Business Commons^™

Workplace Trust As A Mechanism Of Employee (Dis)Advantage: The Case Of Employee Socioeconomic Status, Marko Pitesa, Stefan Thau, Madan M. Pillutla

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Early work on trust in social science highlighted how the lack of trust between individuals can cause social division, contribute to social stratification, and reduce economic opportunities for people from all social groups. We integrate this work with organizational research on antecedents of trust to generate predictions explaining when and why low employee socioeconomic status (SES) can be a barrier to trust. We discuss how this process can impair the success of both organizations as well as their lower-SES employees. We present a model, and data, suggesting that lower-SES employees will be both more distrusted as well as more distrustful …

Examining The Paradox Of Part-Time Employees Working Overtime, Hsin Ning Yong, Jochen Reb

Asian Management Insights

Examining the paradox of part-time employees working overtime. Many studies have revealed that employees on part-time work arrangements are voluntarily working either longer hours or more intensively than what they had contracted for. So why do part-time employees work overtime? And why is it important for organisations to understand the rationale for such behaviour? Despite the increasing relevance of part-time employment, there is little research on how to structure the work, engage, develop or retain part-time employees. For organisations to effectively manage these relationships, they need to first understand what drives part-timers to work above and beyond their contracted capacity

Creating A Great Workplace For All Singapore: First Steps For Business Leaders, Richard R. Smith, Benjamin Ho

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In a highly competitive business world, the pressure for bottom-line results can be intense – sometimes at the expense of a positive workplace environment. Yet, it seems there are organizations that not only do well, but also have people who trust their leaders, possess deep pride in their work and organizations, and take genuine pleasure in working with their colleagues.

Testing, Retesting And Selecting The Right Job Applicant, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Allowing applicants to retake a test can help increase the likelihood of hiring the best person for the job

Inside Accountancy: What It Takes To Become A Big 4 Partner, Qiang Cheng, Yang Hoong Pang, Gary Pan, Poh Sun Seow, Kwong Sin Leong

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Reaching partnership at a Big 4 firm is regarded as the pinnacle ofachievement for any accountant. Ask any early-career employee in a Big 4 firmwhether he or she wants to make partner one day. Many of them will say yes, unequivocally.

Firm-Specific Knowledge Assets And Employment Arrangements: Evidence From Ceo Compensation Design And Ceo Dismissal, Heli Wang, Shan Zhao, Guoli Chen

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Research Summary: We argue that firms with greater specificity in knowledge structure need to both encourage their CEOs to stay so that they make investments with a long-term perspective, and provide job securities to the CEOs so that they are less concerned about the risk of being dismissed. Accordingly, we found empirical evidence that specificity in firm knowledge assets is positively associated with the use of restricted stocks in CEO compensation design (indicating the effort of CEO retention) and negatively associated with CEO dismissal (indicating the job securities the firm committed to CEOs). Furthermore, firm diversification was found to mitigate …

Assessing Personality-Situation Interplay In Personnel Selection: Toward More Integration Into Personality Research, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Over the years, the personnel selection field has developed methods to assess trait expression in particular situations, but these approaches have evolved mostly outside the field of personality psychology. In this article, I review available personnel selection evidence regarding two such approaches: (i) situational judgement tests that present short scenarios and ask job candidates how they would handle the situations and (ii) assessment centre exercises requiring candidates to display behaviour in specified interactive situations. I describe these approaches and discuss their relations with personality research. I posit that adapting these approaches to personality research creates methodological diversity to address key …

Integrating Situational Judgment Tests And Assessment Centre Exercises Into Personality Research: Challenges And Further Opportunities, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this rejoinder, I discuss several broad themes that emerged from the 32 commentaries in response to my target article about the value of integrating Situational Judgment Tests and Assessment Centre exercises for advancing research on the personality-situation interplay. Specifically, I summarize the various challenges put forward (e.g. deficient/contaminated trait measurement, assessment of situation construal, inclusion of personality-driven situation experience) and offer potential conceptual (e.g. use of situational taxonomies and contextualized personality perception) and methodological solutions (e.g. use of open-ended and nonlinear SJTs and multiple speed assessment). Taken together, this fits into a more comprehensive multi-method approach to personality assessment.

Get Innovative In Personnel Selection: The Case Of The Port Of Antwerp, Filip Lievens, Britt De Soete, Christoph Nils Herde

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Thanks to its central location and its large storage and distribution capacity, the Port of Antwerp can be regarded as a key gateway to Europe. Concerning international maritime transport, Antwerp is ranked as the second harbor of Europe and the seventh harbor worldwide. The Port of Antwerp is the European market leader in terms of the transportation of steel, fruit, forest products, coffee, tobacco, and other products. In 2009, it dealt with almost 160 million tons of goods. Each year, over 14,000 sea-going vessels and 55,000 inland navigation vessels are passing through the Port of Antwerp. As nearly every important …

A Closer Look At The Measurement Of Dispositional Reasoning: Dimensionality And Invariance Across Assessor Groups, François S. De Kock, Filip Lievens, Marise Ph. Born

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Despite the growing interest in dispositional reasoning as a construct and determinant of good raters (good judges'), its measurement still requires attention. We address two measurement issues in the present study. First, this study tests a hierarchical model as a more parsimonious account for dispositional reasoning than component- or general-factor models that were examined in earlier studies. So, this provides a more comprehensive test of the different measurement models underlying dispositional reasoning data. Second, we assess the measurement invariance of dispositional reasoning measure scores across two different populations of assessors that are often trained and used in workplace assessments, namely …

Economic Downturns Undermine Workplace Helping By Promoting A Zero-Sum Construal Of Success, Nina Sirola, Marko Pitesa

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Workplace helping is essential to the success of organizations and economies. Given the economic benefits of helping, it seems important that during difficult economic periods the amount of helping does not decline. In this research, we propose and show that it does. We argue that cues that signal the economy is performing poorly prompt a construal that the success of one person implies less success for others. This zero-sum construal of success in turn makes employees less inclined to help. Four studies found evidence consistent with our theory. Study 1 found that worse economic periods are associated with a more …

"More Free Time, More Overtime?" An Examination Of The Overtime Paradox For Part-Time Employees Through The Lens Of Non-Working Time, Hsin Ning Yong

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Why do part-time employees with reduced workload and remuneration work longer hours than contracted? Existing research attributes this phenomenon to organisational culture. design of the part-time work. relationship with others at work and one's personality traits. However, there are at least two major gaps in the existing research. Firstly. there is no integrated framework which links these factors influencing part-time employees to work longer hours. This impacts the ability for individuals and companies to systematically apply these findings to improve part-time arrangements; Secondly. most studies to date use self-report methods such:15 interviews and surveys. which limit the findings to what …

Fast-And-Frugal Trees As Noncompensatory Models Of Performance-Based Personnel Decisions, Shenghua Luan, Jochen Reb

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Employees’ performance provides the basis for many personnel decisions, and to make these decisions,managers often need to integrate information from different performance-related cues. We asked college students and experienced managers to make a series of performance-based personnel decisions and tested how well weighting-and-adding, compensatory logistic regression and lexicographic, noncompensatory fast-and-frugal trees (FFTs) could describe participants’ decision processes regarding both choices and reaction times. Results show that a significant proportion of the participants (i.e., nearly half of the college students and more than two-thirds of the experienced managers) applied FFTs to make such decisions,and that the majority of them adopted key …

The Mediating Role Of Emotional Exhaustion In The Relationship Of Mindfulness With Turnover Intentions And Job Performance, Jochen Reb, Jayanth Narayanan, Sankalp Chaturvedi, Srinivas Ekkirala

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Mindfulness in the workplace has emerged as a legitimate and growing area of organizational scholarship. The present research examined the role of employee emotional exhaustion in mediating the relationship of mindfulness with turnover intentions and task performance. Drawing on theory and empirical research on both organizational behavior and mindfulness, we predicted that more mindful employees would show lower turnover intentions and higher task performance and that these relationships would be mediated by emotional exhaustion. We tested these hypotheses in two field studies in an Indian context. Study 1 was a field study of call center employees of a multinational organization, …

Situational Judgement Tests For Selection, Jan Corstjens, Filip Lievens, Stefan Krumm

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

When situational judgement tests (SJTs) began to regain popularity among the scientific community in the 1990s there was an implicit notion that they captured context‐dependent knowledge. In fact, the term ‘situational judgement’ carries the connotation of test‐takers’ responses being more effective when they consider the specifics of the situation. In recent years another perspective has emerged, which views SJTs as capturing relatively contextindependent knowledge (or general domain knowledge; Motowidlo, Crook, Kell & Naemi, 2009; Motowidlo, Hooper & Jackson, 2006a). Although SJTs and their items will often fall somewhere between these two perspectives, we posit in this chapter that it might …

Future Directions In Personality, Occupational And Medical Selection: Myths, Misunderstandings, Measurement, And Suggestions, Eamonn Ferguson, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper has two objectives: (1) presenting recent advances in personality theory whereby personality traits are conceptualized within a framework that focuses on the dynamic interactions of behaviour, biology, context, and states, and (2) discussing the implications of these developments for measurement and medical selection. We start by presenting evidence that traits are no longer regarded as stable deterministic predictors of behaviour. Instead, traits are found to change across generations, the life span, and in response to environmental contingencies. Thus, there is an urgent need to explore how traits change as function of medical education. Second, drawing on recent theory …

Who Will Leave The Company?: A Large-Scale Industry Study Of Developer Turnover By Mining Monthly Work Report, Lingfeng Bao, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software developer turnover has become a big challenge for information technology (IT) companies. The departure of key software developers might cause big loss to an IT company since they also depart with important business knowledge and critical technical skills. Understanding developer turnover is very important for IT companies to retain talented developers and reduce the loss due to developers' departure. Previous studies mainly perform qualitative observations or simple statistical analysis of developers' activity data to understand developer turnover. In this paper, we investigate whether we can predict the turnover of software developers in non-open source companies by automatically analyzing monthly …

The Role Of Facial Appearance On Ceo Selection After Firm Misconduct, David M. Gomulya, Elaine M. Wong, Margaret E. Ormiston, Warren Boeker

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We investigate a particular aspect of CEO successor trustworthiness that may be critically important after a firm has engaged in financial misconduct. Specifically, drawing on prior research that suggests that facial appearance is one critical way in which trustworthiness is signaled, we argue that leaders who convey integrity, a component of trustworthiness, will be more likely to be selected as successors after financial restatement. We predict that such appointments garner more positive reactions by external observers such as investment analysts and the media because these CEOs are perceived as having greater integrity. In an archival study of firms that have …

Signaler Credibility, Signal Susceptibility, And Relative Reliance On Signals: How Stakeholders Change Their Evaluative Processes After Violation Of Expectations And Rehabilitative Efforts, David Gomulya, Yuri Mishina

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Prior studies have shown that a firm’s violation of expectations might lead to less favorable evaluations of that firm by stakeholders. However, the literature has been silent on whether and how the process by which stakeholders evaluate a firm could change subsequent to the violation. Drawing from signaling and screening theory, we examine how evaluative processes might change in the context of financial restatements. We find that investors appear to shift their relative reliance on particular signals in determining a firm’s stock price following an earnings restatement. These changes are at least partly reversed following the replacement of an incumbent …

Learning From Others' Failures: The Effectiveness Of Failure Stories For Managerial Learning, Ronald Bledow, Bernd Carette, Jana Kuehnel, Daniela Pittig

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School of Business

We argue that other peoples' failures provide a neglected source of managerial learning that is associated with enhanced learning transfer. Due to their negative valence, stories about other peoples' failures as compared to stories about other peoples' successes should elicit a more pronounced motivational response, such that people elaborate the content of failure stories more actively. As a consequence, the knowledge gained from failure stories will more likely be applied on a transfer task. We expect this motivational response to failure stories and its benefits for learning to be most pronounced for people who view failures as valuable learning opportunities. …

Experimental Test Validation: Examining The Path From Test Elements To Test Performance, Stefan Krumm, Joachim Huffmeier, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Although the vast majority of validation studies rely on correlational validity evidence, there is an increased recognition that validity should also focus on whether variations in the focal psychological attribute lead to variations in the measurement outcomes. Therefore, calls have been made that validity evidence should also be gathered through experiments. Existing experimental validation strategies focus on manipulating psychological attributes and their effects on measurement outcomes. In the current manuscript, we present an additional and complementary approach that focuses on manipulating test elements (instead of psychological attributes) that are considered indispensable for test functioning. Examples from personality, situational judgment, emotional …

Individual Differences And Their Measurement: A Review Of 100 Years Of Research, Paul R. Sackett, Filip Lievens, Chad H. Van Iddekinge, Nathan R. Kuncel

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This article reviews 100 years of research on individual differences and their measurement, with a focus on research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. We focus on 3 major individual differences domains: (a) knowledge, skill, and ability, including both the cognitive and physical domains; (b) personality, including integrity, emotional intelligence, stable motivational attributes (e.g., achievement motivation, core self-evaluations), and creativity; and (c) vocational interests. For each domain, we describe the evolution of the domain across the years and highlight major theoretical, empirical, and methodological developments, including relationships between individual differences and variables such as job performance, job satisfaction, and …

What Doesn't Kill You Will Only Make You More Risk-Loving: Early-Life Disasters And Ceo Behavior, Gennaro Bernile, Vineet Bhagwat, P. Raghavendra Rau

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The literature on managerial style posits a linear relation between a chief executive officer's (CEOs) past experiences and firm risk. We show that there is a nonmonotonic relation between the intensity of CEOs’ early-life exposure to fatal disasters and corporate risk-taking. CEOs who experience fatal disasters without extremely negative consequences lead firms that behave more aggressively, whereas CEOs who witness the extreme downside of disasters behave more conservatively. These patterns manifest across various corporate policies including leverage, cash holdings, and acquisition activity. Ultimately, the link between CEOs’ disaster experience and corporate policies has real economic consequences on firm riskiness and …

Performance Appraisals: Pitfalls And Promises, Singapore Management University

Research@SMU: Connecting the Dots

By having a better understanding the performance appraisal process, organisations can develop more effective performance appraisal systems, say Professors Gary Greguras and Jochen Reb.

See their papers:

Performance appraisals as heuristic judgments under uncertainty.

The Regret Elements Scale: Distinguishing the emotional and cognitive components of regret

Understanding performance ratings: Dynamic performance, attributions, and rating purpose

Building Gender-Inclusive Workplaces In Singapore: A Practical Guide For Companies And Human Resource Practitioners, Benjamin Tien Yong Wong, Gillian Pei Wen Loy, Claris Wan Xin Teo

Student Publications

We are a team of students from the Singapore Management University (“SMU”) Diversity Leadership Development Programme and SMU Women’s Connections. We believe that all employees are valuable members of many organisations that operate in Singapore. Companies can therefore harness the potential of stronger teams by ensuring that all employees feel safe, valued and included - regardless of one’s gender. In 2014, Singapore saw more women than men enter tertiary educational institutions. Despite this progress made, a study conducted in 2015 found that women were part of only 9.1 per cent of SGX- listed boards, with almost half of these boards …

Organizational Image/Reputation, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Organizational image refers to people’s global impressions of an organization and is defined as people’s loose structures of knowledge and beliefs about an organization. Organizational image represents the net cognitive reactions and associations of customers, investors, employees, and applicants to an organization’s name. Accordingly, it serves as a template to categorize, store, and recall organization-related information.

Perspectives From 22 Countries On The Legal Environment For Selection, Brett Myors, Filip Lievens, Eveline Schollaert, Greet Van Hoye, Steven F. Cronshow, Antonio Mladinic, Viviana Rodriguez, Herman Aguinis, Dirk D. Steiner, Florence Rolland, Heinz Schuler, Andreas Frintrup, Ioannis Nikolaou, Maria Tomprou, S. Subramony, Shabu B. Raj, Shay Tzafrir, Peter Bamberger, Marilena Bertolino, Marco Mariani

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In the United States, the legal context plays a major role in how industrial/organizational (I/O) psychologists approach selection system development. The set of protected groups, the approaches to making an a priori case of discrimination (e.g., differential treatment vs. adverse impact), the key court cases influencing selection, and the prohibitions against preferential treatment (e.g., the 1991 ban on score adjustment or within-group norming) are well known. Selection texts (e.g., Guion, 1998) and human resource management texts (e.g., Cascio & Aguinis, 2008) give prominent treatment to the legal context. In recent years, there has been a growing internationalization of I/O psychology …

Take A Break! Benefits Of Sleep And Short Breaks For Daily Work Engagement, Jana Kuhnel, Hannes Zacher, Jessica De Bloom, Ronald Bledow

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The current study investigates the benefits of a good night’s sleep and short work breaks for employees’ daily work engagement. It is hypothesized that sleep and self-initiated short breaks help restore energetic and self-regulatory resources which, in turn, enable employees to experience high work engagement. A daily diary study was conducted with 107 employees who provided data twice a day (before lunch and at the end of the working day) over 5 workdays (453 days in total). Multilevel regression analyses showed that sleep quality and short breaks were beneficial for employees’ daily work engagement. After nights employees slept better, they …

The Effects Of Predictor Method Factors On Selection Outcomes: A Modular Approach To Personnel Selection Procedures, Filip Lievens, Paul R. Sackett

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Past reviews and meta-analyses typically conceptualized and examined selection procedures as holistic entities. We draw on the product design literature to propose a modular approach as a complementary perspective to conceptualizing selection procedures. A modular approach means that a product is broken down into its key underlying components. Therefore, we start by presenting a modular framework that identifies the important measurement components of selection procedures. Next, we adopt this modular lens for reviewing the available evidence regarding each of these components in terms of affecting validity, subgroup differences, and applicant perceptions, as well as for identifying new research directions. As …

How Future Work Selves Guide Feedback Seeking And Feedback Responding At Work, Frederik Anseel, Karoline Strauss, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Providing feedback is one of the most widely accepted psychological interventions for learning and development. The belief that giving feedback to employees is beneficial for individual and organizational performance is also strongly held in organizations. Therefore, providing feedback to employees lies at the heart of a wide range of often costly and time-intensive performance management tools in organizations. However, contrary to these beliefs, meta-analytic evidence shows that feedback interventions do not produce unequivocal positive effects on performance (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996).