This longitudinal study examines the development of leader-member-exchange (LMX) relationships via a model that extends and tests ideas presented but not yet fully tested in past theoretical models. New subordinates (n = 205) and their supervisors (n = 112) provided data that were used to test hypotheses stating that dyadic gender and personality similarity, member performance, and leader delegation would be incrementally and cumulatively related to LMX development. Support was found for relationships between the quality of leader-member exchange and positive affectivity similarity, performance, and delegation, but not for a relationship with gender similarity. In addition, it appears that good member performance may precede leader delegation.

Life satisfaction is a key indicator of subjective well-being. This article is a review of the multidisciplinary literature on the relationship between life satisfaction and the work domain. A discussion of top-down and bottom-up theories of life satisfaction is included, and the literatures on work-related antecedents of life satisfaction, the proximal mediators (quality of work life, quality of nonwork life, and feelings of self-worth), and consequences of life satisfaction were reviewed. A meta-analysis of life satisfaction with respect to career satisfaction, job performance, turnover intentions, and organizational commitment was performed. Each major section of the article concludes with a future opportunities subsection where gaps in the research are discussed.

This paper adapts real options theory to explain how executives create and maintain real options portfolios within leadership pipelines. Hypotheses flowing from our theorizing predict that executives often make seemingly risky staffing decisions for leaders who occupy stepping-stone positions. Focusing on their option (future potential) rather than project (current productivity) value, executives laterally transfer leaders in stepping-stone positions frequently, despite it resulting in lower short-term job performance, but often promote these leaders at lower levels of performance and sooner. Once leaders are promoted to destination positions where they may stay indefinitely, executives tend to transfer high-performing leaders more often but not when they are still improving the effectiveness of their current unit. We present evidence suggesting that executives make these decisions to improve other units and maintain a flexible system, possibly recapturing previous investments in developing those leaders. We provide empirical support for our hypotheses using eight years of data in a large retail organization (n = 25,004) where executives overseeing thousands of units made internal mobility decisions. These findings refine real options theory, show that it explains these phenomena better than existing theories, and provide important and immediately usable practical implications for executives. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1608 .

While a great deal of research has investigated strategies for increasing job seekers' initial attraction to organizations, far less is known about how job seekers respond to recruitment activities after application submission. We draw from signaling, uncertainty reduction, and uncertainty management theories to develop a conceptual model of the relationship between recruitment interactions (contact episodes) after application submission and organizational attraction. We test this model in three independent studies with data collected at multiple time periods. Study 1 employed a time-lagged research design with actual job seekers. Findings showed that justice perceptions associated with recruitment interactions influence attraction to an organization indirectly and directly via positive relational certainty (i.e., reduced uncertainty regarding how organizational relations might be upon entering the organization). Study 2 used a controlled experimental design to provide additional evidence of the relational certainty mechanism through which justice signals influence attraction. Finally, Study 3 incorporated a longitudinal (repeated-measures) design to examine reactions to recruitment interactions over ten weeks. Results indicated that the relationship between justice signals and organizational attraction via positive relational certainty is dynamic, suggesting that organizations should carefully manage their communications throughout the recruitment process.

Decades of studies spanning multiple disciplines have provided insight into the critical role of loneliness in work contexts. In spite of this extensive research, a comprehensive review of loneliness and work remains absent. To address this gap, we conducted a multidisciplinary review of relevant theory and research and identified 213 articles reporting on 233 empirical studies from management, organizational psychology, sociology, medicine, and other domains to uncover why people feel lonely, how different features of work can contribute to feelings of loneliness, and the implications of employee loneliness for organizational settings. This enabled a critical examination of the distinct conceptualizations and operationalizations of loneliness that have been advanced and the theories underpinning this scholarship. We developed a comprehensive conceptual model that integrates cognitive discrepancy theory, the affect theory of social exchange, and evolutionary theory. This model elucidates the core antecedents, mediators, outcomes, moderators, and interventions forming the nomological network of work related loneliness, including cross-level influences within teams and among leaders. Our review also identifies a number of promising areas for future inquiry to improve our understanding and measurement of loneliness, the process of experiencing and managing loneliness in the workplace, and potential interventions to reduce it. Finally, we provide tangible guidance for organizations and practitioners on how to address and mitigate employee loneliness. Ultimately, our review underscores the complex nature of loneliness and work and establishes a foundation for advancing both scholarly discourse and organizational practices in this critical domain.

In this research, we simultaneously examined the relative applicability of person-environment fit and relative deprivation theories in explaining the interactive effects of perceived overqualification and collectivism cultural orientations on positive outcomes. We hypothesized that the negative (positive) influence of perceived overqualification on person-environment fit (relative deprivation) will be weaker among employees with high collectivism cultural orientation. We also examined which of these two different mechanisms would explain the hypothesized interactive effects in predicting these workers’ citizenship behavior, personal initiative, work engagement, and life satisfaction. We tested our hypotheses in two studies. In Study 1, we recruited professional staff (n = 852) and their coworkers (n = 301) from 95 universities and tested our hypotheses in a matched sample of 190 employees and their peers. The moderated mediation results supported the idea of person-environment fit (but not relative deprivation) as the mechanism explaining why collectivism orientations assuaged the negative effects of perceived overqualification on these outcomes. We constructively replicated these results in Study 2, which was a time-lagged design with full-time employees (n = 224). Study 2’s results further supported the robustness of our model by testing alternative moderators, mediators, and outcomes.

The effective socialization of newcomers into organizations is critical for employee and organizational success. As such, ensuring successful onboarding has become even more pivotal for newcomer adjustment, performance, and retention. The literature has seen significant growth and incorporated new theoretical perspectives, such as resource-based approaches since the most recent comprehensive meta-analytic review of the literature. Therefore, we extended earlier reviews by presenting an updated model of the socialization process, reviewing the literature, and examining this updated model via meta-analysis. In all, we identified 256 studies that met our meta-analytic inclusion criteria, and 183 with sufficient k across construct categories were included in our meta-analysis. At the correlational level, we analyzed antecedents to proximal adjustment indicators and proximal adjustment to distal outcomes. We examined a potential moderator, whether the study took place in a horizontal-individualistic (HI) versus vertical-collectivistic (VC) culture. Last, we analyzed a path model to identify unique relationships between specific antecedents (age, full-time work experience, organizational tenure, proactive personality, information seeking, organizational tactics, insider mentoring/supporting), proximal adjustment indicators (social acceptance, role clarity, task mastery, perceived fit), and distal outcomes (job satisfaction, organizational commitment, turnover intentions, other-rated performance, and well-being). Our analyses uncover the role of proactive personality and proactive newcomer behaviors in newcomer adjustment and the importance of social acceptance for newcomers. They also identify perceptions of fit as an important but relatively under-examined adjustment indicator and newcomer well-being as an additional socialization outcome. We develop future directions for socialization theory and research methods.