Getting Followers to Transcend Their Self-Interest for the Benefit of Their Company: Testing a Core Assumption of Transformational Leadership Theory

Purpose

We aimed at testing transformational leadership’s (TFL’s) capacity to enhance followers’ willingness to engage in selfless pro-organizational behavior (SPB), that is, behavior for the benefit of the company that is inapt to be instrumentally used for self-serving purposes and carried out despite salient personal costs. Furthermore, we aimed at demonstrating organizational identification to mediate this relation.

Design/Methodology/Approach

In this study with three time points of data collection, 321 employees completed questionnaires measuring TFL, organizational identification, and—to control for dispositional effects—honesty/humility. SPB was captured applying a distribution task where participants had to make trade-off decisions between pro-self and pro-company distribution alternatives. In addition, participants’ general willingness to engage in SPB was measured using a self-report questionnaire.

Findings

We found TFL to predict followers’ (willingness to engage in) selfless pro-organizational behavior and organizational identification to fully mediate this relation.

Implications

Among other things, our findings challenge the negative assumptions regarding human motivation and behavior (e.g., people invariably driven by self-interest) inherent in some influential management-related theories (e.g., agency theory).

Originality/Value

Getting followers to transcend their self-interest for company benefits is a core element of TFL theory. However, this core idea is difficult to test by means of questionnaires that measure citizenship behavior in field study research because three motives remain intertwined: pro-social values or orientation, organizational concern, and impression management motive. By disentangling company interest from employees’ self-interest and controlling for honesty/humility as an indicator for pro-social orientation, our study represents a more rigorous attempt to empirically confirm this assumption.     

Identification With Video Game Characters as Automatic Shift of Self-Perceptions

Two experiments tested the prediction that video game players identify with the character or role they are assigned, which leads to automatic shifts in implicit self-perceptions. Video game identification, thus, is considered as a kind of altered self-experience. In Study 1 (N = 61), participants either played a first-person shooter game or a racing game. Subsequently, they performed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) designed to detect cognitive associations between character-related concepts and players' self. Findings indicate a stronger automatic association of military-related concepts to shooter players' self and a stronger association of racing-related concepts to racing game players' self. Study 2 (N = 48) replicated the IAT result from Study 1 and demonstrated the stability of the identification pattern. Implications for identification as an element of the video game experience and future research directions are discussed.     

Systemische Therapien bei Menschen mit psychotischen Verhaltens- und Erlebnisweisen

Systemic therapy for persons who have been diagnosed as having schizophrenic or schizoaffective psychosis has been practiced since the 1950s, not everywhere and routinely but in many psychiatric hospitals and outpatient clinics with a strong psychosocial orientation. Evidence of the effectiveness is well documented in randomized controlled studies. This article describes three systemic approaches in which the authors are actively involved: (1) systemic constructivist family therapy developed in Heidelberg for outpatient contexts, (2) need-adapted treatment and open dialogue developed in northern Europe that has gained access to psychiatric clinics through regional training within integrated care projects and (3) the concept of systemic therapeutic methods of acute psychiatric treatment (SYMPA) a systemic family-oriented inpatient treatment.     

Validating an Inventory for the Assessment of Egoistic Bias and Moralistic Bias as Two Separable Components of Social Desirability

The psychometric properties of the German adaptation of the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding were investigated. This 2-factor inventory taps the egoistic bias and the moralistic bias as the 2 distinguishable components of social desirability. In 2 validation studies, both subscales showed satisfactory internal consistency and temporal stability. To examine convergent and discriminant validity, the scales were correlated with those of a measure of unrealistic optimism, various measures of self-enhancement, 1-dimensional scales of social desirability, and the tendency to overclaim in a test of general knowledge.     

DISCERNING THE VOICE OF ZYGON: IDENTITY AND ISSUES

The challenge to the journal Zygon as suggested here is to respond to three different reference groups: public intellectuals, academia, and religious communities. An extended discussion follows of what I term the situation of irony in which religion‐and‐science finds itself. I argue that this situation of irony actually constitutes the domain in which our greatest contributions can be offered.     

The development of hazard perception: Dissociation of visual orientation and hazard processing

Eye movements are a key behavior for visual information processing in traffic situations and for vehicle control. Previous research showed that effective ways of eye guidance are related to better hazard perception skills. Furthermore, hazard perception is reported to be faster for experienced drivers as compared to novice drivers. However, little is known whether this difference can be attributed to the development of visual orientation, or hazard processing. In the present study, we compared eye movements of 20 inexperienced and 20 experienced drivers in a hazard perception task. We separately measured (a) the interval between the onset of a static hazard scene and the first fixation on a potential hazard, and (b) the interval between the first fixation on a potential hazard and the final response. While overall RT was faster for experienced compared to inexperienced drivers, the scanning patterns revealed that this difference was due to faster processing after the initial fixation on the hazard, whereas scene scanning times until the initial fixation on the hazard did not differ between groups.     

Mid‐ and Long‐Term Effects of Family Constellation Seminars in a General Population Sample: 8‐ and 12‐Month Follow‐Up

In a previous randomized controlled trial (RCT), short‐term efficacy of family constellation seminars (FCSs) in a general population sample was demonstrated. In this article, we examined mid‐ and long‐term stability of these effects. Participants were 104 adults (M = 47 years; SD = 9; 84% female) who were part of the intervention group in the original RCT (3‐day FCS; 64 active participants and 40 observing participants). FCSs were carried out according to manuals. It was predicted that FCSs would improve psychological functioning (Outcome Questionnaire OQ‐45.2) at 8‐ and 12‐month follow‐up. Additionally, we assessed the effects of FCSs on psychological distress, motivational incongruence, individuals’ experience in their personal social systems, and overall goal attainment. Participants yielded significant improvement in psychological functioning (d = 0.41 at 8‐month follow‐up, p = .000; d = 0.40 at 12‐month follow‐up, p = .000). Results were confirmed for psychological distress, motivational incongruence, the participants’ experience in their personal social systems, and overall goal attainment. No adverse events were reported. This study provides first evidence for the mid‐ and long‐term efficacy of FCSs in a nonclinical population. The implications of the findings are discussed.     

Perceived localizations and eye movements with action‐generated and computer‐generated vanishing points of moving stimuli

When observers localize the vanishing point of a moving target, localizations are reliably displaced beyond the final position, in the direction the stimulus was travelling just prior to its offset. We examined modulations of this phenomenon through eye movements and action control over the vanishing point. In Experiment 1 with pursuit eye movements, localization errors were in movement direction, but less pronounced when the vanishing point was self‐determined by a key press of the observer. In contrast, in Experiment 2 with fixation instruction, localization errors were opposite movement direction and independent from action control. This pattern of results points at the role of eye movements, which were gathered in Experiment 3. That experiment showed that the eyes lagged behind the target at the point in time, when it vanished from the screen, but that the eyes continued to drift on the targets' virtual trajectory. It is suggested that the perceived target position resulted from the spatial lag of the eyes and of the persisting retinal image during the drift.