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Executive functions are the cognitive abilities that enable individuals to effectively manage their attention. The efficient management of attention facilitates performance when individuals must think and act quickly and adaptively, or when job demands are novel and time is constrained. In organizations, these executive functions may be especially relevant for how successful leaders and managers perform in their several roles and how they further organizational goals. Yet, organizational behavior research has largely neglected an executive functioning lens. The present work illustrates how the core facets of executive functions—inhibition, working memory, and shifting—have implications for leadership and management outcomes by influencing common leadership tasks: decision-making, planning and monitoring, problem solving, negotiating, and innovating. Our goal is to supplement prevailing explanations of these tasks (e.g., general intelligence and job knowledge) with this executive functioning lens. We provide strategies for organizations to assess and bolster these executive functions in their leaders and managers and urge future organizational research to consider the important role of executive functions involved in the selection, training, and management of leaders and managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few studies have examined the effect of intergroup threat on cognitive outcomes such as memory. Different theoretical perspectives can inform how intergroup threat should affect memory for threat-relevant and neutral information, such as the mood-congruency approach, Yerkes-Dodson law, Easterbrook's theory, and also evolutionary perspectives. To test among these, we conducted two experiments to examine how exposure to intergroup threats affected memory compared to control conditions. In study 1, we manipulated symbolic threat and examined participants' memory for threat and neutral words. In study 2, memory performance was assessed following the induction of realistic threat. Across the studies, in the control condition participants showed better memory for threat-related than neutral information. However, participants under threat remembered neutral information as well as threat-related information. In addition, participants in the threat condition remembered threat-related information as well as participants in the control condition. The findings are discussed in terms of automatic vigilance processes but also the effects of threat on arousal and its effect on information processing. This latter perspective, suggests paradoxically, that under some circumstances involving an outgroup threat, non-threatening information about outgroups can be extensively processed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]