Knowledge that Transforms

The Journal of Management issues this statement of correction regarding the following article: Jensen, J.M., Patel, P.C., & Messersmith, J.G. 2013. High-performance work systems and job control: Consequences for anxiety, role overload, and turnover intentions. Volume 39, Issue 6, pages 1699-1724. This article was first submitted in November 2010 and was accepted for publication in July 2011. (Original DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206311419663) It came to the editor’s attention that the sample for a variable used in the study was not adequately described in the paper. An investigatory team considered all versions of the paper, reviews, and decision letters and consulted with relevant parties to assess the nature and consequences of this potential problem. The problem revolves around the sample size and timing of the “anxiety” measure used to test Hypotheses 1 and 3. The data were extracted from a Wales Local Government Staff Survey, which is available to the public. The main survey for this data was collected from July 2006 to August 2007, with a temporary delay in the middle to resolve the wording with union representatives. The authors describe a “final sample of 1,592 employees.” However, the anxiety measure was extracted from a phase two data collection, which is also available to the public. Questionnaires for the phase two sample were sent between August 2007 and February 2008 to respondents from the original sample who indicated they were prepared to share in a further study. There was a minimum of six months and a maximum of twelve months between respondents receiving the original and follow-up questionnaires. The phase two sample had a total of 362 responses. The lack of clarity in the paper about the anxiety measure creates at least two potential problems for the study. First, one might presume from the paper that the sample size for the anxiety variable is 1,592, but it is 362. Second, one might presume from the paper that the time at which the anxiety variable is measured is the same as other variables in the study, but in fact anxiety is measured six to twelve months later. This is particularly problematic for interpreting the test of Hypothesis 3 in which anxiety (the proposed mediator) was measured after the dependent variable (i.e., turnover intentions). We correct the record here but remain reasonably confident in the conclusions of the study, for several reasons. First, a prior version of the paper used “strain” as a mediator in place of “anxiety,” with similar conceptual arguments. Strain was measured in the first phase data collection, so it did not have the sample size and temporal structure problems of anxiety, but the results were substantively similar. 1024457 JOMXXX10.1177/01492063211024457Journal of Management correction2021

The alignment among multiple stakeholder benefits is a valuable performance indicator for the benefits generated by a firm for various stakeholders. Our research seeks to augment stakeholder-agency theory with an institutional perspective to analyze how national institutions affect stakeholder benefit alignment. We suggest that the current development of stakeholder-agency theory has overlooked the alignment of different stakeholders’ benefits and the external institutional contexts as critical determinants in ensuring such alignment. We conceptualize stakeholder benefit alignment as a positive relationship between different stakeholder groups’ benefits, and propose an institutional framework grounded in relative stakeholder salience. Using this framework, we argue that stakeholder benefits are better aligned when national institutions enhance the ease of withdrawal, legal protection, and private enforcement for intrinsically less salient stakeholders, and when a long-term oriented culture characterizes a society. We found supportive evidence by employing a meta-analytic approach based on 530 correlations from 94 primary studies representing 23 economies. Our study adds new insights to the stakeholder-agency literature by conceptualizing and quantitatively examining the degree of alignment across different stakeholder benefit dimensions, focusing on national formal and informal institutions as boundary conditions.

This research contributes to theory on self-control at work through applying and extending the limited-capacity model of self-control to examine the extent to which daily self-control work demands predict self-control failure and driving behavior during the commute after work. We develop a dual-pathway model in which resisting-distractions demands and impulse-control demands at work have unique relationships with speeding behavior via two separate pathways of self-control failure: one reflecting a failure to regulate attention and the other reflecting a failure to suppress impulses, which is moderated by negative affect. In two studies of daily work experiences and driving behavior, we find support for our model, over and above the effects of cognitive and affective work demands, postwork fatigue, and motivation. We discuss the implications of our findings in relation to the concept of self-control work demands and self-control depletion theory. Our findings also contribute to research on the links between work and commuting, and driving commuting most specifically, which is important because work-to-driving spillover represents a substantive safety issue for organizations.

This study sheds light on the dark side of entrepreneurship by examining how and under what conditions abusive behavior within new venture teams (NVTs) relates to new venture performance. Using a national (USA) random sample of NVTs, we find that the relationship of intrateam abusive behavior (i.e., degree to which NVT members exhibit “hostile” verbal behaviors toward each other) with new venture performance (i.e., sales and employment growth) is mediated by NVT thriving (i.e., level of vitality and learning exhibited within the NVT). Results further demonstrate that perceived competitive intensity of the industry moderates this relationship, with the indirect effect of intrateam abusive behavior on new venture performance (via thriving) being significantly less negative at high, than at low, levels of competitive intensity. We therefore conclude that perceived competitive threats to the survival of startups act to mitigate the otherwise deleterious effects of abusive behavior occurring within NVTs. These results broaden existing knowledge regarding the dark side of entrepreneurship by expanding the conversation on this topic to include the NVT and providing evidence for why some NVTs, but not others, are able to sustain the growth of their firms despite the occurrence of abusive behavior between their members.

This research extends social exchange theory by investigating unethical reciprocity induced by high compensation in employee–manager exchange relationships. Two experimental studies based on behavioral games showed that even after employees had reciprocated their managers’ wage offers with commensurate work efforts, managers’ previous compensation decisions still had potent effects on employees’ subsequent ethical behaviors. Specifically, Study 1 showed that high wages led employees to engage in unethical reciprocity to benefit their managers at the expense of honesty. In addition, when managers had the possibility of rewarding employees’ unethical reciprocity, only underpaid employees demonstrated more unethical reciprocity, and high-paid employees were not affected by their potential personal payout. Study 2 replicated Study 1’s results using different designs and behavioral games. Its results consistently showed that high-paid employees were more likely to act dishonestly to advance their managers’ interests, irrespective of their own payouts. Finally, Study 3 complemented our experimental results with initial field evidence, suggesting that higher salaries were positively related to the likelihood of police officers engaging in unethical and illegal actions to help their organization. We discuss our results by applying cross-disciplinary insights on exchange models and compensation to organizational studies.

Prior theory suggests that incentive plans, such as piece-rate or commission plans, motivate good performance because employees anticipate that current performance will generate matching future incentive payments. In this article, we move beyond reward expectancy to argue that performance can also derive from employees’ reactive responses to received incentive payments. We propose a salience-based theory casting incentive payments as recurring temporal markers that periodically increase the salience of the incentive plan, to which employees respond by temporarily increasing incentivized and unincentivized performance. We introduce multivariate time-series methods to test our hypotheses in longitudinal data spanning 169 weeks (1,183 days), drawn from an online firm using an incentive plan for its customer-support employees. While we find no evidence that incentive payments affect the dynamics of incentivized performance, they do temporarily boost several unincentivized behaviors and outcomes. Combined with fieldwork, these findings support our proposed mechanism of “salience-induced reciprocity”—that is, the temporary reciprocity in response to a periodic increase in the salience of the incentive plan. This article contributes to a more complete understanding of performance and effort dynamics in incentive plans, offers new inroads into studying temporality in the functioning of human resources practices, and provides other future research avenues.

Social dominance orientation (SDO) is a widely researched construct that indexes a preference for hierarchical intergroup relations. However, it remains unclear whether this preference (a) motivates people to seek out occupations that enhance hierarchical relations between groups (i.e., occupational assortment), (b) develops as a result of working within hierarchy-enhancing occupations (i.e., occupational socialization), or (c) both. One reason for this gap is that the large-scale longitudinal data required to simultaneously model assortment and socialization processes are scarce. In this study, we analyzed data from two waves of longitudinal data (spaced either 1, 3, or 5 years apart) from a nationwide sample of adults ( N = 3,452–4,412) who were already working in either hierarchy-enhancing occupations (e.g., law enforcement) or hierarchy-attenuating occupations (e.g., social work). Results showed that SDO predicted an increased probability of working in a hierarchy-enhancing occupation 3 and 5 years later. Working in a hierarchy-enhancing occupation was also positively associated with SDO after 1 and 5 years. These patterns generally suggest that occupations both shape, and are shaped by, intergroup beliefs.

We theorize that organizations with higher brokerage positions (which we call brokers) benefit from access to capital and distribution that, paradoxically, causes them to implement poorer projects but to survive longer. Whereas prior research proposes that such organizations implement alliance projects because of their superior quality, we argue that they can do so despite project quality, because they have better access to capital and distribution. This access subjects their ventures to fewer implementation hurdles. As a result, there emerge three paradoxes and associated hypotheses: (a) brokers are able to implement more alliance projects, but their projects will perform on average more poorly; (b) brokers will tend to ally with other brokers but will do better when they ally with those having lower brokerage positions; and (c) despite the poorer performance of alliance projects, brokers will experience fewer risks and be less likely to exit the business. Paradoxically, brokerage makes organizations perform worse in each alliance but benefit from longer-term sustainability. In a study of 2,694 movie production companies in the Hollywood film industry from 1994 to 2009, we find considerable support for our hypotheses and develop a novel perspective on brokerage.

Across three studies, we integrate relational leadership theory with affective events theory to examine the leader perspective in dyadic relationships and how this perspective influences differential leader behaviors directed toward each subordinate in terms of safety enforcement. First, in two field studies with different high-risk contexts, we delineate a curvilinear relationship between supervisor-rated leader–member exchange (SLMX) and safety enforcement. In our second field study we also examine the moderating role of leaders’ safety commitment as well as the linkage between safety enforcement and accidents. Finally, in a fully randomized experiment, we explore three relational dynamics as mechanisms of the effect of SLMX on safety enforcement—trust, consideration, and liking. Through these efforts, we offer rare direct tests of the theoretical assertion that leader–member exchange includes differential treatment based on affective relationship cues within a leader-and-subordinate relationship. Our two field studies reveal that leaders are likely to monitor safety most closely for low- and high-SLMX subordinates, but mid-SLMX subordinates are most likely to be overlooked. This U-shaped relationship emerges only for less committed leaders, and safety enforcement translates these effects to actual accidents. Our experimental study reveals a similar U shape between liking and enforcement, but a positive relationship emerges between distrust and enforcement, as well as between consideration on enforcement. These results shed insight into theoretical and practical implications for how leaders can foster a safer workplace for all.

In the face of increasing pressure to comply with institutional norms, firm managers may retreat from previous commitments to comply once they realize the challenges involved. This study examines how firms respond to institutional pressures in a particular way called reversion, in which an organization's managers temporarily comply when there are no consequences but resist when it is in their interest to resist. By integrating institutional and agency theories, we model the reversion decision as a tension between institutional constituents and organizational managers. An empirical analysis of a sample of Japanese firms that scheduled annual shareholder meetings during the 2001 through 2014 period was performed. Our findings show that although organizations’ susceptibility to certain institutional pressures determines initial organizational compliance, managers whose interests diverge from those of the institutional constituents can revert their decisions, especially when they have discretion in decision making to protect their own interests. These findings highlight the temporary nature of organizational responses to institutional pressures and help us understand how organizational agency can limit institutional control over an organization's actions.