Researchers have shown great interest in the antecedents and outcomes of workplace ostracism, which has led to an expansive body of research. In light of this work, the current article fulfills the need for a comprehensive review and meta-analysis of the antecedents and outcomes associated with workplace ostracism. We begin our review by adapting a victimization perspective to understand ostracism as a triadic social process between the victim, perpetrator, and the environment. The meta-analytic results then support that leadership characteristics are the strongest related antecedents of workplace ostracism, followed by certain aspects of personality (e.g., Big Five) and contextual characteristics (e.g., social support). The results also show that workplace ostracism very strongly relates to deviance, and it strongly relates to other performance outcomes (e.g., core-performance, helping, voice), well-being outcomes (e.g., psychological well-being, emotions, self-perceptions), and organizational perceptions (e.g., job satisfaction, commitment, justice). We also show that the relationship of performance, well-being, emotions, and self-perceptions when measured after ostracism was comparable to their relationship when measured before ostracism. These results suggest that the outcomes of ostracism are less certain than previously thought, as they may instead be antecedents of ostracism. Finally, we call for future research to investigate this notion, along with further integration of the victimization perspective as well as the study of contextual predictors and moderators.

Over the past 15 years, regulatory focus has gained prominence as a theory of self-regulatory motivation. Building from personality and social psychology research, the nomological network of regulatory focus spans individuals, groups, and organizations. This review provides an appraisal of regulatory focus from a multilevel perspective as it relates to organizational behavior, human resources, strategic management, and entrepreneurship. We begin with a discussion of the theoretical foundations of regulatory focus, including hierarchical motivation and regulatory fit theory. Using these foundations, we summarize empirical research on regulatory focus and provide actionable avenues for future research on regulatory focus, with particular attention paid to how individuals adjust their motivational strategies on the basis of context. We also consider regulatory focus as a collective function of teams to develop our understanding of motivational processes in the workplace.When I'm old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say "wow, that was an adventure," not "wow, I sure felt safe." -Tom Preston-Werner, Github Cofounder (2008)

It has become common practice to refer to personality traits as being either bright or dark, and a wealth of research has provided support for the effects of both bright traits and dark traits in organizations. This research has largely focused on explaining the downside of dark traits and the upside of bright traits. However, a recent trend has emerged in which scholars are challenging the long-standing convention that bright traits are always beneficial and dark traits are always detrimental. Instead, novel research has begun to explore the potential upside of dark traits and downside of bright traits. In this review, we adopt a multidomain perspective—integrating work from organizational behavior, human resources, strategic management, and entrepreneurship—to highlight this growing body of research. Specifically, we focus on the work advancing our understanding of the complexity of personality, such as identifying situations in which dark traits may be advantageous or beneficial and detecting curvilinear effects that suggest too much of a bright trait may be disadvantageous. Furthermore, we provide a brief discussion on special considerations for the measurement of both bright and dark traits and close with a series of avenues for future research.

Drawing from tenets of self-determination theory, we propose and test a multilevel model that examines the effects of employee involvement climate on the individual-level process linking employee regulatory focus (promotion and prevention) to innovation via thriving. Using data collected at three points in time from 346 participants in 75 groups, multilevel path analytic results demonstrated support for a positive indirect effect from promotion focus to innovation via thriving and a negative indirect effect from prevention focus to innovation via thriving. In addition, results showed a positive indirect effect from employee involvement climate to innovation via thriving. Perhaps most important, cross-level moderated mediation results demonstrated that employee involvement climate strengthens the relationship between promotion focus and thriving, which, in turn, positively relates to innovation. The theoretical and practical implications of these multilevel effects on innovation are discussed.