Until Morale Improves
The limits of psychological safety: Nonlinear relationships with performance
Liat Eldor, Michal Hodor & Peter Cappelli
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, July 2023
Abstract:
While psychological safety climate is widely seen as having a positive relationship with work performance, there are compelling reasons as to why that may not always apply. We draw on cognitive psychology literature to suggest that high levels of psychological safety climate can actually harm the performance of routine tasks. The negative effect of high levels of psychological safety climate on these tasks can be moderated, however, by collective accountability. We find evidence for these propositions across five independent studies at different levels of analysis and organizational settings. We find that while moderate levels of psychological safety climate are associated with better in-role performance, high levels are associated with decreasing in-role performance. Collective accountability can buffer that decreasing performance. These results help identify the boundary conditions of psychological safety climate and extend research on it to organization-level and business outcomes with real-world consequences.
The Effect of Financial Performance on Misconduct: Evidence from Lottery Ticket Sales
Justin Frake, Heejung Byun & Jihyeon Kim
University of Michigan Working Paper, May 2023
Abstract:
We investigate whether a firm's financial performance impacts its likelihood of engaging in misconduct. On one hand, increased financial performance may engender misconduct by spurring hubris, increasing risk tolerance, or inflating expectations. On the other hand, strain theory suggests that low-performing firms may resort to misconduct to alleviate financial strain. Leveraging a difference-in-differences design, we examine quasi-random fluctuations in retailers' financial performance resulting from the sale of winning lottery tickets. Our results show that increased financial performance reduces misconduct, providing support for strain theory. To identify whether the effect is driven by relative (to competitors) or absolute differences in performance, we leverage a second natural experiment that increases the performance of all competitors similarly. The results rule in absolute performance as an operant mechanism.
Accelerating science with human-aware artificial intelligence
Jamshid Sourati & James Evans
Nature Human Behaviour, forthcoming
Abstract:
Artificial intelligence (AI) models trained on published scientific findings have been used to invent valuable materials and targeted therapies, but they typically ignore the human scientists who continually alter the landscape of discovery. Here we show that incorporating the distribution of human expertise by training unsupervised models on simulated inferences that are cognitively accessible to experts dramatically improves (by up to 400%) AI prediction of future discoveries beyond models focused on research content alone, especially when relevant literature is sparse. These models succeed by predicting human predictions and the scientists who will make them. By tuning human-aware AI to avoid the crowd, we can generate scientifically promising 'alien' hypotheses unlikely to be imagined or pursued without intervention until the distant future, which hold promise to punctuate scientific advance beyond questions currently pursued. By accelerating human discovery or probing its blind spots, human-aware AI enables us to move towards and beyond the contemporary scientific frontier.
No person is an island: Unpacking the work and after-work consequences of interacting with artificial intelligence
Pok Man Tang et al.
Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has arrived, as AI systems are increasingly being integrated across organizational functions into the work lives of employees. This coupling of employees and machines fundamentally alters the work-related interactions to which employees are accustomed, as employees find themselves increasingly interacting with, and relying on, AI systems instead of human coworkers. This increased coupling of employees and AI portends a shift toward more of an "asocial system," wherein people may feel socially disconnected at work. Drawing upon the social affiliation model, we develop a model delineating both adaptive and maladaptive consequences of this situation. Specifically, we theorize that the more employees interact with AI in the pursuit of work goals, the more they experience a need for social affiliation (adaptive) -- which may contribute to more helping behavior toward coworkers at work -- as well as a feeling of loneliness (maladaptive), which then further impair employee well-being after work (i.e., more insomnia and alcohol consumption). In addition, we submit that these effects should be especially pronounced among employees with higher levels of attachment anxiety. Results across four studies (N = 794) with mixed methodologies (i.e., survey study, field experiment, and simulation study; Studies 1-4) with employees from four different regions (i.e., Taiwan, Indonesia, United States, and Malaysia) generally support our hypotheses.
The romance of leadership: Rekindling the fire through replication of Meindl and Ehrlich
Michelle Hammond et al.
Leadership Quarterly, August 2023
Abstract:
Given changes in business and society, the romance of leadership theory, which describes a glorification of the perceived influence of leaders on organizational outcomes, is arguably more relevant than at its conception over thirty years ago. This paper presents four studies aimed to replicate Meindl and Ehrlich (1987) early experiment on the romance of leadership, specifically considering the effect of leadership attributions on company evaluations. Studies 1 and 2 are close replications, whereas Studies 3 and 4 provide a conceptual replication drawing from a broader sample in age and work experience and include additional experimental conditions. These conditions vary the gender of the leader and including both success and failure situations, as well as including additional outcomes variables of participants' behavioral intentions to support, invest, seek employment, or purchase from the company. Taken together, these studies do not support Meindl and Ehrlich's findings that organizations are viewed more favorably when such outcomes are attributed to leadership. We discuss implications for the romance of leadership theory.
Learning Strategic Representations: Exploring the Effects of Taking a Strategy Course
Mana Heshmati & Felipe Csaszar
Organization Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite the popularity of strategy courses and the fact that managers make consequential decisions using ideas they learn in such courses, few studies examine the learning outcomes of taking a strategy course -- a research gap most likely the result of the methodological challenges of measuring these outcomes in realistic ways. This paper provides a large-sample study of what individuals learn from taking a strategy course and how those learning outcomes depend on individual characteristics. We examine how 2,269 master of business administration (MBA) students evaluate real-world video cases before and after taking the MBA core strategy course at a large U.S. business school. We document several changes in their performance, mental representations, and self-perceptions. Among other findings, we show that taking a strategy course improves strategic decision making, increases the depth of mental representations and the attention paid to broader industry and competitive concerns, and boosts students' confidence, while making them more aware of the uncertainty pervading strategic decisions. We also find that the magnitude and significance of these changes are associated with individual characteristics, such as cognitive ability, prior knowledge, and gender.
The easy addendum effect: When doing more seems less effortful
Edward Yuhang Lai et al.
Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although people often value the challenge and mastery of performing an activity, their satisfaction may suffer when the tasks comprising the activity are perceived as difficult. Thus, it is important to understand the factors that influence subjective judgments of difficulty. In this research, we introduce an easily actionable and effective tactic to reduce perceptions of the overall difficulty of an activity: We find that concluding a sequence of difficult tasks with a few easy tasks can decrease perceived difficulty of the aggregate activity. While appending extra tasks to a constant sequence should increase the objective amount of effort necessary to complete all the tasks, we find that more tasks can paradoxically be perceived as less effortful. We coin this phenomenon the easy addendum effect and demonstrate that it is less likely to occur when an overall activity is conceptualized as consisting of a single category rather than two distinct categories -- that is, a set of difficult tasks followed by a set of easy tasks. We further show downstream consequences of this effect -- through lower perceived difficulty, the easy addendum effect can lead to greater satisfaction, persistence, and more tasks performed overall.
The dark side of generosity: Employees with a reputation for giving are selectively targeted for exploitation
Matthew Stanley, Christopher Neck & Christopher Neck
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
People endorse generosity as a moral virtue worth exemplifying, and those who acquire reputations for generosity are admired and publicly celebrated. In an organizational context, hiring, retaining, and promoting generous employees can make organizations more appealing to customers, suppliers, and top talent. However, using complementary methods and experimental designs with large samples of full-time managers, we find consistent evidence that managers are inclined to take unfair advantage of employees with reputations for generosity, selectively targeting them for exploitation in ways that likely, and ironically, hamper long-term organizational success. This selective targeting of generous employees for exploitation was statistically explained by a problematic assumption: Since they have reputations for generosity, managers assume that, if they had the opportunity, they would have freely volunteered for their own exploitation. We also investigate a possible solution to the targeting of more generous employees for exploitative practices. Merely asking managers to make a judgment about the ethics of an exploitative request eliminates their propensity to target generous employees over other employees for exploitation.