Exploring Selective Exposure and Confirmation Bias as Processes Underlying Employee Work Happiness: An Intervention Study.

Paige Williams,Margaret L Kern,Lea Waters

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00878

Paige Williams, Margaret L Kern + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00878

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Abstract

Employee psychological capital (PsyCap), perceptions of organizational virtue (OV), and work happiness have been shown to be associated within and over time. This study examines selective exposure and confirmation bias as potential processes underlying PsyCap, OV, and work happiness associations. As part of a quasi-experimental study design, school staff (N = 69) completed surveys at three time points. After the first assessment, some staff (n = 51) completed a positive psychology training intervention. Results of descriptive statistics, correlation, and regression analyses on the intervention group provide some support for selective exposure and confirmation bias as explanatory mechanisms. In focusing on the processes through which employee attitudes may influence work happiness this study advances theoretical understanding, specifically of selective exposure and confirmation bias in a field study context.

Highlights

As the nature of business has shifted from a concentration on scarce financial capital to a concentration on scarce human capital (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 2002), people have become of strategic importance in today’s information and knowledge-driven society
The Inside-out Outside-in (IO-OI) model further suggests that synergistic relationships exist between the inside-out and the outside-in approaches. This occurs via three processes: (1) the iterative reprocessing of evaluations, (2) selective exposure, and (3) confirmation bias The purpose of the current study is to examine the influence of the latter two processes – selective exposure and confirmation bias – as explanatory mechanisms for the associations between employee positive attitudes [conceptualized as psychological capital (PsyCap), Luthans et al, 2006], perception of virtues in the organization culture, and levels of work happiness (WH, Fisher, 2010)
We propose that PsyCap and its elements can be understood as attitudes, and use it as the conceptualization of positive attitudes in this study

Summary

Introduction

As the nature of business has shifted from a concentration on scarce financial capital to a concentration on scarce human capital (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 2002), people have become of strategic importance in today’s information and knowledge-driven society. In this modern economy, value is created through intangibles such as such as intelligence, creativity, and personal factors such as warmth rather than physical mass (Quah and Coyle, 2002). POS is defined as “the study of especially positive outcomes, processes, and attributes of organizations” such as organizational virtues (OVs) and peak performance

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