Transformational leadership (TFL) has been shown to affect employees' job performance, and the literature offers a large variety of explanatory processes. Integrating the diverse literature related ...to the mechanisms that mediate the TFL-performance relationship, the current study identified five core mechanisms—affective, motivational, identification, social exchange, and justice enhancement—that are consistent with established social and psychological theories. Meta-analysis involving >600 samples was conducted to test these mechanisms. General support was found for each of the five mechanisms. The findings showed that TFL was related to variables that represented these mechanisms, which in turn were associated with non-self-report measures of employees' task performance, citizenship behavior, and innovative behavior. An integrative model was further proposed and tested to show the central role of leader-member exchange in the relationships between TFL, other mediating variables, and performance outcomes. This study contributes to the literature by strengthening researchers' theoretical understanding of the major social and psychological processes by which transformational leaders promote followers' job performance.
Studies of innovative behavior (the generation, dissemination, and implementation of new ideas) have generally overlooked the agency perspective on this important type of performance behavior. Guided ...by social-cognitive theory, we propose a moderated mediation relationship to explain why and how employees become motivated to make things happen through their innovative endeavors. First, we propose that within-individual increases in organizational trust and perceived respect by colleagues promote within-individual increases in creative, persuasion, and change self-efficacy over time. Second, we propose that within-individual increases in self-efficacy beliefs promote within-individual increases in idea generation, dissemination, and implementation over time. Finally, we propose that psychological collectivism (a between-individual variable) is a moderator, and that a higher level of psychological collectivism weakens the positive relationship between within-individual increases in self-efficacy beliefs and within-individual increases in innovative behavior. Repeated measures collected from 267 employees in Italy at 3 time points over an 8-month period generally support our proposed dynamic moderated mediation relationship.
This study proposes that employees have to face a variety of obstacles over the course of their careers, each of which can create stress for employees and, in so doing, lower their subjective career ...success (SCS). Using a meta-analysis of 216 samples published over the past three decades (N=94,090), we found that career hurdles associated with dispositional traits (e.g., low emotional stability), motivation (e.g., low work engagement), social networks (e.g. low supervisor support), and organizational and job support (e.g., job insecurity) were all significantly related to lower SCS. Counter to expectations, background-related hurdles (e.g., being female) and skill-related hurdles (e.g., lack of job changes and international experience) were not significantly related to SCS.
•This study meta-analyzed the predictors of subjective career success (SCS).•It examines six groups of career hurdles which potentially lower people's SCS.•Trait-related and motivational hurdles were found to be associated with lower SCS.•Social and organizational hurdles were also associated with lower SCS.•Background-related and skill-related hurdles were not associated with SCS.
Although voice (i.e. expressing change-oriented ideas and suggestions) has frequently been investigated as a way for workers to reciprocate to their employers for the positive treatment they receive, ...much less is known about how workers use voice to deal with stress. This study takes a conservation of resources perspective to examine the relationships among workplace stress, voice behavior, and job performance. We first examined the strength of relationships of three major groups of workplace Stressors and strains (job based, social based, and organization based) with voice behavior. We then examined the relationships of voice behavior with performance variables (e.g. in-role performance and creativity) to investigate how voice may help workers preserve or accumulate resources to enhance their performance. The meta-analytic findings presented here provide support for a negative relationship between workplace stress and voice and a positive relationship between voice behavior and performance outcomes.
We examined socioemotional microfoundations of perceived corporate social responsibility (CSR) and posited that employees’ perceived CSR triggers a perception‐emotion‐attitude‐behavior sequence. ...Drawing from appraisal theory of emotion, we hypothesized that perceived CSR relates to emotions (i.e., organizational pride), which relate to job attitudes (i.e., organizational embeddedness) that in turn relate to job behaviors (i.e., decreased turnover). To test this model, we conducted a multistudy investigation involving different samples, designs, and data‐analytic methods. In Study 1, we conducted an experiment and found that participants who envisioned working in a firm that was active regarding CSR activities reported greater pride and organizational embeddedness. We then conducted two field studies using a nonmanagerial sample (Study 2) and a managerial sample (Study 3) and found that participants’ perceived CSR was positively related to their pride, which in turn was related to stronger organizational embeddedness. Stronger organizational embeddedness was related to lower turnover 6 months later in Study 2 but not in Study 3. In Study 4, we conducted a longitudinal four‐wave 14‐month study to test the proposed relationships from a within‐person conceptualization, and the results were also supportive. Thus, the proposed perception‐emotion‐attitude‐behavior framework received broad support and illustrated that stronger microfoundations of CSR research could be constructed through understanding employees’ emotional, attitudinal, and behavioral reactions to their perceptions of their employers’ CSR.
This study examines the criterion-related and incremental validity of ethical leadership (EL) with meta-analytic data. Across 101 samples published over the last 15 years (N = 29,620), we observed ...that EL demonstrated acceptable criterion-related validity with variables that tap followers' job attitudes, job performance, and evaluations of their leaders. Further, followers' trust in the leader mediated the relationships of EL with job attitudes and performance. In terms of incremental validity, we found that EL significantly, albeit weakly in some cases, predicted task performance, citizenship behavior, and counterproductive work behavior-even after controlling for the effects of such variables as transformational leadership, use of contingent rewards, management by exception, interactional fairness, and destructive leadership. The article concludes with a discussion of ways to strengthen the incremental validity of EL.
Organizational commitment (OC), organizational trust (OT), and organizational identification (OI) are three types of psychological attachment to an organization. Each of these three variables ...captures an organization-targeted attitude toward an employment relationship, but it is unclear whether they have incremental validity over each other. To address this question, this study examined the incremental validity of each variable in predicting job involvement, job satisfaction, turnover intentions, and non-self-report measures of task performance and citizenship behavior. It also examined whether perceived organizational support and psychological contract breach, two other organization-targeted attitudinal variables, were related to OC, OT, and OI when the latter were considered jointly. Meta-analytical evidence suggests that OC, OT, and OI have incremental validity over and above one another in their relationships with some, but not all, of the above correlates. This highlights the need for future research to distinguish these three types of psychological attachment to an organization.
•Organizational commitment, trust, and identification are all organization-targeted attitudes.•They represent three types of psychological attachment to an organization.•This study examined the incremental validity of the three variables.•The outcome variables include job attitudes, withdrawal, and performance.•Results provide modest support for their incremental validity.
This study evaluates the cumulated empirical evidence on 6 common age stereotypes. These stereotypes suggest that older workers are: (a) less motivated, (b) generally less willing to participate in ...training and career development, (c) more resistant and less willing to change, (d) less trusting, (e) less healthy, and (f) more vulnerable to work‐family imbalance. The meta‐analysis included 418 empirical studies (N= 208,204) and examined the relationships of age to 39 variables representing the content domain of age stereotypes. The only stereotype consistent with empirical evidence is that older workers are less willing to participate in training and career development activities. The paper concludes with implications for future theory development and management practice.
Drawing on self-enhancement theory, we propose that, intraindividually, employees tend to give themselves credit when they engage in creativity. Perceived creative credit, in turn, activates multiple ...psychological motives that ultimately affect deviance. On the one hand, perceived creative credit is associated with greater creativity-driven norm-breaking motives and greater entitlement motives, which in turn should increase deviance. On the other hand, perceived creative credit is associated with greater image preservation motives, which in turn should decrease deviance. A within-person study involving 206 employees and their coworkers conducted over a 10-day period provided broad support for the proposed model. In addition, a between-person variable, namely rewards for creativity, moderated the self-crediting process. The within-person serial mediation relationship between creativity and deviance was positive and significant for employees who perceived low rewards for creativity, but was not significant for those who perceived high rewards for creativity. In other words, rewards for creativity in the workplace effectively nullified this within-person self-crediting mechanism among employees. This study thus illustrates that, within individuals, creativity and deviance are related through perceived creative credit and different psychological motives (i.e., serial mediation). However, the strength of this serial mediation relationship varies depending on the availability of formal rewards for creativity (i.e., moderated serial mediation).
Previous reviews of the literature on the relationship between age and job performance have largely focused on core task performance but have paid much less attention to other job behaviors that also ...contribute to productivity. The current study provides an expanded meta-analysis on the relationship between age and job performance that includes 10 dimensions of job performance: core task performance, creativity, performance in training programs, organizational citizenship behaviors, safety performance, general counterproductive work behaviors, workplace aggression, on-the-job substance use, tardiness, and absenteeism. Results show that although age was largely unrelated to core task performance, creativity, and performance in training programs, it demonstrated stronger relationships with the other 7 performance dimensions. Results also highlight that the relationships of age with core task performance and with counterproductive work behaviors are curvilinear in nature and that several sample characteristics and data collection characteristics moderate age-performance relationships. The article concludes with a discussion of key research design issues that may further knowledge about the age-performance relationship in the future.
