The Journal of applied psychology
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Meta Analysis
Is the employee-organization relationship dying or thriving? A temporal meta-analysis.
There is controversy concerning whether, in recent years, organizational failures to act benevolently toward employees have lessened employees' social-exchange relationship (SER) with their work organization or whether, on the contrary, organizations' more favorable treatment of employees has strengthened the SER. With samples of U. S. employees, we examined changes over the past 3 decades in three key elements of the SER: perceived organizational support (POS: 317 samples, including 121,469 individuals), leader-member exchange (LMX: 191 samples, including 216,975 individuals), and affective organizational commitment (383 samples, including 116,766 individuals). ⋯ LMX and affective commitment show levels near neutral, and POS has increased to only a moderately positive level. In contrast, the relationships between these elements with distributive and procedural justice and extra-role performance remain substantial. These findings suggest that employees on average do not currently have strong exchange relationships with their work organization but remain ready to more fully engage based on perceived voluntary favorable treatment by the work organization and its representatives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
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To gain endorsement from their managers, should employees be direct with explicit change suggestions, or should they be indirect with questions and hints? We draw on psychological threat and communication clarity theories to offer competing hypotheses with respect to the association between voice directness and managerial endorsement. We then further draw from social judgment research to theorize whether the relationship between voice directness and managerial endorsement might be modified by voicer politeness and voicer credibility. The results of an experimental study and two field studies show that being direct about change-oriented suggestions is associated with more frequent managerial endorsement when voicers are credible (Studies 1 and 2 in the United States) or polite (Study 3 in China). We discuss implications of these findings, limitations, and directions for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
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Reports an error in "Why and when hierarchy impacts team effectiveness: A meta-analytic integration" by Lindred L. Greer, Bart A. de Jong, Maartje E. Schouten and Jennifer E. ⋯ Additionally, we show that the negative relationship between hierarchy and team performance is exacerbated by aspects of the team structure (i.e., membership instability, skill differentiation) and the hierarchy itself (i.e., mutability), which make hierarchical teams prone to conflict. The predictions regarding the positive effect of hierarchy on team performance as mediated by coordination-enabling processes, and the moderating roles of several aspects of team tasks (i.e., interdependence, complexity) and the hierarchy (i.e., form) were not supported, with the exception that task ambiguity enhanced the positive effects of hierarchy. Given that our findings largely support dysfunctional views on hierarchy, future research is needed to understand when and why hierarchy may be more likely to live up to its purported functional benefits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
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We utilize the social intuitionist approach to moral judgment and moral disengagement theory to understand why and when employees sabotage customers. We contend that when customers mistreat employees (i.e., customer mistreatment), employees experience intuitive emotional reactions in the form of hostility, which automatically activates devaluation of targets, a specific facet of moral disengagement. In turn, employees become unencumbered by moral self-regulation and sabotage customers who mistreat them (i.e., customer-directed sabotage). ⋯ We test our theoretical model using a field sample of customer service employees and an experimental study to establish causality. Our results provide general support for our hypotheses. We discuss theoretical and practical implications and opportunities for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
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Multiple team membership is common in today's team-based organizations, but little is known about its relationship with collective effectiveness across teams. We adopted a microfoundations framework utilizing existing individual- and team-level research to develop a higher-level perspective on multiple team membership's relationship with performance of entire units of teams. We tested our predictions with data collected from 849 primary care units of the Veterans Health Administration serving over 4.2 million patients. In this context, we found multiple team membership is negatively associated with unit performance, and this negative relationship is exacerbated by task complexity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).