The Journal of applied psychology
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This study examined the moderating role of personality traits in the relationship between leader behavior and burnout. In two samples, employees (N = 91; N = 190) filled out the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey and rated their leader's autocratic and charismatic leader behavior and their own neuroticism and internal work locus of control. As expected, neuroticism and internal work locus of control moderated the relationship between leader behavior and burnout. ⋯ The relationship between autocratic leadership and burnout was positive for neurotic individuals, whereas for emotionally stable individuals this relationship weakened. These results were consistent across two independent samples: one with individual employee ratings of manager's leadership styles and the other with aggregate ratings of manager's leadership styles among employees in diverse organizations. Thus, although charismatic and autocratic leader behavior may respectively act to hinder or enhance overload and stress, the relationship between these leadership styles and burnout differs for followers with different traits.
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The authors propose that in mission-driven organizations, prosocially motivated employees are more likely to perform effectively when trust cues enhance their perceptions of task significance. The authors develop and test a model linking prosocial motivation, trust cues, task significance, and performance across 3 studies of fundraisers using 3 different objective performance measures. In Study 1, perceiving managers as trustworthy strengthened the relationship between employees' prosocial motivation and performance, measured in terms of calls made. ⋯ It also revealed 3-way interactions between prosocial motivation, manager trustworthiness, and dispositional trust propensity, such that high trust propensity compensated for low manager trustworthiness to strengthen the association between employees' prosocial motivation and performance. Study 3 replicated all of the previous mediation and moderation findings in predicting initiative taken by professional fundraisers. Implications for work motivation, work design, and trust in organizations are discussed.
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Inferences about the relationships between scores on selection tests and measures of job performance are often made on the basis of an assessment of the match between the content of the test and the content of the job. However, there is little evidence that these test-to-job comparisons have any bearing on the criterion-related validity of selection tests. The authors show that conclusions reached in analyses of cognitive tests-that content matching is largely irrelevant to criterion-related validity-can be generalized to most sets of selection tests (e.g., psychomotor and performance tests, interview ratings, biodata scores, knowledge tests, work sample tests) that are positively correlated with one another and with the criterion. When the universe of potential predictors shows positive manifold, almost all possible sets of test batteries will yield similar outcomes and show similar validities, regardless of whether the content of these tests matches the content of the job.