Who is Being Judged Promotable: Good actors, high performers, highly committed or birds of a feather?

Stay Humble and Fly High: The Roles of Subordinate Voice and Competitive Work Context in the Linkage Between Leader Humility and Career Success

This study examines the relationship between leaders’ humility and their career success. We propose that humble leaders are more likely to occupy central positions in their subordinate teams’ voice networks where they improve their own performance and gain favorable reward recommendations. We also argue that in seemingly disadvantageous competitive work contexts, humble leaders become more central in the team voice network and increase their career prospects. We found support for these hypotheses in a multisource field study of 116 supervisors, 461 subordinates, and 34 shop managers from a Chinese company and in a vignette-based experiment with 233 working adults. Theoretical and practical implications for career success, leader humility, and voice literature are discussed.

Project Success: What is the Role of Project Team Morale and How It Can Be Boosted?

This research presents and validates a model of project team morale and its influence on project success. We operationally define morale in project-based work as a multi-faceted variable encompassing suggested definitions offered in former studies. Unlike past research, we investigate the mediating effects between these facets of morale and success. A structural equation model is proposed and empirically tested to investigate the interdependencies between the facets of project team morale and how they promote project success. The results show that project team morale explains 25% of the variance in project success. Findings provide project leaders with a tool to enhance project success by influencing employees’ morale, rather than solely focusing on traditional project planning and controlling activities. We provide practical implications for project team leadership and performance.

Direct and Indirect Effects of Agreeableness on Overconfidence

Abstract. Agreeableness is generally thought to be a personality trait with positive outcomes, especially with regards to the creation and maintenance of harmonious interpersonal relationships. The potential negative consequences of agreeableness are discussed less often. This study explores the potential for overconfidence among agreeable people. In addition, self-esteem and perceived similarity were examined as an explanation for the indirect effects of agreeableness on overconfidence. Specifically, within each pair of 104 student dyads who had worked jointly on a project in an undergraduate course, one acted as a rater and the other as a ratee. The raters were asked to evaluate their partner’s performance, while the ratees were asked how they thought the raters had evaluated their performance. Our measure of overconfidence was the gap between the partner’s evaluation of the participant’s performance and the participant’s belief in how this performance was evaluated. Additional measures filled out by the subjects included agreeableness, friendship, self-esteem, and perceived similarity. Results indicated that self-esteem and perceived similarity provide an approach for understanding the indirect effects of the agreeableness-overconfidence association.