Rivals without a cause? Relative performance feedback creates destructive competition despite aligned incentives

Whether people compete or cooperate with each other has consequences for their own performance and that of organizations. To explain why people compete or cooperate, previous research has focused on two main factors: situational outcome structures and personality types. Here, we propose that—above and beyond these two factors—situational cues, such as the format in which people receive feedback, strongly affect whether they act competitively, cooperatively, or individualistically. Results of a laboratory experiment support our theorizing: After receiving ranking feedback, both students and experienced managers treated group situations with cooperative outcome structures as competitive and were in consequence willing to forgo guaranteed financial gains to pursue a—financially irrelevant—better rank. Conversely, in dilemma situations, feedback based on the joint group outcome led to more cooperation than ranking feedback. Our study contributes to research on competition, cooperation, interdependence theory, forced ranking, and the design of information environments.     

REVIEW: Presocratic Philosophy

A discussion of W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. I, The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans (xv/538 pp.); Vol. 11, The Presocratic Tradition from Parmenides to Democritus (xvii/553 pp.) Cambridge University Pres F. M. Cleve, The Giants of PreSophistic Greek Philosophy, An Attempt to Reconstruct Their Thoughts, Martinus Nijhoff D. E. Gershenson and D. A. Greenberg, Anaxagoras and the Birth of Physics, Blaisdell Publishing Company G. E. R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy, Cambridge University Press, 1966 (v/503 pp.)     

Getting older and living up to implicit followership theories: Implications for employee psychological health and job attitudes

Age discrimination at work is a widespread destructive phenomenon that often takes subtle forms. Based on negative stereotypes about older employees, we argue that older employees often experience that they are perceived as less ideal followers than younger employees. We propose that older and younger employees do not differ in what they assume their supervisors expect of an ideal follower (implicit followership theories, IFTs). Thus, we hypothesize that older employees perceive that they compare less favorably to their supervisors' IFTs than younger employees (i.e., worse IFT-fit). This should entail lower quality of the relationship between leader and follower (leader-member-exchange, LMX), which, in turn, should have detrimental effects on employees' health (i.e., burnout) and job attitudes (i.e., job satisfaction, turnover intentions, and identification). We tested our model in a field study with 379 employees. Results differed for ideal and counter-ideal follower attributes. Concerning counter-ideal follower attributes (e.g., being incompetent), age had the proposed negative effect on psychological health and job attitudes that mediated through IFT-fit and LMX. Concerning ideal follower attributes (e.g., thinking ahead), older employees expected their supervisors not only to think less of them than of their younger colleagues, but also expected them to have less demanding IFTs—contrary to our expectations. Employee age was negatively related to psychological health and job attitudes, mediated through lower perceived IFTs, worse perceived appraisal of the actual employee and their joint effects on LMX.     

COVID-19 and Religious Ethics

The editors of the JRE solicited short essays on the COVID-19 pandemic from a group of scholars of religious ethics that reflected on how the field might help them make sense of the complex religious, cultural, ethical, and political implications of the pandemic, and on how the pandemic might shape the future of religious ethics.     

The fit and implementation of sexual harassment law to workplace evaluations

Three studies used videotaped harassment complaints to examine the impact of legal standards on the evaluation of social-sexual conduct at work. Study 1 demonstrated that without legal instructions, college students' judgment strategies were highly variable. Study 2 compared 2 current legal standards, the "severity or pervasiveness test" and a proposed utilitarian alternative (i.e., the rational woman approach). Undergraduate participants taking the perspective of the complainant were more sensitive to offensive conduct than were those adopting an objective perspective. Although the utilitarian altemative further increased sensitivity on some measures, it failed to produce a principled judgment strategy. Finally, Study 3 examined the kinds of errors that full-time workers make when applying the "severity or pervasiveness" test to examine more closely the sensitivity of the subjective approach.