Knowledge that Transforms

Researchers have uncovered inconsistent relations between anxiety and performance. Although the prominent view is a "dark side," where anxiety has a negative relation with performance, a "bright side" of anxiety has also been suggested. We reconcile past findings by presenting a comprehensive multilevel, multiprocess model of workplace anxiety called the theory of workplace anxiety (TWA). This model highlights the processes and conditions through which workplace anxiety may lead to debilitative and facilitative job performance and includes 19 theoretical propositions. Drawing on past theories of anxiety, resource depletion, cognitive-motivational processing, and performance, we uncover the debilitative and facilitative nature of dispositional and situational workplace anxiety by positioning emotional exhaustion, self-regulatory processing, and cognitive interference as distinct contrasting processes underlying the relationship between workplace anxiety and job performance. Extending our theoretical model, we pinpoint motivation, ability, and emotional intelligence as critical conditions that shape when workplace anxiety will debilitate and facilitate job performance. We also identify the unique employee, job, and situational characteristics that serve as antecedents of dispositional and situational workplace anxiety. The TWA offers a nuanced perspective on workplace anxiety and serves as a foundation for future work. (PsycINFO Database Record

According to interpersonal interaction theory, relational harmony surfaces when two individuals have compatible interaction styles. Building from this theory, we propose that supervisor-employee power distance orientation incompatibility will be related to employees' experience of higher levels of relationship conflict with their supervisors. Additionally, we propose an asymmetrical incongruence effect such that relationship conflict will be highest when supervisors are high in power distance and employees are low in power distance. Furthermore, we address calls in interpersonal interaction research for more direct attention to the social context of the dyadic interaction and explore the moderating effects of supervisor-employee gender (dis)similarity on the relationship between this incompatibility and conflict. We propose that supervisor-employee gender dissimilarity (e.g., male-female or female-male pairs) acts as a conditional moderator, neutralizing the power distance incongruence effect and the asymmetrical incongruence effect. Using 259 supervisor-employee dyads in the physical therapy industry, the hypotheses were generally supported. Theoretical and practical implications regarding the unique benefits of power distance compatibility and gender diversity in supervisor-employee dyads are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Building on conservation of resources theory, we cast resource depletion as a novel explanatory mechanism to explain why employees' experience of psychological contract violation results in harm to third parties outside the employee-organization exchange dyad. This resource-based perspective extends and complements the dominant social exchange perspective which views employee reactions to psychological contract violation as targeting the source of the violation-the organization. The present article reports on 3 studies. Study 1 conducted an experiment with 109 participants and established the main effect of psychological contract violation on resource depletion. Study 2, using survey data from 315 medical employees and their immediate supervisors, found that after controlling for the social exchange mechanism (i.e., revenge cognitions toward the organization), resource depletion mediated the indirect effects of psychological contract violation on supervisory reports of employees' interpersonal harming toward coworkers and decision-making vigilance for clients. Further, we found that organizational and professional identification played opposing moderating roles in the effects of violation on resource depletion and consequently behavioral outcomes, such that these mediated relationships were stronger when organizational identification was high, and weaker when professional identification was high. Study 3 replicated all the results obtained in Studies 1 and 2 with time-lagged data from 229 medical employees across 3 measurement points. The findings confirm that resource depletion is a more effective explanation of the consequences of violation on third parties than revenge cognitions, although both are useful in predicting organization-directed outcomes (i.e., civic virtue and organizational rule compliance). (PsycINFO Database Record

In the last decade, there has been increased recognition that traits refer not only to between-person differences but also to meaningful within-person variability across situations (i.e., whole trait theory). So far, this broader more contemporary trait conceptualization has made few inroads into assessment practices. Therefore, this study focuses on the assessment and predictive power of people's intraindividual variability across situations. In three studies (either in student or employee samples), both test-takers' mean trait scores and the variability of their responses across multiple written job-related situations of a situational judgment test (SJT) were assessed. Results revealed that people's intraindividual variability (a) was related to their self-rated functional flexibility, (b) predicted performance above their mean scores, and (c) predicted their actual personality state variability over 10 days. These results open opportunities for complementing traditional selection procedures with more dynamic indices in assessment. (PsycINFO Database Record

Unfortunately, not all organizations are supportive of employees' family lives. Family unsupportive workplaces can be stressful for all employees and particularly for pregnant women, who carry a physical reminder of their family life. In the present study, we draw on conservation of resources (COR) theory (Hobfoll, 1989, 2001) to investigate how women manage family unsupportive organizational perceptions during pregnancy via social identity-based impression management behaviors as well as how these strategies relate to changes in stress and changes in conflict between work and family. Specifically, we find that image maintenance strategies-impression management strategies aimed at maintaining one's prepregnancy image-are associated with decreases in work stress and work-family conflict over the course of pregnancy, while decategorization-impression management strategies aimed at avoiding negative outcomes by hiding the pregnancy or dodging the issue-are related to increases in work-family conflict. These results suggest strategies for both organizations and pregnant workers to decrease stress during a time when health is vital for both mother and baby. (PsycINFO Database Record

Does planning for a particular workday help employees perform better than on other days they fail to plan? We investigate this question by identifying 2 distinct types of daily work planning to explain why and when planning improves employees' daily performance. The first type is time management planning (TMP)-creating task lists, prioritizing tasks, and determining how and when to perform them. We propose that TMP enhances employees' performance by increasing their work engagement, but that these positive effects are weakened when employees face many interruptions in their day. The second type is contingent planning (CP) in which employees anticipate possible interruptions in their work and plan for them. We propose that CP helps employees stay engaged and perform well despite frequent interruptions. We investigate these hypotheses using a 2-week experience-sampling study. Our findings indicate that TMP's positive effects are conditioned upon the amount of interruptions, but CP has positive effects that are not influenced by the level of interruptions. Through this study, we help inform workers of the different planning methods they can use to increase their daily motivation and performance in dynamic work environments. (PsycINFO Database Record

Calls continue for randomized interventions in organizational settings. In many cases, however, practical constraints require researchers to use 2-wave randomized pretest-posttest control group designs. We discuss the importance of randomized trials for theory development with a focus on analytic options for 2-wave designs. Our discussion has implications for both designing studies and interpreting results. We review 23 published work and organizational health psychology intervention studies and find that a majority of studies featured a statistical model known to have low statistical power relative to other options. Furthermore, a majority of studies invoked terminology implying the direction of change without providing explicit statistical tests. To improve research practice, we detail statistical power differences in 3 commonly used statistical models and emphasize the distinction between (a) intervention effects and (b) the size and direction of change over time. We encourage researchers to provide inferential evidence for both types of information and show that only 1 of the 3 reviewed models provides information on the direction of change over time, but at a potential expense for statistical power to detect intervention effects. A reanalysis of data from a published work-family workplace intervention illustrates these nuances and supports recommendations for research practice. We conclude by providing recommendations. (PsycINFO Database Record

Impression management (IM) refers to behaviors employees use to create and maintain desired images in the workplace. Prior studies have shown that the successful use of IM relates to a number of important outcomes for employees (e.g., higher performance evaluations), but this work has tended to compare IM usage between individuals, ignoring the fact that employees likely adjust their use of IM depending on the situations they face at work on a given day. In this paper, we argue that managing impressions on a daily basis can be draining, thereby leaving employees susceptible to the temptation to engage in subsequent harmful behaviors at work. To better understand the nature and within-person consequences of IM, we examine the daily use of two supervisor-focused IM tactics-ingratiation and self-promotion-among 75 professionals in China over the course of two work weeks. Our results indicate that there is significant within-person variance in employees' use of ingratiation and self-promotion aimed at supervisors. Moreover, our findings suggest that the use of ingratiation, but not self-promotion, depletes employees' self-control resources. In the case of ingratiation, this depletion is positively associated with employee deviance, and the indirect effect is stronger among employees with low political skill. Overall, this research contributes to our understanding of the dynamic, within-person nature of IM, the consequences of IM for employees, and the dark side of IM for organizations. (PsycINFO Database Record

Despite the growing number of meta-analyses published on the subject of workplace mistreatment and the expectation that women and racial minorities are mistreated more frequently than men and Whites, the degree of subgroup differences in perceived workplace mistreatment is unknown. To address this gap in the literature, we meta-analyzed the magnitude of sex and race differences in perceptions of workplace mistreatment (e.g., harassment, discrimination, bullying, incivility). Results indicate that women perceive more sex-based mistreatment (i.e., mistreatment that explicitly targets a person's sex) in the workplace than men (δ = .46; k = 43), whereas women and men report comparable perceptions of all other forms of mistreatment (δ = .02; k = 300). Similarly, although racial minorities perceive more race-based mistreatment (i.e., mistreatment that explicitly targets a person's race) in the workplace than Whites (δ = .71; k = 18), results indicate smaller race differences in all other forms of workplace mistreatment (δ = .10; k = 61). Results also indicate that sex and race differences have mostly decreased over time, although for some forms of mistreatment, subgroup differences have increased over time. We conclude by offering explanations for the observed subgroup differences in workplace mistreatment and outline directions for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of county-level population health determinants in predicting individual employee reactions to economic stress. Using multilevel modeling and a population health perspective, we tested a model linking nationally representative individual-level data (N = 100,968) on exposure to economic stressors and county-level population health determinants (N = 3,026) to responses on a composite measure of individual well-being that included the facets of purpose, community, physical, and social well-being, as well as life satisfaction. Results indicate that higher income- and employment-related economic stress were significantly related to poorer well-being. Additionally, living in a county with more positive population health determinants was significantly predictive of individual well-being. Finally, the Level-1 relationship between income-related stress and well-being was significantly attenuated for individuals living in counties with more positive population health determinants. In contrast, employment-related stress had a stronger negative relationship with well-being for individuals who lived in counties with more positive population health determinants. We discuss these findings in light of conservation of resources and relative deprivation theories, as well as how they may extend the scientific foundation for evidence-based social policy and evidence-based intervention programs aimed at lessening the effects of economic stress on individual well-being. (PsycINFO Database Record