Psychology Research Digest
Journal of Applied Psychology - Vol 110, Iss 1
The Journal of Applied Psychology will emphasize the publication of original investigations that contribute new knowledge and understanding to fields of applied psychology.
Revisiting the nature and strength of the personality–job performance relations: New insights from interpretable machine learning.
Prior research on the relations between the five-factor model (FFM) of personality traits and job performance has suggested mixed findings: Some studies pointed to linear relations, while other studies revealed nonlinear relations. This study addresses these gaps using machine learning (ML) methods that can model complex relations between the FFM traits and job performance in a more generalizable way, particularly interpretable ML techniques that can more effectively reveal the nature (linear, curvilinear, interactive) and strength (feature/relative importance) of the personality–job performance relations. Overall, the results based on a sample of 1,190 employees suggest that nonlinear ML methods perform slightly yet consistently better than linear regression methods in modeling the relation of job performance with FFM facets, but not with factors. On the factor level, conscientiousness exhibits a noticeable curvilinear relation with job performance, and it also interacts with other FFM factors to predict job performance. Conscientiousness displays the strongest feature importance across job types, followed by agreeableness. On the facet level, most FFM facets show limited evidence for curvilinear and interactive (with other facets) relations with job performance. While several conscientiousness facets (order, deliberation, self-discipline) display the strongest feature importance in predicting job performance, some agreeableness (straightforwardness, altruism) and extraversion (positive emotionality) facets also emerge as important features for different sales job types (corporate vs. individual sales). We discuss the implications of these findings for research and practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 12 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Navigating inter-team competition: How information broker teams achieve team innovation.
Organizations are increasingly using teams to stimulate innovation. Often, these teams share knowledge and information with each other to help achieve their goals, while also competing for resources and striving to outperform each other. Importantly, based on their industry, the nature of work, or prior history, some teams may face more competition from peer teams than others. Our research examines how teams’ competitive relations with other teams in the organization operate in tandem with their collaborative inter-team information exchange relations in impacting their innovation. Using two studies—a field study of 73 knowledge-intensive teams in high-tech engineering firms and a team-based network experimental study of 162 teams—we find that a high degree of overall competition with many peer teams reduces a focal team’s ability to acquire and utilize diverse knowledge from these teams (i.e., inter-team knowledge integration), thereby hindering team innovation. However, applying insights from network structural hole theory, we find that when a focal team occupies a brokerage position in the inter-team information exchange network, this can help buffer the effects of competition in getting access to knowledge resources from other teams, thus enabling their innovation. Additionally, we find that focal broker teams’ dealmaking and network obstruction behaviors explain these effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Fulfilling moral duty or prioritizing moral image? The moral self-regulatory consequences of ethical voice.
Previous research on the consequences of ethical voice has largely focused on the performance or social relational consequences of ethical voice on multiple organizational stakeholders. The present research provides an important extension to the ethical voice literature by investigating the distinct intrapersonal and interpersonal moral self-regulatory processes that shape ethical voicers’ own psychological experiences and their subsequent purposeful efforts to maintain a positive sense of moral self. On one hand, we argue that ethical voice heightens voicers’ sense of responsibility over ethical matters at work (i.e., moral ownership), which motivates them to refrain from violating moral norms (i.e., disengaging from unethical behaviors). On the contrary, we argue that ethical voice generates psychological pressure for voicers as they become anxious about preserving their moral social image (i.e., moral reputation maintenance concerns), which motivates them to signal their moral character to others through symbolic acts (i.e., engaging in moral symbolization behaviors). Further, we expect gender differences in the moral consequences of ethical voice. Across two studies that varied in temporal focus (a multisource, time-lagged field study and a within-person weekly experience sampling study), we found support for most of our predictions. The results suggest that while potentially psychologically uplifting (for both men and women), ethical voice also generates psychological pressure for the voicer to preserve their favorable moral social image and thus motivates them (more so in the case of women voicers at the between-person level) to explicitly symbolize their moral character in the workplace. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 18 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Emergence in context: How team-client psychological contract fulfillment is associated with the emergence of team identification or team-member exchange.
Psychological contracts have been theorized to occur at different levels of analysis and with different exchange parties. In this article, we develop the concept of team-client psychological contract fulfillment (team-client PCF) as a team-level social exchange indicator, reflecting the team members’ perceptions of the degree of fulfillment of the commitments a client promised to a team. Using the multilevel group-process framework (Lang et al., 2019) and a sample of newly formed self-managed teams consisting of 838 observations, nested in 244 individuals, 56 teams, and in four waves of data, we tested the claim that team-client PCF may determine the type of collective states that emerge within the team. When team-client PCF is higher, it should create conditions for the emergence of team states related to team maintenance (i.e., team identification), whereas when team-client PCF is lower, it is more likely that teams develop states related to the regulation of team performance (i.e., team-member exchange [TMX]). Our results support our hypotheses. We discuss implications for both the psychological contract literature as well as the team dynamics literature (especially team dynamics of team identification and TMX). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 08 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Perceived organizational change strengthens organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior via increased organizational nostalgia.
Organizational change has been thought to evoke negative employee responses, yet it is ubiquitous in modern market economies. It is thus surprising that the adverse effects of organizational change are not more visible or apparently disrupting. We hypothesized that, although perceived organizational change, by inducing change apprehension, stimulates negative employee responses (i.e., lower organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior [OCB]), it also elicits organizational nostalgia, which engenders positive employee responses (higher organizational commitment and OCB). We tested our hypotheses in nine studies. First, across four experiments (two preregistered), perceived societal or organizational change elicited organizational nostalgia and, via organizational nostalgia, increased employees’ organizational commitment and OCB. Subsequently, in two preregistered experiments, induced organizational nostalgia (vs. control) strengthened employees’ commitment to the changed organization and galvanized their defense of organizational change. Finally, in a preregistered follow-up experiment and two preregistered surveys, we tested and validated our full model regarding the opposing mediating roles of change apprehension and organizational nostalgia. The findings help to understand why effects of organizational change are less disruptive than might be expected and clarify the role of organizational nostalgia during organizational change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 12 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Third-party perceptions of mistreatment: A meta-analysis and integrative model of reactions to perpetrators and victims.
Third parties have increasingly become the focus of research on mistreatment in organizations. Much of that work is grounded in deonance theory, which argues that third parties should react to the perpetrators of mistreatment with anger. Deonance theory is less explicit as to how third parties should react to the victims of mistreatment, though empirical work has pointed to empathy as one potential reaction. Deonance theory is less capable of explaining recent findings suggesting that third parties may react to mistreatment events with schadenfreude. The purpose of our study was to conduct a meta-analytic test of an integrative model specifying the relationships between third-party perceptions of mistreatment and reactions to perpetrators and victims. That model predicted that third-party perceptions of mistreatment would be associated with emotional reactions (anger toward the perpetrator, empathy toward the victim, schadenfreude from the event), cognitive reactions (evaluations of the perpetrator and victim), and behavioral reactions (antisocial and prosocial behaviors toward the perpetrator and victim). Our model testing provides the first quantitative synthesis of the third-party mistreatment literature while surfacing counterintuitive findings that would not be anticipated from deonance theory’s arguments. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our work while providing guidance for future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 18 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Comparing the efficacy of faking warning types in preemployment personality tests: A meta-analysis.
Numerous faking warning types have been investigated as interventions that aim to minimize applicant faking in preemployment personality tests. However, studies vary in the types and effectiveness of faking warnings used, personality traits, as well as the use of different recruitment settings and participant samples. In the present study, we advance a theory that classifies faking warning types based on ability, opportunity, and motivation to fake (Tett & Simonet, 2011), which we validated using subject matter expert ratings. Using this framework as a guide, we conducted a random-effects pairwise meta-analysis (k = 34) and a network meta-analysis (k = 36). We used inverse-variance weighting to pool the effect sizes and relied on 80% prediction intervals to evaluate heterogeneity. Overall, faking warnings had a significant, moderate effect in reducing applicant faking (d = 0.31, 95% CI [0.23, 0.39]). Warning types that theoretically targeted ability, motivation, and opportunity to fake (d = 0.36, 95% CI [0.25, 0.47]) were the most effective. Additionally, warnings were least effective in studies using recruitment settings and nonuniversity student samples. However, all effect sizes contained substantial heterogeneity, and all warning types will be ineffective in some contexts. Organizations should be cognizant that warnings alone may not be sufficient to address applicant faking, and future research should explore how their effectiveness varies depending on other contextual factors and applicant characteristics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 12 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.
- Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)
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