J Labor and Demographic Economics
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Age discrimination is a common problem in organizations. In our pilot study, we want to explore the processes how the desired retirement age is influenced by age discrimination and see psychological empowerment as an important mediator for the relationship between these variables. Data stem from an online questionnaire completed by 130 employees from different organizations in Germany (all 50 years or older). Our results show that age discrimination is an antecedent for the desired retirement age. It has a direct as well as an indirect (via psychological empowerment) effect on the desired retirement age.
Humor ist Bestandteil tagtäglicher sozialer Interaktion und ein relevantes Forschungsthema - betrachtet man seinen Einfluss auf Einstellungen und Verhalten (Martin, 2007; Rissland, 2002). Schwierige oder unbequeme Ideen können sozial angemessen geäußert werden, wenn sie humorvoll verpackt sind, desgleichen hilft Humor bei der Kontrolle zwischenmenschlicher Interaktionen und kann emotional unterstützen. Humor ist ein komplexes Phänomen mit diversen Auswirkungen, abhängig von Inhalt und Kontext. Während Humor im Lehr-/Lernkontext schon länger Beachtung findet (z.B. Bryant et al., 1980), wird dieser in der arbeits- und organisationspsychologischen Forschung erst in letzter Zeit entdeckt (Romero & Cruthirds, 2006; Wood, Beckmann & Rossiter, 2011). Dabei hat Humor vielfältige Einflüsse auf Lernen (Ziv, 1988) sowie Leistung, Zufriedenheit, Kohäsion, Gesundheit, Burnout und Stress (Metaanalyse, Glew et al., 2010). Auch die negativen Aspekte von Humor finden zunehmend Beachtung (Martin et al., 2003). In dieser Arbeitsgruppe betrachten wir Humor aus pädagogischer und arbeits-/organisationspsychologischer Perspektive. Dabei kommen verschiedene Formen des Humors (Sinn, Stile) in diversen Alterklassen zur Anwendung, um Zusammenhänge mit Lernen und Motivation, Kreativität, Fehlerklima, Führung und Innovation sowie Verhalten in Verhandlungen zu zeigen. In dieser Arbeitsgruppe präsentieren wir folgende spannende Ergebnisse: Schüler lernen besser und sind motivierter, wenn Lehrer Humor anwenden (Bieg & Dresel). Die positiven (sozialer und selbstaufwertender) Humorstile sowie die negativen (aggressiver und selbsabwertender) hängen mit Fehlerorientierung (Csonka & Scheel) sowie mit Kreativität (Scheel & Csonka) zusammen. Humorvolle Führung ist mit innovativem Verhalten verbunden (Pundt) und humorvolle Kommentare in Verhandlungen wirken sich auf den Verhandlungsverlauf aus (Brantl, Gockel & Gibson). Wir plädieren für mehr ernsthafte Humorforschung, insbesondere zu dessen Schatten- und Sonnenseiten. Diskutantin: Frau Prof. Dr. Gisela Mohr, Universität Leipzig.
Durch Partizipation können Individuen und Gruppen ihre Interessen in Organisationen sicherstellen und selbstbestimmt handeln (Wilpert, 1989). Partizipation kann sich auf verschiedene Arten von Entscheidungen und auf verschiedene Ebenen der Organisation beziehen. Sie bedeutet generell, dass mehr als eine Person Entscheidungen vorbereitet oder fällt (Wegge et al., 2010). In dieser Arbeitsgruppe betrachten wir in drei Beiträgen Partizipation auf Teamebene (am Beispiel von geteilter und verteilter Führung), und in zwei weiteren Beiträgen Partizipation auf Organisationsebene. Dabei wird es um die Messung, Prädiktoren und Auswirkungen von Partizipation gehen, um dem komplexen und vielschichtigen Phänomen und seiner Wichtigkeit gerecht zu werden. Piecha und Wegge präsentieren eine Kurzskala zur Messung konstruktiver und destruktiver geteilter Führung in Teams und zeigen in einer Fragebogenstudie mit Altenpflegern differenzierte Zusammenhänge mit Gesundheit auf. Garbers und Konradt zeigen in ihrer Studie zwei positive Konsequenzen verteilter Führung am Beispiel von Apothekenteams: bessere Teamleistung und erhöhtes affektives Commitment. Gockel und Schmidt beschäftigen sich mit den Prädiktoren individuellen Führungsverhaltens in Teams und präsentieren, inwiefern sich eigene Persönlichkeitseigenschaften und die Eigenschaften der Teamkollegen auf Führungsverhalten auswirken. Mende und Wegge untersuchten in einem Experiment Erleben und Verhalten in partizipationsrelevanten Situationen in Organisationen. Pircher-Verdorfer und Kollegen stellen schließlich die psychometrischen Eigenschaften und Korrelate eines englischsprachigen Fragebogens zu sozial-moralischem Klima in Organisationen vor. Als Diskutant haben wir Jörg Felfe, Helmut-Schmidt-Universität Hamburg, eingeladen.
The benefits of stepping into others’ shoes: perspective-taking strengthens transactive memory
(2013)
Perspective taking is an important requirement for effective communication. Teams working on knowledge-intensive tasks should benefit particularly. In a laboratory study, we examined whether perspective taking (vs. egocentrism) facilitated transactive memory when team members' knowledge was either different or similar. Perspective taking led teams to form more accurate transactive memory and agree more regarding each other's knowledge assessments. Corresponding effects were found when knowledge was similar. However, no interaction emerged. Our study shows that perspective taking is a cognitive state that can be induced with a short intervention and that can positively influence team-level outcomes such as transactive memory.
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine, in two studies, whether trust in teammates and trust in management influenced transactive memory and how strongly transactive memory, in turn, influenced perceived team performance and job satisfaction.
Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected via questionnaires from two samples of employees (n1=383 and n2=40). Regression and mediational analyses were employed to test the hypotheses.
Findings – Trust in teammates predicted transactive memory and transactive memory, in turn, predicted perceived team performance and job satisfaction. Trust in management did not predict transactive memory, but it did predict job satisfaction.
Research limitations/implications – Data are cross-sectional and cannot establish cause-effect-relationships. Furthermore, objective performance measures could not be obtained due to the nature of the studies. Thus, future studies need to use longitudinal or experimental designs and objective performance measures.
Practical implications – Intangible factors such as trust can strengthen knowledge sharing and transactive memory systems. This, in turn, can positively impact job satisfaction and team performance. Managers and team leaders should pay more attention to building a climate of trust and participation, both within teams and between team members and supervisors/management.
Originality/value – Results of two studies show the differential effects of trust in teammates versus trust in management. For finishing a knowledge-intensive task in a team, trust in teammates is more important than trust in management because trust influences transactive memory, which, in turn, leads to positive performance outcomes. However, for other organizational outcomes such as job satisfaction, trust in management can be as important as well.
Purpose – Regulatory focus theory (RFT) can successfully predict and describe organizational behaviour and managerial decision making. However, no empirical study has tested its central assumption in an organizational context. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between employee's regulatory focus and their work priorities.
Design/methodology/approach – In total, 307 employees from the public and private sectors in Germany participated and three organizational priorities were confirmed in a confirmatory factor analysis: growth, existence, and relatedness aspects. Their relationship with employee's regulatory focus was analyzed using multi-level modeling.
Findings – It was found that employees' promotion and prevention focus were related to specific work priorities: the higher a person's promotion focus, the more the person valued growth aspects. The higher the prevention focus, the more the person valued existence-related work aspects. Both regulatory foci increased the importance of good relationships at work.
Research limitations/implications – The findings provide new insights into previous research on the impact of personality traits, especially regulatory focus, on job-related attitudes like job satisfaction or job commitment.
Practical implications – The results are useful for leaders and human resource managers aiming to understand the driving forces behind employee's job motivation and decisions.
Originality/value – This is the first study to address the central question of different priorities associated with promotion and prevention focus in the organizational field. Results provide insight into previous findings on the impact of regulatory focus on job-related attitudes and offer practical implications for practitioners interested in job motivation and decision making.
The effects of temperature on service employees’ customer orientation: an experimental approach
(2012)
Numerous studies have demonstrated how temperature can affect perceptual, cognitive and psychomotor performance (e.g. Hancock, P.A., Ross, J., and Szalma, J., 2007. A meta-analysis of performance response under thermal stressors. Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 49 (5), 851–877). We extend this research to interpersonal aspects of performance, namely service employees' and salespeople's customer orientation. We combine ergonomics with recent research on social cognition linking physical with interpersonal warmth/coldness. In Experiment 1, a scenario study in the lab, we demonstrate that student participants in rooms with a low temperature showed more customer-oriented behaviour and gave higher customer discounts than participants in rooms with a high temperature – even in zones of thermal comfort. In Experiment 2, we show the existence of alternative possibilities to evoke positive temperature effects on customer orientation in a sample of 126 service and sales employees using a semantic priming procedure. Overall, our results confirm the existence of temperature effects on customer orientation. Furthermore, important implications for services, retail and other settings of interpersonal interactions are discussed.
Practitioner Summary: Temperature effects on performance have emerged as a vital research topic. Owing to services' increasing economic importance, we transferred this research to the construct of customer orientation, focusing on performance in service and retail settings. The demonstrated temperature effects are transferable to services, retail and other settings of interpersonal interactions.
In this introduction to the special issue on Time and Change in Teams, we argue that the field of team research shows signs of a problem-method misfit with respect to the study of processes. Drawing on the distinction between differential and temporal (or variable vs. process) research, we scrutinise recent theories and research practices in the field, aiming to better understand the lack of congruence between research objectives and methods. We also discuss ways in which the gap between theory and method can be narrowed, and how the five studies making up this special issue contribute to this. We conclude with suggesting some future directions for the study of time and change in teams.
In this article, we provide an overview of current measures of shared leadership. Our aim is to help researchers choose the appropriate measure and give them advice on the statistical analysis of shared leadership measures. We first present traditional approaches, namely two questionnaires assessing shared leadership behaviors displayed by a team. We then describe social network indexes showing how leadership influence is distributed in a team and the coefficient of variation showing the relative dispersion of team members’ leadership influence. Finally, we present a new idea for modeling mutual influence processes in teams, the actor-partner interdependence model (APIM, Kenny, Kashy, & Cook, 2006). It can depict how each team member’s outcomes are affected by own and other team members’ leadership behaviors. For all approaches, we point out requirements, advantages, and disadvantages.
Well-being and Risk-taking Behavior: a Case Study of Employee Well-being Policies in Corporate Japan
(2013)
This article describes risk taking and well-being in corporate Japan. A case study of a research intensive manufacturing company shows how a corporate management can design its business strategy to contribute to the well-being of the employees. An in-depth expert interview with the company’s Chief Executive Officer and a qualitative content analysis of official company documents present and discuss the firm’s employee well-being policy. Findings show that the organization employs its business philosophy to promote a working environment that encourages constructive risk-taking. This leads to technological innovations and improved competitiveness on the market. Furthermore, the company is successful in contributing to the well-being of its employees and other stakeholders.