Search

Although gratitude is a key phenomenon that bridges helping with its outcomes, how and why helping relates to receipt of gratitude and its relation with helper's eudaimonic well-being have unfortunately been overlooked in organizational research. The purpose of this study is to unravel how helpers successfully connect to others and their work via receipt of gratitude. To do so, we distinguish different circumstances of helping-reactive helping (i.e., providing help when requested) versus proactive helping (i.e., providing help without being asked)-and examine their unique effect on the gratitude received by helpers, which, in turn, has downstream implications for helpers' perceived prosocial impact and work engagement the following day. Using daily experience sampling (Study 1) and critical incident (Study 2) methods, we found that reactive helping is more likely to be linked to receipt of gratitude than proactive helping. Receipt of gratitude, in turn, is associated with increases in perceived prosocial impact and work engagement the following day. Our study contributes to the helping literature by identifying receipt of gratitude as a novel mechanism that links helping to helper well-being, by distinguishing proactive and reactive helping, and by highlighting eudaimonic well-being as an outcome of helping for helpers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Incivility at work-low intensity deviant behaviors with an ambiguous intent to harm-has been on the rise, yielding negative consequences for employees' well-being and companies' bottom-lines. Although examinations of incivility have gained momentum in organizational research, theory and empirical tests involving dynamic, within-person processes associated with this negative interpersonal behavior are limited. Drawing from ego depletion theory, we test how experiencing incivility precipitates instigating incivility toward others at work via reduced self-control. Using an experience sampling design across 2 work weeks, we found that experiencing incivility earlier in the day reduced one's levels of self-control (captured via a performance-based measure of self-control), which in turn resulted in increased instigated incivility later in the day. Moreover, organizational politics-a stable, environmental factor-strengthened the relation between experienced incivility and reduced self-control, whereas construal level-a stable, personal factor-weakened the relation between reduced self-control and instigated incivility. Combined, our results yield multiple theoretical, empirical, and practical implications for the study of incivility at work. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).)

Employees help on a regular daily basis while at work, yet surprisingly little is known about how responding to help requests affects helpers. Although recent theory suggests that helping may come at a cost to the helper, the majority of the helping literature has focused on the benefits of helping. The current study addresses the complex nature of helping by simultaneously considering its costs and benefits for helpers. Using daily diary data across 3 consecutive work weeks, we examine the relationship between responding to help requests, perceived prosocial impact of helping, and helpers' regulatory resources. We find that responding to help requests depletes regulatory resources at an increasing rate, yet perceived prosocial impact of helping can replenish resources. We also find that employees' prosocial motivation moderates these within-person relationships, such that prosocial employees are depleted to a larger extent by responding to help requests, and replenished to a lesser extent by the perceived prosocial impact of helping. Understanding the complex relationship of helping with regulatory resources is important because such resources have downstream effects on helpers' behavior in the workplace. We discuss the implications of our findings for both theory and practice. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).)

Employees routinely make judgments of 3 kinds of justice (i.e., distributive, procedural, and interactional), yet they may lack clear information to do so. This research examines how justice judgments are formed when clear information about certain types of justice is unavailable or ambiguous. Drawing from fairness heuristic theory, as well as more general theories of cognitive heuristics, we predict that when information for 1 type of justice is unclear (i.e., low in justice clarity), people infer its fairness based on other types of justice with clear information (i.e., high in justice clarity). Results across 3 studies employing different designs (correlational vs. experimental), samples (employees vs. students), and measures (proxy vs. direct) provided support for the proposed substitutability effects, especially when inferences were based on clear interactional justice information. Moreover, we found that substitutability effects were more likely to occur when employees had high (vs. low) need for cognitive closure. We conclude by discussing the theoretical contributions and practical implications of our findings., ((c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).)

Although experiencing unfairness is a primary source of stress, there are surprisingly few studies that have examined the physiological underpinnings of unfairness. Drawing from social self-preservation theory, we derive predictions regarding the effects of interactional unfairness on activity in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis, which is one of the body's primary hormonal systems for responding to stress. Using an experimental design with objective physiological measures, we found support for our hypothesis that interactional unfairness triggers the release of cortisol by the HPA axis. This cortisol activity in turn mediated the effects of interactional unfairness on deviant behavior. This indirect effect remained significant after controlling for established attitudinal and self-construal mediators of the justice-deviance relationship. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings for the occupational stress and organizational justice literatures.

Both men and women who violate gender stereotypes incur backlashes, or penalties, for these transgressions. However, men who engage in warm, communal behaviors occasionally receive a boost (or benefit) for this female‐stereotyped behavior. To understand how and why warmth and gender interact to predict backlashes or boosts, we integrate uncertainty reduction theory with the stereotype content model and examine warmth by gender interactions. In our first study (a field examination of job seekers), we find that men receive a boost in hireability (i.e., an increased likelihood of obtaining a job offer) for exhibiting gender incongruent (i.e., high) levels of warmth, but women do not receive a backlash in hireability for exhibiting gender incongruent (i.e., low) levels of warmth. In our second study (a laboratory experiment), we replicate and extend these findings by elucidating why they occur: warmth reduces relational uncertainty for male, but not female, applicants. In our third study (another laboratory experiment), we again replicate and extend our findings by identifying when these effects are stronger: in male‐dominated roles. Our investigation suggests that the valence of the gender stereotype violation matters when it comes to hiring decisions. Indeed, we find that displaying warmth appears to promote, rather than impede, career outcomes for men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mindfulness has received increasing attention from scholars and practitioners, and considerable research has demonstrated the intrapersonal effects of mindfulness at work or at home. Research to date, however, has overlooked potential interpersonal effects of mindfulness across the work and family domains. Drawing on the spillover‐crossover model and the mindfulness literature, we investigate the effects of spouse mindfulness at home on employee work and family outcomes. We test our model using dyadic experience‐sampling data collected from 125 focal employees and their spouses over 10 consecutive workdays. The results indicated that, at the within‐person level, spouse mindfulness at home was positively associated with employee authentic emotional sharing at home, which, in turn, was positively associated with employee positive effect at home but negatively associated with employee negative affect at home. The results also indicated that spouse mindfulness at home had a positive indirect effect on family satisfaction at home and work engagement during the next morning through enhancing employee authentic emotional sharing at home. We discuss the implications of these findings and directions for the mindfulness research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central tenet of regulatory focus theory is that people hold more positive appraisals and exhibit greater dedication when their regulatory focus is congruent with the orientation of the immediate context, a phenomenon known as regulatory fit. Unfortunately, scant attention has been paid to regulatory fit in interpersonal contexts and the consequences of relationship partners having congruent promotion and prevention foci. Integrating regulatory fit theory with theories of relational leadership, we predicted that regulatory fit would enhance relationship quality and commitment within leader-follower dyads. These predictions were examined across three samples, using data collected from multiple sources and at multiple times. Our results indicated that promotion fit, prevention fit and the interaction between them predicted relationship quality and commitment to the leader, which in turn predicted leader-targeted citizenship behaviour and withdrawal cognition. These relationships remained after controlling for demographic fit and followers' and leader's individual regulatory foci. Practitioner points Leader-follower regulatory fit predicts high-quality relationship with one's supervisor., Leader-follower promotion fit predicts affective commitment to supervisor., Leader-follower prevention fit predicts normative commitment to supervisor., Promotion fit and prevention fit interact to have synergistic effects on outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]