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This study, based on construal level theory, aims to examine the influential mechanism of leader empowerment behaviour on employee creativity. Specifically, it examines the mediating role of cognitive flexibility between leader empowerment behaviour and employee creativity, along with the moderating effect of consideration of future consequences (CFC) on this linkage.

A two time-point survey study (n = 214) was conducted to collect information from leaders and employees in terms of mutual evaluation in several Chinese industries. To effectively avoid common source bias, this survey was conducted through pairing leaders and employees. During the survey, the supervisors and subordinates were double-blinded. Correlation analysis and hierarchical regression analysis were used to test the research hypotheses.

Firstly, leader empowerment behaviour can significantly predict employee creativity. Second, cognitive flexibility plays a partial mediating role in the linkage between leader empowerment behaviour and employee creativity. Thirdly, CFC moderates the relationship between leadership empowerment behaviour and cognitive flexibility. The mediating role of cognitive flexibility underlies the overall moderating effect of CFC on the relationship between leader empowerment behaviour and employee creativity.

We used construal level theory to explain the influence of the mechanism of leader empowerment behaviour on employee creativity. In this manner, this study bridges the gap between theory and practice, as well as enriching the research on leader empowerment behaviour and employee creativity, especially in the Chinese context. Moreover, our study has several practical managerial implications, based on the importance of employee creativity. It inspires the implementation of leader empowerment behaviour, cultivation of employee creativity and introduction of several procedures.

This paper discusses the influential mechanism of leader empowerment behaviour on employee creativity from a new perspective and explains the process of encouraging employee creativity through information-processing methods. It mainly highlights the application of construal level theory to discuss employee creativity and develops a new research frame for employee creativity. Leaders can raise employee creativity through leader empowerment behaviour.

Various studies have examined the role of executive functions in autism, but there is a lack of research in the current literature on cognitive flexibility in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The purpose of this study is to investigate whether cognitive flexibility deficits could be related to facial emotion recognition deficits in ASD.

In total, 20 children with ASD and 20 typically developing children, matched for intelligence quotient and gender, were examined both in facial emotion recognition tasks and in cognitive flexibility tasks through the dimensional change card sorting task.

Despite cognitive flexibility not being a core deficit in ASD, impaired cognitive flexibility is evident in the present research. Results show that cognitive flexibility is related to facial emotion recognition and support the hypothesis of an executive specific deficit in children with autism.

One of the limit is the use of just one cognitive test to measure cognitive flexibility and facial recognition. This could be important to be taken into account in the new research. By increasing the number of common variables assessing cognitive flexibility, this will allow for a better comparison between studies to characterize impairment in cognitive flexibility in ASD.

Investigating impairment in cognitive flexibility may help to plan training intervention based on the induction of flexibility.

If the authors implement cognitive flexibility people with ASD can have also an effect on their social behavior and overcome the typical and repetitive behaviors that are the hallmark of ASD.

The originality is to relate cognitive flexibility deficits to facial emotion.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of cognitive diversity and structural empowerment on strategic flexibility in the context of business performance.

Structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to statistically test the data that were collected from health-care organizations located in the USA.

SEM reveals the positive main effect of cognitive diversity on strategic flexibility, the moderating effect of structural empowerment on the effect of cognitive diversity on strategic flexibility and performance and the mediating effect of strategic flexibility on the joint effect of cognitive diversity and structural empowerment on business performance.

The study reveals that diversity in cognitive resources and workplace empowerment can jointly support business performance via strategic flexibility. The paper explains that this positive effect can take place because the two factors jointly enable business organizations to find better internal applications for new relevant information, thus allowing firms to quickly reorganize their internal resources in a way that leads to better performance.

Different forms of strategic flexibility allow for reactive adaptation to different changing environments and the proactive driving of change. It is therefore becoming increasingly important for decision makers to not only possess marketing capabilities, but also the capabilities for strategic flexibility in its various forms. However, our knowledge of the relationships between decision makers' different ways of thinking and their capabilities for strategic flexibility is limited. This limitation is constraining research and understanding. In this article we develop a theoretical cognitive content framework that postulates relationships between different ways of thinking about strategy and different information‐processing demands. We then outline how the contrasting beliefs of decision makers may influence their capabilities to generate different hybrid forms of strategic flexibility at the cognitive level. Theoretically, the framework is embedded in resource‐based theory, personal construct theory and schema theory. The implications for research and theory are discussed.

Advertisements facilitate certain emotions, subsequently influencing purchase intentions. Humor, as an influential way of information expression, is frequently used in ads to elicit emotions. Drawing upon literature on advertisement humor and new product purchase intention and the theory of planned behavior, the study proposes that humor stimulation in advertisements can affect consumers' new product purchase intentions, in which two process mechanisms, namely, emotional arousal and cognitive flexibility, play a mediating effect.

To test the assertions, the authors conduct three experimental studies. The authors' first study assesses the main effect between advertisement humor and purchase intentions. In the second study, the authors show the mediating effects of emotional pleasure, emotional arousal, and cognitive flexibility on the relationship between advertisement humor and purchase intentions. In the first two experiments, the authors study incremental new products. In the third study, the authors study the same mediating relationships for radically new products.

This study's results show consumers that watch humorous ads are more likely to choose new products than those who watch non-humorous ads (Study 1); compared with non-humorous ads, humorous ads can enhance emotional arousal, thus promoting cognitive flexibility and making consumers more inclined to choose new products (Study 2 and Study 3). That said, the authors find that these mediation effects are only partial.

This study's results have important implications for firms vying to enhance consumers' new product purchase intentions by deploying humorous ads.

The effect of task conflict on innovative work behavior has yielded inconsistent results pointing to the need to examine the conditions under which task conflict is helpful for employees’ innovative work behavior. This study aims to develop a comprehensive model linking task conflict and innovative work behavior through constructive conflict, positive conflict value, cognitive flexibility and psychological safety.

Data were collected from 316 supervisor–subordinate dyads working in software development and high-technology companies located in Saudi Arabia. The research model was tested using partial least squares approach.

Results show that constructive conflict mediates the relationship between task conflict and innovative work behavior. Moreover, positive conflict value and cognitive flexibility mediate the effect of constructive conflict on innovative work behavior. Finally, psychological safety positively moderates the effect of positive conflict value and cognitive flexibility on innovative work behavior.

This study suggests that constructive conflict, cognitive flexibility, positive conflict value and psychological safety are important mechanisms that explain the link between task conflict and innovative work behavior.

Current Army doctrine stresses a need for military leaders to have the capability to make flexible and adaptive decisions based on a future unknown environment, location and enemy. To assess a military decision maker’s ability in this context, this paper aims to modify the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test which assesses cognitive flexibility, into a military relevant map task. Thirty-four military officers from all service branches completed the map task.

The purpose of this study was to modify a current psychological task that measures cognitive flexibility into a military relevant task that includes the challenge of overcoming experiential bias, and understand underlying causes of individual variability in the decision-making and cognitive flexibility behavior of active duty military officers on this task.

Results indicated that non-perseverative errors were a strong predictor of cognitive flexibility performance on the map task. Decomposition of non-perseverative error into efficient errors and random errors revealed that participants who did not complete the map task changed their sorting strategy too soon within a series, resulting in a high quantity of random errors.

This study serves as the first step in customizing cognitive psychological tests for a military purpose and understanding why some military participants show poor cognitive flexibility.

Despite the increasingly growing empirical research on leader humor, the critical issue of how and when leader humor affects newcomer adjustment was largely overlooked. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between leader humor and newcomer adjustment. Based on social information processing theory, the authors identify newcomers' role breadth self-efficacy (RBSE) as the mediator and suggest that newcomers' cognitive flexibility moderates the effects.

Data were obtained from a 2-wave sample of 195 newcomers. The authors utilized the PROCESS procedure developed by Hayes to assess the hypothesized moderated mediation model.

The findings showed that leader humor could boost newcomers' RBSE which, in turn, was beneficial to newcomer adjustment. Besides, newcomers' cognitive flexibility plays a moderating role in the relationship between leader humor and newcomers' RBSE.

This study utilized a cross-sectional research design, making the design difficult to obtain causal conclusions. Moreover, the data were all based on self-reports from newcomers, which may raise a concern of common method bias.

This paper extends the literature on leader humor and newcomer adjustment by treating RBSE as the mediator and newcomers' cognitive flexibility as the moderator. This study is one of several empirical studies to test the link between leader humor and newcomer adjustment.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and explain the manner in which HR system’s flexibility, in combination with employees’ individual flexibility (IF) and their positive character traits, such as: optimism, hope, resistance or self-efficacy (which comprise psychological capital (PsychCap)), allow to predict employees’ readiness to display innovative behaviors in the workplace.

A quantitative research methodology was adopted which resulted in the development of a both self-administered online survey instrument (n=166) and employees students in the postgraduate program at the Warsaw School of Economics (n=70). Using a national database of service companies, a random sample of 700 e-mail addresses was generated and respondents were invited to participate in the online survey. This resulted in the completion of 166 online surveys, representing a response rate of 26 percent. The second group of respondents consisted of 70 employees from different organizations in Poland.

On the basis of the analyses it was shown that HR flexibility (HRF) and IF are a generally weak predictor of innovative behaviors. However, in a situation when PsychCap is set to be a mediator, these variables allow to predict innovative work behavior.

Research on the relation of HRF to innovative behaviors has not been sufficiently clarified so far. The achieved results shed new light on the relations of these two variables and indicate that HRF does not translate directly into behaviors of the personnel. However, it should be noted that the relationship of these variables are of indirect nature.

Many organizational problems are poorly defined, emotionally laden, and ambiguous. These types of problems rarely have one right answer and the criteria for evaluating the appropriateness of solutions is likely to be context dependent. Further, although cognitive skills are important to effective problem solving, the nature of these problems may also require emotional skills as well. This chapter presents a study which set out to determine whether emotional intelligence as an ability contributes above and beyond cognitive intelligence to the quantity, flexibility, and quality of solutions generated to ill-structured problems. Although support was not found for the notion that emotional intelligence explains the indices of solution generation beyond that of cognitive intelligence, the findings did show that emotional intelligence was a significant predictor of one of the solution metrics, namely the average resolving power of solutions across the two problems. The findings demonstrate that emotional intelligence and cognitive intelligence are separate constructs and suggest that caution be used in proposing the pervasive effects of emotional intelligence. In particular, the results of this study suggest that emotional intelligence may not equally influence all activities, highlighting the need to investigate which steps of the problem-solving process it does indeed impact.