Leading Employees by Involving Them Leads to Results

Topic: Leadership, Job Performance, Citizenship Behavior      
Publication: Journal of Organizational Behavior
Article: Does participative leadership enhance work performance by inducing empowerment or trust? The differential effects on managerial and non-managerial subordinates
Authors: X. Huang, J. Iun, A. Liu, and Y. Gong
Reviewed By: Benjamin Granger

 Isn’t it nice when our supervisors invite our ideas/opinions and include us in decision making?  Of course it is!  These kinds of supervisory behaviors are known as participative leadership behaviors and, not surprisingly, they tend to positively impact employee job performance.  Although this effect is expected for all employees, a recent study by Huang and colleagues (2010) suggests that the reasons why participative leadership behaviors lead to improved performance depends on a subordinate’s hierarchical level in the organization. 

In their study, Huang et al. collected a sample of 527 employees from a Fortune 500 telecommunications company in China.  As expected, they found that participative leadership behaviors of supervisors leads to improved task performance and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) of their subordinates.  But, as mentioned above, there appear to be slightly different reasons why these effects occur depending on the hierarchical level of the subordinate (i.e., managerial vs. non-managerial).  

Specifically, the effect of participative leadership behaviors on performance for managers appears to be due to psychological empowerment (i.e., feelings of competence and meaningfulness) whereas these effects are due to the trust placed in leaders for non-managerial employees. 

Is it Fair to Include “Citizenship” in Performance Appraisals?

Topic: Citizenship Behavior, Performance Appraisal
Publication: Journal of Business and Psychology
Article: Organizational citizenship behavior in performance evaluations: Distributive justice or injustice
Authors: S.K., Johnson, C.L. Holladay, & M.A. Quinones
Reviewed By: Benjamin Granger

 Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCBs) are volitional work behaviors that go above and beyond the call of duty and are intended to benefit the organization and/or its members.  Though OCBs are not formally required of employees (e.g., don’t show up in the job description), they are highly valued by organizations.  Thus, supervisors (and peers) often consider employees’ OCBs in formal performance appraisals.  But, how do employees feel about this?  In other words, since OCBs are not absolutely required of employees, do employees find this practice fair?

Johnson, Holladay, and Quinones (2009) investigated the extent to which employees consider including OCBs in formal performance appraisals fair. The authors conducted two separate experiments, one employing a sample of 78 employees from diverse organizations and industries and the other employing a large sample of undergraduate students.  In general, the findings of both studies were similar. 

Overall, employees reported that it is fairer to include OCBs in performance appraisals than to not include them.  Importantly, employees felt that it is most fair to include OCBs in performance appraisals when they constitute about 30 – 50% of the total performance rating (While the remaining represents Core Task Behaviors).

Organizational Citizenship: Lend a Hand and Look Good Doing It

Topic: Citizenship Behavior
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology
Article: Good soldiers and good actors: Prosocial and impression management motives as interactive predictors of affiliative citizenship behaviors
Authors: A. M. Grant, D. M. Mayer
Reviewed By: Sarah Teague

 In recent years, organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) have received considerable attention in the workplace. OCBs refer to actions taken by an employee that further group and organizational goals but are not explicitly required by the job (e.g. taking on extra work to help a coworker meet their deadline). Research has consistently shown that these behaviors can benefit both the individual employee and the organization. But why do employees engage in these voluntary (and often unrewarded) behaviors at all? 

The general assumption has been that people perform OCBs either because they genuinely want to “do good” or because they just want to “look good;” acting on (selfless) prosocial motives or (selfish) impression management motives, respectively. The current article suggests that those with strong prosocial motives are likely to engage in OCBs when they perceive a potential benefit to others, while those with strong impression management motives will engage in OCBs when they expect it to improve their image.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Stress at Work

Topic: Citizenship Behavior, Counterproductive Work Behaviors
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology
Article: Can “good” stressors spark “bad” behaviors? The mediating role of emotions in links of challenge and hindrance stressors with citizenship and counterproductive behaviors
Authors: J.B. Rodell, T.A. Judge
Reviewed By: Katie Bachman

 Research suggests that stress can come from good or bad sources (Cavanaugh, Boswell, Roehling, & Boudreau, 2000).

Challenge Stressors can serve as opportunities for growth, for example:  you can be stressed because of job complexity (“now, WHAT am I supposed to do?”), workload (“I’ve got too much to do!”), and deadlines (Yikes!  It’s due tomorrow!”), which are termed

Hindrance Stressors, on the other hand, can be caused by stress because of bureaucracy (“Just let me do my job”), role ambiguity (“Whose job is this, anyway”), and hassles (“Like I said, just let me do my job!).

While both can lead to negative outcomes like emotional exhaustion, challenge stressors have been linked to positive outcomes such as job satisfaction. Hindrance stressors, on the other hand, are pretty much all bad, being linked to withdrawal behaviors and turnover. 

Knowing that stress exists in these different forms is well and good, but what’s more interesting is looking at how those stressors affect voluntary behavior on the job.

In the Mood for an OCB

Topic: Citizenship Behaviors, Workplace Deviance
Publication: Academy of Management Journal
Article: A within-person approach to work behavior and performance: Concurrent and lagged citizenship-counterproductivity associations, and dynamic relationships with affect and overall job performance.
Authors: R.S. Dalal, H. Lam, H.M. Weiss, E.R. Welch, C.L. Hulin
Reviewed By: Katie Bachman

 If you aren’t already, sit down because I’m about to blow your mind. Here it comes: happy people act nice and unhappy people act mean, but not everyone is happy or unhappy all the time. Now, where’s my gold star? Sorry, I just get a little sarcastic when I read things in the literature that smack of kindergarten logic. Amazingly, most of the researchers who study this type of thing in organizations totally missed that lesson in school.

Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs; i.e., behaviors aimed at helping an organization and/or its workers) and counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs; i.e., behaviors aimed at hurting an organization and/or its employees) are two of the hottest topics in the literature right now.  Most of the research focuses on comparing multiple people on the dimensions, assuming that a person’s average level of work behavior is enough information. Well, no more of that!

A recent article in the Academy of Management Journal evaluated within-person effects (i.e. people evaluated against themselves rather than against others) for work behaviors. Affect (e.g., mood) was measured as an antecedent to OCBs and CWBs and, as usual, job performance came out the back end. The researchers found that affect predicted levels of work behaviors and that there was a lot of variability within individuals for both their OCB and CWB levels over time. CWB was particularly variable. Also, the behaviors were related but were not two ends of the same spectrum. In sum, mood determines workers’ positive and negative behaviors on the job, but the relationship isn’t one size fits all.

What does this mean for the twelve of us who don’t study work behaviors? It means that the previous research has a gaping hole in it, which this new work will start to fill. If we are looking at data between individuals, we aren’t getting the whole story about predicting behavior.

Dalal, R. S., Lam, H., Weiss, H. M., Welch, E. R., & Hulin, C. L. (2009). A within-person approach to work 

behavior and performance: concurrent and lagged citizenship-counterproductivity associations, and 

dynamic relationships with affect and overall job performance. Academy of Management Journal, 52, 1051 

1066.

Tell Your Boss to Get Off the Web and Back to Work

Topic: Citizenship, Counter-Productive Work Behaior
Publication:  CyberPsychology & Behavior 
Article:  On Cyberslacking: Workplace Status and Personal Internet Use at Work.     
Blogger: LitDigger

Does your boss check his personal email or read websites featuring non-work-related information (such as the news or online shopping) more often than you?  It’s likely according to the findings of Garrett and Danziger (2008).  By conducting a phone survey (n=1,024), these researchers found that employees of higher status (measured by job autonomy, income, education, and job status) use the internet for personal reasons while on the job more often than those of lower status.

Garrett and Danziger also found that men and women differed slightly in the type of cyberslacking (also known as cyberloafing) performed.  Men were more likely to use the internet for leisure-related surfing than women, but no differences in gender were found for engaging in non-work personal communications.

What I find to be most interesting about this article is that its findings are contrary to the modern perception that lower-status employees spend more time cyberslacking than higher-status employees.  Perhaps this is partially due to the fact that higher-status employees nowadays report less leisure time than lower-status employees.  Maybe at higher levels, work time becomes vital for crossing certain personal agenda items off of the list.

Where leaving it to Beaver meets the bottom line

Topic: Citizenship Behavior, Job Performance
Publication: Human Performance
Article: Test of Motowidlo et al.’s (1997) theory of individual differences in task and contextual 
performance.
Blogger: James Grand

A helpful hand here or a thoughtful “hi-how-are-ya” might be more valuable than we think.  Psychologists are starting to realize that such dispositional characteristics can be meaningful predictors of on-the-job performance.

Nearly 10 years ago, Motowidlo, Borman and Schmit proposed that performance at work was more than just the number of pizzas one delivers in 30 minutes or less or any other similar indicators of taskwork proficiency.  There is also a contextual performance aspect to an individual’s job, which is broadly defined as work behaviors that maintain and promote the social, organizational and psychological environment in which employees perform the technical functions of their job.

Thus for example, the number of policies an insurance salesperson racks up in given quarter might be considered their task performance; however, ratings of customer satisfaction, ability to deal with customer complaints and the number of days he/she covered for a sick co-worker might all be indicators of the salesperson’s contextual performance.  So why distinguish between these two areas of performance?

Fostering Fairness in the Workplace: Why it’s so worth it!

Topic: Citizenship Behavior, Organizational Justice 
Publication: Journal of Organizational Behavior
Article: Meta-analytic tests of relationships between organizational justice and citizenship behavior: Testing agent-system and shared-variance models.     
Blogger: Benjamin Granger

Leaders are recognizing that organizations, employees, and customers benefit from non-required cooperative behaviors that go on in the workplace.  These behaviors are referred to as organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs).  Because OCBs are highly valued in organizational settings, business researchers and practitioners are interested in uncovering the causes of these behaviors.

Researchers Fassina, Jones, and Uggerslev (2008) were particularly interested in how employee perceptions of justice (fairness) relate to OCBs.  More specifically, the authors were interested in how different types of justice related to OCBs that are directed toward the organization versus to other individuals in the organization.  Fassina et al. specified three distinct types of justice: (1) procedural justice (the extent to which employees feel organizational practices are fair), (2) distributive justice (the extent to which employees feel organizational outcomes are fair), and (3) interactional justice (the extent to which employees feel they are treated fairly by organizational leaders).

So, based on the findings of Fassina et al.’s meta-analysis, what conclusions can be drawn to help organizations increase the occurrence of OCBs in the workplace?

1) When employees feel that their organizational leaders are treating them fairly (high interactional justice) they are more likely to engage in helpful behaviors targeted toward other individuals and work groups within the organization (e.g., helping coworkers with job-related tasks).  In other words, if a person feels he/she is being treated fairly by an individual (leader), he/she is more likely to be helpful to other individuals,.

2). When employees feel that organizational practices are fair and just (high procedural justice) they are more likely to engage in helpful behaviors aimed at the organization (e.g., going beyond expectations to cooperate with organizational policies).  In other words, if a person feels he/she is being treated fairly by the organization, he/she is more likely to be helpful to the organization. 

Importantly, Fassina et al.’s findings suggest that interactional justice and procedural justice are better predictors of OCBs than distributive justice. This is an important finding because it suggests that when employees receive unfavorable outcomes in the workplace (e.g., demotion, poor performance appraisal), they will not necessarily discontinue engaging in positive workplace behaviors like OCBs.  In fact, if the employees feel that their supervisors are treating them with respect and the procedures by which organizations make decisions are fair (even if outcomes are unfavorable), then they should still engage in OCBs.

The great news is that managers and organizations have the power to influence their employees’ perceptions of justice.  Although negative outcomes in the workplace are inevitable, organizational leaders can affect the ways in which decisions are made and how employees are treated.  If organizations are successful in treating employees fairly and arriving at outcomes (positive or negative) by means which are considered fair by employees, then they will likely increase the occurrence of OCBs in the workplace.  So what exactly can managers do?  By giving employees explanations as to why decisions were made or how outcomes were decided upon, employees are likely to perceive high levels of interactional justice.

    Fassina, N. E., Jones, D. A., & Uggerslev, K. L. (2008). Meta-analytic tests of relationships between organizational justice and citizenship behavior: Testing agent-system and shared-variance models. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 29, 805-828.