Job satisfaction and firm performance: Can employees’ job satisfaction change the trajectory of a firm’s performance?

Contemporary trends in business have focused on enhancing the employee work experience. Proponents argue that doing so will improve employees’ productivity and ultimately the firm's performance. However, critics argue that job satisfaction has only a modest relationship with an employee's job performance, and therefore, such an investment will likely have little impact on the firm's financial performance. To investigate the relationship between employees’ job satisfaction and firm performance, we collected a sample of 404 employees working in 31 firms. We tested this relationship using latent growth modeling which allows us to latently examine how employees’ job satisfaction at one time point can predict the trajectory of firm performance. Study results indicated that job satisfaction predicted a positive linear change in two financial indices of firm performance (i.e., return on assets and return on equity) over the course of four years when controlling for three indicators of firm size. These results suggest that the effects of job satisfaction on firm performance are not immediate but rather take time to manifest.     

When Sharing Is Not Caring: Does (un)Certainty About Bill Payment Method Lead Diners to Consume More and Spend More Money?

Previous work has demonstrated that unacquainted participants in an experimental, restaurant‐like setting consume more when they know in advance that the bill will be split evenly rather than paid according to individual consumption. Real life, however, often differs from these experimental settings in two important ways. First, unlike random groups of participants, diners who eat together are frequently friends or colleagues. Second, payment method (even vs. individual payment) is usually unknown (i.e. uncertain) at the time people place their orders, and is determined when the check arrives. The current research tests the ecological validity of the association between consumption amount and payment method. Study 1 was conducted in a natural setting with organic groups of diners. Some were asked to state their desired payment method before ordering (Certain condition); others did so only after asking for the check (Uncertain condition). In both conditions, even payment (as opposed to individual payment) was associated with greater consumption amount. However, overall, consumption amount was lower among diners in the Uncertain condition than among those in the Certain condition. Study 2 presents a controlled follow‐up experiment showing that eliminating diners' prior expectations regarding the payment method—by informing them that the payment method will be randomly determined after the consumption decision—eliminates the relationship between payment method and consumption amount. This study further indicates that when diners are uncertain what the payment method will be, even bill‐splitting has negative implications for their subsequent social interactions, expressed in retribution tendencies. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

When and why do we want to know? How experienced regret promotes post‐decision information search

The effect of emotional and situational factors on the decision to seek out post‐decision information about un‐chosen alternative was examined in five experiments. Experiment 1 tested participants' willingness to find out the outcome of an un‐chosen investment that was likely to have a higher value than the chosen investment. It was found that participants were more willing to acquire information when they were responsible for the decision. Experiment 2 showed that responsibility affects information seeking, in particular when one suspects that a wrong decision was made. Experiments 3–5 examined the role of regret on information seeking. It was shown that regret about making the wrong investment (Experiment 3), forgetting to send in a lottery ticket (Experiment 4), and missing an opportunity to use a discount card after spending a month in Australia (Experiment 5), mediates the information‐seeking behavior. Experiment 5 also demonstrated that the experience of regret (and not its anticipation) influences post‐decision information seeking even when the information is of no future use. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

NATURALIZED SACREDNESS? A REALIST,PANENTHEIST, AND PERENNIALIST ALTERNATIVE TO KAUFFMAN'S CONSTRUCTIVISM

In his recent book Reinventing the Sacred, renowned biologist and systems theorist Stuart Kauffman offers an avenue for the revival of the sacred and for reconciling sacredness with a robust scientific outlook. According to Kauffman, God is a human cultural invention, and he urges us to reinvent the sacred as the ceaseless creativity in nature. I argue that Kauffman's proposal suffers from a major shortcoming, namely, being at odds with the nature, and content, of authentic experiences of the sacred, experiences which point invariably in the direction of a reality which transcends human imagination and capacity for cultural innovation. Correspondingly, I point in the direction of an alternative approach to the revival of the sacred rooted in what I call the path of direct spiritual awareness. I argue that, while being in better accord with the phenomenology of religious experience, this realist alternative to Kauffman's constructivism also avoids the unpleasant symptoms which often accompany traditional theism, namely, dogmatism, irrationalism, and incompatibility with a scientifically minded metaphysics.