Business and Psychology

Enacting Effective Mentoring Behaviors: Development and Initial Investigation of the Cuboid of Mentoring Abstract Our understanding of how to maximize the benefits of mentoring relationships for employee development has been limited by a vague understanding of what effective mentors are actually doing and how they are doing it. To begin to remedy this, we conducted one qualitative interview study of well-respected mentors to uncover the breadth and detail of their behaviors, and one quantitative study to see how a subset of these behaviors would be endorsed under two moderating conditions. Our qualitative study consisted of 28 interviews followed by detailed coding and analysis, and yielded a new framework of mentoring behaviors we named the cuboid of mentoring. This framework provides a rich set of behavioral statements that could be mined for research and practice purposes. Our quantitative investigation used a policy-capturing approach to investigate the extent to which experienced mentors endorsed mentoring objectives and behaviors under different conditions. This study showed that mentoring actions are purposeful, and the methodology demonstrates a paradigm for further study of boundary conditions of mentoring behaviors and supports conclusions from the qualitative study regarding how mentors think about the objectives and behaviors of mentoring.

Facilitate Knowledge Sharing by Leading Ethically: the Role of Organizational Concern and Impression Management Climate Abstract This study seeks to investigate whether, how, and when leaders can facilitate knowledge sharing by leading ethically. Drawing on social learning theory, we hypothesize that ethical leadership can promote knowledge sharing through inducing organizational concern among employees. However, impression management climate will nullify the effect of ethical leadership on organizational concern and the consequent knowledge sharing. Two-wave data were collected from 567 employees and their supervisors from 73 teams in China. Mediation and moderated mediation hypotheses were examined using multilevel modeling. The results show that ethical leadership is positively related to knowledge sharing and that organizational concern significantly mediates the relationship. Moreover, impression management climate neutralizes the effect of ethical leadership on organizational concern and the resulting knowledge sharing. Our research suggests that leaders can enhance knowledge sharing by aligning their followers with the collective interest and generating genuine concern among them for the organization. To ensure the effectiveness of ethical leadership, organizations are recommended to put less emphasis on impression management and avoid linking performance appraisal and rewards with personal image. Employees’ concern about self-interest represents a great barrier to knowledge sharing. This study is among the first to shed light on the role of ethical leadership in facilitating knowledge sharing; ethical leadership motivates employees to go beyond self-interest and show concern for the organization. We also highlight the potentially negative effect of the group climate and enrich our knowledge of impression management.

A Tale of Two Sample Sources: Do Results from Online Panel Data and Conventional Data Converge? Abstract Samples drawn from commercial online panel data (OPD) are becoming more prevalent in applied psychology research, but they remain controversial due to concerns with data quality. In order to examine the validity of OPD, we conduct meta-analyses of online panel samples and compare internal reliability estimates for scales and effect size estimates for IV–DV relations commonly found in the field with those based on conventionally sourced data. Results based on 90 independent samples and 32,121 participants show OPD has similar psychometric properties and produces criterion validities that generally fall within the credibility intervals of existing meta-analytic results from conventionally sourced data. We suggest that, with appropriate caution, OPD are suitable for many exploratory research questions in the field of applied psychology.

Do You See Me as I See Me? The Effects of Impression Management Incongruence of Actors and Audiences Abstract Based on the idea that both actor and audience member are present in impression management (IM), we argue that the effectiveness of IM usage can only be determined when ratings from both the actor and the audience are considered. Further, we use self-verification theory to explain how IM incongruence may impact workplace outcomes. To test our arguments, we employed congruence analysis (Cheung in Organizational Research Methods 12, 6–33, 2009a). Our approach differs from the majority of extant IM research that employs measures of IM only from the actor’s perspective. By incorporating assessments from the actor and the audience, we bring research on IM back to its theoretical roots and offer a rationale for the varied and inconsistent findings reported in the literature. Using a sample of 175 employees and their supervisors, we examined and compared IM ratings of subordinates’ ingratiation, self-promotion, and exemplification from both the employee and supervisor. Additionally, we investigate the ability of those ratings, individually and together, to predict both subordinate and supervisor ratings of key organizational outcomes. Implications for practice and suggestions for future research also are provided.

Professional Commitment and Team Effectiveness: A Moderated Mediation Investigation of Cognitive Diversity and Task Conflict Abstract This study investigates a moderated mediation model of professional commitment and team effectiveness through cognitive diversity moderated by task conflict. Data were collected from 70 UK healthcare teams and their leaders using two questionnaires. We find that teams comprised of members who have, on average, high professional commitment are more effective than teams of members who are less committed and that this path is mediated by cognitive diversity and contingent on task conflict. Team composed of members who are strongly committed to their profession may be more effective consequent to their advocacy of different perspectives and expertise, reflecting cognitive diversity. However, this positive effect of professional commitment is not universal but contingent on the level of disagreement between members on task-related issues. This is one of the first studies to demonstrate that professional commitment can increase team effectiveness and does so through a complex contingent path. While few studies have investigated professional commitment, our results suggest that such commitment can be of great value to multidisciplinary teams.

Helping Misfits to Commit: How Justice Climate Attenuates the Effects of Personality Dissimilarity on Organizational Commitment Abstract In the present study, we examined whether greater personality dissimilarity would indirectly lead to lower organizational commitment as a result of heightened emotional exhaustion. We also proposed and tested the notion that the experience of being dissimilar to one’s workgroup members in the traits of (a) agreeableness, (b) conscientiousness, or (c) emotional stability would have the strongest positive effect on emotional exhaustion in workgroups with low justice climates. The data from 8196 members of the U.S. Armed Services confirmed the predicted negative indirect effect for agreeableness dissimilarity, but showed that conscientiousness dissimilarity resulted in a positive indirect effect on commitment. Contrary to expectations, emotional stability dissimilarity did not demonstrate a significant relationship. Multilevel moderated mediation analyses revealed that the presence of a strong workgroup justice climate attenuated the significant mediated relationships. Finally, we report supplementary polynomial regression analyses and discuss their implications for workgroup composition and individual career development.

Engaging the Hearts and Minds of Followers: Leader Empathy and Language Style Matching During Appraisal Interviews Abstract Leader empathy has received increased scholarly and practical attention in recent years. However, empirical studies that explore the functionality of leader empathy and that disclose which objective micro-level behaviors actually characterize empathic face-to-face interactions remain sparse. This study explores the role of leaders’ empathic communication style in a sample of 48 audiotaped performance appraisal interviews. Our multimethod approach disclosed that ratings of supervisors’ empathic communication style were positively related to employees’ intentions to change and to employees’ perceptions of supervisor likeability. Fine-grained linguistic analyses (N = 358,586 words) further provided insights into the underlying behavioral manifestation of leader empathy: verbal mimicry in the form of language style matching between supervisors and employees was positively related to supervisors’ empathic communication style. Additional analyses showed that supervisors who communicated more empathically used less second-person pronouns (“you”) and agreed more frequently with their employees. Finally, we found differences in the mean percentage use of personal pronouns between supervisors and employees. Specifically, supervisors used significantly more second-person (“you”) and first-person plural (“we”) pronouns and fewer first-person singular (“I”) pronouns than their employees. We discuss how the findings of this field study enhance our theoretical understanding of leader empathy as a functional leadership skill, and we highlight practical recommendations for conducting more effective appraisal interviews.

Contingent Reward Transactional Leaders as “Good Parents”: Examining the Mediation Role of Attachment Insecurity and the Moderation Role of Meaningful Work Abstract Deriving from the analogy between contingent reward transactional leaders (featured by clarity, consistency, consideration, and consequences) and “good parents,” we develop a moderated mediation model where attachment insecurity (avoidance and anxiety attachment) mediates the relationship of contingent reward transactional leadership with follower job insecurity, burnout, job performance, and organizational citizenship behaviors, and meaningful work moderates the relationship between contingent reward transactional leadership and attachment insecurity. Results based on two-wave data from two independent samples largely support our hypotheses. Specifically, supporting attachment theory, the relationship of contingent reward transactional leadership and follower outcomes (i.e., job insecurity, burnout, and job performance) is mediated by both avoidance attachment and anxiety attachment. Supporting the contingency theory of leadership, meaningful work strengthens the relationship between contingent reward transactional leadership and avoidance and anxiety attachment. Additionally, the indirect effect of contingent reward transactional leadership and follower outcomes via avoidance and anxiety attachment is contingent upon meaningful work.

Getting to Excess: Psychological Entitlement and Negotiation Attitudes Abstract In this paper, we extend the literature on psychological entitlement to the domain of negotiation. Psychological entitlement describes a tendency to demand excessive and unearned rewards. For negotiators, entitlement is associated not only with individually beneficial attitudes, like aspirations, first offer intentions and self-efficacy, but also with contentious and unethical approaches to bargaining. As such, we argue that entitlement in negotiation may function as a social trap: The functional negotiation attitudes it engenders are likely to result in personally favourable outcomes for the entitled negotiator, reinforcing and exacerbating those attitudes. But these advantages are simultaneously accompanied by a suite of dysfunctional attitudes (unethicality, a “zero-sum” mindset and a contentious style) that lead the entitled to seek advantage at others’ cost. In three cross-sectional studies of recalled, hypothetical and planned future negotiations (n = 615), we show both the functional and dysfunctional consequences of entitlement in negotiation. Importantly, we establish the ability of entitlement to predict these consequences above and beyond traits robustly situated in the personality literature (e.g. narcissism, low agreeableness, neuroticism). Our findings indicate entitlement may have pernicious effects for negotiation ethics. We close by addressing the methodological limitations of our study and by proposing a research agenda for management, personality and negotiation researchers interested in mitigating the effects of entitlement in negotiating.

Self-Presentation in Selection Settings: the Case of Personality Tests Abstract Based on theoretical views that applicants express meaningful skills and motivation when presenting themselves in personnel selection settings, we challenge conventional wisdom that self-presentation necessarily impairs the diagnostic value of “fakable” selection devices. Instead, we propose to supplement the traditional psychometric approach to personnel selection with a social perspective that leverages the competitive nature of selection. In order to capture an outcome of self-presentation, we introduce the Ideal Employee Coefficient (IEC) as a supplement to traditional scoring of responses to personality items. Construct and criterion-related validity evidence using the IEC was collected in two studies covering three samples from diverse settings, populations, and measures. The IEC consistently showed incremental criterion-related validity beyond the same tests’ traditional scores, as well as construct-related evidence in line with theoretical underpinnings. Findings imply that traditional personality constructs can be meaningfully aggregated with measures of self-presentation that are cost-effectively derived from the same data sources.