Reaping the benefits of task conflict in teams: the critical role of team psychological safety climate

Past research suggests that task conflict may improve team performance under certain conditions; however, we know little about these specific conditions. On the basis of prior theory and research on conflict in teams, we argue that a climate of psychological safety is one specific context under which task conflict will improve team performance. Using evidence from 117 project teams, the present research found that psychological safety climate moderates the relationship between task conflict and performance. Specifically, task conflict and team performance were positively associated under conditions of high psychological safety. The results support the conclusion that psychological safety facilitates the performance benefits of task conflict in teams. Theoretical implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

A MULTILEVEL INVESTIGATION OF LEADER– MEMBER EXCHANGE,INFORMAL LEADER EMERGENCE,AND INDIVIDUAL AND TEAM PERFORMANCE

This study examines the antecedents and outcomes of informal leader emergence in work teams. Drawing upon research in vertical and shared leadership, we hypothesized that the relationship between leader‐‐member exchange (LMX) quality and employees’ emergence as informal leaders is moderated by team shared vision such that there is a positive (negative) LMX—leader emergence relationship for teams with high (low) shared vision. Informal leader emergence, in turn, was expected to relate to higher individual and team performance. Results based on multisource and multimethod data collected at 3 points in time (361 followers in 74 work teams) provided support for these hypotheses. The findings highlight the role played by formal leaders and team shared vision in jointly promoting or inhibiting informal leader emergence and thereby impacting individual performance and team effectiveness.     

The moderating effect of power distance on employee responses to psychological contract breach

Understanding how employees’ cultural values are related to their responses to promises broken by their organizations (i.e., psychological contract breach) is important given today’s global workplace. Although past research has found that psychological contract breach is positively associated with employee exit, voice and neglect and negatively associated with loyalty, we know little about the role that cultural values play in this process. We explore the role that power distance orientation—an employee’s acceptance of power differentials in society—plays in employee responses to breach. We argue that employees with high power distance orientations will be more likely to respond passively to breach (loyalty and neglect), whereas employees with low power distance orientations will be more likely to exhibit active responses to psychological contract breach (exit and voice). We tested our notions using a sample of 265 employees from different cultures across two points in time. Employees with high power distance orientations were less likely to respond to psychological contract breach with exit and voice than employees with low power distance orientations. However, power distance orientation did not significantly moderate the relationships between psychological contract breach and neglect or loyalty, respectively. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our findings.     

THE ‘EXTENDEDNESS’ OF SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE

In recent years, the idea has been gaining ground that our traditional conceptions of knowledge and cognition are unduly limiting, in that they privilege what goes on inside the ‘skin and skull’ (Clark 1997: 82) of an individual reasoner. Instead, it has been argued, knowledge and cognition need to be understood as embodied (involving both mind and body), situated (being dependent on the complex interplay between the individual and its environment), and extended (that is, continuous with, rather than separate from, the world ‘outside’). Whether these various interrelations and dependencies are ‘merely’ causal, or are in a more fundamental sense constitutive of knowledge and cognition, is as much a matter of controversy as the degree to which they pose a challenge to ‘traditional’ conceptions of cognition, knowledge and the mind. In this paper we argue that when the idea of ‘extendedness’ is applied to a core concept in epistemology and the philosophy of science—namely, scientific evidence—things appear to be on a much surer footing. The evidential status of data gathered through extended processes—including its utility as justification or warrant—do not seem to be weakened by virtue of being extended, but instead are often strengthened because of it. Indeed, it is often precisely by virtue of this extendedness that scientific evidence grounds knowledge claims, which individuals may subsequently ascribe to themselves. The functional equivalence between machine‐based gathering, filtering, and processing of data and human interpretation and assessment is the crucial factor in deciding whether evidence has been gathered, rather than the distinction between intra‐ and extracranial processes or individual and social processes (or combinations thereof). To prioritize biological processes here, and to assert the superiority of human cognitive capacities seems both arbitrary and unwarranted with respect to gathering evidence, and ultimately would lead to an unattractive skepticism about many of the methods used in science to gather evidence. In other words, conceiving of scientific evidence as ‘impersonal’ (or at least not necessarily personal) not only better captures the character of evidence‐gathering in practice, but also makes sense of a large amount of evidence‐gathering that ‘personal’ accounts fail to either acknowledge or accurately describe. Whilst we suggest it is likely that all internally‐distributed evidence‐gathering processes are merely contingently internal processes, a significant number of externally‐distributed evidence‐gathering processes are necessarily externally‐distributed. Some evidence can only be gathered by extended epistemic agents.     

“If a girl doesn't say ‘no’…”: young men,rape and claims of ‘insufficient knowledge’

Most psychological theories of rape tend to stress factors internal to both rapists and their victims in accounting for the phenomenon. Unlike such theories, social psychological and feminist accounts have drawn attention to social and cultural factors as productive of rape, and have criticized psychological accounts on the grounds that they often serve, paradoxically, to cement pre‐existing ‘common‐sense’. In this paper we examine the ways in which young Australian men draw upon widely culturally shared accounts, or interpretative repertoires, of rape to exculpate rapists. In particular, we discuss the reliance placed on a ‘lay’ version of Tannen's 1992 ‘miscommunication model’ of (acquaintance) rape and detail the use of this account—the claim that rape is a consequence of men's ‘not knowing’—as a device to accomplish exculpation. Implications of our methods for capturing young people's understanding of sexual coercion, rape and consent, and for the design of ‘rape prevention’ programmes, are discussed. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

领导职业支持对组织公民行为的影响:心理资本的作用

本研究探讨领导职业支持对工作团队成员组织公民行为的影响机制,研究采用问卷调查法,以10个地市的66个工作团队303名成员为调查对象,在控制被试的教育程度、工作经验及人口统计学变量之后,运用多层线性模型分析领导职业支持与团队成员心理资本及其组织公民行为的关系。结果发现：（1）领导职业支持对团队成员心理资本和组织公民行为有积极促进作用;（2）无论在团队层次还是员工层次,领导职业支持对成员组织公民行为有积极促进作用,成员心理资本在二者之间起完全中介作用。     

Leader Network Centrality and Team Performance: Team Size as Moderator and Collaboration as Mediator

The social network perspective provides a valuable lens to understand the effectiveness of team leaders. In understanding leadership impact in team networks, an important question concerns the structural influence of leader centrality in advice-giving networks on team performance. Taking the inconsistent evidence for the positive relationship of network centrality and leadership effectiveness as a starting point, we suggest that the positive impact of leader centrality in advice-giving networks is contingent on team needs for leadership to meet communication and coordination challenges, which we argue are larger in larger teams. Developing our analysis, we examine the mediating role of member collaboration in the relationship of leader network centrality and team performance as moderated by team size. Based on a multi-source dataset of 542 employees and 71 team leaders, we found that leader centrality in advice-giving networks related positively to team performance in larger teams but negatively in smaller teams. Results supported the mediated moderation model via member collaboration in smaller teams, but not in larger teams.

     

Philosophical dialogues as paths to a more ‘positive psychology’

Although family support programmes have been in place for several decades in Greece very little attention has been paid to evaluating the effectiveness of such endeavours, the techniques that influence their outcomes and the receptiveness to their messages. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of research findings collected during the first qualitative research phase of a community mental health promotion project. The research was conducted in order to delineate programme outcomes and the characteristics that had an impact on the participants' lives. The 3‐month family support programme intended to introduce ‘philosophical dialogues’ as means to developing personal and communal understandings of what makes life worth living. The programme was developed and implemented on Crete under the auspices of a non‐profit community organization appropriately named ‘The Lyceum for Women’. The features of the programme that contributed and enhanced the participants' tendencies to become not passive targets but active partners and stakeholders in the process will be clarified, as will the conceptualization and approach. Of the 45 evaluation protocols that were analysed the following themes were most important for the participants: ‘Group as‐a‐whole process’—the sense of sharing and development understandings in a ‘parea’ (in‐group); ‘relational outcomes’—feeling of belonging, ‘reciprocated kindness’, and giving of self to others; personal and emotional outcomes‐self‐efficacy and empowerment; knowledge outcomes‐learning about positive emotions and enjoying the simple things in life; and group facilitator outcomes‐sharing stories, ‘gives of self to the community’. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The ‘conjunction fallacy’ revisited: how intelligent inferences look like reasoning errors

Findings in recent research on the ‘conjunction fallacy’ have been taken as evidence that our minds are not designed to work by the rules of probability. This conclusion springs from the idea that norms should be content‐blind—in the present case, the assumption that sound reasoning requires following the conjunction rule of probability theory. But content‐blind norms overlook some of the intelligent ways in which humans deal with uncertainty, for instance, when drawing semantic and pragmatic inferences. In a series of studies, we first show that people infer nonmathematical meanings of the polysemous term ‘probability’ in the classic Linda conjunction problem. We then demonstrate that one can design contexts in which people infer mathematical meanings of the term and are therefore more likely to conform to the conjunction rule. Finally, we report evidence that the term ‘frequency’ narrows the spectrum of possible interpretations of ‘probability’ down to its mathematical meanings, and that this fact—rather than the presence or absence of ‘extensional cues’—accounts for the low proportion of violations of the conjunction rule when people are asked for frequency judgments. We conclude that a failure to recognize the human capacity for semantic and pragmatic inference can lead rational responses to be misclassified as fallacies. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Interpersonal Goals and Close Relationship Processes: Potential Links to Health

A substantial body of empirical evidence suggests that social relationships buffer people from poor health. We review a program of research demonstrating how interpersonal goals create relationship processes that shape the quality of close relationships, which we argue may have consequences for own and others’ health. Self‐image goals to construct, maintain, and defend desired images of the self create negative interpersonal dynamics that undermine close relationships and mental health, while compassionate goals to support others’ well‐being create positive interpersonal dynamics that promote close relationships and mental health. We discuss the potential implications of social goals and close relationship processes for health. Finally, we suggest that exploring the independent benefits of giving and receiving in close relationships may inform how social relationships affect health and well‐being.     

On the positive aspects of customers: Customer‐initiated support and affective crossover in employee–customer dyads

This study examines psychological resources for service employees and their customers, which enhance the service experiences of both parties during service conversations. We investigate whether customer behaviour (customer‐initiated support) positively impacts on employees’ affect. We also examine the crossover of employees’ affect on customers’ affect. State positive affect (PA) was assessed in 82 employees of car dealerships and 421 customers on 2 occasions (before and after the conversation). Multi‐level analyses showed the hypothesized positive impact of customer behaviour on employees’ PA and in turn of employees’ PA on customers’ PA. Results are integrated in an overall process model whereby customers’ PA leads to customer‐initiated support, which increases employees’ PA and in turn enhances customers’ PA. Results suggest direct and indirect crossover effects. This study extends research on customer behaviour offering a positive slant on customer behaviour and suggests to actively involve customers in the service process in order to promote their positive behaviour towards employees.     

A client‐generated psychometric instrument: The development of ‘PSYCHLOPS’

PSYCHLOPS (Psychological Outcome Profiles) is a recently developed, client‐generated, psychometric instrument that can be used as an outcome measure. Based on a similar instrument developed primarily for use in physical illnesses (MYMOP — ‘Measure Your Medical Outcome Profile’), it seeks the client's perspective on their psychological distress. It asks them to describe and then score the problem that troubles them the most at the start of counselling. We describe the development of PSYCHLOPS, including the involvement of the Plain English Campaign and two national mental health organisations: the mental health charity and support group, Depression Alliance (DA) and Primary Care Mental Health Education (PRIMHE). We review the literature and suggest that PSYCHLOPS, by focusing on the problems of greatest priority to the client, might prove a sensitive measure of improvement after counselling.     

The Interplay of Low Identification,Psychological Detachment,and Cynicism for Predicting Counterproductive Work Behaviour

Prior research suggests that psychological detachment buffers the detrimental effects of negative work events and stressors on employees’ subsequent performance and well-being. This, however, assumes that employees are motivated to reengage in their work following detachment, which may not always be true. Our paper examines the potential dark side of psychological detachment by exploring its moderating effects on the relationship of low organisational identification with counterproductive work behaviour (CWB) via cynicism toward work. Based on self-discrepancy theory, we argue that detachment strengthens the link from low identification to cynicism because it reinforces the psychological distance of lowly identified employees with the organisation and provides them with additional resources to more deeply reflect on their mismatch with their organisation, thus generating stronger feelings of doubt and distrust that characterise cynicism. We also hypothesise that detachment strengthens the relation from cynicism to CWB, because detachment reinforces personal separation from work in cynical employees and because cynical employees may leverage their replenished resources to fuel deviant acts. Multi-wave data collected from two field samples support our hypotheses. We discuss the implications of our study and propose future research directions.     

Organicism and Reductionism in Cancer Research: Towards a Systemic Approach

In recent cancer research, strong and apparently conflicting epistemological stances have been advocated by different research teams in a mist of an ever‐growing body of knowledge ignited by ever‐more perplexing and non‐conclusive experimental facts: in the past few years, an ‘organicist’ approach investigating cancer development at the tissue level has challenged the established and so‐called ‘reductionist’ approach focusing on disentangling the genetic and molecular circuitry of carcinogenesis. This article reviews the ways in which ‘organicism’ and ‘reductionism’ are used and opposed in this context, with an aim at clarifying the debate. Methodological, epistemological and ontological implications of both approaches are discussed. We argue that the ‘organicist/reductionist’ opposition in the present case of carcinogenesis is more a matter of diverging heuristics than a claim about theoretical or ontological (ir)reducibility. As a matter of fact, except for the downward causation claim, which we question, we argue that the organicist arguments are compatible with the reductionist approach. Moreover, we speculate that both approaches, which currently focus on specific entities i.e., genes versus tissues, will need to shift their conceptual frameworks to studying complex arrays of relationships potentially ranging over several levels of entities, as is the case with ‘systems biology’.     

Affective and effective: Military job performance as a function of work‐related emotional intelligence

The military is a highly stressful career that requires one to work closely with others. These features of the military render it plausible that skills related to emotional perception and management—or emotional intelligence—would tend to benefit performance within this setting. Hypotheses of this type were examined in a panel study that presented 152 active duty military personnel with a new scenario‐based measure that specifically focused on emotional occurrences within the workplace. As hypothesized, work‐related emotional intelligence (W‐EI) positively predicted task performance, discipline, organizational citizenship, and employees with higher W‐EI levels received a greater number of performance commendations. Additionally, these relationships tended to remain significant in discriminant multiple regressions. Altogether, the results provide important evidence for the benefits of W‐EI within an occupational context that requires a high degree of coordination as well as stress management.     

Mirror Self‐Recognition and Self‐Identification

That great apes are the only primates to recognise their reflections is often taken to show that they are self‐aware—however, there has been much recent debate about whether the self‐awareness in question is psychological or bodily self‐awareness. This paper argues that whilst self‐recognition does not require psychological self‐awareness, to claim that it requires only bodily self‐awareness would leave something out. That is that self‐recognition requires ‘objective self‐awareness’—the capacity for first person thoughts like ‘that's me’, which involve self‐identification and so are vulnerable to error through misidentification. This objective self‐awareness is distinct from bodily or psychological self‐awareness, requires cognitive sophistication and provides the beginnings of a more conceptual self‐representation which might play a role in planning, mental time travel and theory of mind.     

Psychological Crisis in a Marathon and the Buffering Effects of Self‐Verbalizations1

In the present study, we investigated the effects of psychological crises on goal striving and the buffering effects of self‐verbalizations in the context of a marathon race. Study 1 showed that during a marathon, a psychological crisis—which is characterized by a strong impulse of goal disengagement and thoughts about benefits and costs—occurred at about Kilometer 30 and that this crisis had negative effects on race performance. Study 2 experimentally induced the use of self‐verbalizations. The results confirmed the hypothesis that self‐verbalizations are an effective strategy to buffer against negative effects of psychological crisis on race performance. Self‐verbalizations are discussed as a general self‐regulatory tool in goal striving.     

“I don't want to be near you,unless…”: The interactive effect of unethical behavior and performance onto relationship conflict and workplace ostracism

Examined through the lens of moral psychology, we investigate when and why employees’ unethical behaviors may be tolerated versus rejected. Specifically, we examine the interactive effect of employees’ unethical behaviors and job performance onto relationship conflict, and whether such conflict eventuates in workplace ostracism. Although employees’ unethical behaviors typically go against moral norms, high job performance may provide a motivated reason to ignore moral violations. In this regard, we predict that job performance will mitigate the relationship between employee unethical behavior and workplace ostracism, as mediated by relationship conflict. Study 1, a multisource field study, tests and provides support for Hypotheses 1 and 2. Study 2, also a multisource field study, provides support for our fully specified model. Study 3, a time‐lagged field study, provides support for our theoretical model while controlling for employees’ negative affectivity and ethical environment. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT ‘HOW DO YOU KNOW?’ CHALLENGES A SPEAKER'S KNOWLEDGE?

It is often argued that the general propriety of challenging an assertion with ‘How do you know?’ counts as evidence for the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA). Part of the argument is that this challenge seems to directly challenge whether a speaker knows what she asserts. In this article I argue for a re‐interpretation of the data, the upshot of which is that we need not interpret ‘How do you know?’ as directly challenging a speaker's knowledge; instead, it's better understood as challenging a speaker's reasons. Consequently, I argue that reasons‐based norms can equally well explain this data.     

Golden parachutes: Changing the experience of unemployment for managers

We examined the effect of career transition support and three other situational variables — financial reserves, social inclusion, and a partner — on the psychological strain of unemployed managers. We extended the theories of unemployment by investigating the mechanisms by which these four situational variables affect psychological strain. After using qualitative research to explore managers' experiences during unemployment, we used the themes that emerged from this first study to conduct a survey on the unemployment experiences of 281 managers. Each of the situational variables protected unemployed managers from psychological strain through a different pathway. The pathways that emerged were agency, the emotions associated with loss, financial strain, and a positive emotional response. The research provides evidence of the utility of providing a ‘golden parachute’ and the additive effects of financial reserves and social inclusion. Evidence from the research also suggests that support programs for unemployed individuals should focus on enhancing agency and regulating emotions to assist with the transition into employment.