Predicting Elections: Child's Play Antonakis, John; Dalgas, Olaf
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
02/2009, Volume:
323, Issue:
5918
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In two experiments, children and adults rated pairs of faces from election races. Naïve adults judged a pair on competence; after playing a game, children chose who they would prefer to be captain of ...their boat. Children's (as well as adults') preferences accurately predicted actual election outcomes.
In this position paper, I argue that the main purpose of research is to discover and report on phenomena in a truthful manner. Once uncovered, these phenomena can have important implications for ...society. The utility of research depends on whether it makes a contribution because it is original or can add to cumulative research efforts, is rigorously and reliably done, and is able to inform basic or applied research and later policy. However, five serious “diseases” stifle the production of useful research. These diseases include: significosis, an inordinate focus on statistically significant results; neophilia, an excessive appreciation for novelty; theorrhea, a mania for new theory; arigorium, a deficiency of rigor in theoretical and empirical work; and finally, disjunctivitis, a proclivity to produce large quantities of redundant, trivial, and incoherent works. I surmise that these diseases have caused immense harm to science and have cast doubt on the role of science in society. I discuss what publication gatekeepers should do to eradicate these diseases, to stimulate the undertaking of more useful and impactful research, and to provide the needed incentives to better align the interests of researchers with those of the greater good. Finally, I highlight where technical improvements are needed to enhance research quality, and call on deeper reflection, transparency, and honesty in how we do research.
The impacts of COVID-19 on workers and workplaces across the globe have been dramatic. This broad review of prior research rooted in work and organizational psychology, and related fields, is ...intended to make sense of the implications for employees, teams, and work organizations. This review and preview of relevant literatures focuses on (a) emergent changes in work practices (e.g., working from home, virtual teamwork) and (b) emergent changes for workers (e.g., social distancing, stress, and unemployment). In addition, potential moderating factors (demographic characteristics, individual differences, and organizational norms) are examined given the likelihood that COVID-19 will generate disparate effects. This broad-scope overview provides an integrative approach for considering the implications of COVID-19 for work, workers, and organizations while also identifying issues for future research and insights to inform solutions.
Public Significance Statement
COVID-19 has disrupted work and organizations across the globe. This overview integrates and applies prior research in work and organizational psychology as well as related fields in its examination of emergent changes for work practices as well as workers. This article also acknowledges and considers the disproportionate impacts that COVID-19 may have on workers depending on demographic characteristics, individual differences, and relevant organizational norms. In addition to helping make sense of the implications of COVID-19 for employees, teams, and work organizations, this review features roadmaps for future research and action.
Despite substantial research on cheating, how and when individual predispositions figure into cheating behavior remains unclear. In Study 1, we investigated to what extent Honesty-Humility predicted ...cheating behavior. As expected, individuals high on Honesty-Humility were less likely to cheat than were individuals low on this trait. In Study 2, integrating arguments from personality research about traits with arguments from behavioral ethics about moral primes, we examined how Honesty-Humility and situational primes interacted to affect cheating. We found an interaction indicating that individuals high on Honesty-Humility consistently did not cheat much across situational primes, whereas individuals low on Honesty-Humility cheated more when exposed to immoral primes than when exposed to moral primes. Our research invites reflection about the interplay of individual differences in Honesty-Humility and situational cues in predicting cheating, including the design of anti-cheating systems and the context in which these person and situation factors interact.
The purpose of the present article is to take stock of a recent exchange in Organizational Research Methods between critics and proponents of partial least squares path modeling (PLS-PM). The two ...target articles were centered around six principal issues, namely whether PLS-PM: (a) can be truly characterized as a technique for structural equation modeling (SEM), (b) is able to correct for measurement error, (c) can be used to validate measurement models, (d) accommodates small sample sizes, (e) is able to provide null hypothesis tests for path coefficients, and (f) can be employed in an exploratory, model-building fashion. We summarize and elaborate further on the key arguments underlying the exchange, drawing from the broader methodological and statistical literature to offer additional thoughts concerning the utility of PLS-PM and ways in which the technique might be improved. We conclude with recommendations as to whether and how PLS-PM serves as a viable contender to SEM approaches for estimating and evaluating theoretical models.
Leadership to defeat COVID-19 Antonakis, John
Group processes & intergroup relations,
02/2021, Volume:
24, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Defeating COVID-19 will not happen only via efforts of scientists working on vaccines or new treatments and interventions. Key to winning this battle is to convince citizens to take the needed ...precautions and to follow scientific advice to stop the spread of the virus and to protect those who are vulnerable to it. Thus, leaders, especially political leaders, play a critical role in coordinating the efforts of individuals who often have private interests to act as they wish, but who expect to benefit from the efforts of others who contribute to the public good. To deal with this unprecedented challenge, I discuss the importance of leadership, particularly charismatic leadership, which is well suited to solving problems in situations of ambiguity and crisis. I also exhort researchers to pay more attention to studying leadership using robust and causally identified designs that can inform policy.
We examine the relationship among structural social capital, resource assembly, and firm performance of entrepreneurs in Africa. We posit that social capital primarily composed of kinship or family ...ties helps the entrepreneur to raise resources, but it does so at a cost. Using data drawn from small firms in Kampala, Uganda, we explore how shared identity among the entrepreneur's social network moderates the relationship between social capital and outcomes. A large network contributed a higher quantity of resources raised, but at a higher cost when shared identity was high. We discuss the implications of these findings for the role of family ties and social capital in resource assembly, with an emphasis on developing economies.
In this study, we examined the validity of the measurement model and factor structure of Bass and Avolio's Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) (Form 5X). We hypothesized that evaluations of ...leadership—and hence the psychometric properties of leadership instruments—may be affected by the context in which leadership is observed and evaluated. Using largely homogenous business samples consisting of 2279 pooled male and 1089 pooled female raters who evaluated same-gender leaders, we found support for the nine-factor leadership model proposed by Bass and Avolio. The model was configurally and partially metrically invariant—suggesting that the same constructs were validly measured in the male and female groups. Mean differences were found between the male and female samples on four leadership factors (Study 1). Next, using factor-level data of 18 independently gathered samples (
N=6525 raters) clustered into prototypically homogenous contexts, we tested the nine-factor model and found it was stable (i.e., fully invariant) within homogenous contexts (Study 2). The contextual factors comprised environmental risk, leader–follower gender, and leader hierarchical level. Implications for use of the MLQ and nine-factor model are discussed.
One stream of leadership theory suggests that leaders are evaluated via inferential observer processes that compare the fit of the target to a prototype of an ideal (charismatic) leader. ...Alternatively, attributional theories of leadership suggest that evaluations depend on knowledge of past organizational performance, which is attributed to the leader's skills. We develop a novel theory showing how inferential and attributional processes simultaneously explain top-level leader evaluation, and, ultimately, leader retention and selection. We argue that observers will mostly rely on attributional mechanisms when performance signals clearly indicate good or poor performance outcomes. However, under conditions of attributional ambiguity (i.e., when performance signals are unclear), observers will mostly rely on inferential processes. In Study 1, we tested our theory in an unconventional context—U.S. presidential elections—and found that the two processes, due to the leader's charisma and country's economic performance, interact in predicting whether a leader is selected. Using a business context and an experimental design, in Study 2, we showed that CEO charisma and firm performance interact in predicting leader retention, confirming the results we found in Study 1. Thus, our results suggest that this phenomenon is quite general and can apply to various performance domains.
We explore the role of leader personality (i.e., the Big 5 traits: Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Openness, Extraversion, and Neuroticism) and gender in self–other (dis)agreement (SOA) in ratings ...of leadership. We contend that certain aspects of the leader's persona may be more or less related to self‐ or other‐ratings of the leader's behaviour if those aspects are (1) more or less observable by others, (2) more or less related to internal thoughts versus external behaviours, (3) more or less prone to self‐enhancement or self‐denigrating biases, or (4) more or less socially desirable. We utilize statistical methodologies that capture fully the effects of multiple independent variables on the congruence between two dependent variables (Edwards, , Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 64, 307), which previously have not been applied to this area of research. Our results support hypotheses predicting less SOA as leader Conscientiousness increases and greater SOA as Agreeableness and Neuroticism increase. Additionally, we found gender to be an important factor in SOA; female leaders exhibited greater SOA than did their male counterparts. We discuss the implications of these findings, limitations, and future research directions.
Practitioner points
Popular practices such as 360‐degree feedback may reveal discrepancies between a person's self‐ratings and other's ratings.
Although often attributed to a lack of self‐awareness, these discrepancies also may be explained by factors such as the personality and gender of the focal individual.
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