Search results

Managers’ boundary spanning role is critical to the effectiveness of groups, teams and organizations. We explore the identity predicament of boundary spanning managers, who must create synergies across multiple identities. In the context of identity threat, formerly synergistic identities may be brought into conflict – a phenomenon we label identity splintering. Our theory and empirical results suggest that identity splintering creates a discrepancy between the identities that boundary spanning managers claim and those they enact.

This study aims to explore whether, how and when leaders' artificial intelligence (AI) symbolization (i.e. the demonstration of leaders' acceptance of and support for AI by engaging in AI-related behaviors and/or displaying objects that reflect their affinity for AI) affects employee job crafting behaviors.

The authors conducted two studies (i.e. an experiment and a multi-wave field survey) with samples from different contexts (i.e. United States and China) to test our theoretical model. The authors used ordinary least squares (OLS) and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to test the hypotheses.

Leaders' AI symbolization is positively related to employee change readiness and, in turn, promotes employee job crafting. Moreover, employee-attributed impression management motives moderate the positive indirect effect of leaders' AI symbolization on employee job crafting via change readiness, such that this indirect effect is stronger when employee-attributed impression management motives are low (vs high).

Leaders should engage in AI symbolization to promote employee job crafting and avoid behaviors that may lead employees to attribute their AI symbolization to impression management.

By introducing the concept of leaders' AI symbolization, this study breaks new ground by illustrating how leaders' AI symbolization positively influences employees' change readiness, as well as job crafting in the workplace. Further, integrating AI as a novel and timely context for evaluating job crafting contributes to the literature where empirical research is relatively scant, particularly regarding the factors that prompt employees to engage in job crafting.

This paper aims to explore the psychological mechanism in the relationship between paternalistic leadership (PL) and employee well-being (EWB) in cross-cultural nonprofit organizations. It also aims to further promote the integration of research on PL and self-concept by examining the relationship between PL and collective self-concept (CSC).

Data were collected on 72 supervisors and 233 expatriate Chinese teachers from 42 Confucius Institutes and 15 Confucius classrooms in Canada and the USA.

PL has a significant effect on EWB. Benevolent and moral leadership are positively related to CSC, while authoritarian leadership is negatively related to CSC. CSC mediates the relationship between PL and EWB. Furthermore, employees’ cross-cultural adaptability positively moderates the relationship between CSC and EWB; the indirect effect between PL and EWB via CSC is stronger for employees with stronger cross-cultural adaptability.

This is the first study that has examined the psychological mechanism under which PL affects EWB in cross-cultural nonprofit organizations. It contributes to the integration of research on PL and CSC by examining its relationship for the first time. It provides important implications for improving the well-being of expatriate employees in cross-cultural organizations.

This chapter explores how Cypriot lecturers perceive and experience fear while being at work. Drawing on the lens of interpretive inquiry, data were collected through interviews with 19 lecturers. Analysis focused on experiences of workplace fear offering rich insights into characteristics of fear, eliciting events, and coping ways. Findings help to unveil the specific events that lead to fear in the Cypriot universities, and the ways lecturers manage their fearful experiences. The study contributes to the study of discrete emotions, by empirically examining fear’s own storyline through the workers’ own perspectives, within a specific context.

This chapter explores the meanings that human service workers employed in the airline industry and in higher education give to workplace fear, the ways it is expressed, and perceptions of its consequences. The findings reveal that fear is not a wholly “negative” emotion, as it can contribute to the achievement of desirable outcomes when openly expressed, suggesting that simplistic evaluations of discrete emotions (i.e. positive or negative) and prescriptive organizational norms of emotional expression may block positive as well as negative outcomes (organizationally and personally). This chapter concludes that permitting a greater range of emotional displays at work could significantly improve workers’ wellbeing and the effectiveness of their organizations.

Racing to the top of the corporate hierarchy is difficult, no matter how qualified or capable the candidate. Producing more widgets than one's competitors is not enough. Negotiating the political landscape of the institution is also required. More specifically, individual corporate officers have to be appeased, powerful interest groups have to be co-opted and made allies, and competitors have to be undermined or eliminated. The more bureaucratic the organization and the more opaque the promotion process, the more important this institutional game to climbing the corporate ladder. This chapter identifies the kind of racial minorities or racial types who are likely to play this game well and, consequently, race to the top of the corporation. It then explains why these racial types might not have the racial commitment, or feel institutionally empowered, to lift other people of color as they climb the corporate ladder.