More than one way to articulate a vision: A configurations approach to leader charismatic rhetoric and influence

Mitigating and managing COVID-19 conspiratorial beliefs

BACKGROUND/AIM

Belief in COVID-19 related conspiracy theories is a widespread and consequential problem that healthcare leaders need to confront. In this article, we draw on insights from social psychology and organisational behaviour to offer evidence-based advice that healthcare leaders can use to reduce the spread of conspiratorial beliefs and ameliorate their negative effects, both during the current pandemic and beyond.

CONCLUSION

Leaders can effectively combat conspiratorial beliefs by intervening early and bolstering people's sense of control. Leaders can also address some of the problematic behaviours that result from conspiratorial beliefs by introducing incentives and mandates (e.g., vaccine mandates). However, because of the limitations of incentives and mandates, we suggest that leaders complement these techniques with interventions that leverage the power of social norms and increase people's connections to others.

The role of humility in Chief Executive Officers: a review

Humility, defined as a multidimensional construct comprising an accurate assessment of one’s characteristics, an ability to acknowledge limitations and strengths, and a low self-focus, is a complex trait to potentially counterbalance detrimental effects of “negative” personal traits (e.g., narcissism), thereby making it relevant to researchers and practitioners in Management and Psychology. Whereas the study of the humility construct has become ubiquitous in Social Psychology, to our best knowledge, a review of the effects of humility in the contexts of company leaders (i.e., Chief Executive Officers) is lacking. Our systematic review suggests that CEO humility, directly and indirectly, affects a variety of individual, team, and organizational level constructs. Implications for research and practice are discussed, providing a future agenda for the construct to reach its full potential despite its relative novelty.

The Interplay among Organisational Learning Culture, Agility, Growth, and Big Data Capabilities

This paper examines how an organisational learning culture impacts organisational agility by developing a model based on dynamic capabilities. The model treats agility as a dynamic capability and explains how an organisational learning culture (OLC) triggers a chain reaction through its influence on organisational agility (OA) that ultimately results in company growth. This paper also investigates the role of big data capabilities in transferring learning outcomes into dynamic capabilities. The model is tested through data collected from a survey of 138 Australian companies. Partial least squares structural equation modeling is adopted to empirically demonstrate how agility fully mediates the impact of the learning culture on growth. In addition, this paper further sheds light on the moderating role of big data competencies on the effects of OLC on OA. After presenting the results with implications to theory and practice, the paper ends with suggestions for future studies.

Text Preprocessing for Text Mining in Organizational Research: Review and Recommendations

Recent advances in text mining have provided new methods for capitalizing on the voluminous natural language text data created by organizations, their employees, and their customers. Although often overlooked, decisions made during text preprocessing affect whether the content and/or style of language are captured, the statistical power of subsequent analyses, and the validity of insights derived from text mining. Past methodological articles have described the general process of obtaining and analyzing text data, but recommendations for preprocessing text data were inconsistent. Furthermore, primary studies use and report different preprocessing techniques. To address this, we conduct two complementary reviews of computational linguistics and organizational text mining research to provide empirically grounded text preprocessing decision-making recommendations that account for the type of text mining conducted (i.e., open or closed vocabulary), the research question under investigation, and the data set’s characteristics (i.e., corpus size and average document length). Notably, deviations from these recommendations will be appropriate and, at times, necessary due to the unique characteristics of one’s text data. We also provide recommendations for reporting text mining to promote transparency and reproducibility.

Crafting a Change Message and Delivering It With Success: An Experimental Study

One primary mechanism through which leaders influence others in the context of organizational change is their rhetoric. While planning change communication, it is important for a change agent to craft the appropriate message content to foster employees’ commitment to change. Furthermore, the literal meaning of a message can be strengthened by the way it is delivered. This study investigates the content of a change message and how it is articulated by the leader using a vignette-based experimental study. Based on a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design, 200 participants are assigned to one of the eight hypothetical change scenarios that vary by change message content, message delivery, and change context. The results show the impact of rational versus emotional content and message content versus delivery on commitment differ based on secure or insecure contexts. This study provides cues for practitioners to design change messages to obtain commitment to change.

“Judging a Book by Its Cover”: The Dominance of Delivery Over Content When Perceiving Charisma

Perceived charisma is an outcome of message content and delivery, where the latter dominates the former. Framing perception of charisma within dual-process theories, we suggest a rapid processing of delivery and a slow processing of content. We aimed to track the differential processing speed of content and delivery that accounts for the delivery dominance. In two laboratory experiments, we manipulated content and delivery. Participants reported perceived charisma after viewing a presentation (Experiment 1) or moment-by-moment during the presentation (Experiment 2). The results confirmed the immediate influence of delivery on perceived charisma that was later either supported or revised by the content. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Reorganizing Organizational Politics Research: A Review of the Literature and Identification of Future Research Directions

Organizational politics has been an oft-studied phenomenon for nearly four decades. Prior reviews have described research in this stream as aligning with one of three categories: perceptions of organizational politics (POPs), political behavior, or political skill. We suggest that because these categories are at the construct level research on organizational politics has been artificially constrained. Thus, we suggest a new framework with higher-level categories within which to classify organizational politics research: political characteristics, political actions, and political outcomes. We then provide a broad review of the literature applicable to these new categories and discuss the possibilities for future research within each expanded category. Finally, we close with a discussion of future directions for organizational politics research across the categories.

When Things Go From Bad to Worse: The Impact of Relative Contextual Extremity on Benjamin Montgomery’s Positive Leadership and Psychological Capital

Drawing from positive organizational behavior, psychological capital has been shown to be a beneficial resource allowing leaders to remain positive and future-oriented. While having hope, optimism, confidence, and resilience are particularly effective in periods of great risk and uncertainty, extreme environments likely affect leaders’ psychological capital, as evidenced by changes to these comprising factors. Answering several recent calls for historical and narrative-based approaches to leadership in extreme events, we use content analysis and historiometrics in the case of Benjamin Montgomery, the first African American plantation owner in the post–Civil War U.S. South, who faced a sequence of extreme events after purchasing the plantation on which he was formerly a slave. We triangulate our examination through the letters Montgomery penned to his former owner Joseph Davis—the older brother of Confederacy President Jefferson Davis, records on the focal actors, and historical documents from the period. We then reconstruct and examine the relative contextual severity and its impact on Montgomery’s psychological capital across a 6-year period directly following the Civil War (1865-1870). We find that while unfamiliar extreme episodes erode leader psychological capital, those resources are restored when such periods are overcome and experience is gained. We also reconsider psychological capital as a profile multidimensional construct and show underlying pairs of dimensions, which we label as overt positivity (optimism and resilience) and realistic positivity (hope and confidence), trend similarly yet remain distinct from the other pair. The implications of these findings and future directions are then discussed.

More Than Words? Computer-Aided Text Analysis in Organizational Behavior and Psychology Research

Computer-aided text analysis (CATA) offers great promise for scholars who aspire to capture the beliefs, cognitions, and emotions of individuals as reflected in their narratives and written texts. We review advancements in the use of CATA in organizational studies and highlight the increased momentum towards incorporating rigor when using CATA. We review key CATA software and note the variance in possibilities of approaches when extracting meaning from languages. We then outline the potential for this technique to build knowledge surrounding organizational psychology and organizational behavior. Specifically, we highlight specific research streams that might benefit from the use of CATA and highlight cross-cultural perspectives that might further advance the use of this technique.

Social Influence and Politics in Organizational Research

This special issue of the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies addresses the topic of “Social Influence and Politics in Organizational Research,” a topic which spans more than a century and represents one of the oldest areas of inquiry in the field. In this article, we first review the literature to extract what we seem to know about this area of the field, and then we shift to an identification of some areas about which we still need to know more. Nine articles were selected to be published in this special issue, and they reflect different aspects of some these “need to know more” areas of social influence and politics in organizations. We believe these articles represent solid contributions to new knowledge in this area, and we hope they stimulate further and renewed scholarly interest.