Perceived value congruence and team innovation

Operationalizing the Culture of Burnout and Well-Being: Multicenter Study of Value Congruence and Flourishing in General Surgery Residency

BACKGROUND

Value congruence (VC) is the degree of alignment between worker and workplace values and is strongly associated with reduced job strain and retention. Within general surgery residency, the impact of VC and how to operationalize it to improve workplace well-being remain unclear.

STUDY DESIGN

This 2-part mixed-methods study comprised 2 surveys of US general surgery residents and qualitative interviews with program directors. In Part 1, January 2021, mixed-level surgical residents from 16 ACGME-accredited general surgery residency programs participated in survey #1. This survey was used to identify shared or conflicting perspectives on VC concerning well-being initiatives and resources. In April 2021, interviews from 8 institutions were conducted with 9 program directors or their proxies. In Part 2, May to June 2022, a similar cohort of surgical residents participated in survey #2. Unadjusted logistic and linear regression models were used in this survey to assess the association between VC and individual-level global well-being (ie flourishing), respectively.

RESULTS

In survey #1 (N = 300, 34% response rate), lack of VC was an emergent theme with subthemes of inaccessibility, inconsiderateness, inauthenticity, and insufficiency regarding well-being resources. Program directors expressed variable awareness of and alignment with these perceptions. In survey #2 (N = 251, 31% response rate), higher VC was significantly associated with flourishing (odds ratio 1.91, 95% CI 1.44 to 2.52, p < 0.001).

CONCLUSIONS

Exploring the perceived lack of VC within general surgery residency reveals an important cultural variable for optimizing well-being and suggests open dialogue as a first step toward positive change. Future work to identify where and how institutional actions diminish perceived VC is warranted.

How to recover from difficult condition? The relationship between leader-employee congruence in creativity goal and innovative performance

Purpose

Drawing upon the literature on person-leader supplementary fit literature, this study aims to positions dissatisfaction with organizational performance as a difficult condition that moderates the relationship between leader-employee congruence/incongruence in creativity goal and employee innovative performance.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper data were collected from 226 leader-employee dyads from several information technology companies in China. Polynomial regression combined with the response surface methodology was used to test the hypotheses.

Findings

Three conclusions were drawn. First, employee innovative performance was maximized when leaders and employees were congruence in creativity goal. Second, in the case of congruence, employee had higher innovative performance when a leader's and an employee's creativity goal matched at high levels. Third, dissatisfaction with organizational performance moderated the effect of leader – employee congruence in creativity goal on employee innovative performance.

Originality/value

This study enhanced theoretical developments by considering the importance of leaders' congruence with employees in creativity goal for the first time. Additionally, the research results provided better practical guidance for how to help employees recover from difficult condition and continue to participate in innovation.

Improving high lean team performance through aligned behaviour-value patterns and coactive vicarious learning-by-doing

Purpose

Why are some lean workfloor teams able to improve their already high performance, over time, and others not? By studying teams' and leaders' behaviour-value patterns, this abductive field study uncovers a dynamic capability at the team level.

Design/methodology/approach

Various methods were employed over three consecutive years to thoroughly examine five initially high-performing lean workfloor teams, including their leaders. These methods encompassed micro-behavioural coding of 59 h of film footage, surveys, individual and group interviews, participant observation and archival data, involving objective and perceptual team-performance indicators. Two of the five teams continued to improve and perform highly.

Findings

Continuously improving high lean team performance is found to be associated with (1) team behaviours such as frequent performance monitoring, information sharing, peer support and process improvement; (2) team leaders who balance, over time, task- and relations-oriented behaviours; (3) higher-level leaders who keep offering the team face-to-face support, strategic clarity and tangible resources; (4) these three actors' endorsement of self-transcendence and openness-to-change work values and alignment, over time, with their behaviours; and (5) coactive vicarious learning-by-doing as a “stable collective activity pattern” among team, team leader, and higher-level leadership.

Originality/value

Since lean has been undertheorised, the authors invoked insights from organisational behaviour and management theories, in combination with various fine- and coarse-grained data, over time. The authors uncovered actors' behaviour-value patterns and a collective learning-by-doing pattern that may explain continuous lean team performance improvement. Four theory-enriching propositions were developed and visualised in a refined model which may already benefit lean practitioners.

Team Innovation

Team innovation is of growing importance in research in organizational psychology and organizational behavior as well as organizational practice. I review the empirical literature in team innovation to draw integrative conclusions about the state of the science and to provide a research agenda to move the field forward. The review identifies two main perspectives in team innovation research, the knowledge integration perspective and the team climate perspective. Key conclusions focus on the need to integrate these perspectives to develop an integrative contingency model of the factors providing teams with diverse informational resources and the factors influencing the extent to which teams integrate these resources in a process of information exchange and integration. As part of these integrative efforts, construct consolidation efforts are important to reverse the tendency for proliferation of substantially overlapping moderators and mediators proposed. The review also identifies the contingencies of the relationship between idea development and idea implementation as the most important understudied issue in team innovation research.

Identity and identification at work

Work identity and identification have generated a great deal of interest in the fields of organizational psychology and organizational behavior. Given several theoretical perspectives available to study work identity, the field has developed in somewhat haphazard fashion with independent streams of research investigating the same or highly similar phenomena. In the present review, we provide a broad overview of theoretical approaches and topics in work identity literature to inform and guide future integration. We review over 600 published articles and organize the literature along two dimensions: level of identity inclusiveness (i.e., individual, interpersonal, and collective) and static/dynamic approaches to identity change. Within each review category, a brief summary of extant research is provided, along with suggestions for future research.