Are supervisors who care more about profits than employee well-being seen by employees as being good exchange partners? How do employees perceive and respond to supervisors who treat the bottom line as more important than anything else? Supervisors who hold a bottom-line mentality (BLM) neglect competing priorities such as employee well-being and ethical practices to focus on securing bottom-line success. We find high-BLM supervisors serve as low-quality exchange partners with their employees, resulting in employee perceptions of low-quality leader-member exchange (LMX) relationships. In turn, employees reciprocate by withholding the very thing the supervisor desires—performance—in order to maintain balance in the exchange relationship. As such, supervisors who possess a BLM could actually be negatively impacting the organization’s bottom line through the harmful social exchange relationships they engender with their employees and their impact on employee task performance. We also examine the moderating role of employee BLM on these relationships. When employee BLM is low, we observe a greater negative effect on employee value judgments of the supervisor (i.e. reduced LMX perceptions) and lower employee performance. We test and find support for all of our hypotheses in two multi-source (i.e. employee-supervisor dyads), time-lagged field studies ( N = 189 and N = 244).

It is widely established that the Big Five personality traits of conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional stability are antecedents to workplace deviance (Berry, Ones, & Sackett, 2007). However, these meta-analytic findings are based on self-reported personality traits. A recent meta-analysis by Oh, Wang, and Mount (2011) identified the value of acquaintance-reported personality in the prediction of job performance. The current investigation extends prior work by comparing the validities of self- and acquaintance-reported personality in the prediction of workplace deviance across 2 studies. We also hypothesized and tested an interactive, value-added integration of self- with acquaintance-reported personality using socioanalytic personality theory (R. T. Hogan, 1991). Both studies assessed self- and acquaintance-rated Big Five traits, along with supervisor-rated workplace deviance. However, the studies varied the measures of workplace deviance, and the 2nd study also included a self-rated workplace deviance criterion for additional comparison. Across both studies, the traits of conscientiousness and agreeableness were strong predictors of workplace deviance, and acquaintance-reported personality provided incremental validity beyond self-reports. Additionally, acquaintance-reported conscientiousness and agreeableness moderated the prediction of workplace deviance by interacting with the corresponding self-reported traits. Implications for personality theory and measurement are discussed along with applications for practice.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore relationships between proactive personality and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). Moderators between these constructs are proposed in order to explain varying levels of dispositional impact on work behavior. These relationships were also tested to see whether proactive personality should be considered a strong or weak trait. Trait activation theory and social exchange theory are used to develop hypotheses. Design/methodology/approach – Data collected via a targeted sampling strategy from 178 supervisor-subordinate dyads spanning multiple industries and organizations were used. Hypotheses were tested using hierarchical linear regression. Findings – Results indicate a positive relationship exists between proactive personality and organizationally directed citizenship behaviors, and that this relationship is moderated by both job autonomy and job meaning. Originality/value – The paper is one of the first to explore the relationship between proactive personality and citizenship behaviors directed at the organization. It also bolsters the strong trait argument by demonstrating that, even in conditions of low autonomy and meaning, highly proactive individuals will still perform OCBs.

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We present a model of family firm performance that tests the notion that strategic decision comprehensiveness plays a pivotal role in family business decision quality and performance. With insights derived from upper echelons theory, our model further proposes that two key decision maker traits associated with an individual’s information-gathering process—risk-taking propensity and need for cognition—influence strategic decision comprehensiveness and have indirect effects on both study outcomes. Study results using a time-lagged sample of family firm leaders provide broad support for our proposed model and provide insight into the performance and decision-making heterogeneity present in family firms.

The literature suggests that contextualized personality measures yield stronger predictive validity. However, frame-of-reference (FOR) theory is underdeveloped, and existing work-FOR personality measures have several limitations. Integrating FOR research with the knowledge-and-appraisal personality architecture (KAPA) theoretical framework, we developed a new work-FOR personality measure: the 20-item ORG-B5. Study 1 summarizes the procedure used to select the items and tests its basic psychometric properties with two samples. Study 2 shows that the ORG-B5 has good convergent and discriminant validity and outperforms the Mini-Markers and the Mini-IPIP in its base psychometrics. Study 3 demonstrates that the ORG-B5 predicts work-engagement and leader-member exchange (LMX), while Study 4a and 4b shows incremental validity of the ORG-B5 above other Big Five measures in predicting work-engagement and LMX. Study 5 demonstrates measurement invariance between native and nonnative English speakers and compares the criterion and incremental validity of the ORG-B5 beyond another work-FOR measure. Study 6 demonstrates convergence between self- and coworker ratings of the ORG-B5 and its prediction of time-lagged self-reported engagement and LMX and supervisor-reported deviance and task performance. Given these results, we argue that the ORG-B5 is a reliable and short personality measure more appropriate than existing measures for organizational research.

Examining socioemotional wealth’s influence at the individual level, an interactionist approach was used to test its moderation effect on the dark personality traits–job performance relationship, using supervisor-employee dyads in family firms. Termed the Dark Triad, dark personality traits include narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. Results showed that when supervisors in family firms prioritize socioemotional wealth, the expected relationships between the Dark Triad and employee job performance outcomes (task, citizenship, and counterproductive behaviors) is ameliorated. These findings demonstrate that family firms can create an environment that improves the otherwise negative impact that dark personality has on job performance.

A pluralistic focus on economic and noneconomic goals creates dissonance for family firm employees. Drawing on social exchange theory, this study explores the idea that congruence between supervisor familial status and importance placed on socioemotional wealth aids in resolving this dissonance and allows committed employees to translate their efforts into better performance. The three-way interaction results show that committed employees working for congruent supervisors experienced higher task and citizenship performance. Supervisor incongruence resulted in the opposite effect. These findings suggest supervisor genuineness is vital to employee performance because of the dissonance associated with the pluralistic goal orientation in family firms.