Reliance and disclosure: How supervisory justice affects trust in supervisor and extra-role performance

Psychological contract breach during the pandemic: How an abrupt transition to a work from home schedule impacted the employment relationship

Organizations shifted employees to a work from home schedule as a protective health measure during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper depicts the path through which the abrupt workplace disruptions can trigger employees' perceptions of felt mistrust, intensify work to life conflict, and cause a psychological contract breach. In study 1, we conducted an experiment with 133 college students and found that switching to a work from home schedule with enhanced supervisor control increased the psychological contract breach through felt mistrust. In Study 2, we surveyed 239 adults who worked from home during the pandemic. Results underline the role of work to life conflict as a mediator through which disruptions and felt mistrust influenced the breach of psychological contract. Further, coping strategies were found to mitigate this detrimental effect. Overall, our findings suggest that sudden shifts in management practices can challenge workplace relationships during environmental shocks.

How leaders restrict employees’ deviance: An integrative framework of interactional justice and ethical leadership

Past research illustrated that leaders could restrict followers’ deviance by reinforcing social norms of appropriate behaviors. Nevertheless, we submit that this understanding is incomplete without considering the effects of leaders on followers’ self-sanctions given that most undesirable behaviors are controlled internally. This research argues that interactional justice is an effective strategy for leaders to enhance followers’ self-sanctions. Leaders’ interactional justice provides personalized information and dyadic treatment that indirectly reduce employees’ deviance by restraining followers’ moral disengagement. Besides, this study examines the social sanction role of ethical leadership. Ethical leaders highlight the importance of adherence to collective norms, which influence the relationship between followers’ moral disengagement and deviance. By identifying the different pathways via which they influence followers’ moral disengagement, we integrate interactional justice and ethical leadership into one theoretical framework. Our predictions are supported by data analyses of 220 samples from a multi-wave and -source field study. This integrative framework contributes to a comprehensive understanding of how leaders restrict employees’ deviance.

The antecedents of leader-member-exchange (LMX) relationships in African context: the influence of the supervisor’s feedback delivery-tactic

Purpose

The current paper aims to analyse the antecedents of leader–member exchange relationships (LMX) by specifically focusing on the influence of the supervisor’s feedback delivery tactic.

Design/methodology/approach

This study uses qualitative research methods with primary interviews as the main data source. Primary interviews with 40 managers from top supermarkets in Nigeria, South Africa and the UK were undertaken.

Findings

The authors found that both high-quality positive feedback and constructive criticisms produced the same feelings – more positive interpersonal relationships with their supervisors, higher levels of commitment to their organisations, higher job satisfaction and thus, high-quality LMX relationships. Where criticisms were delivered without greater interpersonal treatment, feedback was perceived as negative, and participants revealed lack of job satisfaction, lack of commitment to their organisations, poor interpersonal relationship with their supervisors, high turnover intent and thus low-quality LMX relationship.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the current paper is one of the first studies to highlight the consequences of different feedback delivery tactics on subsequent LMX quality particularly in African context. The authors specifically develop a process-based model of enhancing high-quality LMX, which shows the role of the supervisor’s feedback delivery tactic in the process. The authors also develop a process-based model that illustrates how negative/unconstructive feedback could result in a low-quality LMX. Finally, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is also one of the first to offer a comparative assessment between African and British (the UK) empirical settings and highlight some interesting dynamics concerning LMX quality and role of supervisor’s feedback delivery tactic.

Trust Profiles: Associations With Psychological Need Satisfaction, Work Engagement, and Intention to Leave

The study aimed to identify trust profiles in the work domain and to study how these patterns related to psychological need satisfaction, work engagement, and intentions to leave. A cross-sectional survey with a convenience sample (N = 298) was used. The Behavioral Trust Inventory, the Work-related Basic Need Satisfaction Scale, the Work Engagement Scale, and the Turnover Intention Scale were administered. The results showed four trust profiles: skeptic, reliance-based, moderately cautious, and optimistic trustors represented participants' responses on behavioral trust. Skeptic and optimistic trustors (who represented about 50% of the sample) differed primarily regarding their reliance and disclosure intensity. The other two trust profiles (representing the other 50% of the sample) reflected higher reliance and lower disclosure or lower reliance and higher disclosure. Psychological need satisfaction (comprised of autonomy, competence, and relatedness satisfaction) and work engagement were the strongest and intentions to leave the weakest for optimistic trustors (compared to skeptic trustors).

LMX, organizational justice and performance: curvilinear relationships

Purpose

Organizational research has long been dominated by the assumption that relationships between variables are linear, which can be overly simplistic or even misleading. This study proposes and tests a model in which subordinate organizational justice perceptions influence the linearity of the relationship between leader–member exchange (LMX) and subordinate task performance.

Design/methodology/approach

A time-lagged anonymous survey study was conducted in Romania on a sample consisting of 274 subordinates nested under 42 leaders from a wide range of work settings. Supervisors rated the performance of their direct reports, while subordinates rated LMX and justice perceptions.

Findings

Hierarchical linear modeling results revealed that the associations of LMX and LMX affect with task performance were best described by an inverted U shape when perceptions of supervisory interpersonal justice were high. Relationship strength was also affected. No such moderating effects were confirmed for other types of justice. We also found an unmoderated nonlinear effect of LMX-professional respect on task performance.

Practical implications

Results suggest that for supervisors who are perceived as fair in terms of interpersonal justice, a moderate level of LMX (especially LMX affect), slightly above the mean, maximizes subordinate task performance, while high LMX is preferable otherwise. Similarly, a moderate level of LMX professional respect seems optimal for performance.

Originality/value

The present paper challenges the linearity assumption for the established LMX–performance association, demonstrating that both the linearity and strength of the association may be influenced by justice. Second, results suggest that the too-much-of-a-good-thing effect may be the result of additive effects. Third, differential effects of LMX and justice dimensions are revealed.

Vertical Trust Within Organizations and Performance: A Systematic Review

The concept of trust within organizations, or intraorganizational trust, has been considered as a potential mechanism to increase performance and as such has attracted growing interest in the organizational literature. However, despite the increasing number of studies examining the relationship between intraorganizational trust and performance, this apparently positive link has not been consistently confirmed by empirical research, and a deeper understanding is called for. Moreover, the literature on the trust–performance link is highly fragmented and dispersed. This study carries out a systematic review of the evidence, focusing on the vertical dimension of intraorganizational trust and performance relationship in an attempt to provide an integrative picture of the existing literature and to propose new research avenues on the topic. Specifically, this systematic review delves deeper into the antecedents, mediating effects, and moderators of vertical intraorganizational trust and performance, providing a more comprehensive framework for these relationships.

Understanding How Perceived Leader Integrity Affects Follower Trust: Lessons From the Use of Multidimensional Measures of Integrity and Trust

Even though much research has emerged recently supporting the importance of perceived leader integrity judgments on how followers develop trust in their leaders, our efforts to understand possible mechanisms for these relationships have not yet yielded detailed explanations. One reason for this is that most research on perceived leader integrity and trust has used unidimensional measures of each construct, even though recent research has called for more complex treatments of them. The purpose of this study is to couple the use of a recently developed, multidimensional measure of perceived leader integrity with a multidimensional measure of trust to examine possible explanations of how they relate. Results support the value of modeling perceived integrity in two dimensions and support a more nuanced model of how integrity may affect trust when trust is similarly modeled as multiple dimensions. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of how leader integrity may affect trust and other outcomes.

Volitional Trust, Autonomy Satisfaction, and Engagement at Work

This study tested a structural model that identifies the nature of relationships between trust, autonomy satisfaction, and personal engagement at work. A cross-sectional survey design with a convenience sample ( n = 252) was used. The Behavioral Trust Inventory, Work-Related Basic Need Satisfaction Scale, and Work Engagement Scale were administered. While reliance-based trust did not have a significant influence on engagement, disclosure-based trust in a focal leader was found to predict satisfaction of autonomy needs and employee engagement. Mediation analyses revealed that satisfaction of the need for autonomy facilitates the influence of trust on work outcomes. More specifically, disclosure (a dimension of trust) impacted engagement via autonomy satisfaction. Overall, the model explained 44% of total variance in engagement, to which the variables proportionately contributed as follows: autonomy satisfaction = 79.58%, disclosure = 18.22%, and reliance = 2.20%. The findings provide possible directions for how leaders can leverage trust to facilitate autonomy support and higher levels of engagement.

Bridging corporate social responsibility and compassion at work

Purpose

– This study aims to examine how employees' perceptions of organizational actions, such as corporate social responsibility (CSR), affect their compassionate acts in organizations through employee perceptions of organizational justice and affective organizational commitment.

Design/methodology/approach

– The employees from 87 firms in South Korea were surveyed using a self-administered instrument for data collection. Out of 400 questionnaires, a total of 253 usable questionnaires were obtained after list-wise deletion, for a 63.3 percent response rate. The firms belong to a variety of industries (banking and financial services, manufacturing, hospitals, education, etc.).

Findings

– The results indicate that employees' perceptions of CSR positively relate to compassion at work through organizational justice perceptions (i.e. perceptions of distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice), and affective organizational commitment, in a sequential manner, in addition to their direct effects on compassion at work.

Originality/value

– This study sheds new light on both the compassion and the CSR literature due to its attempt to bridge the macro concept of CSR with micro research in compassion. This is, apparently, one of the first pieces of research in the management literature to specifically address compassion as a consequence of employees' CSR perception.