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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]

Although emerging actor-centric research has revealed that performing morally laden behaviors shapes how employees behave subsequently, less is known about what work behaviors may emerge following employees' unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB)—a unique behavior with competing moral connotations. We integrate the moral self-regulation literature with research on micro corporate social responsibility (CSR) to develop and test a theoretical framework articulating how perceived CSR initiatives reconcile the morally paradoxical nature of UPB and how people respond to such behavior. We propose that, given its dual moral nature, performing UPB simultaneously increases feelings of moral deficit (which triggers moral cleansing) and psychological entitlement (which triggers moral licensing). Importantly, perceived CSR initiatives moderate these countervailing psychological experiences by strengthening feelings of moral deficit while weakening psychological entitlement, which respectively result in increased service-oriented helping behavior and decreased deviant behavior. Results from a scenario-based lab study, an online experiment, and two field studies largely corroborate our propositions. This research provides a finer-grained understanding of the complex moral self-regulation processes that employees experience at work and highlights why and how organizations' CSR initiatives affect employees' moral mindsets and behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do leaders lead in a complex environment? Leaders often rely on help from others. However, not all help is necessarily beneficial to leaders, especially when it is offered without being asked (i.e., proactive helping). Unfortunately, theory to date has failed to understand the consequences associated with leaders' receipt of proactive helping at work. To address this shortcoming, we integrate theories of approach–avoidance and challenge–hindrance to unravel how leaders respond to receipt of proactive helping at work, which enabled us to capture both favorable and unfavorable responses to receipt of proactive helping. Our results demonstrated that leaders with higher levels of approach-oriented characteristics were likely to perceive the receipt of proactive helping as more challenging and less hindering. We further found that leaders' challenge and hindrance appraisals prompt them to engage in transformational and laissez-faire leadership behaviors, respectively. Our work provides an answer to the question of why and under what conditions leaders' receipt of proactive helping results in constructive leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social comparison processes were integral to the origins of the organizational justice literature, and are incorporated within several justice-based constructs and theories. Yet, despite this, the justice social comparison literature is theoretically underdeveloped; while the extant literature affirms that justice social comparisons influence employee outcomes, it does not explain why, when, or for whom these effects occur. We build new theory on why justice social comparison perceptions influence employee behavior (specifically, helping and instigated incivility) by viewing the phenomenon through a self-regulatory lens. Doing so enables us to identify a novel explanatory mechanism and boundary condition for these effects. In two experience sampling studies, each conducted over multiple weeks, we test our proposed mechanism—envy and self-regulatory resource depletion—against four alternative justice-based mechanisms derived from equity theory, the group engagement model, social exchange theory, and referent cognitions theory. Findings were consistent with our theorizing, verifying that our integration of self-regulation with social comparison processes offers new insights to the justice literature. Overall, our scholarship has the potential to change the conversation about social comparisons in the justice literature by revitalizing a foundational aspect of justice rarely considered in contemporary research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literatures on emotion regulation and emotional labor have generated a considerable amount of knowledge on the relative effectiveness of how people regulate their emotional displays when their feelings are misaligned. By comparison, scholars have ignored the importance of what emotions individuals were feeling prior to the emotion regulation attempt vis-à-vis the emotions they made an effort to display. The consideration of individuals' emotional origins and destinations during an emotion regulation episode leads to the key tenet that both distance and direction are essential concepts that must be integrated into theory and research on emotion regulation. Accordingly, we reconceptualize emotion regulation as a journey involving the joint interplay of distance, direction, and method of travel. Drawing from the circumplex model of affect, we introduce the concepts of "emotional distance" and "emotional direction" to map the discrepancies between the emotion an individual currently feels and the emotion that individual attempts to display via emotion regulation. We describe how emotional distance and emotional direction augment constructs and theories relevant to emotion regulation, and we explain how the combined consideration of distance, direction, and method of travel is necessary to fully understand the intrapersonal consequences of regulating emotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of upper echelons research focuses on the background characteristics and traits of executives to explain their strategic choices, but much less is understood about the information-filtering process by which those characteristics manifest in strategic decisions. We develop theory to explain how executives process information by integrating construal-level theory with upper echelons theory. Construal-level theory describes how the same event can be interpreted in different ways, thus influencing the type of information people pay attention to, how they process that information, and their resulting decisions and actions. Our theoretical framework explores the dynamic nature of construal levels by developing two new constructs: construal shifts and construal flexibility. In doing so we draw on self-regulation research to detail how executives can develop the capacity to modify how they process information to best meet changing situational demands. As an illustrative example, we apply our theory to the acquisition context and demonstrate the vital role played by construal shifts and flexibility for executives attempting to manage complex strategic actions. The end result is a framework that executives can use to effectively navigate the challenging acquisition process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1994, R. G. Lord and P. E. Levy proposed a variant of control theory that incorporated human information processing principles. The current article evaluates the empirical evidence for their propositions and updates the theory by considering contemporary research on information processing. Considerable support drawing from diverse literatures was found for propositions concerning the activation of goal-relevant information, the inhibition of goal-irrelevant information, and the consequences of goal completion. These effects were verified by meta-analytic analyses, which also supported the meaningfulness of such effects on the basis of their unstandardized magnitudes. The authors conclude by proposing new directions for this version of control theory by invoking recent theorizing on goal emergence and the importance of velocity and acceleration information for goal striving and by reviewing research in cognitive neuroscience.