Group harmony in the workplace: Conception, measurement, and validation

Striving for the bottom line: the impact of supervisor bottom-line mentality on employees' work effort and helping behavior

Purpose

This study aims to advance the bottom-line mentality (BLM) literature by drawing on goal-setting theory to examine the positive effects of supervisor BLM on employees' behavior.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors collected survey data from 291 full-time employees from various Chinese organizations at three different points in time.

Findings

The authors found that supervisor BLM and employees' collectivism orientation interacted to influence employees' bottom-line goal commitment such that the positive relationship between supervisor BLM and employees' bottom-line goal commitment was stronger when employees' collectivism orientation was high rather than low. Furthermore, they found that employees' collectivism orientation moderated the positive indirect effects of supervisor BLM on employees' work effort and helping behavior via bottom-line goal commitment such that the indirect effects were stronger when employees had a high rather than a low collectivism orientation.

Originality/value

The authors explored the “bridge side” of supervisor BLM on employees' behavior, especially after being moderated by collectivism orientation. Our results can help managers develop a comprehensive understanding of BLM.

Contextualizing small business resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from small business owner-managers

In light of the unprecedented global crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, resilient businesses are those more likely to make the transition to the post-COVID era. Our study draws on the concept of psychological resilience and focusses on individual owner-managers to the end of examining business resilience in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We conduct a longitudinal qualitative study, collecting data from 35 small business owner-managers between April and December 2020. Our findings-which provide insights into the micro-underpinnings of the resilience exhibited by small business in response to the COVID-19 pandemic-illustrate the responses and resilient qualities of owner-managers at both the personal and leadership levels, which facilitate resilient actions at the small business level. By drawing on a psychological perspective, our study provides a novel conceptualization of small business resilience at the person-role-organization nexus.

Cognitive Flexibility Matters: The Role of Multilevel Positive Affect and Cognitive Flexibility in Shaping Victims’ Cooperative and Uncooperative Behavioral Responses to Trust Violations

Despite a significant growth in the scholarly literature in the area of trust violations and repair in the last decade, extant work has largely ignored the complex and socially competent responses of the victims of these violations. Our framework integrates insights from affective events theory, the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, and theories of cognitive processing to suggest that cognitive flexibility is central to understanding how individuals respond to trust violations. Rather than viewing victims solely as gatekeepers to trust repair, we examine how victims’ cognitive processes are influenced by the affective context of those violations, which can, in turn, produce a spectrum of nuanced behavioral responses. We refer to this spectrum as the “swollen middle,” the range of behavior that resides between the extremes of impulsive revenge and forgiveness-based, communal cooperation. By integrating psychological theories of emotion and cognitive processing, we seek to highlight the central role of cognitive flexibility in the range of cooperative responses to trust violations. More broadly, we seek to contribute to the emergence of a new paradigm for studying interpersonal trust at work—a paradigm that explores trust-violating events as situated affect-laden experiences that interact with relevant organizational and interpersonal factors to influence employee behavior and trust dynamics in organizations.

When Are Pay Gaps Good or Bad for Firm Performance? Evidence from China

There is still an ongoing debate regarding the firm performance implications of pay gaps between top executives and subordinate employees. This study integrates relative deprivation theory and tournament theory to investigate the potential nonlinear effects of pay gaps. We expect that at low levels of pay inequality, increased inequality hurts firm productivity, while at higher levels of pay inequality, increased inequality helps firm productivity. Our study of Chinese firms confirms that pay gaps have an approximately U-shaped relationship with firm performance. This nonlinear relationship is weaker in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) than in non-SOEs, suggesting that state ownership is an important moderator in the association. Overall, this study explains previous mixed findings regarding consequences of pay gaps with meaningful implications for policymakers and entrepreneurs in China and other economies with similar cultural and institutional backgrounds.

Antecedents and Consequences of Frontline Employee’s Trust-in-Supervisor and Trust-in-Coworker

Based on social exchange theory, this study investigates the antecedents and consequences of a frontline employee’s trust-in-supervisor and a frontline employee’s trust-in-coworker in a single framework. A personally administered survey was conducted to collect data from 203 frontline employees of coffee shops in the Republic of Korea. Covariance-based structural equation modeling was applied using AMOS 21.0 to explore the proposed relationships. The results show that abusive supervision is negatively related to frontline employee’s trust-in-supervisor, whereas supervisor support and communication quality have significant positive effects on frontline employee’s trust-in-supervisor. Similarly, coworker ostracism has a significant negative effect on frontline employee’s trust-in-coworker, whereas coworker harmony and communication quality have significant positive effect on frontline employee’s trust-in-coworker. Finally, the results show that a frontline employee’s trust-in-supervisor predicts a frontline employee’s supervisor cooperation, and a frontline employee’s trust-in-coworker leads to a frontline employee’s coworker cooperation.

How Do Coworkers Aid in Coping with Emotional Exhaustion? An Experience Sampling Method Approach

The present study emphasizes the indirect influences of coworker helping behavior on emotional exhaustion through psychological availability and the moderating role of perceived task demands on a daily basis. Using a two-wave experience sampling method with data collected via mobile phones, we collected 345 matched data from 69 samples over five consecutive days in mainland China. We developed a moderated mediation model to test our conceptual model, with the following significant results: (1) Daily coworker helping behavior decreased employee emotional exhaustion; (2) daily psychological availability mediated the influence of coworker helping behavior on employee emotional exhaustion; (3) through psychological availability, perceived task demands moderated the indirect influence of daily coworker helping behavior on emotional exhaustion. The indirect influence of daily coworker helping behavior only emerged with a low perception of job demands. This research explores the mechanism and boundary conditions of the relationship between daily coworker helping behavior and employee emotional exhaustion with the job demands-resources model framework. In practice, leaders should adopt beneficial interventions to enhance team cohesion, to facilitate team members' helping behavior, and to manage task demands.

Spiritual Leadership on Proactive Workplace Behavior: The Role of Organizational Identification and Psychological Safety

This study investigates whether and why spiritual leadership may contribute to enhanced proactive employee workplace behavior. Based on self-determination theory (SDT), we examine the effects of two sequential mediators (i.e., organizational identification and psychological safety) on the relationship between spiritual leadership and proactive workplace behavior. Data collected from 188 subordinate-leader dyads in Chinese firms suggested that spiritual leadership has a significant positive effect on proactive workplace behavior. In addition, both organizational identification and psychological safety mediate the relationship between spiritual leadership and proactive workplace behavior. Furthermore, spiritual leadership positively influences organizational identification, and such identification nurtures psychological safety, which, in turn, fosters the proactive behavior of employees. It extends the existing impact of spiritual leadership to proactive workplace behavior and shed lights on the mediating mechanisms through which spiritual leadership exerts influences on proactive workplace behavior. Finally, it considers the important roles played by leaders in modern organizations.

Justice Climates and Management Team Effectiveness: The Central Role of Group Harmony

Although social harmony is one of the most important cultural values in many of Asian societies it has rarely been studied in the mainstream management literatures. Based on the group-value theory of justice we examined how group justice climates influence group effectiveness through group harmony. Analyses of data on 106 upper-level management teams from Chinese organizations showed that justice climates were positively associated with group harmony, which in turn was positively associated with team task performance and team helping behavior. Group harmony was found to significantly mediate the positive effect of both distributive and interactional justice climates on team helping behavior but only marginally on team task performance. Finally, in support of past research both at the group and individual level, procedural justice climate had the weakest effect on group processes and outcomes. By applying the group value theory on group harmony this paper aims to integrate Eastern and Western perspectives on one hand and the justice climates and group harmony research on the other. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

A Giant of Cultural Research: Seeing Further from the Shoulders of Kwok Leung

This is a special issue in honor of Kwok Leung, whose path-breaking career in social psychology, cross-cultural psychology, organizational behavior, and international management was cut short by his untimely death in 2015. Newton said, ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’. In cultural research, it's Kwok's shoulders that enable us to see further.