Psychology Research Digest
Journal of Applied Psychology - Vol 110, Iss 4
The Journal of Applied Psychology will emphasize the publication of original investigations that contribute new knowledge and understanding to fields of applied psychology.
A stimulus-based model of the team adaptation process: An integrated conceptual review.
As organizations face constant pressures to respond to changing situations and emergent demands, team members are frequently called upon to change their processes and routines and adapt to new ways of working together. In examining adaptation, most researchers have taken a behavior-driven approach where they collapse across the many types of adaptive demands teams face and rely on traditional input–process–outcome frameworks (e.g., Hackman, 1987; McGrath, 1984) to isolate specific behavioral responses. However, this perspective has resulted in several critical limitations. There are key differences in the way teams must collectively respond to different types of adaptive stimuli to be successful, and current research cannot account for or differentiate adaptive demands by stimulus type and needed responses. In this integrated conceptual review, we address these limitations and develop a novel, stimulus-based phase model of team adaptation. We examine studies across our newly developed stimulus detection, urgency identification, and duration assessment phases, and through the team’s adaptive response, adaptive performance, and learning from the experience. We integrate research within each phase of the adaptive process, highlighting factors that demonstrate what successful team adaptation “looks like,” and describe future avenues of research to address key issues within each phase. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Personality profiles of 263 occupations.
While personality trait assessments are widely used in candidate selection, coaching, and occupational counseling, little published research has systematically compared occupations in personality traits. Using a comprehensive personality assessment, we mapped 263 occupations in self-reported Big Five domains and various personality nuances in a sample of 68,540 individuals and cross-validated the findings in informant ratings of 19,989 individuals. Controlling for age and gender, occupations accounted for 2%–7% of Big Five variance in both self-reports and informant reports. Most occupations’ average Big Five levels were intuitive, replicated across rating methods, and were consistent with those previously obtained with a brief assessment in a different sociocultural context. Often, they also tracked the Occupational Information Network database’s work style ratings and clustered along the International Standard Classification of Occupation’s hierarchical framework. Finally, occupations with higher average levels of the personality domains typically linked to better job performance tended to be more homogeneous in these domains, suggesting that jobs with higher performing incumbents are often more selective for personality traits. Several personality nuances had intuitive occupational differences that were larger than those of the Big Five domains (explaining up to 12% variance) and replicated well across rating methods, providing more detailed insights into how job incumbents vary in personality. We provide an interactive application for exploring the results (https://apps.psych.ut.ee/JobProfiles/) and discuss the findings’ theoretical and practical implications. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 24 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Considering personal needs in misdeeds: The role of compassion in shaping observer reactions to leader leniency.
Although punishment deters misconduct, protects employees from harm, and maintains cooperation in organizations, not all leaders punish—some are lenient. Employees keenly watch leaders’ responses to misconduct. Leniency is often judged as unfair because it violates moral principles of justice, motivating observers to withhold support to leaders. Our research shifts the conversation to explain how moral consideration of offenders factors into the sensemaking of leaders’ leniency that influences observer reactions. Perceptions of offender personal need (distress from the offender’s personal life that is outside their control) raise observers’ humanitarianism, which is reflected in compassion. Compassion elicited from offender personal need motivates observers to reduce the distress from the situation, lessening the unfairness of the leniency and punitive reactions to the leader. Three experiments demonstrated that leniency elicited unfairness that reduced support to leaders; observers’ perceptions of offender personal need moderated the effects of leniency, reducing its unfairness and punitive reactions to leaders. In Studies 2 and 3, we found that compassion mediated the moderating effects of offender personal need. Only distress from personal need that is inflicted onto offenders (i.e., other-inflicted personal need), compared to distress from work performance need (Study 2) and self-inflicted personal need (Study 3), elicited compassion that lessened the unfairness of leniency. Study 3 also showed that self-inflicted personal need elicited contempt for the offender, which mediated the moderating effect of self-inflicted personal need, bolstering the unfairness of leniency and lessening support to lenient leaders. Implications to theory and practice are presented. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Workplace aggression and employee performance: A meta-analytic investigation of mediating mechanisms and cultural contingencies.
We present a meta-analytic investigation of the theoretical mechanisms underlying why experienced workplace aggression is harmful to the three core performance outcomes (i.e., task performance, citizenship behavior, and deviant behavior). Through a comprehensive literature review of 405 empirical articles, we first extract and identify five prominent theoretical mechanisms: relationship quality, justice perception, psychological strain, negative affect, and state self-evaluation. By synthesizing evidence from these articles, which include 471 unique samples from 36 countries or regions (N = 149,341 participants), we reveal the incremental effects of the five mechanisms, compare their relative strengths for each performance outcome, and examine their cultural contingencies. We find that when the five mechanisms are examined simultaneously, only relationship quality and state self-evaluation show incremental effects across all performance outcomes in the predicted direction. Moreover, the comparative strengths of mechanisms vary across performance outcomes: The impact of workplace aggression on task performance is best explained by the negative affect and state self-evaluation mechanisms, its impact on citizenship behavior is best explained by the relationship quality mechanism, and its impact on deviant behavior is best explained by the negative affect mechanism. Finally, the prominence of some mechanisms is contingent on certain cultural dimensions: The relationship quality mechanism is strengthened by individualism and masculinity, while the state self-evaluation mechanism is strengthened by masculinity. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of our research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 03 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Do human resource systems indeed have “system” effects? The dual internal fit model of a high-performance work system.
The configurational or “internal fit” perspective proposes that human resource (HR) systems are most effective when individual practices are configured such that they fit together and are mutually reinforcing. The Ability–Motivation–Opportunity (AMO) model has emerged as a predominant way to select and configure HR practices based on whether they attempt to enhance employee ability, motivation, or opportunities. Despite the widespread use of the configurational perspective and AMO model in building a high-performance work system (HPWS), researchers have not clearly articulated how HR practices across the AMO domains should be configured to maximize internal fit across the system. Moreover, research has overlooked the hierarchical nature of an HPWS, such that HR practices are nested within a particular AMO domain, and the AMO domains, in turn, are nested within the HPWS. To address these gaps, we develop and test a dual internal fit model that specifies synergistic interactions within and among AMO domains. Analyses of six-wave panel data from 640 firms reveal that internal fit effects of HR practices simultaneously exist within (i.e., HR practice-level interactions) and among AMO domains (i.e., AMO domain-level interactions) to predict workforce productivity and ultimately firm profitability. Moreover, the two sets of interactions predict outcomes beyond the additive effects of the HR practices on which prior research has typically focused. These findings show that HR practices can be configured to have “system” effects. They also highlight the value of the dual internal fit model to understand the performance benefits of optimally configured HR systems. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Experimental examination of the incentive and sorting effects of pay-for-performance on creative performance.
There is long-standing debate over whether pay-for-performance (PFP) enhances or undermines creative performance. Traditional motivation and revised creativity theories suggest that PFP and intrinsic task interest combine additively to enhance creative performance, whereas cognitive evaluation theory and self-determination theory posit that PFP undermines task interest and thus intrinsic motivation and creative performance. To help resolve these conflicting predictions and provide a more comprehensive understanding of how and when PFP influences creative performance, this study incorporates both the incentive and sorting mechanisms of PFP, varying strengths of PFP, and task autonomy as a key moderator. A novel laboratory experiment was designed to capture key elements of workplace contexts, including in the design of the creative tasks, PFP strengths based on benchmarking of U.S. companies’ practices, and allowing subjects to sort into different pay conditions, consistent with the opportunity for mobility in the labor market. The results showed that, through both incentive and sorting mechanisms, high PFP intensity enhanced creative performance more so than low PFP intensity, and both were superior to fixed pay. Importantly, task autonomy positively moderated the PFP–creative performance relationship, such that creative performance under PFP increased much more under higher task autonomy. Finally, the difference in creative performance under PFP versus fixed pay was greater when subjects were allowed to sort into their preferred pay conditions than when they worked only under randomly assigned pay conditions. Theoretical and practical implications and future research directions are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
- Alan Watts, Secular Buddhism
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