The Journal of applied psychology
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The authors demarcated mental efficacy and physical efficacy at the team level, and they explored these 2 factors as outcomes of 4 potential inputs and as predictors of 3 outcomes among 110 newly formed action teams in a military setting. Both types of team efficacy benefited from greater team size and an initial experience of enactive mastery, but they were not influenced by teams' female representation or knowledge pool. In terms of predictive contributions, both mental and physical efficacy facilitated internal social cohesion, yet only mental efficacy promoted problem solving and observed teamwork effectiveness.
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A longitudinal field experiment was designed to test the efficacy of a new type of orientation program in facilitating sojourners' organizational and cultural entry. Focused on stress coping, this new approach to orientation has the following features: (a) a thorough needs assessment identified the major stressors from both organizational and cultural entry, (b) sojourners were provided with realistic information regarding their future tasks and environment, and (c) sojourners were taught various coping skills to handle the major stressors. Seventy-two new graduate students from Asia entering a large midwestern public university in the United States were randomly assigned to either a traditional orientation program or the new program. ⋯ Results show that participants in the new orientation program had lower pre-entry expectations, felt less stressed, and reported higher levels of academic and interaction adjustment at 6 and 9 months post-entry than participants in the traditional orientation program. Many of the beneficial effects from the new orientation experience were not immediately apparent; rather, they emerged over time. Sojourner stress was found to mediate some of the treatment effects, as predicted.
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The authors propose that broad aspects of lateral relationships, conceptualized as coworker support and coworker antagonism, are linked to important individual employee outcomes (role perceptions, work attitudes, withdrawal, and effectiveness) in a framework that synthesizes several theoretical predictions. From meta-analytic tests based on 161 independent samples and 77,954 employees, the authors find support for most of the proposed linkages. ⋯ The authors also observe differential strengths of coworker influence based on its valence, content, and severity, and on the social intensity of the task environment. The authors conclude with a call for more comprehensive, complex theory and investigation of coworker influences as part of the social environment at work.
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The authors examined the role of employee conscientiousness as a moderator of the relationships between psychological contract breach and employee behavioral and attitudinal reactions to the breach. They collected data from 106 newly hired employees within the 1st month of employment (Time 1), 3 months later (Time 2), and 8 months after Time 1 (Time 3) to observe the progression through contract development, breach, and reaction. ⋯ In contrast, employees who were higher in conscientiousness reduced their job performance to a greater degree in response to contract breach. Future research directions are discussed.
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Although earlier studies have shown significant positive relationships between leader-member exchange (LMX) and its outcomes, they have also noted that the effect sizes of these relationships have been modest and heterogeneous. Addressing numerous calls for future studies that examine potential moderators of the LMX-job performance and LMX-job satisfaction relationships and utilizing a multidomain perspective, this study tests the moderating roles of personal (i.e., locus of control) and task-related (i.e., task autonomy) factors on these relationships. ⋯ Moreover, the results suggested that the LMX-job satisfaction relationship was stronger when task autonomy was high as opposed to when it was low. Finally, contrary to theoretical expectations, employees' locus of control did not moderate the LMX-job satisfaction relationship.