Editors' Note

Abstract

Editors' Note Craig R. Fox and Sim B Sitkin In this issue, we are pleased to feature articles on a wide range of topics, including nudges that can improve health and safety, factors fostering more effective organizational leadership and workplace voice, and policies that promote the use of public transportation and family financial security. Field reviews and original research studies provide actionable insights for government and business organizations as well as individuals. Three articles focus on how behavioral interventions can promote health and safety. In one, Xilin Li, Christopher K. Hsee, and Li Wang report on studies they conducted in China that were aimed at reducing how often pedestrians cross busy intersections when the light is red—behavior that not only violates social norms but also poses a serious safety problem. They posted signs that featured either imperatives ("Don't cross at the red light"), safety awareness, danger awareness, civility awareness ("Waiting for the green light is civil"), or incivility awareness ("Crossing at the red light is uncivil"). In three field experiments with over 12,000 observations, these authors found that posting signs warning against "uncivil" norm violations was most effective at reducing crossing against red lights at intersections. In a second article in this group, Sujatha Changolkar, Kevin G. Volpp, and Mitesh S. Patel present a field review taking stock of how physical activity can be successfully encouraged using a combination of remote-monitoring technologies and behaviorally informed programs. They observe that making such technology easier to use is especially important for sustained engagement. They also describe several behavioral approaches that successfully promoted exercise, including precommitment contracts, goal setting by participants, social incentives, gamific tion, and financial incentives that were delivered in the form of lotteries or that framed rewards as something that could be lost. Daniella Meeker, Tara Knight, Pantra Childress, Elmar R. Aliyev, and Jason N. Doctor examined a clever way to simultaneously use lottery rewards to motivate exercise class enrollment and loss avoidance to motivate persistence. In each week of a 12-week field experiment, all participants received a 90% chance of winning $20 if they attended the first exercise class of the week. Participants in the experimental condition could guarantee against losing the lottery prize by attending the second class each week, turning the 90% chance into a certainty. Meanwhile, participants in the control condition would simply receive a fl t $2 reward if they attended the second class each week (the same expected value as would be gained by participants in the experimental condition who attended the second class and thus guaranteed a full lottery payout). In the end, the experimental intervention proved to be quite effective: participants in the loss-protection condition attended classes 16% more often than did participants in the control condition. A second set of articles points to organizational practices that can improve leadership training and development or foster a culture of voice in the workplace. David Day, Nicolas Bastardoz, Tiffany Bisbey, Denise Reyes, and Eduardo Salas offer a field review to explain how the effectiveness of leadership training and development programs hinges on specific design and implementation characteristics. They differentiated between leader training programs (that target knowledge, skills, and attitudes) and leader development programs (that focus on more general adaptive capacity) and found that effectiveness resulted from seemingly obvious but often neglected prerequisites: clear definition of needs and specific expectations and use of evidence-based program designs. Ethan R. Burris and Wonbin Sohn review studies on the critical features of organizations that are able to effectively encourage employees to voice their concerns, criticisms, and different perspectives. They specify three key strategies these organizations use to foster a culture of voice: creating a safe environment for employee voice by protecting employees from retaliation, providing employees with illustrations of [End Page ii] instances in which voicing concerns led the organization to implement responsive action, and providing managers with resources that enable them to take action to address the concerns raised through employee voice. Overall, the evidence suggests that achieving the goal of increasing employee voice depends on specificactions to reduce the risk of speaking up and to increase the odds that employee input will have an impact. Further, managers must be...