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The present paper aims to explore the effects of state (trust in supervisor) and trait (trust propensity) trust on employees' work engagement. Furthermore, it seeks to investigate the mediating role of learning goal orientation in the relationship between work engagement and two forms of performance: in‐role job performance and innovative work behaviour.

Data for this cross sectional survey study were collected from 168 research scientists drawn from six Irish science research centres. Structural equation modelling was used to test the research hypotheses.

The results suggest that both trust in supervisor and trust propensity were positively and significantly related to work engagement. Additionally, results indicate that learning goal orientation partially mediated the effects of work engagement on in‐role job performance and innovative work behaviour.

This research was limited by two main factors: the cross‐sectional research design, and use of self‐reported questionnaire data. Limitations aside, this study provides evidence that a climate of trust can fuel work engagement, which in turn, is likely to promote learning, innovation and performance.

This paper extends the developing engagement literature in two ways. First, it empirically establishes an association between two facets of trust and work engagement. Second, it highlights the role of learning goal orientation in explaining the linkage between work engagement and job performance.

Goal orientation shapes employees’ approach to and interpretation of workplace aspects such as supervisors’ behavior. However, research has not fully examined the effect of goal orientation as an antecedent of abusive supervision. Drawing from victim precipitation theory, this study aims to fill this research gap by investigating how employees’ goal orientation influences their perception of abusive supervision.

Two studies were conducted to test the hypotheses. In Study 1, 181 employees in 45 departments participated in the survey, and multilevel confirmatory factor analysis, two-level path model and polynomial regression were used. In Study 2, 108 working adults recruited from a professional online survey platform participated in a two-wave time-lagged survey. Confirmatory factor analysis, hierarchical linear regression and polynomial regression were used.

This study found that employees’ learning goal orientation was negatively related to their perception of abusive supervision. In contrast, performance-avoidance goal orientation was positively related to their perception of abusive supervision, whereas performance-approach goal orientation was unrelated to this perception. Moreover, employees’ perception of abusive supervision was greater when learning and performance-approach goal orientation alignment occurred at lower rather than higher levels, and when performance-avoidance and performance-approach goal orientation alignment occurred at higher rather than lower levels.

This research identified two novel victim traits as antecedents of abusive supervision – employees’ learning goal orientation and performance-avoidance goal orientation. Furthermore, adopting a multiple goal perspective, the authors examined the combined effects of goal orientation on employees’ perception of abusive supervision.

Drawing upon the feedback intervention theory, this study aims to focus on the concept of negative feedback change (increase or decrease) to analyze the dynamics of performance feedback and its relationships with goal orientation, feedback utility and task performance.

The authors conducted a two-wave survey by tracking 195 employees and their supervisors from two representative semiconductor-related equipment companies in China for one month.

Results showed that learning goal orientation positively moderates, and performance-approach goal orientation negatively moderates the indirect relationship between negative feedback change and employees’ task performance through employees’ perceptions of feedback utility.

This study provides new directions for performance feedback research by treating negative feedback from a dynamic perspective and addressing the mediating and moderating mechanisms. Furthermore, the findings also remind managers to not only consider feedback actions at a single moment but also manage it as a series of actions in the ongoing stream of time.

Most studies have focused on the impact of the application of AI on management attributes, management decisions and management ethics. However, how job demand and job control in the context of AI collaboration determine employees' learning process and learning behaviors, as well as how AI collaboration moderates employees' learning process and learning behaviors, remains unknown. To answer these questions, the authors adopted a Job Demand-Control (JDC) model to explore the influencing factors of employee's individual learning behavior.

This study used questionnaire survey in organizations using AI to collect data. Partial least squares (PLS) predict algorithm and SPSS were used to test the hypotheses.

Job demand and job control positively influence self-efficacy, self-efficacy positively influences learning goal orientation and learning goal orientation positively influences learning behavior. Learning goal orientation plays a mediating role between self-efficacy and learning behavior. Meanwhile, collaboration with AI positively moderates the impact of employees' job demand on self-efficacy and the impact of self-efficacy on learning behavior.

This study introduces self-efficacy as the outcome of JDC model, demonstrates the mediating role of learning goal orientation and introduces collaborative factors related to artificial intelligence. This study further enriches the theoretical system of human–AI interaction and expands the content of organizational learning theory.

Although individual exploration activities have been shown to promote organizational change and innovation, few studies have clarified the factors that quantitatively promote such aspects. This study aims to examine how individual exploration activities are facilitated by goal orientation and individual unlearning.

The data are analyzed from 1,474 employees in various jobs in a variety of organizations in Japan. This study uses structural equation modeling to test the research model.

The results of this study indicate three findings. First, unlearning is effective in promoting individual exploration activities. Second, goal orientation has not only a direct effect on individual exploration activities but also a significant indirect effect on such activities through unlearning. Third, performance goal orientation has an inhibitory effect on individual exploration activities.

Managers should encourage team members’ exploration activities by setting learning goals for members and providing opportunities for members to unlearn the outdated knowledge or skills they are familiar with and learn new ones.

These findings contribute to the existing literature by demonstrating that learning goal orientation and unlearning play important roles in promoting individual exploration activities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of learning goal orientation and training readiness on teachers’ multicultural teaching efficacy and cultural intelligence.

A total of 182 responses from secondary schools in midwest and southern areas of the USA were analyzed using the hierarchical multiple regression.

The findings indicated that learning goal orientation positively influenced both teachers’ multicultural teaching efficacy and cultural intelligence, while training readiness did not significantly affect them. In addition, teachers’ multicultural teaching efficacy positively influenced their cultural intelligence.

The study implied that high-level learning goal orientation can contribute to enhance multicultural teaching efficacy and cultural intelligence for teachers.

By conducting needs analysis of participants in advance, trainers can reflect what teachers want and need when designing and implementing a workshop. In addition, trainers could prepare for interventions to improve the participation rate of multicultural workshops and the quality of existing workshop programs.

This study is important in that it will help to develop culturally sensitive workshop/training programs that can prepare teachers for diverse classroom environments and face potential issues that may arise.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of self-efficacy, goal orientation and task complexity on audit judgement performance in correctly linking audit procedures to audit objectives and types of misstatements.

The authors conducted an experiment audit with 154 auditors from small and medium audit firms in Malaysia as participants. The experimental task required them to link audit procedures to audit objectives and types of misstatements.

For sample of auditors from small and medium audit firms in Malaysia, the authors found that learning goal orientation has a stronger effect on audit judgement performance than performance-approach and performance-avoidance goal orientations. Self-efficacy mediates the effect of goal orientation when an audit task is less complex compared to when the task is more complex.

These results highlight the importance of social cognitive factors in explaining variations in audit judgement performance for audit judgement tasks with different levels of complexity.

The incorporation of individual psychological differences as explanatory variables in audit judgement studies may lead to a better understanding of auditors’ judgement and decision-making processes in small and medium audit firms located in developing economies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance of salespeople when selling new products (namely, electronic goods) in a business-to-business context by incorporating the organizations’ perceived psychological climate into goal orientation theory.

The current study uses the goal orientation theory to examine the performance of 158 salespeople based on new electronic product sales. Organizational psychological climate perceptions (i.e. customer orientation, sales supportiveness and sales innovativeness) are included as variables that can moderate salespeople’s performance. This study used partial least squares to examine its proposed model.

This study found that the learning goal orientation and the performance-prove goal orientation positively affect salespeople’s self-efficacy to sell new products, whereas a performance-avoid goal orientation negatively affects efficacy. In addition, new product selling self-efficacy itself has a positive influence on new product sales performance. As for the moderator, sales supportiveness and customer orientation have the ability to moderate the relationship between self-efficacy and performance.

This study has implications for sales managers or product managers who are responsible for promoting new products. First, this study’s findings suggest that managers should consider employing performance-prove goal-oriented staff and learning goal oriented staff to sell new products. Second, management can attempt to develop a more supportive climate for the sales team, such as assisting the team in obtaining needed resources from other departments. Finally, management needs to let salespeople know that they are doing their best to understand what new products existing and potential customers will need in the near future.

This current research is one of the first to examine how the perceived psychological climates of organizations (i.e. sales supportiveness, sales innovativeness and customer orientation) may moderate salespeople’s performance when selling new products. Second, this research examines how different types of goal orientation affect salespeople’s self-efficacy when selling new products. Previous results have not always been consistent regarding the influence of a performance-prove goal orientation. Last but not least, this study tests how new product selling self-efficacy mediates the relationships between goal orientations and new product sales performance as scholars have suggested that more research into the mediating role of self-efficacy is needed.

This paper aims at examining the relationship between proactive personality and training motivation among older workers (aged over 55 years) in a context characterized by the growing ageing of the global population. First, the authors hypothesized that proactive personality predicts the motivation to learn among older workers and that this relationship is mediated by goal orientation. In particular, the authors hypothesized that learning goal orientation may mediate the relationship between proactive personality and learning motivation.

The employees of an Italian bank completed an online questionnaire. AMOS 17 was used to carry out confirmatory factor analysis, and the SPSS macro was used to test the meditational model.

The results confirmed both the hypotheses, demonstrating the influence of proactive personality on training motivation of older workers, as mediated by goal orientation and, in particular, by learning goal orientation.

From an applicative point of view, this study may have implications for organizations that aim to increase the employability of older people by encouraging them to undertake more training. In particular, interventions aimed at increasing learning goal orientation could contribute in strengthening proactive personality that, in turn, may affect levels of training motivation.

Even if proactive personality has already been found as a predictor of learning motivation, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the present study demonstrates that the relationship between proactive personality and training motivation is mediated by goal orientation among older workers.

Though employee job engagement has been one of the few most proliferated organizational concepts during the last two decades, evidence on how to achieve an engaged workforce is unclear. The purpose of this study was to contribute to the engagement literature by investigating the role of interpersonal leadership in developing job engagement through the relative importance of deep acting emotional labor skills, initiative climate and learning goal orientation as intervening mechanisms.

This study employed an online self-reported survey in data collection, gathering input from 438 frontline service employees in Malaysia. The data was then tested using the structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to evaluate the proposed parallel mediation model of the study.

The findings demonstrated that deep acting emotional labor skills, initiative climate and learning goal orientation were significantly effective in intervening mechanisms through which interpersonal leadership impacted job engagement.

This study offers insightful evidence that can be utilized by service organizations to improve employees' job engagement. The evidence derived from this study suggests that interpersonal leadership is a valuable organizational resource that can help carve pathways through which the objective of employee job engagement can be achieved. Therefore, while crafting organizational interventions for employee job engagement, service managers should address the findings of this study.

Despite the evidence presented in previous literature on the notable relationship between leadership and engagement, there is yet to be an apt understanding of the impact of new leadership perspectives and the intervening mechanisms in predicting job engagement. This study attempts to fill the research gap.