The Psychology of Gratitude: Implications for Organizations

ABSTRACTOrganizational risk is the possibility of events preventing the achievement of objectives and disrupting organizational viability. Developing understanding of organizational risk is necessary to allow realization of opportunities and protection from harm. However, much existing theorizing focuses on either a higher level of analysis, for example, studies of organizational risk culture, or a lower level of analysis, such as studies of individual perception, personality, and risk‐taking. One way to advance theorizing involves connecting both levels of analysis. These connections are central to a microfoundations perspective that suggests organizational phenomena can be understood by linking macrolevel contexts with microlevel contexts and actions. I draw on this perspective to develop a model of organizational risk and explain how cross‐level processes connect macro‐ and microlevel concepts. I focus on the organizational psychology literature that encompasses higher and lower levels of analysis to select and examine relevant concepts. I explain how organizational cultures create contexts for individual risk‐taking that are homogeneous when constraints are strong and directional or variable when constraints are weak and ambiguous. These behaviors aggregate within and across units to influence organizational risk. Individual risk‐taking also influences organizational risk via autonomy and discretion. In developing the model, I show how theories of cross‐level processes extend understanding of organizational risk. I discuss implications for advancing theorizing about organizational risk by encompassing its microfoundations and linking them with managerial actions and objectives. Future research could examine these mechanisms through empirical studies and shed light on how leaders influence processes and change organizational risk.

When a mission ends, missionaries must make sense of their experiences, themselves, and their lives going forward. This process of sensemaking and its implications for religious organizations’ communication with members who occupy terminal roles is the focus of this study. Based on ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with former missionaries in one organization, two distinct and divergent patterns of missionaries’ sensemaking and role exit emerged. Finisher sensemaking involved deidentification with vocational ministry, leaving the sending organization, and (re)constructing multiple identities through an arduous process of identity work. Conversely, bypasser sensemaking drew upon the sending organization as a resource to sustain a deep identification with vocational ministry. Thus bypassers positioned themselves as essential members and reidentified with new roles in the organization. The ongoing study of communication in/about terminal roles in religious and other totalistic organizations is discussed as well as practical implications for organizations and their members.

With emergent attention on pre-crastination (PRE), together with a familiar and widely discussed proclivity – procrastination (PRO), a growing need is evident to examine these constructs – their definitions, conceptualizations, and manifestations of paradoxical nature, especially when these seemingly maladaptive behaviors displayed by managerial roles in organizations. Given the central role of time embedded in PRE/PRO, and the importance of temporal activities in organizational settings, the present work integrates literature in PRE and PRO, leadership, and temporal resource utilization to present a framework mapping PRE/PRO to time in four conditions: temporal resource compression, temporal resource suppression, temporal resource exploitation, and temporal resource exploration. Built on this foundation, the second half of this work proposes a multiphase process model explaining how temporal variances initiated by leaders could shape followers’ perception of, responses to, and evaluation of the leaders and leader-follower relationships. The present work thus advances the literature by infusing PRE/PRO-related temporal characteristics into leadership research, providing a perceptual framework that explains followers’ reactions, investigating the role of temporal resource utilization as salient contextual factors in altering followers’ perceptions, and offering new propositions that have the potential to provide a more complete understanding of the integrative literature and its implications for organizations.

I first show that employee engagement can emerge at higher levels of analysis by following different types of emergence. According to composition emergence, engagement emerges as a shared higher-level property that can be operationalized by using work-units’ engagement averages. Following compilation emergence, engagement can also emerge as a configural higher-level property. In this case, engagement homogeneity and engagement uniformity are two configural properties that deserve attention. Using data from a sample of bank branches, I show that engagement actually emerges following the aforementioned types and offer descriptive empirical evidence about engagement homogeneity and uniformity. Secondly, I show how to estimate the influence of engagement operationalized at higher levels on individual level outcomes by means of multilevel methods. Finally, I briefly show how multilevel methods can be used to model engagement data collected in intensive longitudinal designs.

This study reports an ethnographic case study, where a temporary emergency team was established in response to scarcity of respirators at hospitals during the Covid-19 crisis. Developing an innovative cleaning method required cross-sectoral collaboration, where trust-control dynamism emerged at temporal, interactional and multilevel dimensions. We examine how a temporary emergency team leadership leverages these dynamics in a cross-sectoral collaborative innovation. Our results suggest that mechanisms such as third-party trust, perspective taking, and social support facilitate trust at the individual level and may mitigate the lack of emerging leader authority and control. This impacts trust and control mechanisms at the higher levels of analysis. Through appropriate interpretation and translation of rules, control at higher levels may be leveraged to provide needed justification and the means to build trust across different levels. Higher-lever trust also feeds back to the individual level, strengthening the emerging leadership.

Psychoacoustic research suggests that multiple auditory channels process incoming sounds over temporal windows of different durations, resulting in multiple auditory representations being available to higher-level processes. The current experiments investigate the size of the temporal window used in vowel quality perception using an acoustic priming paradigm with nonspeech and speech primes of varying duration. In experiment 1, identification of vowel targets was facilitated by acoustically matched nonspeech primes. The magnitude of this effect was greatest for the shortest (25 and 50 ms) primes, remained level at medium (100 and 150 ms) duration primes, and declined significantly at longer prime durations, suggesting that the auditory stages of vowel quality perception integrate sensory input over a relatively short temporal window. In experiment 2, the same vowel targets were primed by speech stimuli, consisting of vowels using the same duration values as those in experiment 1. A different pattern of results emerged with the greatest priming effects found for primes of around 150 ms and less priming at the shorter and longer durations, indicating that longer-scale temporal processes operate at higher levels of analysis.

Researchers are often interested in comparing correlations between variables at different levels of analysis (e.g., individual and organizational) to determine if the same relationship holds across the levels. A special situation emerges when correlations at higher levels are based on aggregated data. This article contains an analysis of the nature of the relationship between correlations based on individual-level data and correlations based on aggregated data from individuals. In particular, the conditions under which differences between individual correlations and correlations based on aggregates represent statistical artifacts or meaningful differences are explored. In recent years, levels-of-analysis issues and understanding relationships between levels (e.g., individual, group, and organizational) have become important themes in organizational research (e.g., Dansereau, Alluto, & Yammarino, 1984; Dansereau & Markham, 1987; Glick, 1985; Click & Roberts, 1984; James, 1982; Mossholder & Bedeian, 1983; Roberts, Hulin, & Rousseau, 1978). As a result, some researchers have begun to hypothesize that stronger relationships between variables may be found at higher levels of analysis. For example, Schneider (1985) suggested that research is needed to assess relationships at the group or organizational level in many areas that have traditionally been studied at the individual level, such as motivation and leadership, leadership and organizational performance, and absenteeism and attitudes. Comparisons of relationships between variables at different levels of analysis (e.g., individual and organizational) necessitates collection of data at each of the different levels. Oftentimes, researchers do not have a global index of the organiza

Psychological capital (PsyCap) has been conceptualized as an individual-level construct concerned with an employee’s state of positive psychological development. However, research has now started to examine PsyCap as a collective phenomenon. Although positive associations between team-level PsyCap and team-level functioning have been demonstrated empirically, there has been limited synopsis regarding the theoretical and measurement foundations of PsyCap at higher levels of analysis. This conceptual article extends collective PsyCap scholarship by applying a multilevel-multireferent framework to explore alternate conceptualizations of collective PsyCap. The framework furthers understanding of PsyCap at higher levels by exploring unique antecedents and emergent processes relating to five proposed forms of collective PsyCap. A series of testable propositions pertaining to the antecedent network of collective PsyCap are offered to guide empirical multilevel PsyCap research.

We present a paradigm for feedback strategies that find instances of a generic class of objects by improving on established single-pass hypothesis generation and verification approaches. We improve upon the mechanisms of the traditional or classical image processing systems by introducing control strategies at low, intermediate, and high levels of analysis. We produce optimal sets of low-level features to reduce the number of hypotheses generated. The feedback further enables updated sets of features to be extracted so that the target object may be located even in very, noisy data. The use of an interest operator in the feedback directs the search through the hypotheses in an optimal manner, so minimizing the amount of feedback to false alarms. Furthermore, we aim to obtain detailed information about a complex object and not just its location. Thus, following top-down recognition of the object our feedback control directs the search for missing information. The system can extract complex objects in a scale and rotation independent manner where the objects may be partially occluded. The method is illustrated using box shaped objects and noisy IR images of a number of bridges.

It is now more evident than ever that society needs business leaders who seek more inclusive and sustainable economic models that lift people up rather than leaving them behind. According to Clifton & Harter’s (2019) It’s the Manager, the best life imaginable for young people and increasingly women doesn’t happen unless they have a great job and a manager or leader who encourages their development. Transformational leaders act as role models for their followers, motivating them through idealized influence, inspiration, individualized consideration, and intellectual stimulation, raising followers’ awareness about issues of consequence, shifting them to higher-order needs, and influencing them to transcend their own self-interest for the good of the group or organization. As leadership is an influence process and power is the potential to influence, this study examines relationships between French and Raven’s model of leader’s power and Kelman’s motives for follower conformity by invoking Bass’s model of transformational leadership as a mediating variable to better understand motives for conformity. The findings supported hypotheses that relationship between leader’s legitimate, referent, and expert power and followers’ identification and internalization were mediated by Bass’ full range of leadership model. Support for a fourth motive for conformity, obligation, being directly related to follower’s felt obligation to their organizational role and legitimate power and not leadership were also found. Implications for organizations and teaching leadership are made.

When students are able to visualize data in real time they can think at higher levels of analysis and evaluation because the data arrive immediately. A kinetics laboratory was modified to include real-time visualization. On the basis of completion of laboratory questions, quiz, and an end-of-semester assessment, students demonstrated they could connect several disparate concepts related to kinetics.

Socialization is the process by which individuals are assisted to become members of their social groups. Findings from social cognition and cross-cultural psychology offer two major insights into the socialization process. First, basic social cognitive principles imply that the immediate environment functions as a socialization agent by activating and inhibiting knowledge structures and thereby shaping cognition and behavior. Second, because the immediate environment factors into cognition and behavior, socialization efforts should involve the modification of the environment for optimal effect. We discuss various examples of socialization through the configuration of the immediate environment, such as rituals and use of physical artifacts. Our review links basic social cognitive mechanisms to socialization processes, which are customarily treated at higher levels of analysis. How do children come to act like other members of their groups? How do immigrants become part of a new culture, and how do people adapt to their occupational roles? All these questions are about the process of socialization, most broadly defined as ‘the way in which individuals are assisted in becoming members of one or more social groups’ (Grusec & Hastings, 2007, p.1). Even though socialization is not a prominent concept in social psychology, ideas emanating from social cognition research are ripe with implications for understanding the socialization process. In this article, we will spell out the implications of social cognitive principles on socialization. Research in social cognition has revealed a great deal about how people process mental representations of social knowledge (e.g., Smith, 1998; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). Social and cross-cultural psychologists built on these ideas and have shown how cultural knowledge and identity can fruitfully be conceptualized as mental representations like any other social information (e.g., Hong & Chiu, 2001; Lehman, Chiu, & Schaller, 2004). In this article, we adopt these cognitive conceptualizations of culture and identity as complex and loose knowledge structures, and define socialization as the process by which individuals are helped to acquire, maintain, and apply these knowledge structures. This social cognitive perspective offers two major insights to our understanding of socialization:

Seismic liquefaction assessment at different geographical scales provides hazard maps at increasing levels of resolution and reliability. According to the considered level, the areas prone to liquefaction are identified based on specific predisposing and triggering factors, including geological and geotechnical subsoil properties and local seismicity. The robustness of the definition of these areas is strongly correlated to the availability and spatial distribution of this information. Moreover, the data type and quality considerably influence the method of analysis and the degree of uncertainty of the results. This work proposes a methodological approach to define maps in terms of liquefaction susceptibility at two different geographical scales (i.e., regional and sub-regional scale). The Calabria region in Southern Italy was studied for the scope, characterised by a relatively high level of seismicity and liquefaction occurrences recorded during the numerous historical earthquakes. At the regional scale, the level of zonation represents a preliminary assessment of areas potentially susceptible to liquefaction. The considered predisposing factors and geospatial variables were implemented from approximately 5520 available surveys, using geostatistical tools to filter inconsistent data and quantify uncertainties. A quantitative assessment of the liquefaction predisposition was also proposed at a sub-regional scale in the identified areas prone to liquefaction. A new proposal of a Territorial Liquefaction Predisposing Index was carried out by quantifying the uncertainty due to the limited availability of data with geostatistical methods. This approach could provide helpful information for land management and emergency planning to characterise the territory for liquefaction instability and optimise resources allocation to reduce the level of uncertainty at higher levels of analysis.

In a recent theoretical article, I proposed that the efficiency of mitochondrial functioning is the most fundamental biological mechanism contributing to individual differences in general intelligence (g; Geary, 2018). The hypothesis accommodates other contributing mechanisms at higher levels of analysis (e.g., brain networks), and is attractive because mitochondrial energy production undergirds the developmental, maintenance, and expression of these other mechanisms and provides a means to link individual differences in g to individual differences in health and successful aging in adulthood. I provide a brief summation here and a few clarifications to the original article.

Constructivist psychotherapy and contemporary metaphor theory, as part of the neighboring fields of psychology and linguistics, share fundamental assumptions rooted in constructivist philosophy. There has been much cross-disciplinary discussion of how our inclination toward metaphors translates into an important meaning-making resource in therapy and other domains of professional practice, such as education. Nevertheless, more reciprocal effort is needed to (a) show practitioners the relevance of nuanced aspects of metaphor theory and linguistic analysis that may evade their attention, and (b) sensitize linguists toward practice-driven factors in their analyses. This article attempts the first of these tasks by identifying and exemplifying four such aspects: (a) source domains at different experiential levels, (b) variable source-target relationships in discourse, (c) metaphorical processes at higher levels of analysis, and (d) discursive and communicative grounding of metaphor. I suggest how they might provide pertinent insights and future directions for interpreting, analyzing, and working with metaphors in psychotherapy.