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To remain competitive, organizations tend to change their established ways of working, their strategy, the core values, and the organizational structure. Such thorough changes are referred to as transformational change. Unfortunately, transformational change is often unsuccessful because organizational members do not always welcome the change. Although organizations often expect their supervisors to be successful role-models and change-agents during the transformational change process, we argue that initiating transformational change could increase supervisors' hindrance stress levels, which may result in abusive behaviors towards employees. More specifically, in a multi-source survey and an experimental study, we find evidence that transformational change is associated with supervisors' experienced hindrance stress, which subsequently led to more abusive behaviors towards employees.

The issue of trust has increasingly attracted attention in the business ethics literature. Our aim is to contribute further to this literature by examining how the use of the carbon copy (cc) function in email communication influences felt trust. We develop the argument that the use of cc enhances transparency—representing an important characteristic of workplace ethics—and hence promotes trust. We further argue that a downside of the cc option may be that it can also be experienced as a control mechanism, which may therefore negatively affect trust. The results of our first study showed that the use of cc indeed enhances perceived transparency, but at the same time also leads to the experience of increased control. Building upon this insight, the findings of five subsequent studies consistently revealed that the use of cc negatively influences felt trust. More precisely, employees felt trusted the least when the supervisor was always included in cc (Studies 2 and 3). This effect on felt trust also negatively influenced how trustworthy the organizational climate was perceived (Study 4). We further replicated these results in two field surveys, which showed that the negative effect of cc on felt trust lowered perceptions of psychological safety (Study 5) and contributed to a culture of fear (Study 6). Taken together, our findings suggest that when transparency in email communications is experienced as a control mechanism, its use is perceived as unethical, rather than as ethical. Implications and recommendations for future business ethics research are discussed.

Managerial trickle-down effects refer to the tendency for supervisors to treat their subordinates in ways analogous to how they have been treated by their own bosses. Whereas trickle-down effects are widely documented, including in the justice literature, less is known about the conditions under which they are more versus less likely to emerge. Across two studies we examined how supervisors’ tendencies to exhibit interpersonal fairness are interactively determined by the informational fairness they receive from managers above them and supervisors’ sense of power. Study 1 was a multi-source survey conducted in organizational settings. Study 2 was an experiment in which we manipulated the informational fairness that supervisors received from managers and supervisors’ sense of power. The results of both studies showed that the positive relationship between the informational fairness received from managers and supervisors’ enactment of interpersonal fairness was stronger among supervisors who had a lower sense of power. This interactive effect did not emerge on supervisors’ enactment of other forms of fairness (distributive, procedural and informational), consistent with prior theory and research showing that interpersonal fairness allows for greater discretion than other forms of fairness. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed as are limitations and suggestions for future research.

Organizations that focus upon the development of positive emotions, from the individual to the organizational culture level, improve employee well-being, engagement and attitudes, as well as experi...

In today’s competitive work environment, organizations have to continually adjust their usual ways of working. These modifications organizations have to make to survive are often referred to as tra...

We conducted preregistered replications of 28 classic and contemporary published findings, with protocols that were peer reviewed in advance, to examine variation in effect magnitudes across samples and settings. Each protocol was administered to approximately half of 125 samples that comprised 15,305 participants from 36 countries and territories. Using the conventional criterion of statistical significance (p < .05), we found that 15 (54%) of the replications provided evidence of a statistically significant effect in the same direction as the original finding. With a strict significance criterion (p < .0001), 14 (50%) of the replications still provided such evidence, a reflection of the extremely highpowered design. Seven (25%) of the replications yielded effect sizes larger than the original ones, and 21 (75%) yielded effect sizes smaller than the original ones. The median comparable Cohen’s ds were 0.60 for the original findings and 0.15 for the replications. The effect sizes were small (< 0.20) in 16 of the replications (57%), and 9 effects (32%) were in the direction opposite the direction of the original effect. Across settings, the Q statistic indicated significant heterogeneity in 11 (39%) of the replication effects, and most of those were among the findings with the largest overall effect sizes; only 1 effect that was near zero in the aggregate showed significant heterogeneity according to this measure. Only 1 effect had a tau value greater than .20, an indication of moderate heterogeneity. Eight others had tau values near or slightly above .10, an indication of slight heterogeneity. Moderation tests indicated that very little heterogeneity was attributable to the order in which the tasks were performed or whether the tasks were administered in lab versus online. Exploratory comparisons revealed little heterogeneity between Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) cultures and less WEIRD cultures (i.e., cultures with relatively high and low WEIRDness scores, respectively). Cumulatively, variability in the observed effect sizes was attributable more to the effect being studied than to the sample or setting in which it was studied. UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Instituto de Investigaciones Psicológicas (IIP)

Drawing from the transactional theory of stress, we examined the relationships between authoritarian leadership, fear, defensive silence, and ultimately employee creativity. We also explored the moderating effect of employee psychological capital on these mediated relationships. We tested our hypothesized model in two studies of employee-supervisor dyads working in Africa (Nigeria; Study 1) and Asia (China; Study 2). The results of Study 1 revealed that the negative relationship between authoritarian leadership and creativity was mediated by employee defensive silence. Extending these findings in a three-wave study in Study 2, our results revealed a more complex relationship. Specifically, our results showed that both fear and defensive silence serially mediated the link between authoritarian leadership and employee creativity. In addition, we found that this mediated relationship was moderated by employee psychological capital such that the relationship was stronger when psychological capital was low (versus high). Implications for both theory and practice are discussed. ispartof: JOURNAL OF BUSINESS RESEARCH vol:92 pages:219-230 status: Published online

We study when and why perceptions of trustworthiness trickle down the organizational hierarchy to influence the performance of subordinates. Building on social learning theory, we argue that when supervisors perceive their managers as trustworthy, subordinates are more likely to also perceive their supervisor as trustworthy, which in turn enhances subordinate performance. We further argue that this trickle-down effect of trustworthiness perceptions emerges especially when the manager invites the supervisor to participate in decision-making. Finally, we propose that social learning processes that lead to supervisors exhibiting more trusting behavior toward their subordinates mediate this trickle-down effect. We find support for our predictions across one multisource field study (Study 1) and two experiments (Studies 2 and 3) that both use a yoked design. This research represents the first attempt to examine trickle-down effects related to trustworthiness, its impact on performance, and the mediating mechanisms by which those effects emerge. This research also provides the first empirical evidence about the role that social learning processes play in explaining trickle-down processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved). ispartof: JOURNAL OF APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY vol:103 issue:12 pages:1335-1357 ispartof: location:United States status: Published online

People morally evaluate norm violations that occur at various distances from the self (e.g., a corrupt politician vs. a cheating spouse). Yet, distance is rarely studied as a moderator of moral judgment processes. We focus on the influence of disgust on moral judgments, as evidence here has remained inconclusive. Based on feelings as information theory and the notion that disgust evolved as a pathogen avoidance mechanism, we argue that disgust influences moral judgment of psychologically distant (vs. near) norm violations. Studies 1 and 3 show that trait disgust sensitivity (but not trait anger and fear) more strongly predicts moral judgment of distant than near violations. Studies 2 and 4 show that incidental disgust affects moral judgment of distant (vs. near) violations and that the moderating role of distance is mediated by involvement of others (vs. the self) in the evaluator’s conceptualization of the violation.

Previous research suggests that charismatic leadership can have negative consequences for followers if the leader has self-centric and self-aggrandizing intentions. With this research we suggest th...

In this study, we explored the relationships between controlling leadership and employee creative performance by examining the mediating and moderating roles of fear and psychological capital. Usin...

In this present research, we examined how authoritarian leadership influence individual employees creativity. Specifically, we drew from the transactional model of stress to suggest that authoritar...