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Allocation of individuals' resources among multiple goals is an increasingly prominent theoretical and practical issue. Despite several theoretical perspectives that highlight the potential role of affect in this resource allocation process, empirical work on the topic is quite limited with little focus on the activation dimension of affect. This study aimed to provide further insight into this issue.

The current research explored the role of the activation dimension of affect in a multiple-goal environment. Specifically, 118 individuals participated in a 21-day longitudinal study in which they reported on affect and resource allocation related to two real-life goals.

Multilevel-modeling analyses indicated that activation positively relates to allocation of resources (effort, intended effort, and intended time devoted to a goal). The results also illustrate that task-related negative valence is a significant predictor for two of the three indicators of resource allocation (intended effort was the exception).

This research informs theory and practice at the intersection of emotion and work motivation by investigating a relatively understudied dimension of affect and provides results that help clarify the role of affect during the pursuit of multiple, competing goals.

Achievement goal theory traces people's behaviors, thoughts, and emotions in achievement situations to the broad goals they pursue in that activity, whether in education, sports, work, or other achievement domains (Dweck, 1986; Maehr & Midgley, 1991; Nicholls, 1984). Two goals have featured prominently: mastery goals (also sometimes called learning goals) and performance goals (also called ego goals or ability validation goals). Both goals concern the pursuit of competence and the assessment of one's own skill level, yet they do so in distinct ways. People pursuing a mastery goal strive to develop their skill or expertise, while those pursuing a performance goal instead strive to demonstrate and validate their existing skill, typically by outperforming peers. As such, those pursuing mastery goals typically use self-referential standards to define success versus failure, while those pursuing performance goals instead use normative standards to define success versus failure.

This chapter provides an in-depth understanding of the cognitive processes that facilitate creativity from a multi-level perspective. Because cognitive processes are viewed as residing within the individual and as an individual-level phenomenon, it is not surprising that a plethora of research has focused on various cognitive processes involved in creative production at the individual level and the factors that may facilitate or hinder the successful application of these processes. Of course, individuals do not exist in a vacuum, and many organizations are utilizing teams and groups to facilitate creative problem solving. We therefore extend our knowledge from the individual to the team level and group level, providing more than 50 propositions for testing and discussing their implications for future research.

Business ethics provide a potent source of competitive advantage, placing increasing pressure on organizations to create and maintain an ethical workforce. Nonetheless, ethical breaches continue to permeate corporate life, suggesting that there is something missing from how we conceptualize and institutionalize organizational ethics. The current effort seeks to fill this void in two ways. First, we introduce an extended ethical framework premised on sensemaking in organizations. Within this framework, we suggest that multiple individual, organizational, and societal factors may differentially influence the ethical sensemaking process. Second, we contend that human resource management plays a central role in sustaining workplace ethics and explore the strategies through which human resource personnel can work to foster an ethical culture and spearhead ethics initiatives. Future research directions applicable to scholars in both the ethics and human resources domains are provided.

Our editorial argues that categories theory can be advanced by embracing heuristics research, and the insight that audiences often evaluate items based on multiple valued criteria. Thus, rather than building on extant theory – which suggests that categories embody specific evaluative criteria, or that audiences operate according to a set “theory of value” – the authors argue that hybrids research would benefit from attending to the underlying processes that actors use to weigh and balance the diverse considerations that guide their decisions. The authors define and discuss three commonly used heuristics (satisficing, lexicographic preferences, and elimination by aspects), and show how these might lead audiences to support different types of hybrid entities.

We currently know little about how transferring can be accomplished when source- and target environments only have little in common. This chapter utilizes the case of EuroCo and AsiaCo to account for how a transfer of interrelated routines across multiple boundaries unfolds. A pragmatic and flexible approach to transferring, where coordinating actors attended to replication and adaptation as means rather than ends, is illuminated. Notably, coordinators split their work into smaller chunks by focusing on artifacts, people, and actions. As pressures to progress the transfer increased, they conceived of new ideas for performances and put the ideas to use along three trajectories focused on embedding, embodying, and enacting routines. Eventually, they blended performances from each trajectory back together into a new overarching notion of what was to be transferred. In elaborating on and discussing these findings, the chapter contributes to literature on routine transfer. Boundary conditions and avenues for future research are discussed.