How do supervisors who treat the bottom line as more important than anything else influence team success? Drawing from social information processing theory, we explore how and when supervisor bottom-line mentality (i.e., an exclusive focus on bottom-line outcomes at the expense of other priorities) exerts influence on the bottom-line itself, in the form of team performance. We argue that a supervisor’s bottom-line mentality provides significant social cues for the team that securing bottom-line objectives is of sole importance, which stimulates team performance avoidance goal orientation, and thus decreases team performance. Further, we argue performing tension (i.e., tension between contradictory needs, demands, and goals), serving as team members’ mutual perception of the confusing environment, will strengthen the indirect negative relationship between supervisor bottom-line mentality and team performance through team performance avoidance goal orientation. We conduct a path analysis using data from 258 teams in a Chinese food-chain company, which provides support for our hypotheses. Overall, our findings suggest that supervisor’s exclusive focus on the bottom-line can serve to impede team performance. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed.
This paper investigates how analyst categorisation hierarchies (CH) affect corporate social responsibility (CSR) conformity. We argue that firms that are labelled as either high rank or low rank by analysts have higher institutional immunity, while firms that are categorised as middle rank have lower immunity. These heterogeneous institutional immunities will affect the levels of CSR conformity differently. Our results, which originate from a sample of Chinese listed firms from 2009 to 2016, suggest that CH exhibit an inverted‐U‐shaped relationship with CSR conformity. High‐ranked and low‐ranked firms are most likely to be CSR nonconformist, while middle‐ranked firms tend to conduct CSR like the majority of their industry peers. Moreover, we also investigate the environmental boundary conditions of this curvilinear relationship. This relationship is moderated by environmental munificence (positively) and dynamism (negatively). Our findings fill the theoretical gap by proposing an institutional‐based explanation for the CSR conformity heterogeneity which is rarely discussed and extending the boundary conditions for the categorisation‐CSR conformity relationship.
Team reflexivity has gained popularity as a phenomenon of interest in team research, but mixed theorizing around the relationship between team reflexivity and team performance indicates that the relationship is not fully understood. In an effort to improve our understanding and explain why and when team reflexivity will be conducive to team performance, we examine the role of team diversity as a possible boundary condition and of team decision quality as an explanatory mechanism. Using survey data from 82 teams with 82 leaders and 194 team members, we find that team decision quality is a partial mediator of the relationship between team reflexivity and team performance and that team diversity strengthens this mediating relationship. We also find that team diversity moderates the relationship between team reflexivity and decision quality. Taken together, these findings suggest that reflexivity is most effective in conditions of informational richness, such as when teams have high diversity, as the reflective process allows team members to capitalize on their varied perspectives to improve the quality of their decisions and, thus, their performance.
Promotions, as a part of organizational incentive and reward systems, can motivate employees to perform well and to increase commitment to their firms. But very little is known about why and when promotion failure influences employees' subsequent responses. Integrating social‐cognitive theory and the cognitive appraisal theory of emotion in justice literature, we investigated the effect of promotion failure on employees' work engagement through cognitive and emotional processes and the moderating effects of perceived promotion fairness. Employing two survey studies (Study 1 and Study 2) and an experimental study (Study 3), we found that: (1) promotion failure was negatively related to self‐efficacy and positively associated with anger; (2) promotion failure was negatively related to work engagement through reduced self‐efficacy and elevated anger; (3) promotion perceived to be fair amplified the negative effect of promotion failure on employee self‐efficacy but mitigated its influence on anger; (4) promotion fairness perception strengthened the indirect negative relationship between promotion failure and work engagement through self‐efficacy but weakened this indirect relationship via anger. Our work contributes to promotion and justice literature and enlightens practitioners about how to manage promotion practice.
Based on social exchange theory, this research aims to develop and test a model in which supervisor affiliation mediates the impact of servant leadership on employees’ pro‐group unethical behavior a highly competitive intergroup environment. Using a sample of 239 employees from 39 groups in four foreign‐owned engineering enterprises, we found that supervisor affiliation mediated the positive relationship between servant leadership and employees’ pro‐group unethical behavior. Our results also revealed that employees’ moral attentiveness weakened the positive impact of supervisor affiliation on pro‐group unethical behavior. The current study contributes to business ethics research by advancing our understanding of antecedents of pro‐group unethical behavior as well as how servant leadership leads to employees’ unethical behaviors. Implications for theory, practice, and directions for future research are discussed.
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