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.
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