potentially a crucial oversight, considering the substantial body of research that has demonstrated the impact of employees' affective states on organizationally relevant attitudes and behaviors. Drawing on cognitive-motivational-relational theory (Lazarus, 1991), we explore the discrete affective states elicited by high-performance goals. We suggest that a key to understanding these affective states is the source of the performance goal. The literature has largely considered whether goals are organization-set or self-set to be a peripheral aspect of a goal's impact on employees. From an affective perspective, however, an employee's self-set performance goals may be appraised and experienced quite differently than performance goals assigned by the organization. We build a theoretical model that suggests high organization-set goals will elicit anxiety due to an appraisal characterized by uncertainty and threat, whereas high self-set goals will elicit enthusiasm due to an appraisal characterized by positive expectations and benefit. We propose that these affective states will have diverging effects on employees' emotional exhaustion and, subsequently, their extrarole performance. We support our model both in the field via a 4-wave study conducted with police officers and their supervisors and in the laboratory via an experiment in which we manipulated goal source during a performance task. (PsycINFO Database Record

Employee voice, or speaking up with constructive expressions in the workplace, is beneficial to organizations as it is often a catalyst for positive change. Despite its benefits, voice may have mixed implications for supervisors who are frequently the targets of group members' ideas or concerns. We draw on the transactional theory of stress to examine the positive and negative effects of group promotive and prohibitive voice on supervisor emotional exhaustion and performance. Specifically, we theorize and find that supervisors appraise group promotive voice as fostering their well-being and personal growth (i.e., challenge appraisal) and, conversely, appraise group prohibitive voice as inhibiting their well-being and personal growth (i.e., hindrance appraisal). These appraisals, in turn, influence supervisors' emotional exhaustion and performance. Furthermore, we investigate a supervisor's personal sense of power as a boundary condition that influences the effects of group voice on supervisor appraisals of group voice and subsequent emotional exhaustion and performance. We test our model using a multiwave field sample design (Study 1) and an in-person experimental design (Study 2). Across these 2 studies, we find negative indirect effects of group promotive voice on supervisor emotional exhaustion through challenge appraisals of group voice and positive indirect effects of group prohibitive voice on supervisor emotional exhaustion through hindrance appraisals of group voice as well as conditional indirect effects of supervisors' personal sense of power. Our model offers novel insights into supervisors' appraisals of group voice and the implications for their emotional exhaustion and performance. (PsycInfo Database Record

Drawing on self-enhancement theory, we propose that, intraindividually, employees tend to give themselves credit when they engage in creativity. Perceived creative credit, in turn, activates multiple psychological motives that ultimately affect deviance. On the one hand, perceived creative credit is associated with greater creativity-driven norm-breaking motives and greater entitlement motives, which in turn should increase deviance. On the other hand, perceived creative credit is associated with greater image preservation motives, which in turn should decrease deviance. A within-person study involving 206 employees and their coworkers conducted over a 10-day period provided broad support for the proposed model. In addition, a between-person variable, namely rewards for creativity, moderated the self-crediting process. The within-person serial mediation relationship between creativity and deviance was positive and significant for employees who perceived low rewards for creativity, but was not significant for those who perceived high rewards for creativity. In other words, rewards for creativity in the workplace effectively nullified this within-person self-crediting mechanism among employees. This study thus illustrates that, within individuals, creativity and deviance are related through perceived creative credit and different psychological motives (i.e., serial mediation). However, the strength of this serial mediation relationship varies depending on the availability of formal rewards for creativity (i.e., moderated serial mediation). (PsycINFO Database Record

There is controversy concerning whether, in recent years, organizational failures to act benevolently toward employees have lessened employees' social-exchange relationship (SER) with their work organization or whether, on the contrary, organizations' more favorable treatment of employees has strengthened the SER. With samples of U.S. employees, we examined changes over the past 3 decades in three key elements of the SER: perceived organizational support (POS: 317 samples, including 121,469 individuals), leader-member exchange (LMX: 191 samples, including 216,975 individuals), and affective organizational commitment (383 samples, including 116,766 individuals). We considered both how the average levels changed over time and how the associations of these 3 elements with the antecedents of procedural and distributive justice and the consequences of in-role and extra-role performance have changed. We found that the average levels of indicators of the SER have remained steady except for an increase in POS. LMX and affective commitment show levels near neutral, and POS has increased to only a moderately positive level. In contrast, the relationships between these elements with distributive and procedural justice and extra-role performance remain substantial. These findings suggest that employees on average do not currently have strong exchange relationships with their work organization but remain ready to more fully engage based on perceived voluntary favorable treatment by the work organization and its representatives. (PsycINFO Database Record

Variable-centered views of emotional labor suggest that high customer incivility and employee-felt negative affect should co-occur with high employee emotion regulation. Similarly, low customer incivility and employee positive affect should be accompanied by low emotion regulation. We theorize that these theory-based configurations of emotional labor variables represent only a subset of the possible ways that emotional labor events unfold. We propose that there are distinct subpopulations of emotional labor events, some of which conform to this standard view of emotional labor and some of which deviate from this model and that these distinct configurations suggest different underlying theoretical processes with implications for employee well-being. To investigate these ideas, we adopt an event-centered view (i.e., event-level profiles) that seeks to identify distinct configurations of emotional labor events. In a sample of 246 call center employees who provided ratings of 7,331 customer service interactions, results from multilevel latent profile analysis (MLPA) revealed 8 distinct event-level profiles, some of which align with variable-centered approaches and some of which suggest new ways to think about such events. We then linked these profiles to the event-level well-being outcomes of emotional exhaustion and psychological vitality, showing both longitudinal and concurrent effects. Finally, supplemental analyses detailed how this event-level profile approach differed from standard variable-centered analyses. (PsycINFO Database Record

Drawing upon socioanalytic theory of personality, we hypothesize and test inverted U-shaped relationships between team members' assertiveness and warmth (labeled as the "getting ahead" and "getting along" facets of extraversion) and peers' reactions (i.e., advice seeking by peers and peer liking, respectively) that, in turn, predict members' emergence as informal leaders in self-managed teams. Integrating research on prosocial motivation, we also examine whether prosocially motivated members have more enhanced positive curvilinear influences of assertiveness and warmth on peer reactions. Based on 223 members in 69 student project teams (Study 1) and 337 employees in 79 self-managed work teams (Study 2), we found support for the inverted U-shaped relationships between assertiveness and advice seeking by peers, and between warmth and peer liking. Further, prosocial motivation enhances the inverted U-shaped effect of assertiveness in Study 2 and those effects of warmth in both studies. Advice seeking by peers and peer liking, in turn, were positively related to leadership emergence in both studies. Our findings have important theoretical and practical implications for dispositional and motivational factors that shape peer reactions and facilitate leadership emergence in teams. (PsycINFO Database Record