This is a reflection on my 2006 article, "The Essential Impact of Context on Organizational Behavior," which received the 2016 Academy of Management Review Decade Award. I review some studies ...supporting my earlier contention that the impact of context has been underappreciated in management research and then recount the genesis of the article, particularly emphasizing the capacity of context to explain anomalous and counterintuitive research findings. I offer conjectures as to why the article has been cited and present evidence that contextual appreciation is increasing in management, and that this is part of a general trend in the social and behavioral sciences. I discuss some newer theories and measures of context and consider the desirable properties of theories that incorporate context. Finally, I argue that it is not easy to control away context, that context is about similarities as well as differences and about change as well as stability, and that variables and relationships vary in their sensitivity to context.
Presenteeism refers to attending work while ill. Although it is a subject of intense interest to scholars in occupational medicine, relatively few organizational scholars are familiar with the ...concept. This article traces the development of interest in presenteeism, considers its various conceptualizations, and explains how presenteeism is typically measured. Organizational and occupational correlates of attending work when ill are reviewed, as are medical correlates of resulting productivity loss. It is argued that presenteeism has important implications for organizational theory and practice, and a research agenda for organizational scholars is presented.
Although scholars in the field of organizational behavior have raised concerns about a lack of contextual appreciation, there has been a recent embrace of contextual thinking in the organizational ...sciences. In this review, I discuss several recent theories and measures of context. The added value of a contextual approach is illustrated by how context can shape personality, how it affects the emergence of work designs, and how it benefits the study of organizational demography. Future research topics include context cue sensitivity, the way context is shaped, the mediators of context effects, and the breadth and limits of contextual impact. A recurrent theme is that although context enables a demarcation of what is distinctive about situations, it also permits integration across research areas and levels of analysis, identifying what they have in common as settings for organizational behavior.
Presenteeism is attending work when ill. This study examined the antecedents and correlates of presenteeism, absenteeism, and productivity loss attributed to presenteeism. Predictors included work ...context, personal characteristics, and work experiences. Business school graduates employed in a variety of work positions (N = 444) completed a Web-based survey. Presenteeism was positively associated with task significance, task interdependence, ease of replacement, and work to family conflict and negatively associated with neuroticism, equity, job security, internal health locus of control, and the perceived legitimacy of absence. Absenteeism was positively related to task significance, perceived absence legitimacy, and family to work conflict and negatively related to task interdependence and work to family conflict. Those high on neuroticism, the unconscientious, the job-insecure, those who viewed absence as more legitimate, and those experiencing work-family conflict reported more productivity loss. Overall, the results reveal the value of a behavioral approach to presenteeism over and above a strict medical model.
I argue that the impact of context on organizational behavior is not sufficiently recognized or appreciated by researchers. I define context as situational opportunities and constraints that affect ...the occurrence and meaning of organizational behavior as well as functional relationships between variables, and I propose two levels of analysis for thinking about context--one grounded in journalistic practice and the other in classic social psychology. Several means of contextualizing research are considered.
Interest in presenteeism, attending work while ill, has flourished in light of its consequences for individual well-being and organizational productivity. Our goal was to identify its most ...significant causes and correlates by quantitatively summarizing the extant research. Additionally, we built an empirical model of some key correlates and compared the etiology of presenteeism versus absenteeism. We used meta-analysis (in total, K = 109 samples, N = 175,965) to investigate the correlates of presenteeism and meta-analytic structural equation modeling to test the empirical model. Salient correlates of working while ill included general ill health, constraints on absenteeism (e.g., strict absence policies, job insecurity), elevated job demands and felt stress, lack of job and personal resources (e.g., low support and low optimism), negative relational experiences (e.g., perceived discrimination), and positive attitudes (satisfaction, engagement, and commitment). Moreover, our dual process model clarified how job demands and job and personal resources elicit presenteeism via both health impairment and motivational paths, and they explained more variation in presenteeism than absenteeism. The study sheds light on the controversial act of presenteeism, uncovering both positive and negative underlying mechanisms. The greater variance explained in presenteeism as opposed to absenteeism underlines the opportunities for researchers to meaningfully investigate the behavior and for organizations to manage it.
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.
This study examines the role of team political skill in predicting team effectiveness. Extending the current paradigm of individual political skill and contributing to the team effectiveness ...literature, we offer a theoretical framework for team political skill composition and test a model whereby task and social cohesion mediate the relationship between team political skill and team performance. On the basis of the results obtained from 189 student project teams and 28 business work teams, we demonstrate that team political skill benefits extend to groups. In both samples, team political skill directly related to subjective and objective team performance. Among several team political skill composition models, the interaction between the group skill mean and standard deviation (“skill strength”) was found to be the best predictor of team emergent states and outcomes. Team political skill was related to objective team performance via social and task cohesion in the student teams and via task cohesion in the work teams. Finally, we investigated the potential dark side of high team political skill but failed to support the too-much-of-a-good-thing hypothesis. Given the social focus of the construct, an aim for future research is to further understand how the composition of individual political skill influences team dynamics and outcomes. Multiple organizational implications extend to recruitment, training, development, and team building.
Complementary evidence from narrative literature reviews and meta-analyses leads to the conclusion that much research suffers from a lack of attention to the context in which leadership occurs. ...Several possible reasons for this context deficit are refuted, including notions that context is unimportant for leaders, contextualized research is less scientific than decontextualized research, and useful contextual descriptors are lacking. Rather, it is argued that the context deficit is a negative manifestation of the romance of leadership. Advantages of enhanced attention to context include reduction of omitted variable bias, improved understanding of anomalous research results, differentiation and integration of research findings, and enhanced teaching and practice of leadership. Improved contextual appreciation can be facilitated by consulting contextual success stories, embracing an interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on events, behavior, and change, employing experience sampling, conducting more qualitative research, using a configural approach, studying how leaders construe and process contextual cues, adopting context-specific leadership measures, and improving writing, editing, and review practices concerning context.
Because of a variety of access limitations, self-reported absenteeism from work is often employed in research concerning health, organizational behavior, and economics, and it is ubiquitous in large ...scale population surveys in these domains. Several well established cognitive and social-motivational biases suggest that self-reports of absence will exhibit convergent validity with records-based measures but that people will tend to underreport the behavior. We used meta-analysis to summarize the reliability, validity, and accuracy of absence self-reports. The results suggested that self-reports of absenteeism offer adequate test-retest reliability and that they exhibit reasonably good rank order convergence with organizational records. However, people have a decided tendency to underreport their absenteeism, although such underreporting has decreased over time. Also, self-reports were more accurate when sickness absence rather than absence for any reason was probed. It is concluded that self-reported absenteeism might serve as a valid measure in some correlational research designs. However, when accurate knowledge of absolute absenteeism levels is essential, the tendency to underreport could result in flawed policy decisions.
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