Knowledge that Transforms

This study examines relationships among high-performance work systems (HPWS), job control, employee anxiety, role overload, and turnover intentions. Building on theory that challenges the rhetoric versus reality of HPWS, the authors explore a potential “dark side” of HPWS that suggests that HPWS, which are aimed at creating a competitive advantage for organizations, do so at the expense of workers, thus resulting in negative consequences for individual employees. However, the authors argue that these consequences may be tempered when HPWS are also implemented with a sufficient amount of job control, or discretion given to employees in determining how to implement job responsibilities. The authors draw on job demands–control theory and the stress literatures to hypothesize moderated-mediation relationships relating the interaction of HPWS utilization and job control to anxiety and role overload, with subsequent effects on turnover intentions. The authors examine these relationships in a multilevel sample of 1,592 government workers nested in 87 departments from the country of Wales. Results support their hypotheses, which highlight several negative consequences when HPWS are implemented with low levels of job control. They discuss their findings in light of the critique in the literature toward the utilization of HPWS in organizations and offer suggestions for future research directions.

A growing body of empirical evidence in the management literature suggests that antecedent variables widely accepted as leading to desirable consequences actually lead to negative outcomes. These increasingly pervasive and often countertheoretical findings permeate levels of analysis (i.e., from micro to macro) and management subfields (e.g., organizational behavior, strategic management). Although seemingly unrelated, the authors contend that this body of empirical research can be accounted for by a meta-theoretical principle they call the too-much-of-a-good-thing effect (TMGT effect). The authors posit that, due to the TMGT effect, all seemingly monotonic positive relations reach context-specific inflection points after which the relations turn asymptotic and often negative, resulting in an overall pattern of curvilinearity. They illustrate how the TMGT effect provides a meta-theoretical explanation for a host of seemingly puzzling results in key areas of organizational behavior (e.g., leadership, personality), human resource management (e.g., job design, personnel selection), entrepreneurship (e.g., new venture planning, firm growth rate), and strategic management (e.g., diversification, organizational slack). Finally, the authors discuss implications of the TMGT effect for theory development, theory testing, and management practice.

Where there is uncertainty, there is bound to be failure. It is not surprising, therefore, that many new ventures fail. What happens to entrepreneurs when their business fails? People hear of highly successful entrepreneurs extolling the virtues of failure as a valuable teacher. Yet the aftermath of failure is often fraught with psychological, social, and financial turmoil. The purpose of this article is to review research on life after business failure for entrepreneurs, from the immediate aftermath through to recovery and re-emergence. First, the authors examine the financial, social, and psychological costs of failure, highlighting factors that may influence the magnitude of these costs (including individual responses to managing these costs). Second, they review research that explains how entrepreneurs make sense of and learn from failure. Finally, the authors present research on the outcomes of business failure, including recovery as well as cognitive and behavioral outcomes. They develop a schema to organize extant work and use this as a platform for developing an agenda for future research.

Multilevel modeling allows researchers to understand whether relationships between lower-level variables (e.g., individual job satisfaction and individual performance, firm capabilities and performance) change as a function of higher-order moderator variables (e.g., leadership climate, market-based conditions). We describe how to estimate such cross-level interaction effects and distill the technical literature for a general readership of management researchers, including a description of the multilevel model building process and an illustration of analyses and results with a data set grounded in substantive theory. In addition, we provide 10 specific best-practice recommendations regarding persistent and important challenges that researchers face before and after data collection to improve the accuracy of substantive conclusions involving cross-level interaction effects. Our recommendations provide guidance on how to define the cross-level interaction effect, compute statistical power and make research design decisions, test hypotheses with various types of moderator variables (e.g., continuous, categorical), rescale (i.e., center) predictors, graph the cross-level interaction effect, interpret interactions given the symmetrical nature of such effects, test multiple cross-level interaction hypotheses, test cross-level interactions involving more than two levels of nesting, compute effect-size estimates and interpret the practical importance of a cross-level interaction effect, and report results regarding the multilevel model building process.

This article offers a review, integration, and extension of the literature relevant to ostracism in organizations. We first seek to add conceptual clarity to ostracism, by reviewing existing definitions and developing a cohesive one, identifying the key features of workplace ostracism, and distinguishing it from existing organizational constructs. Next, we develop a broad model of ostracism in organizations. This model serves to integrate the relevant findings related to ostracism in organizations and to extend our theorizing about it. We take a decidedly organizational focus, proposing organizationally relevant factors that may cause different types of ostracism, moderate the experience of ostracism at work, and moderate the reactions of targets. We hope this article will provide a good foundation for organizational scholars interested in studying ostracism by providing a framework of prior literature and directions for future study.

Previous research has primarily revealed a negative relationship between collective employee turnover and organizational performance. However, this research also suggests underlying complexity in the relationship. To clarify the nature of this relationship, the authors conduct a meta-analytic review in which they test and provide support for a portion of Hausknecht and Trevor’s model of collective turnover. The authors’ meta-analysis includes 48 independent samples reporting 157 effect size estimates ( N = 24,943), tests six hypothesized moderator variables, and provides path analyses to test alternative conceptualizations of the turnover–organizational performance relationship. Results indicate that the mean corrected correlation between turnover and organizational performance is −.03, but this relationship is moderated by several important variables. For example, the relationship is stronger in manufacturing and transportation industries (−.07), for managerial employees (−.08), in midsize organizations (−.07), in samples from labor market economies (−.05), and when organizational performance is operationalized in terms of customer service (−.10) or quality and safety (−.12) metrics. In addition, proximal performance outcomes mediate relationships with financial performance. The authors discuss implications of their results for theory and practice and provide directions for future research.

Research examining the relationship between work stress and well-being has flourished over the past 20 years. At the same time, research on physiological stress processes has also advanced significantly. One of the major advances in this literature has been the emergence of the Allostatic Load model as a central organizing theory for understanding the physiology of stress. In this article, the Allostatic Load model is used as an organizing framework for reviewing the vast literature that has considered health outcomes that are associated with exposure to psychosocial stressors at work. This review spans multiple disciplines and includes a critical discussion of management and applied psychology research, epidemiological studies, and recent developments in biology, neuroendocrinology, and physiology that provide insight into how workplace experiences affect well-being. The authors critically review the literature within an Allostatic Load framework, with a focus on primary (e.g., stress hormones, anxiety and tension) and secondary (e.g., resting blood pressure, cholesterol, body mass index) mediators, as well as tertiary disease end points (e.g., cardiovascular disease, depression, mortality). Recommendations are provided for how future research can offer deeper insight into primary Allostatic Load processes that explain the effects of workplace experiences on mental and physical well-being.