Contributions published at Human Resource Management and Leadership (Jochen Menges)

null

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to use the job demands-resources model to investigate intra-individual engagement-burnout profiles, and demands-resources profiles. Design/methodology/approach A representative sample of the US workforce was surveyed online. Latent profile analysis (LPA) and configural frequency analysis examined intra-individual profiles and their inter-relations. Findings A negative inter-individual correlation between engagement and burnout suggested that burnout tends to be lower when engagement is high, but intra-individual analyses identified both aligned engagement-burnout profiles (high, moderate, and low on both variables), and discrepant profiles (high engagement – low burnout; high burnout – low engagement). High engagement and burnout co-occurred in 18.8 percent of workers. These workers reported strong mixed (positive and negative) emotions and intended to leave their organization. Another LPA identified three demands-resources profiles: low demands – low resources, but moderate self-efficacy, low workload and bureaucracy demands but moderate information processing demands – high resources, and high demands – high resources. Workers with high engagement – high burnout profiles often reported high demands – high resources profiles. In contrast, workers with high engagement – low burnout profiles often reported profiles of high resources, moderate information processing demands, and low other demands. Originality/value This study examined the intersection of intra-individual engagement-burnout profiles and demands-resources profiles. Previous studies examined only one of these sides or relied on inter-individual analyses. Interestingly, many employees appear to be optimally engaged while they are burned-out and considering to leave their jobs. Demands and resources facets were distinguished in the LPA, revealing that some demands were associated with resources and engagement.

Research suggests positions of brokerage in organizational networks provide many benefits, but studiestend to assume everyone is equally able to perceive and willing to act on brokerage opportunities. Herewe challenge these assumptions in a direct investigation of whether people can perceive brokerageopportunities and are willing to broker. We propose that the psychological experience of powerdiminishes individuals’ ability to perceive opportunities to broker between people who are not directlyconnected in their networks, yet enhances their willingness to broker. In Study 1, we find that employeesin a marketing and media agency who had a high sense of power were likely to see fewer brokerageopportunities in their advice networks. In Study 2, we provide causal evidence for this claim in anexperiment where the psychological experience of power is manipulated. Those who felt powerful,relative to those who felt little power, tended to see fewer brokerage opportunities than actually existed,yet were more willing to broker, irrespective of whether there was a brokerage opportunity present.Collectively, these findings present a paradox of agency: Individuals who experience power are likely tounderperceive the very brokerage opportunities for which their sense of agency is suited.

Theory and research on affect in organizations has mostly approached emotions from a valence perspective, suggesting that positive emotions lead to positive outcomes and negative emotions to negative outcomes for organizations. We propose that cognition resulting from emotional experiences at work cannot be assumed based on emotion valence alone. Instead, building on appraisal theory and social identity theory, we propose that individual responses to discrete emotions in organizations are shaped by, and thus depend on, work-related identifications. We elaborate on this proposition specifically with respect to turnover intentions, theorizing how three discrete emotions—anger, guilt, and pride—differentially affect turnover intentions, depending on two work-related identifications: organizational and occupational. A longitudinal study involving 135 pilot instructors reporting emotions, work-related identifications, and turnover intentions over the course of one year provides general support for our proposition. Our theory and findings advance emotion and identity theories by explaining how the effects of emotions are dependent on the psychological context in which they are experienced.

Younger employees are often promoted into supervisory positions in which they then manage older subordinates. Do companies benefit or suffer when supervisors and subordinates have inverse age differences? In this study, we examine how average age differences between younger supervisors and older subordinates are linked to the emotions that prevail in the workforce, and to company performance. We propose that the average age differences determine how frequently older subordinates and their coworkers experience negative emotions, and that these emotion frequency levels in turn relate to company performance. The indirect relationship between age differences and performance occurs only if subordinates express their feelings toward their supervisor, but the association is neutralized if emotions are suppressed. We find consistent evidence for this theoretical model in a study of 61 companies with multiple respondents.

Supporting one’s family is a major reason why many people work, yet surprisingly little research has examined the implications of family motivation. Drawing on theories of prosocial motivation and action identification, we propose that family motivation increases job performance by enhancing energy and reducing stress, and it is especially important when intrinsic motivation is lacking. Survey and diary data collected across multiple time points in a Mexican maquiladora generally support our model. Specifically, we find that family motivation enhances job performance when intrinsic motivation is low—in part by providing energy, but not by reducing stress. We conclude that supporting a family provides a powerful source of motivation that can boost performance in the workplace, offering meaningful implications for research on motivation and the dynamics of work and family engagement.

In competitive settings, people prefer leaders with masculine faces. But is facial masculinity a trait that is similarly desired in men and women leaders? Across three studies, we discovered that people indeed prefer men and women leaders who have faces with masculine traits. But surprisingly, we find that people also prefer women with low facial masculinity as leaders in competitive contexts (Study 1). Our findings indicate that low facial masculinity in women, but not in men is perceived to indicate competitiveness (Study 2). Thus, in contrast to men, women leaders who rate high in facial masculinity as well as those low in facial masculinity are both selected as leaders in competitive contexts. Indeed, among CEOs of S&P 500 companies, we find a greater range of facial masculinity among women CEOs than among men CEOs (Study 3). Our results suggest that traits of facial masculinity in men and women are interpreted differently. Low facial masculinity in women is linked to competitiveness and not only to cooperativeness as suggested by prior research.

Why are employees motivated to work? If we believe graduation speakers, it is to "follow their passion" and to "do what they love." Being passionate about one's work is increasingly seen as an important component of employees' motivation, and has sparked recent calls for a theoretical construct of its' own (Perrewé et al. 2012). However, whether passion for work is really essential to work-related outcomes is unclear. Employees can view their work in a variety of ways, as a job, career or a calling (Wrzesniewski et al., 1997), which may determine the importance of passion for work. Because multiple sources of motivation do not add to each other to create larger overall motivation (Wrzesniewski et al. 2014), we wonder is passion really necessary? In addition, a new set of studies questions whether passion is something that is fixed or can be grown (Chen et al., 2015), and whether passion can develop with invested energy over time (Gielnik et al., 2015). Is passion necessary for a meaningful life? Does passion have to occur at work? How can passion be refueled? In this symposium, we propose to start thinking about passion more rigorously, and help establish it as a meaningful construct in the organizational behavioral literature.

This study examines how followers regulate their outward expression of emotions in the context of two types of leadership that are commonly associated with transformational leadership, namely charismatic leadership and individually considerate leadership. Based on new theorizingand a series of three studies involving experiments andfield work, we show that the two types of leadership have different effects on followers' emotional expressiveness. Specifically, we find that followers under the influence of leaders' charisma tend to suppress the expression of emotions(we call this the “awestruck effect”), but followers express emotions when leaders consider them individually. Awestruck followers may suffer from expressive inhibition even as charismatic leaders stir their hearts.

null

This study integrates the emotion and social influence literatures to examine how emotion recognition ability (ERA) relates to annual income. In a sample of 142 employee-peer-supervisor triads from a broad range of jobs and organizations, we find that people’s level of ERA indirectly relates to how much they earn per year. The relationship between ERA and annual income is mediated sequentially through political skill and inter-personal facilitation. The results imply that emotional abilities allow people not only to process affect-ladeninformation effectively but also to use this information to successfully navigate the social world of organizations in the pursuit of prosperity.

This paper focuses on an emergent debate about the microfoundations of organizational social networks. We consider three theoretical positions: an individual agency perspective suggesting that people, through their individual characteristics and cognitions, shape networks; a network patterning perspective suggesting that networks, through their structural configuration, form people; and a coevolution perspective suggesting that people, in their idiosyncrasies, and net-works, in their differentiated structures, coevolve. We conclude that individual attitudes, behav-iors, and outcomes cannot be fully understood without considering the structuring of organizational contexts in which people are embedded, and that social network structuring and change in organizations cannot be fully understood without considering the psychology of pur-posive individuals. To guide future research, we identify key questions from each of the three theoretical perspectives and, particularly, encourage more research on how individual actions and network structure coevolve in a dynamic process of reciprocal influence.

Charisma is crucially important for a range of leadership outcomes. Charisma is also in the eye of the beholder - an attribute perceived by followers. Traditional leadership theory has tended to assume charismatic attributions flow tomen rather than women. We challenge this assumption of an inevitable charismatic bias toward men leaders. We propose that gender-biased attributions about the charismatic leadership of men and women are facilitated by the operation of aleader-in-social-network schema. Attributions of charismatic leadership depend on the match between the gender of theleader and the perceived structure of the network. In three studies encompassing both experimental and survey data, we show that when team advice networks are perceived to be centralized around one or a few individuals, women leaders are seen as less charismatic than men leaders. However, when networks are perceived to be cohesive (many connectionsamong individuals), it is men who suffer a charismatic leadership disadvantage relative to women. Perceptions of leadershipdepend not only on whether the leader is a man or a woman but also on the social network context in which the leader is embedded.

Research has established that groups are pervaded by feelings. But group emotion research within organizational science has suffered in recent years from a lack of terminological clarity, from a narrow focus on small groups, and from an overemphasis on micro-processes of emotion transmission. We address those problems by reviewing and systematically integrating relevant work conducted not only in organizational science, but also in psychology and sociology. We offer a definition of group emotions and sort the conceptual space along four dimensions: group emotion responses, recognition, regulation, and reiteration. We provide evidence that group emotions occur at all levels of analysis, including levels beyond small work groups. The accounts of group emotion emergence at higher levels of analysis differ substantially between organizational science, psychology, and sociology. We review these accounts - emergence through inclination, interaction, institutionalization, or identification - and then synthesize them into one parsimonious model. The consequences of different group emotions are reviewed and further constructs (including emotional aperture, group emotional intelligence, emotional culture, and emotional climate) are discussed. We end with a call for future research on several neglected group emotion topics including the study of discrete shared emotions, emotions at multiple levels, the effects of social network patterns, and effects on group functioning.

The article presents research on the association of emotion recognition with annual income through interpersonal mechanisms in work environment. The study shows workplace success bearing upon and integrating social influence research and emotional abilities. It recommends people with having higher emotion recognition ability (ERA) levels get higher annual income as they have better political skills allowing them to smoothly operate on an interpersonal level. The significant factor of job performance, which serve as mediators between annual income and ERA is proposed.

What makes people perceive a leader as charismatic, and how do team leaders obtain performance outcomes from their followers? We examine leaders in times of organizational change and investigate the mechanisms through which leaders' change-promoting behaviors are associated with team performance.In a multilevel mediation model, we propose that the indirect relationship between change-promoting behaviors and team performance is sequentially transmitted through followers' perceptions of charisma and followers' commitment to change. A study of 33 leadersand 142 followers provides empirical support for the model, using multilevel structural equation modeling to analyze top-down relationships between leaders and followers and bottom-up relationships between followers and team outcomes. Results suggest that team leaders are perceived as more charismatic when they engage inchange-promoting behaviors. These behaviors facilitate team performance through individual followers' perceived charisma and commitment to change.