Search

Many field office leaders contend that authoritarian leadership improves the performance of humanitarian operations. The common narrative is that authoritarian leadership helps aid workers more quickly adapt to changes and thus deliver better job performance (e.g., by improving operations in their field office). However, given that field reports often highlight extant leadership as the source of serious operational failures, could leaders with an authoritarian style be part of the problem? We draw on psychological theorizing on the nature of human motivation to address this question. Specifically, we note that many aid workers primarily join humanitarian operations with the prosocial motive to help beneficiaries. While proactive adaptability is inherent to prosocial motivation, we hypothesize that authoritarian leadership may curtail the relationship by impeding aid workers' autonomy. We find support for our theorizing in a sample of 299 humanitarian aid workers from the field. Additionally, we conducted 31 expert interviews to contextualize and validate our empirical findings. The paper concludes by discussing the findings' theoretical and managerial implications for humanitarian operations.

This paper seeks to explain when and why people respond to status threat at work with behaviors oriented toward either self-improvement or interpersonal harming. To that end, we extend the established static social comparison perspective on status threat. Specifically, we introduce the notion of temporal proximity of status threat, which is informed by five temporal social comparison markers. We argue that people construe distal future status gaps as a challenge (and thus show self-improvement-oriented responses), but construe a more proximal status gap as a threat (and thus engage in negative interpersonal behaviors). Further, we introduce three factors of uncertainty that may render the underlying temporal comparison less reliable, and thereby less useful for guiding one's response. Overall, our temporal social comparison theory integrates and extends current theorizing on status threat in organizations by fully acknowledging the dynamic nature of social comparisons. Plain Language Summary Employees often compare themselves to others to evaluate their status. If they perceive that their status is at threat or risk losing status, they engage in behaviors to prevent status loss. These behaviors can be positive, aimed at improving one's position or they can be negative, aimed at harming others. This paper develops a theoretical framework to examine when employees engage in more challenge- vs. threat-oriented behaviors. We argue that an important question how employees react to status threat is its temporal proximity—will an employee's status be threatened in the near versus distal future? We propose that the more distal (vs. proximate) the status threat is, the more employees gravitate towards challenge- and less threat-oriented behaviors. But how do employees know when a status threat occurs in the future? We argue that employees will compare their past status trajectories to co-workers’ status trajectories to mentally extrapolate the temporal proximity of such a threat. More specifically, we propose five characteristics (temporal markers) of social comparison trajectories that inform employees about the temporal proximity: their relative current position, the relative velocity and acceleration of their status trajectory, their relative mean status level, and their relative minimum and maximum status. Moreover, we suggest that employees’ conclusions from these markers are weakened by uncertainty in the “data stream” of social comparison information over time, that is, the length of the time span available, the amount of interruptions in this data stream, and the number of fluctuations in their own and others’ status trajectories.

Conducting organizational research via online surveys and experiments offers a host of advantages over traditional forms of data collection when it comes to sampling for more advanced study designs, while also ensuring data quality. To draw attention to these advantages and encourage researchers to fully leverage them, the present paper is structured into two parts. First, along a structure of commonly used research designs, we showcase select organizational psychology (OP) and organizational behavior (OB) research and explain how the Internet makes it feasible to conduct research not only with larger and more representative samples, but also with more complex research designs than circumstances usually allow in offline settings. Subsequently, because online data collections often also come with some data quality concerns, in the second section, we synthesize the methodological literature to outline three improvement areas and several accompanying strategies for bolstering data quality.Plain Language Summary: These days, many theories from the fields of organizational psychology and organizational behavior are tested online simply because it is easier. The point of this paper is to illustrate the unique advantages of the Internet beyond mere convenience—specifically, how the related technologies offer more than simply the ability to mirror offline studies. Accordingly, our paper first guides readers through examples of more ambitious online survey and experimental research designs within the organizational domain. Second, we address the potential data quality drawbacks of these approaches by outlining three concrete areas of improvement. Each comes with specific recommendations that can ensure higher data quality when conducting organizational survey or experimental research online.

While strategic management theories have heavily engaged with the reality of matrix organizations, leadership theories that actually focus on the people working within such arrangements are missing. We argue that (a) followers perceive dual leadership effectiveness to be more than the sum of each leader's effectiveness, (b) a core detriment to perceived dual leadership effectiveness is role conflict experienced by the follower, and (c) Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) needs to be theoretically extended to the triadic level to capture the influence of dual leadership. Specifically, followers’ role conflict and leadership effectiveness perceptions are driven not only by how they perceive their LMX relationships with both leaders, but also how they perceive the relationship quality between their leaders (dual leadership exchange, DLX). As such, even though higher LMX is still better than lower LMX, having a similar exchange relationship with both leaders reduces employees’ role conflict and, by extension, heightens dual leadership effectiveness. Additionally, we reason that when employees lack a good relationship with one of the leaders, higher DLX can act as a substitute. We find support for our hypotheses by applying polynomial regression analyses to a dataset of 111 managers from a matrix organization who report to both a regional and business unit leader.

Studies on abusive supervision typically posit that targets of abuse will either directly blame the perpetrating supervisor or indirectly blame the organization for allowing the abuse, and as a res...

Business scandals in the early 2000s gave renewed rise to the question of how companies can be led ethically. Correspondingly, research on ethical leadership focuses on leaders as moral persons—but even more so as moral managers. This focus came with a more general shift within many Western societies toward issues of sustainability, social justice, and well-being, and it has simultaneously given rise to the development of related constructs such as servant, respectful, and authentic leadership. In general, ethical leadership research has contributed to a necessary debate about leaders’ roles and responsibilities. Nonetheless, recent meta-analyses and critical reviews have criticized the minimal to nonexistent incremental value of the current operationalization of ethical leadership beyond other leadership concepts, underscored the philosophically all too simplistic notion of ethics underlying the concept, and highlighted its construct redundancy with the domain of follower-focused leadership. As such, there appear to be fruitful avenues for further honing the construct and its operationalization so that research can meaningfully inform leadership practice.

While managers generally seem to enjoy better mental health than regular employees, there are also plenty of reports about them suffering from burnout. The present study explores this relationship between hierarchy level and burnout in more detail. In doing so, we not only investigate what impact managerial rank may have on burnout, but we also contrast two different theoretically meaningful mediators for the relationship: sense of power (feeling in control over people) and work-related self-efficacy (feeling in control over tasks). The results of two surveys—the first with 580 managers (single-source) and the second with 154 managers matched with ratings from close others (multi-source)—show a negative relationship between managers’ hierarchy level and burnout that is explained by both mediators independently. Additional analyses reveal that high sense of power and high self-efficacy are both necessary conditions for low levels of burnout. Such fine-grained analyses allow us to understand why managers at the top are less threatened by burnout, in contrast to what some media reports suggest.

Academics have lamented that practitioners do not always adopt scientific evidence in practice, yet while academics preach evidence-based management (EBM), they do not always practice it. This paper extends prior literature on difficulties to engage in EBM with insights from behavioral integrity (i.e., the study of what makes individuals and collectives walk their talk). We focus on leader development, widely used but often critiqued for lacking evidence. Analyzing 60 interviews with academic directors of leadership centers at top business schools, we find that the selection of programs does not always align with scientific recommendations nor do schools always engage in high-quality program evaluation. Respondents further indicated a wide variety of challenges that help explain the disconnect between business schools claiming A but practicing B. Behavioral Integrity theory would argue these difficulties are rooted in the lack of an individually owned and collectively endorsed identity, an identity of an evidence-based leader developer (EBLD). A closer inspection of our data confirmed that the lack of a clear and salient EBLD identity makes it difficult for academics to walk their evidence-based leader development talk. We discuss how these findings can help facilitate more evidence-based leader development in an academic context.

The literature has widely discussed and supported the relationship between poverty and support for authoritarian leaders and regimes. However, there are different claims about the mediating mechanism and a lack of empirical tests. We hypothesize that the effect of poverty on support for authoritarianism is mediated by shame: People living in poverty frequently experience social exclusion and devaluation, which is reflected in feelings of shame. Such shame, in turn, is likely to increase support for authoritarianism, mainly due to the promise of social re-inclusion. We support our hypothesis in two controlled experiments and a large-scale field study while empirically ruling out the two main alternative explanations offered in the literature: stress and anxiety. Finally, we discuss how the present findings can support policymakers in efficiently addressing the negative political consequences of poverty.

Abstract. We propose that two aspects of leadership, perceived respectful leadership and the degree of leaders’ prototypicality, positively affect employee proactivity. A multisource and multilevel field study of 234 employees supervised by 62 leaders shows that respectful leadership relates positively to employee proactivity in terms of personal initiative and that leader group prototypicality diminishes this effect. Moreover, perceived respectful leadership and prototypicality substitute for one another in their relation to follower proactivity. This study contributes to previous research that shows leader–follower relationships enhance proactivity by showing the impact of perceived respectful leadership and leader group prototypicality.

Public corporations often appoint external former founders to their boards in hope that they will encourage a (re‐)focus on creating future new business. Seeking to investigate this common practice, we integrate upper echelons theory with imprinting theory, arguing that founding a company indeed represents a formative experience that will leave an imprint on founders and their subsequent board decision‐making. Subsequent to their founding experience, however, some founders may be subjected to likewise formative but public corporate experiences, for instance, by taking their own business public or by assuming CEO positions in other corporations, that will lead to a decay of the original founding imprint and its effect. We find support for our reasoning across corporate boards in S&P1500 firms ranging from 2000 to 2012.

Although authentic leadership has been shown to inform a host of positive outcomes at work, the literature has dedicated little attention to identifying its personal antecedents and effective means to enhance it. Building on strong theoretical links and initial evidence, we propose mindfulness as a predictor of authentic leadership. In 2 multi-source field studies (cross-sectional and experimental), we investigated (a) the role of leaders’ trait mindfulness and (b) the effectiveness of a low-dose mindfulness intervention for perceptions of authentic leadership. The results of both studies confirmed a positive relation between leaders’ trait mindfulness and authentic leadership as rated by both followers and leaders. Moreover, the results of study 2 showed that the intervention increased authentic leadership via gains in leaders’ mindfulness, as perceived by both followers and leaders. In addition, we found that the intervention positively extended to followers’ work attitudes via authentic leadership. The paper concludes with a discussion of the study’s implications for leadership theory and leader development.

Contrary to an often-found result in the organizational justice literature, we suggest that there may be circumstances under which organization members will not perform poorly in response to being on the receiving end of low procedural fairness. To explain the theoretical mechanism, we integrate the group engagement model of justice with the emotion regulation perspective. Specifically, we argue that the detrimental effect of lower procedural fairness on performance is attenuated when individuals engage in reappraisal. Moreover, this is the case because reappraisal makes lower procedural fairness less likely to undermine self-perceived standing in the organization. Three experiments and a multisource survey among employees reveal support for these predictions. This research contributes to the organizational justice literature by showing that reappraisal can help maintain performance when people have experienced low procedural fairness, extending the typical finding that low procedural fairness undermines performance. Theoretical and practical implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

In the aftermath of various corporate scandals, management research and practice have taken great interest in ethical leadership. Ethical leadership is referred to as “normatively appropriate conduct” (Brown et al. in Organ Behav Hum Decis Process 97(2):117–134, 2005), but the prescriptive norms that actually underlie this understanding constitute an open question. We address this research gap by turning to relational models theory (Fiske in Structures of social life: the four elementary forms of human relations, Free Press, New York, 1991), which contextualizes four distinct moralities in four distinct interactional norms (i.e., the relational models). We expect that the norms inherent in each model dictate the type of leader relationship that followers deem ethical. Specifically, we hypothesize that, for each norm, followers will perceive leaders as less ethical the more discrepant, i.e., the more incongruent, followers’ ideal relational norm is with the perceived norm that they attribute to their actual leader–follower interaction. We tested the respective incongruence hypothesis in a cross-sectional survey of 101 Dutch employees. Polynomial regression and surface response analyses provide support for the hypothesized incongruence effects in each of the four relational models, suggesting that normatively appropriate conduct should not be limited to caring (i.e., community-oriented) behaviors. Indeed, all four relational models can predict ethical leadership perceptions. We discuss the implications in the context of ethical leadership research and managerial practice.

The extant social undermining literature suggests that employees envy and, consequently, undermine coworkers when they feel that these coworkers are better off and thus pose a threat to their own current status. With the present research, we draw on the sociofunctional approach to emotions to propose that an anticipated future status threat can similarly incline employees to feel envy toward, and subsequently undermine, their coworkers. We argue that employees pay special attention to coworkers' past development in relation to their own, because faster-rising coworkers may pose a future status threat even if they are still performing worse in absolute terms in the present. With a set of two behavioral experiments (N = 90 and N = 168), we establish that participants react to faster-rising coworkers with social undermining behavior when the climate is competitive (vs. less competitive). We extended these results with a scenario experiment (N = 376) showing that, in these situations, participants extrapolate lower future status than said coworker and thus respond with envy and undermining behavior. A two-wave field study (N = 252) replicated the complete moderated serial mediation model. Our findings help to explain why employees sometimes undermine others who present no immediate threat to their status. As such, we extend theorizing on social undermining and social comparison. (PsycINFO Database Record

Practitioners repeatedly note that the everyday behavior of asking followers open questions and attentively listening to their responses is a powerful leadership technique. Yet, despite such popularity, these practices are currently undertheorized. Addressing this gap, we formally define the behavioral configuration of asking open questions combined with attentive listening as “respectful inquiry,” and we draw on self-determination theory to provide a motivational account of its antecedents, consequences, and moderators within a leader-follower relationship. Specifically, we argue that respectful inquiry principally satisfies followers’ basic psychological needs for competence, relatedness, and autonomy. Against this background, we highlight “paradoxical” contexts where respectful inquiry is likely to be especially rare but would also be especially valuable. These paradoxical contexts include situations where interpersonal power difference, time pressure, physical distance, cognitive load, follower dissat...

Integrating implicit leadership theory with intersectionality theory, we propose that the extent to which a manager is endorsed when claiming leadership is a function of a manager’s gender (i.e., b...

Disasters mobilize hundreds of organizations, but coordination among them remains a challenge. This is why the United Nations has formed clusters to facilitate information and resource exchange among humanitarian organizations. Yet, coordination failures in prior disasters raise questions as to the effectiveness of the cluster approach in coordinating relief efforts. To better understand barriers to coordination, we developed a grounded theory and augmented the theory with an agent-based simulation. Our theory discerns a cluster lead's roles of facilitating coordination, but also investing in its own ground operations. We find that specifically serving such a dual role impairs swift trust and consequent coordination among cluster members. The additional simulation findings generalize the detrimental effect of the cluster lead's dual role versus a pure facilitator role and specify it against various boundary conditions.

To safeguard the diffusion of verified health advice during the pandemic, researchers and practitioners jointly call for experts’ confident and authentic communication through social media. Yet, re...

Organizations often pay greater salaries to higher-ranking executives compared to lower-ranking executives. While this method can be useful for retaining those at the organization's apex, it may also incline executives at the bottom of the pay pyramid to see themselves at a disadvantage and thus exit the firm. Naturally, organizations often want to retain some of their lower-paid, but highly valuable executives; the question, then, is how organizations can reduce the turnover of lower-ranking executives. By integrating social with temporal comparison theory, we argue that, when executives earn relatively less than their peers, more pay growth (i.e., individual pay increases over time) leads to less turnover. The results of our analysis, which covered almost 20 years of objective data on a large sample of U.S. top executives, provide support for our theory.

We propose that one politician's disrespectful behavior can spill over to voters' generalized judgments of politicians and thereby affect trust in the political system. We delineate the spillover effect along the basic dimensions of social judgment, communion, and agency. Moreover, we argue that any spillover effect is contingent on the focal politicians' category prototypicality, that is, their representativeness of politicians as such. Conducting an experiment (N = 392) and a field study (N = 273), we found that politicians' respect only affected trust through generalized communion ratings. This spillover only occurred if the observed politician was perceived as prototypical. Our findings provide new insights on when and how individual politicians may be able to undermine voters' trust in the political system.

While many disciplines embrace the possibilities that Big Data present for advancing scholarship and practice, organizational and management research has yet to realize Big Data’s potential. In an effort to chart this newfound territory, we briefly describe the principal drivers and key characteristics of Big Data. We then review a broad range of opportunities and risks that are related to the Big Data paradigm, the data itself, and the associated analytical methods. For each, we provide research ideas and recommendations on how to embrace the potentials or address the concerns. Our assessment shows that Big Data, as a paradigm, can be a double- edged sword, capable of significantly advancing our field but also causing backlash if not utilized properly. Our review seeks to inform individual research practices as well as a broader policy agenda in order to advance organizational and management research as a scientifically rigorous and professionally relevant field.

Despite the proliferation of research on ethical leadership, there remains a limited understanding of how specifically the assumingly moral component of this leadership style affects employee behavior. Taking an identity perspective, we integrate the ethical leadership literature with research on the dynamics of the moral self-concept to posit that ethical leadership will foster a sense of moral identity among employees, which then inspires followers to adopt more ethical actions, such as increased organization citizenship behavior (OCB). We further argue that these identity effects should be more pronounced when leaders are perceived to be group prototypical, as their actions then speak louder to followers’ sense of identity. Two studies—a scenario experiment with 138 participants and a field study with 225 employees—provided support for our hypothesized moderated mediation model. Perceived ethical leadership positively affected OCB via followers’ moral identity but only under conditions of high perceived leader group prototypicality. We discuss how the identity pathway of ethical leadership can facilitate novel theorizing about moral transference. Our findings also suggest that, when hiring external ethical leaders or training internal managers, practitioners are well advised to consider that these individuals may only be effective in morally transforming followers when they are perceived as prototypical for the group.

Abstract. Many organizations use pay-for-performance (PfP) programs in order to fuel employee motivation and performance. In the present article, we argue that PfP may also increase employees’ interpersonal deviance (i.e., active harming behavior toward coworkers) because it might induce social comparison and competition. In order to uncover the underlying process, we further argue that this effect should be particularly pronounced for employees who are high in individual competitiveness, that is, employees who have a strong desire for interpersonal comparison and aspire to be better than others. A cross-sectional field study (N = 250) and two experiments (N = 92; N = 192) provide support for our interaction hypothesis. We discuss the theoretical implications regarding PfP and competitiveness, and offer suggestions concerning the practical implementation of PfP.

Ethical leadership has so far mainly been featured in the organizational behavior domain and, as such, treated as an intra-organizational phenomenon. The present study seeks to highlight the relevance of ethical leadership for extra-organizational phenomena by combining the organizational behavior perspective on ethical leadership with a classical marketing approach. In particular, we demonstrate that customers may use perceived ethical leadership cues as additional reference points when forming purchasing intentions. In two experimental studies (N = 601 and N = 336), we find that ethical leadership positively affects purchasing intentions because of customers’ concerns for moral self-congruence. We show this by means of both mediation and moderation analyses. Interestingly, the effect of perceived ethical leadership on purchasing intentions holds over and above the ethical advertising claims (e.g., cause-related marketing) that are commonly used in marketing. We conclude by discussing the possible ramifications of ethical leadership beyond its effects on immediate employees.

Charismatic leaders have consistently been shown to affect followers' performance, motivation, and satisfaction. Yet, what precisely constitutes charisma still remains somewhat enigmatic. So far, research has mainly focused on leader traits, leader behaviors, or the leader follower-relationship, and the subsequent consequences of each on followers' self-concepts. All of these approaches share the notion that leader charisma depends on an explicit interaction between leader and follower. With the present review paper, we extend extant theorizing by arguing that charisma is additionally informed by embodied signals that flow directly from either the leader or the immediate environment. We introduce the embodiment perspective on human perception and describe its utility for theoretically understanding the charismatic effect. Correspondingly, we review studies that show which concrete embodied cues can support the charismatic effect. Finally, we discuss the variety of new theoretical and practical implications that arise from this research and how they can complement existing approaches to charismatic leadership.

The Leadership Quarterly has developed the reputation of being the custodian of the best multidisciplinary scientific research focusing on leadership. This reputation has been the result of the efforts of successive editorial teams who laid important foundations in building the journal (see joint article from former editors: Atwater, Mumford, Tosi, & Yammarino, 2014). We are passionate about scientific discovery and aspire to publish the best leadership research, on par with that of the top general journals. Thus, as current guardians of the journal's scientific record, we realize the enormous responsibility we have in shaping what is published and in signaling to the field what types of research we value. In this editorial, we discuss the importance afforded to leadership as a scientific discipline, take stock of the first two years of our term, explain the current editorial policy, and report on how the journal is doing and where it is heading.

In this paper, we argue that performance-contingent incentive schemes represent a double-edged sword for organizations’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) and thus should be a factor in research on CSR. On the one hand, these systems are used to align organizational and individual goals, helping to steer employee and executive performance. On the other hand, these systems can motivate irresponsible behavior by evoking conscious and unconscious processes that eventually lead to unethical decision-making, which directly concerns an organization’s CSR. On this basis, we provide a review of the theoretical and empirical arguments for and against the use of incentive schemes in organizations. We further show the individual psychological processes that lead to the desired and undesired behaviors. Finally, we conclude that CSR research should work to integrate different research streams in order to strengthen CSR’s central role in organizational management.

Recent conceptual work suggests that the sense of identity that employees develop vis-a-vis their organization goes beyond the traditional notion of organizational identification and can also involve conflicting impulses represented by ambivalent identification. In this study, we seek to advance this perspective on identification by proposing and empirically examining important antecedents and consequences. In line with our hypotheses, an experimental study ( N = 199 employees) shows that organizational identification and ambivalent identification interactively influence employees’ willingness to engage in organizational citizenship behavior. The effect of organizational identification on organizational citizenship behavior is significantly reduced when employees experience ambivalent identification. A field study involving employees from a broad spectrum of organizations and industries ( N = 564) replicated these findings. Moreover, results show that employees’ promotion and prevention focus form differential relationships with organizational identification and ambivalent identification, providing first evidence for a link between employees’ regulatory focus and the dynamics of identification. Implications for the expanded model of organizational identification and the understanding of ambivalence in organizations are discussed.

Many field office leaders contend that humanitarian aid operations call for authoritarian leadership in order for aid workers to more quickly adapt to changes and thus deliver a better job performa...

Research has highlighted the widespread disadvantages women face relative to men in emerging as leaders. While it is certainly true that such disadvantages exist, they may not be as universal as ha...

The literature on ethical leadership has focused primarily on the way ethical leaders influence follower moral judgment and behavior. It has overlooked that follower responses to ethical leaders may differ depending on the attention they pay to the moral aspects of leadership. In the present research, we introduce moral attentiveness as an important moderator for the relationship between ethical leadership and unethical employee behavior. In a multisource field study (N = 90), we confirm our hypothesis that morally attentive followers respond with more deviance to unethical leaders. An experimental study (N = 96) replicates the finding. Our paper extends the current leader-focused literature by examining how follower moral attentiveness determines the response of followers to ethical or unethical leadership. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In public debates, political candidates often attack their opponents disrespectfully. Research revealed mixed effects of such behavior on voters’ candidate judgments. In order to understand these results, we argue that it is necessary to consider onlookers’ general attitude towards disrespect in politics. Across an experimental design (N = 229) and a field study (N = 199), we found that voters who consider disrespect a “necessary evil” in the political arena judged disrespectful politicians more favorably with regard to both communion and agency. Furthermore, they displayed a higher intention to vote as well as actually voted more in favor of disrespectful candidates compared to voters who disapproved of disrespect in politics. The results show that the success of a disrespectful communication strategy substantively depends on the audience.

To advance current knowledge on ethical decision-making in organizations, we integrate two perspectives that have thus far developed independently: the organizational identification perspective and the ethical climate perspective. We illustrate the interaction between these perspectives in two studies (Study 1, N = 144, US sample; and Study 2, N = 356, UK sample), in which we presented participants with moral business dilemmas. Specifically, we found that organizational identification increased moral decision-making only when the organization's climate was perceived to be ethical. In addition, we disentangle this effect in Study 2 from participants' moral identity. We argue that the interactive influence of organizational identification and ethical climate, rather than the independent influence of either of these perspectives, is crucial for understanding moral decision-making in organizations.

Interpersonal respect can be differentiated into two kinds: (1) horizontal respect, i.e. treating someone with dignity; and (2) vertical respect, i.e. genuinely honoring someone’s merits. With the present research, we draw on motivation theory to explore their interplay in leadership relations. Specifically, we argue for a moderated mediation hypothesis in that (a) leaders’ horizontal respect for their subordinates fundamentally speaks to subordinates’ self-determination and (b) that the message of respectful leadership is enhanced by the vertical respect subordinates have for their leaders. As a result, subordinates are more satisfied with their jobs, which should also show in a decreased willingness to leave. The proposed model was supported in two survey studies (N = 391 and N = 518) and an experimental scenario study (N = 107)—thus suggesting that perceived leader behavior needs to be complemented by leader standing.

Leader categorization theory proposes that subordinates perceive leaders against the backdrop of a cognitively represented leader prototype. The match between the two ultimately determines how favourably subordinates respond towards leaders. The respective research, however, yields some confusion as to what kind of prototype is exactly used in this process. Are leaders matched against a central tendency leader prototype, i.e. to an average image of leaders in general, or is it subordinates' goal-directed leader prototype, i.e. their image of an ideal leader, that leaders have to live up to? We reanalysed a field study ( N = 266) and conducted a second one likewise with employees ( N = 271) to contrast the relevance of both prototypes. The analyses reveal that only the match with the ideal leader prototype was predictive of subordinates’ responses towards their leaders. Previous central tendency leader categorization research thus might have pertained to the ideal aspects in the existing leader population.

Studies revealed that patients with paranoid schizophrenia display overconfidence in errors for memory and social cognition tasks. The present investigation examined whether this pattern holds true for visual perception tasks. Nonclinical participants were recruited via an online panel. Individuals were asked to complete a questionnaire that included the Paranoia Checklist and were then presented with 24 blurry pictures; half contained a hidden object while the other half showed snowy (visual) noise. Participants were asked to state whether the visual items contained an object and how confident they were in their judgment. Data from 1966 individuals were included following a conservative selection process. Participants high on core paranoid symptoms showed a poor calibration of confidence for correct versus incorrect responses. In particular, participants high on paranoia displayed overconfidence in incorrect responses and demonstrated a 20% error rate for responses made with high confidence compared to a 12% error rate in participants with low paranoia scores. Interestingly, paranoia scores declined after performance of the task. For the first time, overconfidence in errors was demonstrated among individuals with high levels of paranoia using a visual perception task, tentatively suggesting it is a ubiquitous phenomenon. In view of the significant decline in paranoia across time, bias modification programs may incorporate items such as the one employed here to teach patients with clinical paranoia the fallibility of human cognition, which may foster subsequent symptom improvement.

Values are an important concept in marketing because they comprise part of peoples’ identity and can thus help marketers separate and target different audiences. Unsurprisingly, places and their marketing initiatives increasingly try to appeal to (potential) residents’ identity by communicating core values. While the notion of value congruence is not novel, most empirical methods in marketing to date only account for the degree rather than the level of congruence. To address this issue, the present article utilizes polynomial regression and response surface methodology (Edwards & Parry, 1993) in the context of place marketing. Accordingly, the first study shows that the perceived congruence of residents’ own values and the values of stereotypical city inhabitants significantly affect residents’ feelings about their own cities (N = 1257), but with different effects for different values and levels of congruence. This finding holds not only for popular target groups such as the “creative class” but also across all groups. The second study (N = 449) shows that city slogans can effectively communicate specific values and that value congruence leads to a more positive evaluation of the city brand. Finally, the article discusses the benefits of differentiating between levels of congruence both in marketing research in general, and place brand management in particular.

Paranoid beliefs strongly impact behaviour and emotion: most people with paranoid delusions engage in safety behaviours and a relevant minority even commits violent acts under the influence of delusional thoughts. The present study examined whether different levels of belief conviction modulate subsequent behaviour and emotion. To be able to control for important confounds, we set up an analogue study using nonclinical participants.Participants were recruited from the general population (N=1935) and asked to fill out the Paranoia Checklist. Individuals had to imagine being persecuted by a secret service, whereby the level of subjective conviction was set at 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, 90%, or 100%. Subsequently, participants had to estimate for 37 behavioural and emotional items how they might respond to this threat.Three quarters of the sample affirmed the presence of at least one paranoid idea from the Paranoia Checklist over the duration of a month. The level of belief conviction and paranoia was positively associated with behavioural and emotional consequences.Our investigation suggests that a higher degree of belief conviction aggravates the behavioural consequences of persecutory beliefs in a linear fashion. The study is limited by its "what if" character and should be replicated with clinical participants. The study suggests that treatment approaches that aim to reduce overconviction may positively impact behaviour in psychosis.