Journal of Applied Psychology

Vaziri, Hoda; Casper, Wendy J.; Wayne, Julie Holliday; Matthews, Russell A.

doi: 10.1037/apl0000819pmid: 32866024

Employees around the world have experienced sudden, significant changes in their work and family roles due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, applied psychologists have limited understanding of how employee experiences of work–family conflict and enrichment have been affected by this event and what organizations can do to ensure better employee functioning during such societal crises. Adopting a person-centered approach, we examine transitions in employees’ work–family interfaces from before COVID-19 to after its onset. First, in Study 1, using latent profile analysis (N = 379; nonpandemic data), we identify profiles of bidirectional conflict and enrichment, including beneficial (low conflict and high enrichment), active (medium conflict and enrichment), and passive (low conflict and enrichment). In Study 2, with data collected before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, we replicate Study 1 profiles and explore whether employees transition between work–family profiles during the pandemic. Results suggest that although many remain in prepandemic profiles, positive (from active/passive to beneficial) and negative (from beneficial to active/passive) transitions occurred for a meaningful proportion of respondents. People were more likely to go through negative transitions if they had high segmentation preferences, engaged in emotion-focused coping, experienced higher technostress, and had less compassionate supervisors. In turn, negative transitions were associated with negative employee consequences during the pandemic (e.g., lower job satisfaction and job performance, and higher turnover intent). We discuss implications for future research and for managing during societal crises, both present and future.

Chen, Gilad; Eby, Lillian T.

doi: 10.1037/apl0000845pmid: 32940483

Hennekam, Sophie; Ladge, Jamie; Shymko, Yuliya

doi: 10.1037/apl0000832pmid: 32897086

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has raised the visibility of health care workers to the level of public heroes. We study this phenomenon by exploring how nonphysician health care workers, who traditionally believed they were invisible and undervalued, perceive their newfound elevated status during the pandemic. Drawing from a qualitative study of 164 health care workers, we find that participants interpreted the sudden visibility and social valorization of their work as temporary and treated it with skepticism, incredulity, and as devoid of genuinely transformative power. We seek to contribute to the recent call to develop novel approaches to understanding the contours of the paradoxical nature of invisibility in the workplace by offering insights into what makes “invisible” workers accept or reject publicly driven elevation in their sudden social valorization.

Homan, Astrid C.; Gündemir, Seval; Buengeler, Claudia; van Kleef, Gerben A.

doi: 10.1037/apl0000482pmid: 31971407

The importance of leaders as diversity managers is widely acknowledged. However, a dynamic and comprehensive theory on the interplay between team diversity and team leadership is missing. We provide a review of the extant (scattered) research on the interplay between team diversity and team leadership, which reveals critical shortcomings in the current scholarly understanding. This calls for an integrative theoretical account of functional diversity leadership in teams. Here we outline such an integrative theory. We propose that functional diversity leadership requires (a) knowledge of the favorable and unfavorable processes that can be instigated by diversity, (b) mastery of task- and person-focused leadership behaviors necessary to address associated team needs, and (c) competencies to predict and/or diagnose team needs and to apply corresponding leadership behaviors to address those needs. We integrate findings of existing studies on the interplay between leadership and team diversity with insights from separate literatures on team diversity and (team) leadership. The resulting Leading Diversity model (LeaD) posits that effective leadership of diverse teams requires proactive as well as reactive attention to teams’ needs in terms of informational versus intergroup processes and adequate management of these processes through task- versus person-focused leadership. LeaD offers new insights into specific competencies and actions that allow leaders to shape the influence of team diversity on team outcomes and, thereby, harvest the potential value in diversity. Organizations can capitalize on this model to promote optimal processes and performance in diverse teams.

van Knippenberg, Daan; Hirst, Giles

doi: 10.1037/apl0000486pmid: 31985236

The idea that individual creativity derives from the interaction of personal traits and the situation in which the individual operates, is one of the most prominent themes within the creativity literature. A review of the literature highlights 5 distinct interaction patterns observed in person-in-situation creativity research (trait activation, trait inhibition, trait substitution, trait channeling, and curvilinear interactions). Yet at present there is no integrative theory that can predict and explain all 5 interaction patterns. To develop such integrative theory, we propose the motivational lens model of person-in-situation creativity. The motivational lens model offers an integrative theoretical account of person-in-situation interactions through a parsimonious set of considerations: (a) whether the trait of interest is associated with intrinsic motivation for (activities conducive to) creativity or with extrinsic motivation (i.e., which can be directed toward creativity in response to extrinsic cues), (b) the extent to which the situation variable of interest reflects opportunities for creativity or expectations for creativity, and (c) whether the situation variable is linearly or curvilinearly related to opportunities or expectations. We discuss how the motivational lens model informs future creativity research and potentially person-in-situation research beyond the creativity domain.

Larson, Nicole L.; McLarnon, Matthew J. W.; O’Neill, Thomas A.

doi: 10.1037/apl0000479pmid: 31985237

Although team effectiveness research has advanced our understanding of team processes, much of this research has been based on static methodologies, despite the recognition that team processes change over time. Thus, the purpose of this article is to advance the team dynamics literature by developing and testing a theoretical account of team engagement in processes toward a deadline. We theorize about team process trajectories, which we suggest is the form of process change over time (i.e., pattern of increase/decrease). Further, we identify a key driver of process trajectories and consider the implications of trajectories for team performance. Results from a series of linear multilevel latent growth models suggested that teams’ engagement in strategy and planning, monitoring goal progress, and cooperative conflict management (cf. Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001) increased over time toward a deadline, and that steeper increases tended to be positively related to team performance. Finally, achievement-striving was found to be an important within-team factor driving team-specific process trajectories and was indirectly related to performance. This study provides new theoretical insights with respect to how teams engage in processes toward a deadline, along with team achievement-striving as a compositional input, and the performance implications of team process trajectories.

Hillebrandt, Annika; Barclay, Laurie J.

doi: 10.1037/apl0000485pmid: 31999136

Scholars have devoted significant attention to investigating when and why people cheat in organizations. However, there is increasing recognition that these behaviors can be difficult to eradicate, which points to the importance of understanding the consequences of cheating. Given that cheating violates moral norms that govern social relationships, it is critical to understand how cheating can influence social dynamics in the workplace. Drawing upon appraisal theories, we argue that cheating can have damaging consequences for individuals and their social relationships by eliciting shame. In turn, shame can reduce the extent to which individuals value receiving justice—a critical facilitator of social relationships in the workplace. We test our predictions across 6 studies using different samples and methodologies. In Study 1, we find that cheating is negatively associated with the importance people place on others upholding justice for them (i.e., overall justice values). In Studies 2–6, we demonstrate that shame plays a mediating role in this relationship, even in the presence of guilt and embarrassment. In Studies 3–5, we identify organizational identification as a moderator and show that the effect of cheating on shame is stronger for those with high (vs. low) identification. Theoretical implications include the importance of identifying the outcomes of cheating for individuals within organizational contexts, understanding the functional and dysfunctional consequences of shame, recognizing the differential effects of discrete emotions, and elucidating the role of identity within the context of cheating. We conclude with practical recommendations for managing cheating behaviors and their outcomes in the workplace.

Rosen, Christopher C.; Dimotakis, Nikolaos; Cole, Michael S.; Taylor, Shannon G.; Simon, Lauren S.; Smith, Troy A.; Reina, Christopher S.

doi: 10.1037/apl0000483pmid: 31999135

Over the past two decades, accumulating evidence has indicated that individuals experience challenge and hindrance stressors in qualitatively different ways, with the former being linked to more positive outcomes than the latter. Indeed, challenge stressors are believed to have net positive effects even though they can also lead to a range of strains, eliciting beliefs that managers can enhance performance outcomes by increasing the frequency of challenge stressors experienced in the workplace. The current article questions this conventional wisdom by developing theory that explains how different patterns of challenge stressor exposure influence employee outcomes. Across 2 field studies, our results supported our theory, indicating that when challenge stressors vary across time periods, they have negative indirect effects on employee performance and well-being outcomes. In contrast, when employees experience a stable pattern of challenge stressors across time periods, they have positive indirect effects on employee performance and well-being outcomes. These results, which suggest that the benefits of challenge stressors may not outweigh their costs when challenge stressors fluctuate, have important implications for theory and practice.