Search results

This study aims to examine the relationship between abusive supervision and workplace incivility using a dual theoretical framework. First, it draws on the ego depletion theory to investigate the relationship between abusive supervision and incivility by exploring the mediating role of ego depletion. Second, it integrates the job demands–resources model with the ego depletion theory to examine how perceived co-workers’ support functions as a buffer in mitigating the effects of ego depletion on incivility.

The authors tested our moderated mediation model using hierarchical linear modeling through an experience-sampling study based on data collected from a participants across five consecutive workdays.

The findings reveal employees subjected to abusive supervision are more likely to experience a depletion of self-regulatory resources. Moreover, the authors found a positive association between ego depletion and workplace incivility, suggesting that diminished self-control resulting from abusive supervision contributes to a higher likelihood of engaging in uncivil workplace behaviors. In addition, perceived coworkers’ support emerged as a significant moderating factor that attenuates the indirect impact of abusive supervision on workplace incivility through ego depletion. Specifically, when perceived coworkers’ support is high, the negative influence of abusive supervision on ego depletion, and subsequently, on workplace incivility, is mitigated.

By exploring ego depletion as the underlying mechanism and boundary conditions imposed by perceived coworker support on the relationship between abusive supervision and workplace incivility, this research contributes to a nuanced understanding of the intricate dynamics of this relationship. Based on the research findings, the authors advocate that organizations should establish and integrate support services, such as counseling and employee assistance programs, to reduce the emotional turmoil caused by abusive supervision.

This study aims to investigate the impact of overnight off-work relaxation on the performance of frontline service employees (FLEs). Specifically, the authors focused on FLEs' customer-directed extra-role service behavior (C-ERSB) and coworker-directed extra-role service behavior (CW-ERSB) as indicators of outstanding service performance. Drawing on the conservation of resources (Hobfoll, 1989) and ego depletion theories (Baumeister, 2002), the authors hypothesized that the positive effect of overnight relaxation on ERSBs will be mediated by the state of recovery. Additionally, the authors examined the boundary conditions of these relationships by testing the moderating effects of work–family conflict (WFC) and family–work conflict (FWC).

The study employed an episodic sampling method. One hundred thirty-five FLEs completed two daily surveys (before- and after-work) over five consecutive workdays, yielding 636 time-lagged day-level observations. Multilevel path modeling was performed to analyze the mediation and second-stage moderated mediation effects.

Results showed that overnight off-work relaxation was positively related to FLEs' next-day C-ERSB and CW-ERSB via next-morning recovery state. The positive relationship between overnight off-work relaxation and the next-morning recovery state was weaker for FLEs who experienced overnight WFC. FWC during work hours weakened the positive relationship between the next-morning recovery state and CW-ERSB, but not the relationship between the next-morning recovery state and C-ERSB.

The study used an episodic sampling method to reveal the significance of off-work relaxation, recovery and family–work interface on FLEs' ERSBs, a critical yet underexplored phenomenon in service literature. This study sheds light on the pathways to achieve exceptional service performance by revealing the importance of overnight off-work relaxation and the conditions that promote ERSBs.

Extant scholars identified negative workplace gossip as a social stressor that negatively influences employees’ behavior and attitude. Despite the burgeoning interest in workplace stressors, limited studies have explored how the detrimental consequences of targets’ perceived negative workplace gossip spur their emotions and behaviors. Grounding on conservation of resources and ego depletion theories, this study aims to investigate why and how targets’ negative workplace gossip may contribute to trigger knowledge hiding. Specifically, the authors explore the underlying mechanism of personal ego depletion and boundary conditions of organizational justice to shed new light on the above process.

Using two time-wave survey, the authors collected 340 sample data from employees working in high-tech companies of China. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to examine hypothesized relationships of moderated mediation model.

The empirical results revealed that negative workplace gossip exacerbates knowledge hiding by increasing personal ego depletion. Furthermore, through testing moderated mediation model, the results showed that organizational justice (i.e. distributive and procedural justice) with the low presence moderates the stronger strength of the linkage between negative workplace gossip and personal ego depletion, and likewise, it also moderates the stronger effect of negative workplace gossip on knowledge hiding via personal ego depletion.

This study recommends several guidelines for managers and practitioners to mitigate negative gossip by strengthening organizational justice.

This study first enriches novel understanding in the literature between negative workplace gossip and knowledge hiding by using a new emotional mechanism (i.e. personal ego depletion). This research also contributes new insights by incorporating contextual boundary conditions (i.e. organizational justice) that have not been yet researched on negative gossip and knowledge hiding linkage.

This study aimed to investigate the underlying boundary conditions under which boundary-spanning behaviour has a positive or negative effect on innovative behaviour.

A multi-wave and multi-source research design was adopted to collect data. Data were analysed using the multilevel structural equation modelling and latent moderated structural equation approach.

The results showed that boundary-spanning behaviour was significantly and negatively associated with employees' innovative behaviour via ego depletion when employees' intrinsic motivation or organisational support was low. Additionally, boundary-spanning behaviour was significantly and positively associated with employees' innovative behaviour via ego depletion when employees' intrinsic motivation or organisational support was high.

This research suggests that the consequences of boundary-spanning behaviour are conditional, explaining the contrasting conclusions in this regard.

This research examines the underlying psychological process of customers' impulsive buying on social media through the lens of customer inspiration. Drawing on the customer inspiration theory, it identifies the factors influencing customer inspiration on social media from three perspectives: source characteristics, platform characteristics and personal characteristics, which subsequently lead to impulsive buying. Since the conceptualization of source credibility includes three mostly reported components: attractiveness, expertise and trustworthiness, it further contrasts the effects of three dimensions of source credibility on customer inspiration.

A structural equation model of customers' impulsive buying on social media was developed through the lens of customer inspiration. An online survey with 625 participants was conducted to test the hypotheses, and the partial least squares (PLS3) method was used.

This research found that source credibility, social presence and customer innovativeness are antecedents of customer inspiration on social media, which positively influence the inspired-by state of the customers, which impacts the inspired-to state and further leads to impulsive buying. By comparing the three dimensions of source credibility, the authors found that attractiveness and expertise positively affect the inspired-by state, while trustworthiness has no significant effect.

This research establishes the link between impulsive buying and customer inspiration, which provides a new psychological perspective to understand impulsive buying. In addition, it investigates the source characteristics of customer inspiration by comparing the effect of three dimensions of source credibility on customer inspiration, which provides the first evidence for connecting customer inspiration and source credibility.

This study examines how and under what conditions jobs involving surface acting as key employee performance requirements induce work–family conflict (WFC) and thus negatively impact employees' family lives. Drawing from stress theories, the authors modeled emotional exhaustion as a mediator and trait anxiety and education level as moderators in the surface acting–WFC relation.

Applying the time-lagged design, the authors collected data from 203 service sector employees whose jobs involved frequent interactions with customers. The authors assessed surface acting, trait anxiety and level of education at time 1, emotional exhaustion at time 2 and WFC at time 3 with a three-week time lag between each wave.

The study results confirmed that surface acting drained the emotional energies of the employees who on reaching homes were not able to attend to their family needs, thus experiencing WFC. The authors also found that employees who were high in trait anxiety and education level suffered most from emotional exhaustion and WFC.

To mitigate the harmful effects of surface acting, organizations should ensure that their employees who must perform surface acting have sufficient time off from their roles, such as regular breaks, free evenings and vacations to prevent emotional exhaustion. The authors further recommend hiring only those customer care candidates who have low tendencies to be anxious while interacting with customers.

This study integrates and extends both the emotional labor and WFC literature. This research answers the earlier calls for research on the effects of personality on WFC. Contrary to the expectation, the study reveals that a higher level of education does not buffer the impact of emotional exhaustion on WFC; it rather intensifies the harmful effect of emotional exhaustion on WFC.

This paper aims to examine how a stereotype threat, which entails being aware of a negative stereotype about one’s social group (e.g. gender), affects consumers’ price perceptions.

The authors conducted four studies to examine the effect of a stereotype threat on consumers’ perceptions of a product’s price–quality relationship.

This study found that being aware of a negative stereotype about one’s social group (i.e. gender here) led consumers to use price more as a quality indicator. This study also determined that reappraisal – an alternative way of coping with stereotype threats – reduced the impact of a stereotype threat and, subsequently, decreased reliance on price to infer quality.

This research contributes to the consumer decision-making literature by examining stereotype threat effect in in-store product purchasing contexts; provides theoretical contributions to the processing of price information by exploring the role of a stereotype threat in price perceptions and revealing that impairment of consumers’ working memory resources affects price perceptions; adds to the existing stereotype threat literature by investigating the effect of a stereotype threat on systematic versus heuristic information processing; and advances the stress and coping literature by suggesting that consumers adopting a reappraisal strategy cope better with a stereotype threat than when opting for a suppression strategy.

This research provides important implications for consumers. For example, the findings suggest that consumers who would like to avoid paying more for stereotype-associated products may adopt reappraisal to cope with a stereotype threat. Reappraisal may allow consumers to use fewer cognitive resources when coping with stereotype threats, thus minimizing the possibility that they might overpay for high-priced products.

This research uniquely examines the effect of a stereotype threat on consumers’ price perceptions and the role of reappraisal in this effect.

This study addressed a relatively understudied process of school leadership: the principal-teacher conversation about instructional change. Two distinct conversation structures were examined: controlling conversation and transformative leadership conversation (TLC). Self-determination theory (SDT) was used to make the case that TLC is a better fit for instructional change than controlling conversation. Hypotheses were developed on the relationship between principal-teacher conversation and teacher trust in the principal, teacher autonomy and teacher vitality. These mental states were identified for empirical testing because of their influence on change processes.

The empirical study used a correlational research design with survey data. The data came from a random sample of 2,500 teachers from the population of certified teachers in a southwestern state in the USA. Useable survey responses were obtained from 1,615 teachers, for a response rate of 65 percent. Teachers in the sample averaged 15 years of teaching experience, with 7 years in their current school. Around 81% of teachers identified as female and 18 percent as male and 79% of teachers listed a racial identification as white. Hypotheses were tested in a path model using AMOS 28.0 with robust maximum likelihood (MLR).

As hypothesized, TLC had moderate to strong positive relationships with teacher trust in the principal, teacher autonomy and teacher vitality. Controlling conversation had small, negative relationships with teacher trust in the principal and teacher autonomy. Controlling conversation was not related to teacher vitality in the path analysis. Compared with controlling conversation, TLC had stronger relationships with teacher mental states.

The results of this study begin to reveal useful evidence on the inherent social-psychological mechanisms active in principal-teacher conversations. With results indicating that conversation structure has consequences for positive teacher mental states, the study directs attention to a ubiquitous yet understudied leadership process.

Via the lens of the ego-depletion phenomenon (Baumeister et al., 1998) and Higgins' (1998) regulatory focus theory, this paper seeks to explain why current controlled communications are failing to achieve coherence between people's free will and their actions pursuing sustainable goals in a society. This paper explains how ego-depletion triggered by controlled communications can lead to confusion and decision fatigue in a society, thus potentially sabotaging people's participation in sustainable behaviour.

The authors applied Jaakkola's (2020) theory synthesis approach to integrate concepts from previously unconnected disciplines in order to generate novel insights in the area of controlled communication management.

The authors develop a theoretical framework and present research propositions that can help advance research and the discourse at the intersection of controlled communication and self-regulation theories.

This paper possesses the limitations associated with conceptual papers, e.g. the lack of empirical support of the study’s conceptual arguments.

This paper generates novel insights to assist communication practitioners and policymakers to improve vehicles and mechanisms of controlled communication with the public regarding sustainable goals pursuit.

To the best of authors' knowledge, this is one of the first papers that has merged the domains of self-regulation, ego-depletion, and controlled communication in an integrative framework in order to explain the mechanisms of how to enhance the effectiveness of controlled communication associated with sustainable goals pursuit.

Based on conservation of resources theory, this study explored the relationship between multitasking and creative work involvement through the mediation of emotional exhaustion, taking regulatory focus as a first-stage moderator.

Based on a three-wave and two-source survey among a sample of 418 employees and 116 leaders, this study conducted multilevel analyses to examine the conceptual model.

The results showed that multitasking was negatively associated with creative work involvement and that emotional exhaustion mediated the relationship between multitasking and creative work involvement. Furthermore, promotion focus and prevention focus moderated the relationship between multitasking and emotional exhaustion and the indirect relationship between multitasking and creative work involvement via emotional exhaustion.

Organizations can promote creative work involvement through interventions that reduce employees' multitasking or emotional exhaustion. In addition, supervisors should be aware of the different responses to multitasking exhibited by employees with different regulatory focuses and could potentially assign multiple tasks to employees with either a high promotion focus or a low prevention focus.

This study contributes to the literature on multitasking and creative work involvement by exploring whether and how multitasking is related to creative work involvement.