Humans systematically make poor decisions because of cognitive biases. Can digital games train people to avoid cognitive biases? The goal of this study is to investigate the affordance of different educational media in training people about cognitive biases and to mitigate cognitive biases within their decision-making processes. A between-subject experiment was conducted to compare a digital game, a traditional slideshow, and a combined condition in mitigating two types of cognitive biases: anchoring bias and representativeness bias. We measured both immediate effects and delayed effects after four weeks. The results suggest that the digital game and slideshow conditions were effective in mitigating cognitive biases immediately after the training, but the effects decayed after four weeks. By providing the basic knowledge through the slideshow, then allowing learners to practice bias-mitigation techniques in the digital game, the combined condition was most effective at mitigating the cognitive biases both immediately and after four weeks.
This article demonstrates that when supervisors encourage subordinates to defer to their embodied expertise, subordinates are more likely to voice explicitly moralized upward dissent to an unethical business request. Working adults (N = 312) were randomly assigned to respond to an unethical business request from their boss in one of three scenarios that varied by how much the supervisor was known for encouraging deference to (a) embodied knowing, (b) intellectual reasoning, or (c) neither (i.e., a baseline control condition). Analyses revealed that participants were more than twice as likely to voice their private moral concerns explicitly with their boss when the supervisor was known for valuing subordinates’ embodied expertise (e.g., “going with your gut feelings”). In addition, participants also reported feeling significantly less communication anxiety in that same condition. Implications for leading organizational ethics conclude the article.
This message-production experiment demonstrates that supervisors can mitigate the workplace moral mum effect and encourage upward ethical dissent by talking about ethics with subordinates (i.e., moral talk contagion). Working adults (N = 324) were randomly assigned to respond to an unethical request by their supervisor in one of five scenarios that varied by supervisor talk type and trust-in-supervisor or a baseline-control condition. Content and contingency table analyses revealed participants were twice as likely to invoke explicitly moralized upward dissent to an unethical business request from a supervisor when the supervisor was known for describing work situations in ethical terms. In addition, the V-shaped relationship between trust-in-supervisor and upward ethical dissent indicated that participants in the high-and low-trust conditions were twice as likely to engage in upward ethical dissent as those in the baseline-control condition. Implications for theory and practice conclude the essay.
Post‐positivism is a label for a set of research assumptions that underlie some organizational communication scholarship. Post‐positivistic assumptions entail beliefs about reality, knowledge, and value in research. Ontology, or the philosophical study of being and reality, is one way to describe the unique assumptions of post‐positivism. Post‐positivistic research assumes that social reality is out there and has enough stability and patterning to be known. Social reality is conceived as coherent, whole, and singular. Epistemology, or the philosophical study of knowledge and knowing, is another way to describe the unique assumptions of post‐positivism. Post‐positivistic research assumes that social reality is measurable and knowable, albeit difficult to access. Together, the ontological and epistemological assumptions undergirding post‐positivistic organizational communication research are rarely, if ever, described explicitly in research reports. Those assumptions, however, are the philosophical ground on which data are collected and analyzed and on which this kind of research is sensible as an intellectual enterprise with logical coherence. This entry reviews the major assumptions of post‐positivism and its history and explains and illustrates several ways of identifying post‐positivist approaches to contemporary organizational communication research.
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