Do Subordinates Formulate an Impression of their Manager's Implicit Person Theory?

Implicit person theory (IPT) is characterised by the belief that specific attributes of people are generally either more static (i.e. entity beliefs) or more malleable (i.e. incremental beliefs). Within the organisational sciences literature, past IPT research has focused on the impact of managers' IPT beliefs on their own behaviours. The current research advances the extant literature by presenting two empirical studies that assess whether subordinates formulate an impression of their manager's IPT. The results are consistent with subordinates forming such an impression, as subordinates working under the same manager generally agreed on their manager's IPT. Moreover, our results support the convergent validity (e.g. with job satisfaction, turnover intention) and the discriminant validity (e.g. with transformational leadership, subordinates' own IPT perception) of the subordinates' impressions of their manager's IPT. The theoretical and practical implications of the current research, and future directions regarding cross‐cultural differences related to IPT impression, are discussed.     

Getting to Best: Efficiency versus Optimality in Negotiation

Negotiation between two individuals is a common task that typically involves two goals: maximize individual outcomes and obtain an agreement. However, research on the simplest negotiation tasks demonstrates that although naive subjects can be induced to improve their performance, they are often no more likely to achieve fully optimal solutions. The present study tested the prediction that a decrease in a particular type of argumentative behavior, substantiation, would result in an increase in optimal agreements. As substantiation behaviors depend primarily on supplied content of the negotiation task, it was also predicted that substantiation behavior would be reduced by curtailing the content. A 2 × 2 experimental design was employed, where both negotiation tactics (list of tactics present versus absent) and negotiation task content (high versus low) were varied to determine the processes leading beyond solution improvement to solution optimality. Sixty‐one dyads engaged in a two‐party, four‐issue negotiation task. All negotiations were videotaped and analyzed. Although the list of negotiation tactics resulted in improved performance, only the content manipulation resulted in a significant increase in dyads achieving optimal solutions. Analyses of the coded protocols indicated that the key difference in achieving optimality was a reduction in persistent substantiation‐related operators (substantiation, along with single‐issue preferences and procedures) and an increase in a complex macro‐operator, multi‐issue offers that reduced the problem space, facilitating the search for optimality.     

Mood-congruent free recall bias in anxiety

The present study evaluated the status of mood-congruent free recall bias in anxious individuals following incidental encoding of target words. In the first experiment, high trait anxiety individuals showed increased recall of threat-related information after an orienting task promoting lexical processing of target words. In a second experiment, both lexical and semantic orienting tasks were performed at study. In this experiment, anxious individuals displayed a mood-congruent recall bias only for target information processed at a lexical level. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.