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Toward whole-person fit assessment: Integrating interests, values, skills, knowledge, and personality using the Occupational Information Network (O*NET).

Measuring person-occupation fit serves many important purposes, from helping young people explore majors and careers to helping jobseekers assess fit with available jobs. However, most existing fit measures are limited in that they focus on single individual difference domains without considering how fit may differ across multiple domains. For example, a jobseeker might be highly interested in a job, yet not possess the requisite skills or knowledge to perform the job well. The current research addresses this issue by evaluating an integrative set of person-occupation fit assessments that measure 88 fit dimensions across five domains: vocational interests, work values, knowledge, skills, and personality. These measures were either newly developed or adapted from existing assessments to directly correspond with occupational variables from the Occupational Information Network database. Across three studies with diverse samples, we obtained extensive reliability and validity evidence to evaluate the fit assessments. Results consistently showed that integrating across fit domains led to practical improvements in predictions of relevant outcomes, including career choice and subjective and objective career success. However, some fit measures (i.e., interests and knowledge) were generally more predictive of outcomes than others (i.e., personality), thus warranting greater consideration for use in research and applied contexts. We discuss how our results advance theoretical and practical knowledge concerning the measurement of person-occupation fit in the modern labor market. Moreover, to inspire additional research and applications involving whole-person fit measurement, we made all newly developed fit assessments publicly available, providing guidance for using them with the Occupational Information Network database. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

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A tale of two narratives: The role of event disruption in employee affective and behavioral reactions to authoritarian leadership.

Extant research demonstrates the destructive nature of authoritarian leadership in the workplace, yet its widespread use suggests that a more balanced view of this leadership style may be needed to identify whether this form of leadership engenders favorable reactions in specific circumstances. Integrating insights from appraisal theory and the compensatory control model, we posit that authoritarian leadership can evoke anxiety among employees in less disruptive settings, whereas it evokes feelings of awe in highly disruptive contexts. These anxiety and awe reactions then influence employees' downstream leader-focused behaviors (i.e., leader-directed avoidance and affiliation) and general work behaviors (i.e., counterproductive behavior and job performance). Thus, whether reactions to authoritarian leadership are dysfunctional or functional is contingent on event disruption as a key boundary condition. Results from an experience sampling study (Study 1), a multiwave and multisource field study (Study 2), and laboratory experiments (Studies 3a and 3b) largely confirm these predictions. The findings underscore the importance of event disruption for predicting employee reactions to authoritarian styles of leadership. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

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Emboldened in the rap "game": How severely stigmatized video models navigate disrespect and vulnerability to workplace mistreatment.

Moral stigma attached to an occupation can scar workers through discrediting, shaming, and denying respect. It can also open the door to interpersonal mistreatment, but little is known about how morally stigmatized workers navigate anticipated disrespect to potentially avoid harm. We explore this issue in a study of an occupation carrying severe moral stigma and where disrespect and workplace mistreatment are pervasive: models in hip-hop and rap music videos. Through analyses of 71 interviews with 48 video models and 19 industry informants, field observations, and archival data, we show how severe moral stigma and industry constraints promote generalized disrespect of video models (i.e., denial of worth to all role occupants) and, thus, each model's personal vulnerability to mistreatment. Two distinct groups of models emerged from our analysis-those who viewed themselves as emboldened in their role identity and those who did not-and this emboldened role identity was associated with differing perceptions of their personal vulnerability to mistreatment and their behaviors to mitigate it. The first group of models, those reporting an emboldened role identity, perceived their vulnerability to mistreatment as controllable. They strategically used both assertive behaviors (that earned respect from others) and passive behaviors (that avoided disrespect from others) to mitigate mistreatment. By contrast, the second group perceived their vulnerability to mistreatment as uncontrollable and reported using only passive behaviors (to avoid disrespect) when mistreatment was imminent. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our findings, advancing knowledge of dirty work, workplace mistreatment, respect dynamics, and identity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

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Examining the effectiveness of interventions to reduce discriminatory behavior at work: An attitude dimension consistency perspective.

Academic interest in reducing discrimination has produced substantial research testing interventions to mitigate biased outcomes. However, disparate findings and a scarcity of studies examining work-related behavioral measures make it challenging to determine which interventions are better suited to reduce workplace discrimination. Derived from the tripartite theory of attitudes and the principle of compatibility, I develop a conceptual model mapping the attitude focus of interventions and code studies in this literature from the past two decades for these common properties. Based on a meta-analysis of 70 articles totaling 208 effect sizes, I test this conceptual model, finding that it helps explain why some interventions to reduce discrimination yield superior outcomes relative to others. In particular, results indicate that passive interventions, such as short-term education or reminders of bias processes, are largely ineffective in shifting behavior. Conversely, the class of interventions that targets behavior directly by attempting to inhibit the manifestation of bias (e.g., making individuals accountable for their decisions or changing social norms) emerged as the most helpful category of interventions in this area. Overall, results support a key prediction of the attitude dimension consistency perspective, demonstrating that aligning the attitude dimension primarily targeted by an intervention and the outcome measured could lead to improved results in this area. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

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Euphemism as a powerful framing device that influences moral judgments and punitive responses after wrongdoing.

Euphemism-that is, softening words or phrases substituted for more direct language-has become pervasive in our everyday personal and professional lives. Leveraging theory and research on construal and framing effects, we conceptualize euphemism as a linguistic framing device that influences how observers construe situations and the people, groups, objects, and events within them. We then experimentally investigate the effects of euphemism as a linguistic framing device on third-party judgments about moral transgressions (i.e., bribery, fraud). Across studies (total N = 3,081) we find consistent evidence that employing euphemistic labels (relative to their noneuphemistic analogs) reduces the perceived severity of moral transgressions and, as a result, also reduces third-party motivations to punish transgressors. Overt experimental manipulations to reconstrue euphemistic labels into their noneuphemistic forms reduced, but did not entirely eliminate, the effects on moral severity and punishment judgments. Participants did not sufficiently adjust their judgments. These findings underscore the power of simple linguistic manipulations in influencing public opinion, and they have important implications for the possibility of creating a more just and fair society. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

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Navigating inter-team competition: How information broker teams achieve team innovation.

Organizations are increasingly using teams to stimulate innovation. Often, these teams share knowledge and information with each other to help achieve their goals, while also competing for resources and striving to outperform each other. Importantly, based on their industry, the nature of work, or prior history, some teams may face more competition from peer teams than others. Our research examines how teams' competitive relations with other teams in the organization operate in tandem with their collaborative inter-team information exchange relations in impacting their innovation. Using two studies-a field study of 73 knowledge-intensive teams in high-tech engineering firms and a team-based network experimental study of 162 teams-we find that a high degree of overall competition with many peer teams reduces a focal team's ability to acquire and utilize diverse knowledge from these teams (i.e., inter-team knowledge integration), thereby hindering team innovation. However, applying insights from network structural hole theory, we find that when a focal team occupies a brokerage position in the inter-team information exchange network, this can help buffer the effects of competition in getting access to knowledge resources from other teams, thus enabling their innovation. Additionally, we find that focal broker teams' dealmaking and network obstruction behaviors explain these effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

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The influence of friends' person-organization fit during recruitment.

Although recruitment and perceptions of fit are inherently social-as they reflect the interactions between applicants and recruiting firms-applicants' social networks during recruitment can exert both positive and potentially negative consequences for subsequent applicant perceptions and behaviors. In this study, we examine the role of applicants' friends' perceptions of fit with the same recruiting organizations. Integrating ideas from social information processing theory and the person-organization (P-O) fit literature, we argue that friends' P-O fit perceptions drive social learning and social influence processes for applicants, thus predicting applicant perceptions and behaviors toward recruiting firms. In addition, we posit that the direct and indirect relationships between friends' P-O fit perceptions and applicants' own fit perceptions and job choices with recruiting firms are further strengthened by how centrally connected applicants are within their friend networks. Using a sample of 576 applicant-firm observations from 178 job applicants, we found that friends' P-O fit perceptions are positively related to applicant P-O fit perceptions and job choice decisions. Furthermore, applicants' position in their network-assessed via applicants' outdegree centrality within their friend group-strengthened the relationship between friends' P-O fit and applicant P-O fit as well as with their job choice decisions. Our research provides important theoretical and empirical findings on the influence of applicants' friends during recruitment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

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When time theft promotes performance: Measure development and validation of time theft motives.

The prevailing viewpoint has long depicted employee time theft as inherently detrimental. However, this perspective may stem from a limited understanding of the underlying motives that drive such behavior. Time theft can paradoxically be motivated by neutral and even laudable intentions, such as promoting work efficiency, thus rendering it potentially beneficial and constructive. Across three mixed-methods studies, we explore the motives behind employee time theft, develop and validate an instrument to assess these motives, and examine how they differentially predict time theft behavior. Specifically, in Study 1, we use a qualitative method and identify 11 types of time theft motives. Study 2 embarks on the development of measures of these motives, subsequently validating their factor structure. Study 3 examines their incremental variance in predicting time theft behavior by controlling for personality and demographic variables. Overall, these studies reveal that employees' engagement in time theft can be driven not solely by self-oriented motives but also by others- and work-oriented motives. Further, each of these motives provides incremental value in understanding time theft behavior. Implications for both research and practice emanating from these findings are also discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

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Emergence in context: How team-client psychological contract fulfillment is associated with the emergence of team identification or team-member exchange.

Psychological contracts have been theorized to occur at different levels of analysis and with different exchange parties. In this article, we develop the concept of team-client psychological contract fulfillment (team-client PCF) as a team-level social exchange indicator, reflecting the team members' perceptions of the degree of fulfillment of the commitments a client promised to a team. Using the multilevel group-process framework (Lang et al., 2019) and a sample of newly formed self-managed teams consisting of 838 observations, nested in 244 individuals, 56 teams, and in four waves of data, we tested the claim that team-client PCF may determine the type of collective states that emerge within the team. When team-client PCF is higher, it should create conditions for the emergence of team states related to team maintenance (i.e., team identification), whereas when team-client PCF is lower, it is more likely that teams develop states related to the regulation of team performance (i.e., team-member exchange [TMX]). Our results support our hypotheses. We discuss implications for both the psychological contract literature as well as the team dynamics literature (especially team dynamics of team identification and TMX). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

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The identity conflict process: Appraisal theory as an integrative framework for understanding identity conflict at work.

Identity conflict-the experience of perceiving incompatibilities between aspects of one's identity content that call into question the individual's ability to meet the identity standard of at least one of these identities-can significantly impact individuals' work experiences. As individuals navigate experiences of identity conflict at work, managers and organizations also grapple with how to support employees' multiple identities while mitigating the primarily negative outcomes of identity conflict. However, the scholarship on work-relevant identity conflict faces several challenges, including disciplinary fragmentation, conceptual imprecision, and diverse but deficient theoretical perspectives, which together have limited our ability to accumulate knowledge about this experience and to develop useful management tools. To overcome these, we conducted a thorough review of the cross-disciplinary literature, allowing us to offer a refined integrative definition of identity conflict and a reconceptualization of identity conflict as the result of an appraisal process. As we delineate what we know about the appraisal process of identity conflict, we provide a detailed theoretical explanation of its antecedents, outcomes, and responses and shed light on the mechanisms that drive the process. This approach not only enhances theoretical depth and guides new research directions but also equips managers to address and reduce identity conflict experienced by their employees. This research contributes to the literature by offering clarity and coherence to the identity conflict domain, providing theoretical and practical guidance, and outlining promising directions for future inquiry. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

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