Psychology Research Digest
Journal of Applied Psychology - Vol 110, Iss 6
The Journal of Applied Psychology will emphasize the publication of original investigations that contribute new knowledge and understanding to fields of applied psychology.
Liberal versus conservative distrust: A construal-level approach to dissimilarity in the workplace.
The dramatic rise in political polarization and aggravation of race relations are prominent in the United States. While dissimilarity to others is thought to undermine trust, I challenge the assumption that dissimilarity does so uniformly in the workplace where cross-party and cross-race interactions are structurally induced. Leveraging construal-level theory, I theorize that deep- versus surface-level differences with a coworker interact with ideology to activate higher versus lower construals of trustworthiness, prompting liberals and conservatives to distrust their coworkers in different ways. For liberals, I argue that perceived political dissimilarity undermines perceived person trustworthiness (a higher level/abstract construal, capturing one’s trustworthiness generally as a person in the world) and disclosure. For conservatives, I argue that perceived racial dissimilarity undermines perceived role trustworthiness (a lower level/concrete construal, capturing one’s trustworthiness specifically in their job) and reliance. Study 1 (a proof of concept) and Study 2 (a longitudinal, dyadic field study) utilize inductive theory-building and exploratory analyses. Studies 3a, 3b(i), and 3b(ii) (three preregistered experiments) support my hypotheses: Liberals tend to view politically dissimilar coworkers as less trustworthy people in the world and refrain from disclosures, while conservatives tend to view racial outgroup coworkers as less trustworthy in their jobs and refrain from reliance. Given liberal and conservative employees’ roles in the calcification of political and racial group cleavages, respectively, organizations must determine whether both forms of bias should be addressed—indeed, racial bias is socially unacceptable, whereas political bias is widely tolerated—and, if so, whether interventions should target employees based on ideology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>High performers in the shadow: The adverse effect of star employees on their peers.
Star employees are pivotal to organizational success and significantly influence their peers. Previous studies on this topic often explore the attributes of stars and nonstars in isolation. Using social comparison theory, our study posits that as employees’ performance approaches that of star employees, nonstar employees become more likely to compare themselves with stars, thereby increasing their sense of psychological entitlement. The increase in entitlement is likely to promote workplace deviance and decrease workplace well-being. We further propose that team interdependence amplifies the relationship between the star–nonstar performance gap and psychological entitlement. When team interdependence is high, the influence of the star–nonstar performance gap on nonstars’ psychological entitlement and the mediating effects of psychological entitlement become more significant. We conducted four studies including two field surveys and two experiments to test our hypotheses. The results indicated that employees who exhibit small performance gaps are more adversely affected by stars than other employees, thus offering a more nuanced understanding of star employees’ influence within organizations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 16 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>History and leadership: How a head monk uses historical narratives to facilitate change in a Buddhist temple.
Leadership and historical narrative studies suggest that leaders strategically use history as a source of narratives to facilitate change. Yet the dynamic microprocess of how leaders craft and recraft their historical narratives to shift the organizational members’ understanding of current reality and thereby facilitate change remains unexplored. Using the case of a Korean Buddhist temple that confronts significant societal change and financial shortage, this study investigates how the head monk—the leader of the temple—strategically creates and modifies historical narratives to achieve change and how the organizational members respond to the leader’s narratives. To deeply immerse myself in the context, I engaged in 4 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Korean Buddhist temple where the tension between tradition and change was most salient. The findings show that some narratives effectively reshaped the members’ understanding of the need for change while others unexpectedly failed. By theorizing this sensegiving and sensemaking process, this study reveals that crafting effective historical narratives is a messy process, which manifests as an evolving trial-and-error process of leaders’ sensegiving and members’ sensemaking. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 20 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Trickle-up effects of children’s financial anxiety on parent retirement intentions.
Today, adult children depend financially on their parents more than ever before. This poses challenges for the financial well-being of parents, particularly in the context of retirement planning. Our research investigates the crossover of financial anxiety from adult children to their parents and its impact on parents’ retirement intentions. Drawing on crossover theory and the resource-based view of retirement, we examine the mechanisms underlying this stress crossover. Across three studies (Studies 1a, 1b, and 2) conducted in developed economies, we found that adult children’s financial anxiety was associated with their parents’ delayed retirement intentions through an increase in their parents’ own financial anxiety. Study 3, conducted in a developing economy, further established that financial stress crossover occurred primarily through an increase in social undermining and financial expenditure, although these mechanisms do not translate into delayed retirement intentions. Our work contributes to the stress-crossover literature by testing different mechanisms of stress crossover and highlighting how children’s financial anxiety might “trickle-up” to affect their parents’ stress and important life decisions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 12 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Jekyll and Hyde leadership: Examining the direct and vicarious experiences of abusive and ethical leadership through a justice variability lens.
Drawing on uncertainty management theory and the nascent work on justice variability, we examine employees’ direct and vicarious experiences of abusive supervision and ethical leadership. Conceptualizing the simultaneous display of abusive and ethical leadership styles as a form of justice variability, we suggest that a direct supervisor’s ethical leadership exacerbates, rather than ameliorates, the detrimental effects of his/her abusive supervision on employees’ emotional exhaustion and job performance. We further contend that a similar effect exists when employees vicariously experience leadership interactions involving their direct supervisor and higher level manager, whereby higher level managers’ ethical leadership exacerbates the negative effects of their abusive supervision toward supervisors on those supervisors’ employees’ emotional exhaustion and job performance. We draw the contrast between the direct and vicarious experiences by theorizing justice uncertainty and linking-pin effectiveness uncertainty, respectively, as two distinct theoretical mechanisms that explain the two proposed destructive effects. Using a multisource and multiphase lagged field study and two vignette-based experiments, we find general support for our model. Our research advances the theories of justice variability, vicarious leadership and (in)justice, and supervisors’ linking-pin role effectiveness. We also offer practical insights for managing “Jekyll and Hyde” leadership across organizational hierarchies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Automated speech recognition bias in personnel selection: The case of automatically scored job interviews.
Organizations, researchers, and software increasingly use automatic speech recognition (ASR) to transcribe speech to text. However, ASR can be less accurate for (i.e., biased against) certain demographic subgroups. This is concerning, given that the machine-learning (ML) models used to automatically score video interviews use ASR transcriptions of interviewee responses as inputs. To address these concerns, we investigate the extent of ASR bias and its effects in automatically scored interviews. Specifically, we compare the accuracy of ASR transcription for English as a second language (ESL) versus non-ESL interviewees, people of color (and Black interviewees separately) versus White interviewees, and male versus female interviewees. Then, we test whether ASR bias causes bias in ML model scores—both in terms of differential convergent correlations (i.e., subgroup differences in correlations between observed and ML scores) and differential means (i.e., shifts in subgroup differences from observed to ML scores). To do so, we apply one human and four ASR transcription methods to two samples of mock video interviews (Ns = 1,014 and 414), and then we train and test models using these different transcripts to score multiple constructs. We observed significant bias in the commercial ASR services across nearly all comparisons, with the magnitude of bias differing across the ASR services. However, the transcription bias did not translate into meaningful measurement bias for the ML interview scores—whether in terms of differential convergent correlations or means. We discuss what these results mean for the nature of bias, fairness, and validity of ML models for scoring verbal open-ended responses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Self-promotion in entrepreneurship: A driver for proactive adaptation.
Research in impression management has primarily examined how self-promotion affects one’s image, neglecting the potential benefits of feedback on the underlying image that is being impression managed. This study bridges this gap by integrating impression management with social–cognitive theory to explore how self-promotion can enhance feedback from targets, thereby stimulating initiative-taking and proactive adaptation in the actor. Analyzing five-wave monthly survey data from 574 entrepreneurs, I find a positive relationship between self-promotion and experimentation, which positively associates with business-model adaptation. This indirect effect is observed exclusively among entrepreneurs confident in their capabilities, highlighting the critical role of self-efficacy. Furthermore, results from three scenario-based experiments demonstrate that higher levels of self-promotion elicit greater engagement from targets, with responses containing more constructive elements, such as ideas or concerns, thereby supporting my theory. My findings underscore the richer feedback generated from self-promotion, suggesting it plays a critical role in facilitating agentic behavior. This contributes to a more nuanced understanding of self-promotion’s impact, proposing new avenues for future studies in impression management and entrepreneurship. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Prospects for reducing group mean differences on cognitive tests via item selection strategies.
Cognitive ability tests are widely used in employee selection contexts, but large race and ethnic subgroup mean differences in test scores represent a major drawback to their use. We examine the potential for an item-level procedure to reduce these test score mean differences. In three data sets, differing proportions of cognitive ability test items with higher levels of difficulty or subgroup mean differences were removed from the tests. The reliabilities of these trimmed tests were then corrected back to the lengths of the original tests, and the subgroup mean differences of the trimmed tests were compared to those of the original tests. Results indicate that it is not possible to come anywhere close to eliminating subgroup differences via item trimming. The procedure may modestly reduce subgroup mean differences in test scores, with effects becoming stronger as higher proportions of items are removed from the tests. Removing items based on difficulty or subgroup differences have roughly similar impacts on test score mean differences for Black–White test taker comparisons, but results are more mixed for Hispanic–White comparisons. Our results also provide preliminary evidence that removing items on the basis of subgroup mean differences may have relatively little effect on test criterion-related validity, but the impact of removing difficult items was more mixed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.
- Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person (1961)
Reach Out