Incivility experienced by immigrants struggling with acculturation: exploring buffering effects of holding behaviors by mentors

Purpose

Challenges with acculturation in organizations may make employees an easy target of workplace incivility and awareness of what constitutes uncivil behaviors at work can influence the association between acculturation and incivility. The current study examined the links between acculturation, incivility and tested mentor holding behavior as a moderator.

Design/methodology/approach

Survey data including responses to incivility vignettes were collected from 163 full-time first- and second-generation immigrant employees in the southeastern United States. The data were analyzed through moderated hierarchical regression analysis.

Findings

The results indicated that those experiencing separation or marginalization in trying to acculturate into the dominant culture reported experiencing uncivil behaviors from supervisors and coworkers. Also, one's awareness of incivility moderated the positive relationship between experience of separation and experiences of incivility, such that this relationship was stronger for those who had higher awareness of what constitutes uncivil behavior. Additionally, the effect of marginalization on reported incivility was dampened with higher levels of mentor holding behavior.

Originality/value

This study’s findings extend the application of the selective incivility theory beyond the minoritized categories of race and gender to the immigrants struggling with acculturation in organizations. Also, our study lends support to widening the theoretical lens for mentoring to include relational systems theory.

A Test-Retest Reliability Generalization Meta-Analysis of Judgments Via the Policy-Capturing Technique

Policy capturing is a widely used technique, but the temporal stability of policy-capturing judgments has long been a cause for concern. This article emphasizes the importance of reporting reliability, and in particular test-retest reliability, estimates in policy-capturing studies. We found that only 164 of 955 policy-capturing studies (i.e., 17.17%) reported a test-retest reliability estimate. We then conducted a reliability generalization meta-analysis on policy-capturing studies that did report test-retest reliability estimates—and we obtained an average reliability estimate of .78. We additionally examined 16 potential methodological and substantive antecedents to test-retest reliability (equivalent to moderators in validity generalization studies). We found that test-retest reliability was robust to variation in 14 of the 16 factors examined but that reliability was higher in paper-and-pencil studies than in web-based studies and was higher for behavioral intention judgments than for other (e.g., attitudinal and perceptual) judgments. We provide an agenda for future research. Finally, we provide several best-practice recommendations for researchers (and journal reviewers) with regard to (a) reporting test-retest reliability, (b) designing policy-capturing studies for appropriate reportage, and (c) properly interpreting test-retest reliability in policy-capturing studies.

Fat-Phobic and Non-Fat-Phobic Anorexia Nervosa: A Conjoint Analysis on the Importance of Shape and Weight

With the introduction of new diagnostic criteria in DSM-5, fear of weight gain no longer represents a sine qua non-criterion for the diagnosis of anorexia nervosa (AN). This is of relevance as a subgroup of individuals with AN denies fear of weight gain as the reason for restrictive eating but still remain at a very low weight. As self-reports are susceptible to bias, other methods are needed to confirm the existence of the subtype in order to provide adapted treatment. Therefore, we aimed to measure fear of weight gain using a novel method in clinical psychology, the conjoint analysis (CA). Relative importance and preference scores for various life aspects, including appearance/shape and weight were assessed in women with fat-phobic AN (FP-AN, n = 30), NFP-AN (n = 7), and healthy controls (n = 29). Individuals with FP-AN showed a significant lower preference for weight gain versus weight maintenance than HC (p = 0.011, ηp2 = 0.107). Correlation between explicitly assessed drive for thinness and CA score was low. As expected, in FP-AN the explicitly endorsed fear of weight gain was confirmed by the marked preference for weight maintenance compared to HC, while for NFP-AN explicit and implicit measures diverged, indicating that against their self-report they may experience at least some fear of weight gain. The utility of CA as a tool to measure fear of weight gain — and potentially other psychopathological constructs —requires further confirmation.

Mistreatment in Organizations: Toward a Perpetrator-Focused Research Agenda

Cortina, Rabelo, and Holland (2018) have cogently suggested that workplace mistreatment should be viewed through a “lens” that squarely implicates the perpetrator (i.e., the perpetrator predation framework) rather than through a lens that at least partially absolves the perpetrator while blaming the victim for inviting, or not actively resisting, the mistreatment (i.e., the victim precipitation framework). We agree that the perpetrator predation framework provides a better basis for policy, practice, and law. Furthermore, however, the perpetrator predation framework provides a better basis for science. Whereas Cortina et al. allude briefly to the scientific benefits of a perpetrator-focused framework, the current commentary fleshes out these benefits and outlines an agenda for future perpetrator-focused research on workplace mistreatment.

Opening the Implicit Leadership Theories' Black Box: An Experimental Approach with Conjoint Analysis

Although research on implicit leadership theories (ILTs) has concentrated on determining which attributes define a leadership prototype, little attention has been paid to testing the relative importance of each of these attributes for individuals' leadership perceptions. Building on socio-cognitive theories of impression processes, we experimentally explore the formation of leadership perceptions based on the recognition of six key attributes in a series of three experimental studies comprising 566 US-based participants recruited online via Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our results show that while certain attributes play an important role in the leader categorization process, others are less relevant. We also demonstrate that some attributes' importance is contingent on the presence of other attributes and on the leadership schema type activated in respondents' minds. Consistent with the Leadership Categorization Theory, our findings support the premise that individuals cognitively hold a superordinate leadership prototype, which imposes constraints on their more basic level prototypes. We discuss the implications of these results for leadership theory and practice.