People

From employees’ point of view, changes in ethical leadership perceptions can signal important changes in the nature of the employment relationship. Guided by social exchange theory, this study proposes that changes in ethical leadership perceptions shape how employees appraise their exchange relationship with the organization and affect their pride in or contempt for the organization. Changes in these associative/dissociative emotions, in turn, precipitate changes in behaviors that serve or hurt the organization, notably voice and turnover. Experimental data collected from 900 subjects (Study 1) and field data collected from 470 employees across 4 waves over 14 months (Study 2) converged to show that changes in ethical leadership perceptions were related to same-direction changes in employees’ pride in the organization and to opposite-direction changes in their contempt for the organization above and beyond the effect of the present ethical leadership level. Changes in pride were in turn related to same-direction changes in functional voice, whereas changes in contempt were related to same-direction changes in dysfunctional voice. The field study also provided evidence that when pride increased (decreased), employees were less (more) likely to leave the organization 6 months after. These results suggest that changes in ethical leadership perceptions are meaningful on their own, that they may alter employees’ organization-targeted behaviors, and that changes in associative/dissociative emotions are the mediating mechanism.

Building positive perception of a company’s activities in corporate social responsibility among employees can result in valuable benefits, including increasing employees’ loyalty to the company and slowing turnover rates.

We provide a meta-analytic examination of the regulatory strategies that employees adopt to cope with different types of stressors in the workplace and how these strategies are linked to work and personal outcomes. Drawing from regulatory focus theory, we introduce a new taxonomy of promotion- and prevention-focused coping that complements the traditional taxonomy of problem- and emotion-focused coping in the transactional theory of stress. In addition, we propose that challenge stressors tend to evoke promotion-focused coping, whereas hindrance stressors tend to evoke prevention-focused coping. As a pair of important coping mechanisms in the work stress process, promotion-focused coping is positively related to employees’ job performance, job attitudes, and personal well-being, whereas prevention-focused coping is negatively related to these outcomes. We conducted an original meta-analysis of coping strategies in the workplace and tested the hypotheses with 550 effect sizes drawn from 156 samples that involved a total of 75,344 employees. We also tested the tenability of the proposed stressor-coping-outcome processes using meta-analytic path models and further examined the robustness of these models using full-information bootstrapping technique. The results converge to show that promotion- and prevention-focused coping serve as important intervening mechanisms that account for the relationships between work stressors and individual outcomes.

Drawing on self-enhancement theory, we propose that, intraindividually, employees tend to give themselves credit when they engage in creativity. Perceived creative credit, in turn, activates multiple psychological motives that ultimately affect deviance. On the one hand, perceived creative credit is associated with greater creativity-driven norm-breaking motives and greater entitlement motives, which in turn should increase deviance. On the other hand, perceived creative credit is associated with greater image preservation motives, which in turn should decrease deviance. A within-person study involving 206 employees and their coworkers conducted over a 10-day period provided broad support for the proposed model. In addition, a between-person variable, namely rewards for creativity, moderated the self-crediting process. The within-person serial mediation relationship between creativity and deviance was positive and significant for employees who perceived low rewards for creativity, but was not significant for those who perceived high rewards for creativity. In other words, rewards for creativity in the workplace effectively nullified this within-person self-crediting mechanism among employees. This study thus illustrates that, within individuals, creativity and deviance are related through perceived creative credit and different psychological motives (i.e., serial mediation). However, the strength of this serial mediation relationship varies depending on the availability of formal rewards for creativity (i.e., moderated serial mediation).