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A limited number of empirical studies have indicated that individuals who experience workplace ostracism tend to engage in subtle and retaliatory behaviors as a means of seeking inner peace. However, research on organizational behavior and employee psychology in relation to ostracism is still in its nascent stages. Specifically, further investigation is warranted to explore how supervisor ostracism influences task procrastination (TP) through psychological processes such as self-efficacy, self-esteem and motivation. Notably, a significant gap exists in the ostracism literature, as it has yet to thoroughly examine employee behaviors related to knowledge hiding (KH) and TP in the context of individual or team-based work (Zhao et al., 2016; Brouwer and Jansen, 2019). Therefore, the present study aims to address this gap and expand the research stream within the education sector by introducing “threat to self-esteem” (TSE) as a mediating factor in the outcomes of ostracism.

The study employed a quantitative approach, using questionnaires to collect data and mainly focused on statistics and standards. The authors used SPSS and Smart-PLS to employ numerical values developed from questionnaire surveys. Likewise, we employed primary data collection tools, including mixed survey analysis (self-reported and peer-reported). The data were collected from middle-level managers working in three public sector universities. By using a three-wave research design with a two-week interval in each phase, we were able to separate the measurement of the predictor and moderator factor [supervisor ostracism (SO) and individual resilience (IR)], mediator (TSE) and outcome variables (KH and TP).

The study has discovered a substantial relationship between variables, and all hypotheses are accepted according to the data results and findings. The study measures the effects of supervisor ostracism on knowledge hiding and task procrastination through mediating effect of threat to self-esteem, which individual resilience moderates. This study adds a few contributions to the current literature, following the goals stated above. First, this attempts to highlight employee KH behavior and TP behavior by identifying SO as the primary predictor.

The organization should closely monitor the level of workplace ostracism. One strategy to accomplish this goal is to routinely gauge the extent of ostracism at work using targeted techniques like surveys and observation. The organization can also create an employee assistance program for the workers to assist them in coping with the mistreatment and better adjusting to the workplace culture. Furthermore, employee empowerment and collaborative decision-making can boost workers' self-esteem, eventually leading to diminishing knowledge-hiding and procrastination habits inside the organization.

There is a research gap regarding the barriers to KH from the perspective of team dynamics and interpersonal mistreatment at work because prior research has focused on knowledge sharing, organizational culture and organizational obstruction. Research on organizational behavior and employee psychology in relation to ostracism is still in its nascent stages. Specifically, further investigation is warranted to explore how SO influences TP through psychological processes such as self-efficacy, self-esteem and motivation. Notably, a significant gap exists in the ostracism literature, as it has yet to thoroughly examine employee behaviors related to KH and TP in individual or team-based work.

This paper examines the experiences of a team of female academics (teaching a large cohort of undergraduate students) and the coping mechanisms used to combat the challenges they confront in the Australian higher education sector.

Using a reflective autoethnographic method and strengths perspective, the authors share experiences as female professionals whose intersectional identities presented challenges that extend beyond those typically found in the current higher education setting.

The individualized nature of academic work exacerbates the systemic marginalization of female academics. Adopting a flock culture serves as a support network for addressing the various intersectional challenges. The authors liken the “flock cultural approach” to a “sisterhood” where individuals impacted by intersectional challenges build a strong and cohesive unit to support each other by utilizing their combined strengths to create positive synergy to cope with ongoing workplace challenges.

The study highlights the benefit of the strengths perspective to understand how female academics with intersectional identities can overcome the challenges of their highly individualized profession.

This paper highlights the importance of building team-based work, cultivating collective achievement and high trust in a highly individualistic profession.

Using the strength perspective, the authors disrupt the conventional and currently narrow usage of sisterhood to help develop strong, adaptive, flexible and responsive bonds among diverse female academics. The findings point to how using a “flock culture” – a membership-based philosophy – became the key support mechanism for the marginalized groups, empowering them to confront the systemic barriers within their profession.

First, the findings of this study are shaped by the intersections of factors such as ethnicity, age, race, religion and mode of employment, which all influences the participants’ lived experiences. Second, this study contributes to the transnational feminist movement by unveiling the contextualized barriers that junior academic females from various migrant backgrounds face and identify how they synergized their collective strengths to survive the challenging academic environment. Third, using the strength perspective, the authors disrupt the conventional and currently narrow usage of sisterhood to help develop strong, adaptive, flexible and responsive bonds among diverse female academics.

Managers play a crucial role in organizations. They make decisions that directly influence organizational success and significantly impact employees’ mental health, development and performance. They are responsible for ensuring the financial well-being and long-term sustainability of organizations. However, their mental health is often overlooked, which can negatively affect employees and organizations. This study aims to address managers’ mental health at work, by examining specifically the direct and indirect effects of identity verification on their psychological distress and depression through self-esteem at work. The study also aims to examine the moderating as well as moderated mediation effects of identity salience.

A sample of 314 Canadian managers working in 56 different companies was studied, using multilevel analyses.

The findings showed that the verification of managers’ identity vis-à-vis recognition is positively associated with psychological distress and depression. Self-esteem completely mediates the association between low identity verification vis-à-vis work control and psychological distress, and also the association between low identity verification vis-à-vis work control and superior support and depression, while it partially mediates the association between low identity verification vis-à-vis recognition and depression.

This study can also help both managers and human resource management practitioners in understanding the role of workplaces in the identity verification process and developing relevant interventions to prevent mental health issues among managers at work.

This study proposed a relatively unexplored approach to the study of managers’ mental health at work. Its integration of identity theory contributes to expanding research on management and workplace mental health issues.

Unlike multinational companies, small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) have budget constraints and, thereby, cannot invest heavily in improving the creativity of employees. They look for alternative budget-friendly ways to do the same. The authors of the current paper attempt to identify two psychological-based constructs which positively influence creativity among employees. Both these psychological constructs may be improved among the employees using suitable interventions from the human resource (HR) professionals and line managers working in the organization. This study is an attempt to test the influence of organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) and psychological capital (PC) (both malleable) on creative performance behaviour (CPB) among SME employees.

Validated instruments were used to collect data. Structural equation model (SEM) was used to evaluate the 377 responses collected from the employees working in three SME's in India. All three SMEs work in the area of innovative process design and require a high level of creativity among employees.

PC fully mediates the relationship between OBSE and the CPBs of employees. Employees experiencing higher levels of OBSE will develop higher self-esteem, and these employees will exhibit more creative behaviours, increasing the likelihood of achieving creative results.

This study provides valuable inputs to the creativity literature as it describes the process of how self-esteem influences the creativity of an employee. HR professionals working in SMEs can work on enhancing the OBSE and PC (both malleable) of employees to improve creativity among employees.

To the best of the researcher's knowledge, this is the first attempt to identify frugal ways to improve creativity, especially in SMEs.

Employees compete for organizational resources as scarcity of resources has always been a critical issue in organizations. Since every employee cannot get equal pay raises, promotions and other incentives, therefore, they start feeling competition in the workplace which may further lead to negative outcomes such as envy. The purpose of this study is to investigate the negative consequences of the competitive psychological climate in the hospitality industry. The authors further intend to familiarize with the envy reducing mechanism.

Drawing on social comparison theory our study intends to explain the role of competitive psychological climate in workplaces. The authors utilized an exploratory qualitative research approach and surveyed through semi-structured interviews of the hospitality professionals working in the star hotels in Pakistan.

The authors’ findings reveal that there is a huge psychological competitive climate in the hotel industry in Pakistan. The psychological competitive climate leads to workplace envy among workers which further results in poor employee performance. The authors further found the role of personality traits in affecting employees' envious feelings.

Despite the fact that this study only examined the star-category hotels in Pakistan and its findings may not be representative of the whole hospitality industry, it offers a clear illustration of the effect that competitive climate can have on individuals in the form of workplace envy.

The authors examined the dark side of the competitive climate in the hospitality industry which was overlooked in the literature. The study highlights key research implications and sets the future agenda for research in the hospitality industry.

The study aims to determine the outcomes of mentorship in an online game system, as well as the characteristics of good mentors.

A combination of anonymized survey measures and in-game behavioral measures were used to power longitudinal analysis over an 11-month period in which protégés and non-mentored new players could be compared for their performance, social connections and retention.

Successful people were more likely to mentor others, and mentors increased protégés' skill. Protégés had significantly better retention, were more active and much more successful as players than non-protégés. Contrary to expectations, younger, less wealthy and educated people were more likely to be mentors and mentors did not transfer their longevity. Many of the qualities of the mentor remain largely irrelevant—what mattered most was the time spent together.

This is a study of an online game, which has unknown generalizability to other games and to offline settings.

The results show that getting mentors to spend dedicated time with protégés matters more than their characteristics.

Good mentorship does not require age or resources to provide real benefits.

This is the first study of mentorship to use survey and objective outcome measures together, over time, online.

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine how psychological power explains dual conflicting emotions, influences and jeopardises knowledge sharing and eventually affects job performance. Specifically, this study argues that psychological power can induce feelings of pride and anxiety, which have opposite downstream effects on employees’ knowledge sharing and tasks, proactive and affiliative (TPA) performances.

This study tested the model using three waves of multi-source data from 46 teams and 357 respondents in the information technology and software industry in China. This study used multilevel structural equation modelling with Mplus 7.4 to examine the within-level team variance and thereby estimated the confidence intervals for the direct and indirect paths.

The results indicate that increased psychological power can cause contradictory emotions (i.e. pride and anxiety). Pride positively mediates the indirect influence of psychological power on knowledge sharing and TPA performance, while anxiety negatively mediates the above-mentioned indirect relationships.

This study provides a novel perspective on how psychological forces shape people’s emotional experiences and subsequently their motivation to share knowledge and job performance. By integrating the existing power literature rooted in the approach/inhibition theory of power and cognitive appraisal theory of emotion, we identify two discrete emotions as underlying mechanisms between increased psychological power and motivation to share knowledge and job performance.

This research provides insights for managers regarding the ways in which psychological power can stimulate individuals to engage in negative behaviour towards others. Managers, in turn, must consider self-regulation to control this negative impact.

This study is among the earliest to examine the role of discrete positive and negative emotions caused by increased psychological power, which subsequently affect knowledge sharing and TPA performance.

This study develops and validates a theoretical model of real-time mobile connectivity, examining how employees' perceptions of their relationship with supervisors influence their emotional experiences. Through quasi-experiments, the authors investigate the behavioral patterns and emotional responses associated with real-time mobile connectivity in organizations, with a focus on messaging apps that indicate message read status. Specifically, they explore how supervisors' attentiveness or inattentiveness in mobile connectivity impacts emotional ambivalence (anxiety and pride) among subordinates. Additionally, they examine the downstream effects of this emotional ambivalence on employees' workplace thriving and job performance across various dimensions.

To address the paradox of real-time mobile connectivity, a quasi-experimental design involving 320 team members from 46 teams was implemented. Multi-level structural equation modeling was employed to analyze within-person variance and evaluate the proposed hypotheses.

The findings indicate that employees who do not receive timely indications from their supervisors are more likely to experience elevated levels of anxiety, while those who receive prompt indications experience a sense of pride. Moreover, the indirect effects of the real-time mobile connectivity paradox on employee performance, mediated by anxiety (negatively) and pride (positively), are fully explained through workplace thriving.

This study provides insights into the emotional ambivalence experienced in the workplace due to real-time mobile connectivity, highlighting its implications for organizational competitiveness. Integrating resource conservation theory and cognitive appraisal theory of emotion, the study explores the mediating role of workplace thriving and the impact on employee performance through pride and anxiety. Generalizability requires considering organizational settings and cultural contexts while acknowledging limitations such as a focus on messaging apps and specific samples. Future research should explore these dynamics in diverse contexts and identify additional factors influencing the relationship between real-time mobile connectivity and employee outcomes.

This study provides valuable insights for managers regarding the significance of message indications, as their attentiveness can elicit emotional reactions from employees that subsequently impact workplace thriving and job performance.

This study pioneers the exploration of the paradox of real-time mobile connectivity in the workplace, uncovering the discrete emotions experienced by employees. Furthermore, it elucidates the subsequent opposing effects on workplace thriving and job performance, contributing to the existing literature and knowledge in this area.

Based on the self-evaluation maintenance model and social comparison theory, the purpose of this study is to test a novel model to explore the influence of competitive psychological climate on knowledge withholding of employees with the mediating role of envy. This study also investigated when the effect of climate on envy is more pronounced by assessing the role of a narcissistic personality.

The authors collected time-lagged data from 376 employees working in UAE national banks to test the model.

The findings of this study showed that a competitive psychological climate indirectly affects knowledge withholding behaviour because such a climate enhances the emotional response of employee envy. In a competitive climate, upward social comparisons are likely to be heightened, resulting in employee envy and knowledge withholding because knowledge is used as leverage to gain self-control and self-worth in the organisation. This effect of such a climate on employee envy was found to be stronger when employees have a narcissistic personality.

The findings offer practical insights to managers and practitioners on the importance of managing the competitive climate cautiously to address the likelihood of knowledge withholding behaviour among employees at work.