“Scattered In Times”

Climate change is a temporally fragmented phenomenon: the causes and effects at work are dispersed over a remarkably long time period. Climate change exceeds human ability to forecast and quantify its effects in time. This creates serious epistemic, moral, and psychological difficulties and poses challenges to generating adequate ethical responses. Augustine’s understanding of time as a measure of imagination emphasizes the way in which human beings actively shape their sense of time. He sees “looking forward” in time as a matter of spiritual vocation that collects the self out of dispersion and connects to a transgenerational collective. A notable example of how this “looking forward” may be practiced is singing the Psalms. The Augustinian “temporal imagination” links the imaginative, affective, moral, and vocational dimensions of measuring time. This offers some preliminary avenues for reimagining a sense of time responsive to climate change’s temporal fragmentation.     

Linking individuation and organizational identification: Mediation through psychological safety

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how individuation, a view that organizational members are all unique individuals, induces a perception of psychological safety and how perception of psychological safety, in turn, increases one’s organizational identification. Results from 66 respondents in Study 1 provided first support for the proposed mechanism. In Study 2, data collected from 176 employees in work organizations also provided evidence for this mediation model. It was found in both studies that individuation has a significantly positive association with the perception of psychological safety such that the more employees view individual members of the organization as unique individuals, the more likely they perceive that their organization is a safe environment for self-expression. Furthermore, perception of psychological safety was found to serve as a mediator linking individuation and organizational identification.     

New nonlinear and dynamic avenues for the study of work and organizational psychology: an introduction to the special issue

ABSTRACT

Nonlinear and dynamic approaches are two main principles of complex systems. The work and organizational psychology field has recently applied these concepts to understand human behaviour at work. In this introductory paper, we describe how human behaviour at work can be understood from a nonlinear and dynamic perspective, developing and applying the advantages of this approach to continue moving beyond the frontiers of our knowledge. We focus on the theoretical, methodological, and epistemological implications of the nonlinear dynamic approach in the field. Then, we present the five papers included in this special issue. These papers have applied nonlinear and dynamic concepts to understand a wide range of phenomena: subordinates-supervisors relationships, team behaviour, deviant workplace behaviour, transformational leadership, and training transfer. Overall, these papers demonstrate the utility of nonlinear dynamics in our field and how we can create more time-sensitive and complex knowledge by paying special attention to when and how phenomena happen and how such phenomena interrelate over time.     

The Influence of Identity Salience on Framing Effectiveness: An Experiment

Efforts to influence attitudes on highly polarizing issues, such as climate change, often fail because individuals interpret political messages through the lens of their partisan identities. However, shifting the identity lens through which an individual interprets a message may result in more effective political communication. Through a preregistered survey experiment (n = 978), this study tested how priming either a partisan or a nonpartisan (parental) identity influenced the effectiveness of a climate change frame on several attitudinal outcomes. Findings suggest that identity salience—specifically partisan identity salience—can influence the effectiveness of a frame. Among Republican parents, receiving a message about the impact of climate change on future generations increased climate change concern and intended proclimate political behaviors, but this framing effect disappeared when a partisan identity was first primed. Among Democrat parents, framing had no significant effect until a partisan identity was first primed. The findings offer important insight into the role that identity salience plays in framing effectiveness and suggest that political communication on polarized issues is likely to be more effective at building bipartisan agreement when nonpartisan identities are salient.