What Will the Boss Think? The Impression Management Implications of Supportive Relationships With Star and Project Peers

Although impression management scholars have identified a number of tactics for influencing supervisor evaluations, most of those tactics represent supervisor‐targeted behaviors. This study examines the degree to which employees form supportive relationships with peers for impression management purposes. In so doing, we explore this intriguing question: Will employees gain more from forming supportive relationships with “stars” (i.e., top performers who are “on the fast track” in the organization) or “projects” (i.e., “works in progress” who need help and refinement to perform well)? We examined this question in 2 field studies. Study 1 included 4 sources and 2 time periods; Study 2 included 2 sources and 3 time periods. The results showed that supportive relationships with both stars and projects seemed to represent impression management opportunities, insofar as they predicted supervisor positive affect and perceptions of employee promotability. Impression management motives only predicted supportive relationships with stars, however, not projects. Relationships with projects were driven by prosocial motives not concerns about managing images. We discuss the practical and theoretical implications of our results for the managing of impressions and peer relationships.     

Job crafting and extra-role behavior: The role of work engagement and flourishing

This study investigates whether crafting of job demands and resources relates positively to extra-role behavior (i.e. contextual performance and creativity) through work engagement and flourishing. We collected data from 294 employees and their supervisors regarding employees' contextual performance and creativity. Results show that seeking resources had a positive indirect relationship with contextual performance through work engagement, and with creativity through work engagement and flourishing. Reducing demands had negative indirect relationships with both contextual performance and creativity through work engagement. We conclude that particularly seeking resources has important implications for extra-role behavior and discuss the practical implications of these findings.     

Generality of creativity across performance domains

The existence of general creative‐thinking skills was investigated. In the first study, 50 eighth‐grade students wrote poems, stories, mathematical equations, and mathematical word problems, all of which were rated for creativity by experts. When the effects of IQ reading achievement, and math achievement were controlled through multiple regression analyses, creativity scores on the four tasks were not correlated. This suggests that general creative‐thinking skills did not contribute to creative performance in these different tasks. Subjects also responded to a brief verbal fluency test. Scores on this test correlated significantly with story‐writing creativity (r = .34) but not with the other three tasks. Three follow‐up studies were conducted with second‐, fourth‐, and fifth‐grade students, and adults. These studies also produced no significant correlations among creativity ratings of various products.     

Nonjudgment as a moderator of the relationship between present-centered awareness and borderline features: Synergistic interactions in mindfulness assessment

The symptoms of borderline personality disorder (BPD) have been characterized as deficits in mindfulness. Mindfulness can be defined as nonjudgmental, present-centered awareness. The present study investigates the theory that, consistent with this conceptualization, the extent to which acting with awareness predicts reduced BPD features and related dysfunction depends upon levels of nonjudgment. In a sample of 223 undergraduates, we calculated the interaction between awareness-based and nonjudging-based mindfulness skills using subscales of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire. Regression analyses demonstrated a significant effect of the interaction on several difficulties that are common in BPD: problems with relationships, emotion-related impulsivity, and anger rumination. For acting with awareness to benefit individuals with these difficulties, a less judgmental stance toward internal experiences may be necessary. These findings have significant treatment implications and demonstrate the importance of assessing mindfulness as a multifaceted, synergistic construct.     

Preliminary psychometric properties of the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-II: a revised measure of psychological inflexibility and experiential avoidance

The present research describes the development and psychometric evaluation of a second version of the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (AAQ-II), which assesses the construct referred to as, variously, acceptance, experiential avoidance, and psychological inflexibility. Results from 2,816 participants across six samples indicate the satisfactory structure, reliability, and validity of this measure. For example, the mean alpha coefficient is .84 (.78–.88), and the 3- and 12-month test–retest reliability is .81 and .79, respectively. Results indicate that AAQ-II scores concurrently, longitudinally, and incrementally predict a range of outcomes, from mental health to work absence rates, that are consistent with its underlying theory. The AAQ-II also demonstrates appropriate discriminant validity. The AAQ-II appears to measure the same concept as the AAQ-I (r = .97) but with better psychometric consistency.     

Incremental validity of the MMPI-A content scales in the prediction of self-reported symptoms

The incremental contribution of the MMPI-A (Butcher et al., 1992) content scales to the prediction of scores on self-report measures of psychopathology was examined in a sample of 62 adolescents in inpatient treatment and 59 adolescents from the community. All participants completed the MMPI-A and a battery of criterion measures. A series of hierarchical regression analyses was conducted in which the MMPI-A clinical and content scales served as the independent variables and the criterion measures as the dependent variables. The content scales were found to have incremental validity beyond the clinical scales in predicting variance in the criterion measures. Similarly, the clinical scales also demonstrated incremental validity over the content scales in making these predictions. Both sets of scales made independent contributions to the prediction of sample membership (clinical vs. nonclinical). Findings suggest that both the clinical and content scales of the MMPI-A make significant contributions to the assessment of adolescents' psychological functioning.     

Effectiveness of NEO-PI-R research validity scales for discriminating analog malingering and genuine psychopathology

We investigated the research validity scales for the NEO Personality Inventory-Revised (NEO-PI-R) proposed by Schinka, Kinder, and Kremer (1997): Positive Presentation Management (PPM) and Negative Presentation Management (NPM). Additionally, an experimental analog to the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2's (MMPI-2; Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989) F-K index was calculated by subtracting the raw score on PPM from the raw score on NPM (NPM-PPM). In 2 studies, all indexes showed significant between-group differences when samples of analog malingerers (n = 97) were contrasted with psychiatric outpatients (n = 272). The sensitivity and specificity of these validity indexes indicated that although none performed well in extremely low base rate environments, the NPM and NPM-PPM indexes showed promise when the base rate of faking bad rose to higher levels.     

Dynamics between Member Replacement and Team Performance: The Role of Members’ Relative Attributes

Analysing the 367 member replacement acts in the 2014 FIFA World Cup tournament, we uncover important dynamics between member replacement and team performance. We find that poor team performance leads to substitutions with more competence gains (or with less competence loss), that substituting and substituted members’ functional background dissimilarity improves subsequent content‐related team performance (i.e. scoring more goals), and that their competence superiority is associated with the speed of team performance turnaround (i.e. scoring goals faster). Going beyond contrasts between teams with and without membership change, the paper highlights the importance of substituting and substituted members’ relative task‐related attributes and provides a more nuanced understanding of the complex phenomenon of team membership change. Furthermore, the paper extends the methodological spectrum of dynamic team composition research from predominantly laboratory experiments with short‐lived student groups performing cognitive tasks to field studies with real‐life work teams performing action tasks.     

At what age are children most likely to be bullied at school?

Cross‐sectional questionnaire surveys of school bullying reliably find that the frequency of incidents falls with age. However, it is not clear how much of this decline is due to a real change in behaviour, and how much to children’s changing definitions of what bullying is. This paper presents the results of two retrospective studies in an attempt to assess at what ages bullying is really most likely to occur. Male and female adults aged 18–55 years (n¹ = 205 and n² = 200) completed questionnaires about their memories of being bullied at school. Results showed that bullying was most frequently remembered from around 11–13 years of age, with incidents from earlier and later childhood being reported comparatively rarely. There were no differences between the reports of younger (18–21 years) and older (22–55 years) participants or between those of males and females. Bullying memories were also compared with memories for other aspects of childhood to assess the accuracy of these memories. It is concluded that the most memorable (and therefore perhaps the most severe) bullying is that which occurs in middle childhood. Aggr. Behav. 27:419–429, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.