Search results

This study aims to examine the effect of supervisor developmental feedback on employee silence behaviour by developing a moderated mediation model. The model focuses on the mediating role of role breadth self-efficacy and high activated positive affect underpinning the relationship between supervisor developmental feedback and employee silence behaviour, and the moderating role of interdependent self-construal.

The two-wave survey was conducted among 265 employees. Structural equation modelling was conducted to test the mediation and moderation mediation hypotheses.

Results indicated that high activated positive affect mediated the negative relationship between supervisor developmental feedback and employee silence behaviour. The authors also found that interdependent self-construal moderated the relationship between supervisor developmental feedback and role breadth self-efficacy, as well as the indirect effect of supervisor developmental feedback on employee silence behaviour via role breadth self-efficacy.

This empirical study provides preliminary evidence of the mediating role of breadth self-efficacy and high activated positive affect in the negative relationship between supervisor developmental feedback and employee silence behaviour. The moderated mediation results further show that the mediation of role breadth self-efficacy between supervisor developmental feedback is contingent on individual interdependent self-construal, such that the mediation effect is significant among individuals with high interdependent self-construal, but the mediation effect of high activated positive effect is independent of individual interdependent self-construal. The findings further extend boundary conditions (interdependent self-construal) that may constrain the effect of supervisor developmental feedback on role breadth self-efficacy and high activated positive affect. The research makes considerable contributions to the cognitive-affective personality system theory by specifying the cognitive and affective mechanisms between supervisor developmental feedback and employee silence behaviour, as well as the boundary conditions.

Despite much attention being devoted to shared leadership, the negotiation of such arrangements remains underexplored. In parallel, the revival of interest in matrix structures reveals their challenges but neglects the dynamics of shared leadership. In this case study, the author analyzes the tensions experienced by senior managers of a healthcare organization transitioning from a hierarchical to matrix structure as they negotiate their leadership roles in this new arrangement.

The author interviewed 16 senior managers, observed their meetings and analyzed documents. These data were combined with secondary data including previous interviews and observations of this top leadership team. The author then conducted an inductive data analysis.

The author's analysis reveals that the tensions experienced by senior managers as they negotiate their roles reflect the co-existence of leadership surpluses (too much leadership) and deficits (too little leadership) in matrix organizations. The author argues that surpluses and deficits are not mutually exclusive but are interrelated and shows how leadership surpluses can create leadership deficits.

The author’s findings suggest that in contexts of leader abundance, actors should explore leadership voids. Particular attention should be paid to incidents of intrusion and exclusion, moments of transition and intense role negotiation, as those contexts are particularly conducive to leadership deficits.

While previous work on matrix structures focuses on leadership surpluses, the author discusses leadership deficits. The author explores how more leaders do not necessarily mean more leadership, but instead how more leaders may result in leadership voids.

This study examines how assurors make sense of sustainability assurance (SA) work and how interactions with assurance team members and clients shape assurors’ sensemaking and their actual SA work.

To obtain detailed accounts of how SA work occurs on the ground, this study explores three SA engagements by interviewing the main actors involved, both at the client firms and at their Big Four assurance providers.

Individual assurors’ (i.e. partners and other team members) sensemaking of SA work results in the crafting of their logics of action (LoAs), that is, their meanings about the objectives of SA work and how to conduct it. Without organizational socialization, team members may not arrive at shared meanings and deviate from the team-wide assurance approach. To fulfill their objectives for SA work, assurors may engage in socialization with clients or assume a temporary role. Yet, the role negotiations taking place in the shadows of the scope negotiations determine their default role during the engagement.

Two options are available to help SA statement users gauge the relevance of SA work: either displaying the SA work performed or making it more uniform.

This study theoretically grounds how assurors make sense of SA work and documents how (the lack of) professional socialization, organizational socialization and socialization of frequent interaction partners at the client shape actual SA work. Thereby, it unravels the SA work concealed behind SA statements.

Utilizing boundary theory as a guiding framework, this study aims to explore facets of work–life balance (WLB) that women entrepreneurs experience in the context of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It sheds light on strategies women entrepreneurs use to manage and shape boundaries between their personal and professional lives.

In this qualitative study, we conducted in-depth interviews with 50 women entrepreneurs to gain a deeper understanding of their WLB challenges.

Integration is a boundary management approach used by most women in our sample, facilitated by the thin work–life boundary inferable from their entrepreneurial careers. Integration has all the hallmarks of being imposed on women entrepreneurs because of family role challenges and societal expectations, on top of their entrepreneurial obligations. Women are reactors; they shoulder societal, family and entrepreneurial roles while having little control over events and circumstances.

Boundary theory suggests two roles must be interconnected to coexist successfully. Women entrepreneurs can benefit from the synergy between their personal and professional lives. As their roles tend to be more complex, it is essential to consider the consolidation of both spheres as an ongoing process to maximize their benefits.

Today’s independent forms of working are contingent on flexible work arrangements, work intensification and wireless communication. Understanding how women entrepreneurs find balance amid boundarylessness adds to our limited knowledge of people in comparable environments.

This paper aims to examine the impact of the assurance and advisory role of internal audit (ADRIA) on organisational, human and technical proactive measures to enhance cybersecurity (CS).

The questionnaire was used to collect data for 97 internal auditors (IAu) from the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. The authors used partial least squares (PLS) to test the hypotheses.

The results show a positive effect of the ADRIA on each of the organisational proactive measures, human proactive measures and technical proactive measures to enhance CS. The study also found a positive effect of the confirmatory role of IA on both human proactive measures and technical proactive measures to enhance CS. No effect of the confirmatory role of IA on the organisational proactive measures is found.

This study focused on only three proactive measures to enhance CS, and this study was limited to the opinions of IAu. In addition, the study was limited to using regression analysis according to the PLS method.

The results of this study show that managers need to consider the influential role of IA as a value-adding activity in reducing CS risks and activating proactive measures. Also, IAu must expand its capabilities, skills and knowledge in CS auditing to provide a bold view of cyber threats. At the same time, the institutions responsible for preparing IA standards should develop standards and guidelines that help IAu to play assurance and advisory roles.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of its kind that deals with the impact of the assurance and ADRIA on proactive measures to enhance CS. In addition, the study determines the nature of the advisory role and the assurance role of IA to strengthen CS.

Although researchers have long recognized the importance of participating organizations’ (POs) relational behavior for mega construction projects (MCPs) performance, relational behavior may not be executed by POs without effective leadership from project owners. However, little is known about the mechanisms linking owners’ leadership styles to POs’ relational behavior. This study draws on full range leadership theory and role theory to examine the relationships between owners’ leadership styles (i.e. transformational and transactional) and relational behavior. POs’ role orientations (i.e. normative and economic) are considered as potential mediators.

Data were collected from 175 managers deeply involved in MCPs. Hierarchical regression model and bootstrapping methods were performed on the data to examine the direct effects of owners’ leadership on POs’ relational behavior and the mediating effects of POs’ role orientations.

The results revealed that both owners’ transformational and transactional leadership positively affect POs’ relational behavior, despite the former being higher than the latter, and indirectly influence relational behavior via POs’ normative and economic role orientation, respectively.

This study provides a clear picture of how owners’ leadership can motivate POs’ relational behavior to achieve high-quality inter-organizational relationships in MCPs. The findings can guide owners’ top manager selection by prioritizing those with transformational leadership, which is beneficial to achieving high-level relational behavior of POs. The results also imply that owners should pay greater attention to cultivating POs’ normative role orientation by encouraging teamwork and open communication to enhance their implementation of relational behavior.

Unlike previous research focusing more on intra-organizational leader–follower relationship within one PO, this study is one of the first to empirically confirm owners’ leadership as a critical antecedent of POs’ relational behavior, thus enhancing the theoretical understanding of inter-organizational relationship management in MCPs. Based on role theory, this study considers a novel organizational psychology mechanism, i.e. POs’ role orientations, as the mediator to unravel how owners’ leadership affects POs’ relational behavior, which was rarely invoked in MCP leadership literature.

This paper describes an exploratory, international research collaboration that seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the development and experiences of peer leaders in higher education across different international contexts, namely the USA, Canada (CAN), Australasia (Australia and New Zealand) (ANZ), the United Kingdom (UK) and South Africa (SA).

Data are summarized and compared across each of the participating countries, providing a more global context and depth of perspective on peer leadership (PL) in higher education than is currently available in the literature.

The findings highlight some apparent differences between countries in relation to student engagement in peer leader roles and the ways in which PL is supported by higher education institutions, as well as some similarities across the different international contexts, particularly in the way peer leaders view the benefits of their involvement in PL.

These insights provide a valuable addition to the literature on PL and practical information to higher education institutions for supporting student leadership development and involvement.

Faculty play a unique role in universities performing duties along the three fronts of teaching, research and service. While it might be teaching that contributes most to the bottom line of a small university, it is often research by which faculty merit is judged. This study explores the relationships between role ambiguity, role conflict and commitment (affective, normative and continuance) as mediated by job satisfaction among faculty members.

A sample of 133 faculty members at a US-accredited university in Lebanon served as the basis for this study. The faculty members completed a survey covering scales on role ambiguity, role conflict, commitment and job satisfaction in addition to demographic variables.

We find that a decrease in role ambiguity strengthens affective and normative commitment but weakens continuance commitment. Structural equation modeling indicates that job satisfaction partially mediates the relationship between role ambiguity and affective commitment, while not mediating the relationship between role ambiguity and normative and continuance commitments. Similar findings hold for job satisfaction as a mediator in the relationship between role conflict and commitment.

Based on statistical modeling, this work (1) puts forth a revised scale for organizational commitment tailored to academia and (2) provides guidance to higher education institutions in terms of the differential impacts on faculty commitment that stem from reducing role-ambiguity versus role-conflict. Managerial recommendations focus on improving normative and affective commitment through the design of policies to reduce role conflict among faculty.

Role congruity theory and gender stereotypes research suggests men are expected to engage in agentic behavior and women in communal behavior as leaders, and that role violation results in backlash. However, extant gender and leadership research does not directly measure expectations–behavior incongruence. Further, researchers have only considered one condition of role incongruence – display of counter-role behavior – and have not considered the outcomes of failing to exhibit role-congruent behavior. Additionally, few studies have examined outcomes for male leaders who violate gender role prescriptions. The present study aims to address these shortcomings by conducting a novel empirical test of role congruity theory.

This experimental study used polynomial regression to assess how followers evaluated leaders under conditions of incongruence between follower expectations for men and women leaders’ behavior and leaders’ actual behavior (i.e. exceeded and unmet expectations). Respondents read a fictional scenario describing a new male or female supervisor, rated their expectations for the leader’s agentic and communal behavior, read manipulated vignettes describing the leader’s subsequent behavior, rated their perceptions of these behaviors, and evaluated the leader.

Followers expected higher levels of communal behavior from the female than the male supervisor, but no differences were found in expectations for agentic behavior. Regardless of whether expectations were exceeded or unmet, supervisor gender did not moderate the effects of agentic or communal behavior expectations–perceptions incongruence on leader evaluations in polynomial regression analyses (i.e. male and female supervisors were not evaluated differently when displaying counter-role behavior or failing to display role-congruent behavior).

In addition to providing a novel, direct test of role congruity theory, the study highlighted a double standard in gender role-congruent behavior expectations of men and women leaders. Results failed to support role congruity theory, which has implications for the future of theory in this domain.