Business Commons^™

Expressed Humility In Inter-Organization Interactions: Why And When Boundary-Spanning Leaders’ Expressed Humility Can Promote Partner Cooperation Commitment, Wenhao Yang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In an organization, expressing humility can promote more meaningful and satisfying relationships with others. Given its potentially positive effects, researchers have been interested in studying the promotion and management of expressed humility for decades. Although there is some literature on the mechanism of expressing humility within an organization, none of them has pointed out the positive effects of expressed humility between organizations represented by their boundary-spanning leaders. Specially, no research efforts have been devoted to understanding how expressed humility between partners affects the economic behavior and outcomes of organizations and when it is effective for positive effects.

In this paper, …

Workplace Culture Must Emphasise Mutual Respect [In Chinese], Siow-Heng Ong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In a commentary, SMU Professor of Communication Management (Education) Ong Siow Heng discussed the importance of having a respectful culture in the workplace. He opined that one way to appreciate employees is to provide equitable pay and career advancement opportunities for staff, so that workers will know that their employer respects their contribution. Even though more forms of disrespect for workers are being addressed by law, Prof Ong opined that improving respect for the workers’ dignity is best managed by those in workplace leadership even before relevant laws are passed, especially in areas that cannot be covered by law. He …

Effect Of Leader-Member Exchange Social Comparison On Co-Worker’S Envy And Work Behavior Moderated By Perceived Deservingness Of Star Workers, Ronnie Ng

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The extant leader-member exchange (LMX) literature suggests that leaders establish and develop different quality dyadic relationships with members in the same workgroup. High-quality LMX is argued as beneficial to employees. However, studies have overlooked the emotions and behaviors of low-quality LMX employees to determine how they differ from high-quality LMX employees. This study integrates LMX differentiation literature, social comparison theory and attributional theory to examine the role of LMX social comparison (LMXSC) perceptions in triggering help-seeking and knowledge hiding from star co-workers in the workplace. This study also explores the mediating role of dual envy, that is, benign and malicious …

Purpose In The For-Profit Firm: A Review And Framework For Management Research, Gerard George, Martine R. Haas, Anita M. Mcgahan, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx, Paul Tracey

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Purpose is a concept often used in managerial communities to signal and define a firm’s benevolent and pluralistic approach to its stakeholders beyond its focus on shareholders. While some evidence has linked purpose to positive organizational outcomes such as growth, employee satisfaction, innovation, and superior stock market performance, the definition and application of purpose in management research has been varied and frequently ambiguous. We review literature streams that invoke purpose in the for-profit firm and propose a unifying definition. Next, we develop a framework to study purpose that decouples its framing and formalization within firms from its realization, thus helping …

Why Employees Accept Lower Pay At Mission-Oriented Companies, Insiya Hussain, Marko Pitesa, Stefan Thau, Michael Schaerer

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Today’s companies are likely to tout how their work benefits human welfare or “makes the world a better place.” Recent research suggests that this may come with a potential financial drawback for workers, as it can inhibit them from negotiating for higher pay. Over five studies, job candidates consistently reported that they worried asking for higher pay from these companies would be seen as greedy or inappropriate. This suggests they are aware of a common bias, known as motivation purity bias, where managers believe employees interested in material rewards of work (such as pay) are less motivated than those motivated …

Scaling Digital Solutions For Wicked Problems: Ecosystem Versatility, Katherine Tatarinov, Tina Ambos, Feichin Ted Tschang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Digital solutions are increasingly used to address ‘‘wicked problems’’ that are locally embedded but require global approaches. Scaling these solutions internationally is imperative for their success, but to date we know little about this process. Using a qualitative case study methodology, our paper analyzes how four digital solutions driven by the United Nations are built and how they scale internationally. These solutions address wicked problems through artificial intelligence, blockchain, and geospatial mapping, and are embedded in networks of partners which evolve during scaling to create unique ecosystem roles and configurations. We identify different ecosystem roles and find that the specific …

Mindfully Outraged: Mindfulness Increases Deontic Retribution For Third-Party Injustice, Adam A. Kay, Theodore Charles Masters-Waage, Jochen Reb, Pavlos A. Vlachos

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Mindfulness is known to temper negative reactions by both victims and perpetrators of injustice. Accordingly, critics claim that mindfulness numbs people to injustice, raising concerns about its moral implications. Exam-ining how mindful observers respond to third-party injustice, we integrate mindfulness with deontic justice theory to propose that mindfulness does not numb but rather enlivens people to injustice committed by others against others. Results from three studies show that mindfulness heightens moral outrage in witnesses of injustice, particularly when the injustice is only moderate. Although these findings did not replicate with a mindfulness induction, post-hoc analysis in a fourth study reveals …

How Transformational Leadership Transforms Followers’ Affect And Work Engagement, Benjamin Bader, Michael Gielnik, Ronald Bledow

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

How do episodes of transformational leadership transform followers? To address this question, we build on theories of affective events and affect regulation and develop a research model that explicates a mechanism of the transformation process implicit in transformational leadership theory. Specifically, the model explains how experiencing episodes of transformational leadership transforms (i.e., changes) followers’ positive affect and eventually their work engagement by fulfilling followers’ basic psychological needs. We tested our model in two independent longitudinal samples using daily and weekly measurement designs with 214 (N = 75) and 147 (N = 54) lagged observations, respectively. In support of our model, …

Behavioral Factors Associated With Patients' Non-Attendance: A Retrospective Study In An Outpatient Specialty Clinic At A Women's And Children's Hospital In Singapore, Yue Tang, Houyuan Jiang, Zhichao Zheng, Zhichao Zheng, Chui Yee Loke, Bee Keow Goh

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Background: This study aimed to identify behavioral factors that affect patient attendance in outpatient clinics, especially those related to rescheduling.Methods: A retrospective study was conducted on 20,386 appointment records for 6,252 patients in an outpatient specialty clinic at a women’s and children’s hospital in Singapore over 34 months (January 2012–October 2014). Multivariate logistic regression was used to analyze the influence of independent variables on appointment no-shows.Results: The average no-show rate of the study population was 28.87%. Patient historical behaviors were significantly associated with appointment attendance. In particular, a larger number of previous visits, more historical no-shows, more historical rescheduling events …

The Mutual Constitution Of Culture And Psyche: The Bidirectional Relationship Between Individuals’ Perceived Control And Cultural Tightness-Looseness, Anyi Ma, Krishna Savani, Fangzhou Liu, Kenneth Tai, Aaron C. Kay

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

According to the theory of mutual constitution of culture and psyche, just as culture shapes people, individuals’ psychological states can influence culture. We build on compensatory control theory, which suggests that low personal control can lead people to prefer societal systems that impose order, to examine the mutual constitution of personal control and cultural tightness. Specifically, we tested whether individuals’ lack of personal control increases their preference for tighter cultures as a means of restoring order and predictability, and whether tighter cultures in turn reduce people’s feelings of personal control. Seven studies (five preregistered) with participants from the United States, …

Pay Suppression In Social Impact Contexts: How Framing Work Around The Greater Good Inhibits Job Candidate Compensation Demands, Insiya Hussain, Marko Pitesa, Stefan Thau, Michael Schaerer

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Past research suggests that when organizations communicate the benefits of their work for human welfare—that is, use a social impact framing for work—job candidates are willing to accept lower wages because they expect the work to be personally meaningful. We argue that this explanation overlooks a less socially desirable mechanism by which social impact framing leads to lower compensation demands: the perception among job candidates that requesting higher pay will breach organizational expectations to value work for its intrinsic (rather than extrinsic) rewards, or constitute a motivational norm violation. We find evidence for our theory across five studies: a qualitative …

The More The Merrier: How Psychological Standing And Work Group Size Explain Managers' Willingness To Communicate About Unethical Conduct In Their Work Group, Burak Oc, Maryam Kouchaki

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Business ethics research has long examined the dichotomy between remaining silent or reporting ethical misconduct to a third party. Little is known, however, about ethical conversations within a work group after observing misconduct. Specifically, we do not know how many members of their work group individuals choose to communicate with. These conversations could have important implications for creating an ethical workplace. We propose that psychological standing is an important driver of individuals' decisions not to remain silent and to instead raise moral concerns with a greater number of others in their work group. In addition, integrating existing work on structural …

Maximising Effectiveness Of Talent Pools Through Mindfulness: An Empirical Investigation In A Multinational Corporation, Tarmo Raudsepp

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Traditional human resource management is looking to identify and develop talent for maximising human capital in a competitive environment with limited resources and negative demographic trends. Attracting, deploying, motivating, developing and retaining talented employees is a corporate norm for meeting organisational goals. Proper human resource processes through rigorous mapping of employees according to the performance-potential matrix allow the grading of employees against peer groups to establish talent pools for development and internal succession planning.

Mindfulness originates from 2,500-year-old Buddhist spiritual practices and has a rare combination of spirituality and science. Eastern perspective originates from Asian traditions focusing on the self-regulation …

Arousing Motives Or Eliciting Stories? On The Role Of Pictures In A Picture–Story Exercise, Philipp Schäpers, Stefan Krumm, Filip Lievens, Nikola Stenzel

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Picture–story exercises (PSE) form a popular measurement approach that has been widely used for the assessment of implicit motives. However, current theorizing offers two diverging perspectives on the role of pictures in PSEs: either to elicit stories or to arouse motives. In the current study, we tested these perspectives in an experimental design. We administered a PSE either with or without pictures. Results from N = 281 participants revealed that the experimental manipulation had a medium to large effect for the affiliation and power motive domains, but no effect for the achievement motive domain. We conclude that the herein chosen …

Engaging Students Through Conversational Chatbots And Digital Content: A Climate Action Perspective, Thomas Menkhoff, Benjamin Gan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this case study, we report experiences developing a conversational chatbot as a pre-class and post-class engagement tool for undergraduate students enrolled in sustainability-related courses aimed at educating them about the severity of climate change and the importance of climate action by offsetting one’s carbon footprint (e.g, by planting trees or mangroves in SEA). The intitiative supports the university’s sustainability efforts in general and our new sustainability major in particular aimed at helping students to achieve sustainability-related learning outcomes with reference to climate change and climate action (SDG 13), one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals established by the United …

Relative Power And Interpersonal Trust, Christilene Du Plessis, My Hoang Bao Nguyen, Trevor A. Foulk, Michael Schaerer

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Because trust is essential in the development and maintenance of well-functioning relationships, scholars across numerous scientific disciplines have sought to determine what causes people to trust others. Power dynamics are known to predict trust, but research on the relationship between power and trust is inconclusive, with mixed results and without systematic consideration of how the relative power distribution within dyadic relationships may influence trust in those relationships. Building on interdependence theory, we propose that both individuals in an unequal-power dyad trust each other less than individuals in an equal-power dyad because unequal-power dyads heighten the perception of a conflict of …

Multiple, Speeded Assessments Under Scrutiny: Underlying Theory, Design Considerations, Reliability, And Validity, Christoph N. Herde, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Recently, multiple, speeded assessments (e.g., “speeded” or “flash” role-plays) have made rapid inroads into the selection domain. So far, however, the conceptual underpinning and empirical evidence related to these short, fast-paced assessment approaches has been lacking. This raises questions whether these speeded assessments can serve as reliable and valid indicators of future performance. This paper uses the notions of stimulus and response domain sampling to conceptualize multiple, speeded behavioral job simulations as a hybrid of established simulation-based selection methods. Next, we draw upon the thin slices of behavior paradigm to theorize about the quality of ratings made in multiple, speeded …

Remediating System Neglect In Judgmental Demand Forecasting, Srikant Vinakota

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Prior research has shown that individuals tasked with judgmental forecasting of demand based on time-series data overreact in stable environments and underreact in unstable environments. Kremer et al. (2011) attributed this to the system neglect hypothesis, which claims that forecasters emphasize forecast errors over the system parameters.

The present research investigates interventions that mitigate system neglect and address the causal factors for overreaction and underreaction. Given the desire by organizations to move towards touchless planning and automated decision-making, minimizing human judgment and understanding its drivers is of significant practical importance.

We tested four different interventions on an online subject pool …

Employer Branding In The Healthcare Sector: The Role Of Instrumental And Symbolic Image Attributes Among Potential Applicants And Doctors, Jiaxin Luo, Aristides I. Ferreira, Filip Lievens, Beatriz R. Trigo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study draws from the instrumental-symbolic framework to analyze the employer image of public hospitals among final-year students and employed doctors. We examine the relative importance of perceived instrumental and symbolic employer image attributes in public hospitals in China among two groups of individuals (211 final-year students and 200 currently employed doctors). Both instrumental and symbolic attributes are significantly related to hospitals' attractiveness as an employer. Symbolic trait inferences explain incremental variance in employer attraction beyond instrumental attributes. Although both attributes explain similar portions of the variance in the two groups, the attributes that emerge as significantly related to hospitals' …

Going Beyond Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, And Democratic (Weird) Samples And Problems In Organizational Research, Marko Pitesa, Michele J. Gelfand

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The goal of organizational research is to make inferences about a target population based on samples studied. Most target populations referred to in theories of organizational behavior, whether explicitly or implicitly, tend to be the entire populations of workers or managers, or even the entire human population. A typical sample, however, is convenient, being located where most researchers are, and thus also predominantly from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries (WEIRD; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010).

Work Effort: A Conceptual And Meta-Analytic Review, Chad H. Van Iddekinge, John D. Arnold, Herman Aquinis, Jonas W. B. Lang, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Work effort has been a key concept in management theories and research for more than a century. Maintaining and increasing employee effort also is a persistent concern to managers. The goal of the present conceptual and meta-analytic review was to increase clarity and consensus regarding what effort is and how to measure it. First, we reviewed conceptualizations of effort and provided an integrated definition that views effort as a direct outcome of motivation that captures (a) what employees work on, (b) how hard they work, and (c) how long they persist in that work. Second, we identified four main ways …

Biting The Hand That Feeds: A Status-Based Model Of When And Why Receiving Help Motivates Social Undermining, Kenneth Tai, Katrina Jia Lin, Catherice K. Lam, Wu Liu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Social exchange theory suggests that after receiving help, people reciprocate by helping the original helpgiver. However, we propose that help recipients may respond negatively and harm the help giver when they perceive helping as a status threat and experience envy. Integrating the helping as status relations framework and the social functional perspective of envy, we examine when and why receiving help may prompt help recipients to undermine help givers. Across four studies, we find progressive support for our results, which show that when individuals receive task-related help from help givers who are perceived to be more, rather than less, competent …

Cheating Constraint Decisions And Discrimination Against Workers With Lower Financial Standing, Grace J. H. Lim, Marko Pitesa, Abhijeet K. Vadera

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Workers with lower financial standing face many personal challenges due to the relatively lower level of material resources they have at their disposal. We propose that lower financial standing not just impacts workers themselves, but also engenders discrimination from supervisors. Drawing on social cognition principles, we forward a situational inference perspective whereby supervisors make a naïve inference that workers with lower financial standing pose a higher risk of cheating which leads them to subject such workers to more negative treatment and deprive them of opportunities. We focus on two ubiquitous ways in which organizations constrain cheating behavior: worker surveillance and …

The Study Of Followers In Leadership Research: A Systematic And Critical Review, Burak Oc, Kraivin Chintakananda, Michael Ramsay Bashshur, David V. Day

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Despite the significant amount of existing research examining the relationship of follower-related factors with leadership outcomes, there is no systematic, critical review that integrates and helps leadership scholars make sense of this rapidly growing body of research. To address this gap in the literature, we first briefly discuss the leading perspectives explaining the role of followers in leadership. Next, we identify and discuss the most frequently studied theoretical narratives explaining the relationship between follower-related predictors and leadership outcomes. Because theoretical arguments generally make causal claims, we identify and examine how methodological concerns including power analysis, multicollinearity, and endogeneity might prevent …

Automatic Scoring Of Speeded Interpersonal Assessment Center Exercises Via Machine Learning: Initial Psychometric Evidence And Practical Guidelines, Louis Hickman, Christoph N. Herde, Filip Lievens, Louis Tay

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Assessment center (AC) exercises such as role-plays have established themselves as valuable approaches for obtaining insights into interpersonal behavior, but they are often considered the “Rolls Royce” of personnel assessment due to their high costs. The observation and rating process comprises a substantial part of these costs. In an exploratory case study, we capitalize on recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) by developing NLP-based machine learning (ML) models to investigate the possibility of automatically scoring AC exercises. First, we compared the convergent-related validity and contamination with word count of ML scores based on models that used different NLP methods …

Personnel Selection: A Review Of Ways To Maximize Validity, Diversity, And The Applicant Experience, Chad H. Van Iddekinge, Filip Lievens, Paul R. Sackett

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Personnel Psychology has a long tradition of publishing important research on personnel selection. In this article, we review some of the key questions and findings from studies published in the journal and in the selection literature more broadly. In doing so, we focus on the various decisions organizations face regarding selection procedure development (e.g., use multiple selection procedures, contextualize procedure content), administration (e.g., provide pre-test explanations, reveal target knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics [KSAOs]), and scoring (e.g., weight predictors and criteria, use artificial intelligence). Further, we focus on how these decisions affect the validity of inferences drawn from the …

R&D Project Portfolio Collaboration: How To Structure The Strategic Alliance, Guiyun Feng, Pascale Crama, Wenqi Lian

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Incumbent companies target innovative firms with promising research and development (R&D) projects to rejuvenate their product portfolio. Such strategic alliances create value by combining the innovator’s research expertise with the partner firm’s superior marketing capability. The partner firm chooses the timing and payment terms of the strategic alliance, accounting for the innovator's budget and marketing capability, and the project portfolio's market interaction and revenue variability. The partner firm may prefer delayed alliances post R&D completion for innovator firms with high marketing capability when the innovator has sufficient budget or when market interaction is weak. Upfront alliances - prior to the …

Employees’ Job Positions, Psychological Ownership, And Commitment To Change, Bo Zhang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Organisational change is crucial to the development of enterprises. However, when enterprises are implementing major changes, there are great differences in the attitudes and behaviours of employees in different job positions toward changes. Research in this area is insufficient. Therefore, this dissertation investigates the problem of employee commitment amid enterprises’ organisational changes. This dissertation is committed to determining why employees at different levels and with different roles have different degrees of commitment to change and confirming the role of job positions in affecting employees’ psychological ownership of the change process. According to the findings, the impact of employees’ job rank …

Social Performance Feedback And Firm Communication Strategy, Heli Wang, Ming Jia, Yi Xiang, Yang Lan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Although corporate social performance has become an important measure of firm performance, there is little understanding about how firms respond to social performance feedback and how impression management may function as an important firm response to the feedback. Building upon and extending the literature on the behavioral theory of the firm and the strategic use of language, we examine how discrepancies between firms’ social performance and their aspiration levels affect how firms use visual expressions in their CSR reports. In addition, we argue that the relationship between social performance discrepancies and the use of visual expressions in CSR reports is …

Revisiting Meta-Analytic Estimates Of Validity In Personnel Selection: Addressing Systematic Overcorrection For Restriction Of Range, Paul R. Sackett, Charlene Zhang, Christopher M. Berry, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper systematically revisits prior meta-analytic conclusions about the criterion-related validity of personnel selection procedures, and particularly the effect of range restriction corrections on those validity estimates. Corrections for range restriction in meta-analyses of predictor–criterion relationships in personnel selection contexts typically involve the use of an artifact distribution. After outlining and critiquing five approaches that have commonly been used to create and apply range restriction artifact distributions, we conclude that each has significant issues that often result in substantial overcorrection and that therefore the validity of many selection procedures for predicting job performance has been substantially overestimated. Revisiting prior meta-analytic …