Servant leadership and employee outcomes: the moderating role of subordinates’ motives

Drawing from implicit leadership theories we advance servant leadership theory by examining moderating mechanisms that explain under what conditions servant leader behaviours impact followers in organizations. Specifically, we focused on the moderating role of subordinates’ motivational orientations—prosocial values or impression management motives—in relationships between servant leadership behaviours and job satisfaction, as well as subordinate organizational citizenship behaviours (OCBs). Using time-lagged data collected from 192 supervisor-subordinate dyads, we found that servant leadership was positively associated with employees’ job satisfaction, but not significantly related to their performance of OCBs. We also found evidence that subordinates’ motives moderate the relationships between servant leadership and outcomes. Specifically, employees high on impression management experienced lower levels of job satisfaction than their lower scoring counterparts. Our findings suggest that servant leadership may not be equally beneficial for all followers. We discuss implications for theory and practice.     

Job demands,coping, and impacts of occupational stress among journalists: a systematic review

This paper systematically reviews empirical research published from 2002 to July 2015 investigating journalists’ occupational stressors, coping strategies, and the impacts of these variables on the health and well-being of such professionals, whether on their daily work or as special envoys to critical scenarios. A meta-analytic approach was displayed to analyse the association between exposure to traumatic events during work and journalists’ symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Twenty eight articles met the inclusion criteria and revealed that very few studies distinguish (and none compare) the distress of journalists in their daily work from the distress of reporting major disasters, not a single study addressed positive emotional responses and only one research study focused on an in-depth analysis of the most commonly used coping strategies by journalists. The impacts of occupational stress among these professionals were sorely negative (e.g., burnout, PTSD), and no study was found to address the design and assessment of preventive interventions for these impacts on the health and well-being of journalists. Thirteen studies were included in a random-effects model meta-analysis and a small to moderate effect size (r = 0.272) between exposure to traumatic events during assignments and PTSD was found. The article closes with directions for future studies.     

Parental Monitoring,Association with Externalized Behavior,and Academic Outcomes in Urban African‐American Youth: A Moderated Mediation Analysis

African‐American adolescents exposed to neighborhood disadvantage are at increased risk for engaging in problem behavior and academic underachievement. It is critical to identify the mechanisms that reduce problem behavior and promote better academic outcomes in this population. Based on social disorganization and socioecological theories, the current prospective study examined pathways from parental monitoring to academic outcomes via externalizing behavior at different levels of neighborhood disadvantage. A moderated mediation model employing maximum likelihood was conducted on 339 African‐American students from 9th to 11th grade (49.3% females) with a mean age of 14.8 years (SD ± 0.35). The results indicated that parental monitoring predicted low externalizing behavior, and low externalizing behavior predicted better academic outcomes after controlling for externalizing behavior in 9th grade, intervention status, and gender. Mediation was supported, as the index of mediation was significant. Conversely, neighborhood disadvantage did not moderate the path from parental monitoring to externalizing behavior. Implications for intervention at both community and individual levels and study limitations are discussed.     

Effects of contextual diversity on semantic decision and reading aloud: evidence from a word learning study in English as a second language / Efectos de la diversidad contextual en la decisión semántica y la lectura en voz alta: evidencia de un estudio de aprendizaje de palabras en inglés como segundo idioma

This experiment investigated contextual diversity effects on novel word learning in English as a second language (L2). A group of advanced English speakers, whose native language was Spanish, participated in the study. Participants learned the meaning of real but obscure words that were embedded in either two or 12 different sentences and learned over two days (frequency of exposure was kept constant). On day three, participants were tested using reading aloud and semantic decision tasks. The results showed that participants learned the meaning of words in both conditions fairly well as revealed by their accuracy in the semantic decision task. However, words experienced in 12 different contexts generated more accurate and faster reaction times (RTs), suggesting the acquisition of more robust semantic representations. Strikingly, reading latencies were also faster for the 12-sentence condition, which might imply that semantics has an effect on reading newly learned words in English as a second language. These results are discussed and accommodated in view of the DRC and the PDP models of single-word reading.     

Good Soldier or Good Actor? Supervisor Accuracy in Distinguishing Between Selfless and Self-Serving OCB Motives

Purpose

In line with findings that organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) may be driven by selfless and self-serving motives, we sought to determine supervisor effectiveness in distinguishing good soldiers from good actors.

Design/Methodology/Approach

Employing a sample of 197 supervisor-subordinate dyads, we collected self- and supervisor-reports of employees’ citizenship motives. Dominance analysis was used to determine supervisory accuracy in identifying and distinguishing among subordinates’ motives.

Findings

We found that the relationships between self- and supervisor-reports of corresponding motives were strongest, supporting our hypotheses that supervisors are able to accurately identify their subordinates’ OCB motives and that they are not fooled by good actors.

Implications

Our results address concerns raised in previous research that inaccuracy in supervisor attributions of motives might lead to unfair reward or punishment of their subordinates. In demonstrating their accuracy in identifying their subordinates’ motives, an important implication of our work is that supervisors’ preferences for selfless motives may relate to actual differences in their employees’ contribution to the organization.

Originality/Value

Our study contributes to existing research to more conclusively address the question of supervisors’ bias in their preference for selfless motives. Our results also underscore the importance of accounting for employee motives in research exploring the outcomes of OCBs.

     

Changing views of emotion regulation and neurobiological models of the mechanism of action of psychotherapy

Influential neurobiological models of the mechanism of action of psychotherapy attribute its success to increases of activity in prefrontal areas and decreases in limbic areas, interpreted as the successful and adaptive recruitment of controlled processes to achieve emotion regulation. In this article, we review the behavioral and neuroscientific evidence in support of this model and its applicability to explain the mechanism of action of psychotherapy. Neuroimaging studies of explicit emotion regulation, evidence on the neurobiological substrates of implicit emotion regulation, and meta-analyses of neuroimaging studies of the effect of psychotherapy consistently suggest that areas implicated in coding semantic representations play an important role in emotion regulation not covered by existing models based on controlled processes. We discuss the findings that implicate these same areas in supporting working memory, in encoding preferences and the prospective outcome of actions taken in rewarding or aversive contingencies, and show how these functions may be integrated into process models of emotion regulation that depend on elaborate semantic representations for their effectiveness. These alternative models also appear to be more consistent with internal accounts in the psychotherapeutic literature of how psychotherapy works.     

Naming times and standardized norms for the italian PD/DPSS set of 266 pictures: Direct comparisons with American, English, French, and Spanish published databases

The present study provides Italian normative measures for 266 line drawings belonging to the new set of pictures developed by Lotto, Dell’Acqua, and Job (in press). The pictures have been standardized on the following measures: number of letters, number of syllables, name frequency, within-category typicality, familiarity, age of acquisition, name agreement, and naming time. In addition to providing the measures, the present study focuses on indirect and direct comparisons (i.e., correlations) of the present norms with databases provided by comparable studies in Italian (in which normative data were collected with Snodgrass & Vanderwart’s set of pictures; Nisi, Longoni, & Snodgrass, 2000), in British English (Barry, Morrison, & Ellis, 1997), in American English (Snodgrass & Vanderwart, 1980; Snodgrass & Yuditsky, 1996), in French (Alario & Ferrand, 1999), and in Spanish (Sanfeliu & Fernandez, 1996).