Although helping behaviors can increase the effectiveness of work units, when task interdependence is low, units often develop norms of self-interest that inhibit helping. Little research has explained how these norms can be changed by a work unit member. We present a minority influence framework that specifies how norms can shift in response to a challenger's consistent modeling, advocating, or inquiring about helping behavior, contingent on prosocial impact, status, similarity, work unit agreeableness and openness, and timing. We also examine how normative conflict motivates efforts to initiate and sustain challenges, depending on identification, status, and small wins. Our model provides a novel theoretical account of how helping norms emerge in work units to support caring and compassion.

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Managers face hard choices between process and outcome systems of accountability in evaluating employees, but little is known about how managers resolve them. Building on the premise that political ideologies serve as uncertainty-reducing heuristics, two studies of working managers show that: (1) conservatives prefer outcome accountability and liberals prefer process accountability in an unspecified policy domain; (2) this split becomes more pronounced in a controversial domain (public schools) in which the foreground value is educational efficiency but reverses direction in a controversial domain (affirmative action) in which the foreground value is demographic equality; (3) managers who discover employees have subverted their preferred system favor tinkering over switching to an alternative system; (4) but bipartisan consensus arises when managers have clear evidence about employee trustworthiness and the tightness of the causal links between employee effort and success. These findings shed light on ideological and contextual factors that shape preferences for accountability systems.

Although considerable research demonstrates that employees are unlikely to be proactive when they view their supervisors as discouraging this type of behavior, we challenge the assumption that this is true for all employees. Drawing on motivated information processing theory, we argue that prosocial motivation can spark employees to be proactive even when supervisors are perceived as discouraging. Specifically, prosocial motivation may weaken the negative relationship between perceived discouraging supervisor behaviors and proactivity by driving employees to bring about change to impact coworkers or the organization. Because they are less focused on self-interest and more focused on benefitting others, prosocially motivated employees are able to maintain their reason-to (felt responsibility for change) and can-do (efficacy to be proactive) motivation even when supervisors do not welcome proactivity. We test our hypotheses across three studies, using multisource data from employees and supervisors in two organizations (Studies 1a and 1b), and lagged data from employees working in a range of industries (Study 2). By identifying the mechanisms driving prosocially motivated employees to be proactive despite having supervisors who are perceived to be discouraging, we offer novel theoretical and practical insights regarding the effects of context on proactivity at work. (PsycINFO Database Record

In dynamic task environments, decision makers are vulnerable to two types of errors: sticking too closely to the rules (excessive conformity) or straying too far from them (excessive deviation). We explore the effects of process and outcome accountability on the susceptibility to these errors. Using a multiple-cue probability-learning task, we show that process accountability encourages conformity errors and outcome accountability promotes deviation errors. Two additional studies explore the moderating effects of self-focused and other-focused group norms. Self-focused norms reduce the effect of process accountability on excessive conformity. Other-focused norms reduce the effect of outcome accountability on excessive deviation. Our results qualify prevailing claims about the benefits of process over outcome accountability and show that those benefits hinge on prevailing group norms, on the effectiveness of prescribed decision rules, and on the amount of irreducible uncertainty in the prediction task.