Team diversity and team performance: Paths to synergetic and disruptive effects.

Team diversity holds promises and challenges for team performance. The promise of diversity lies in synergy generated from exchange and integration of diverse perspectives; the challenge lies in social categorization processes that give rise to biases favoring similar others over dissimilar others that disrupt team collaboration. I discuss theory capturing these paths to synergetic and disruptive effects and their contingencies as well as the evidence in research in team diversity and performance.

Keeping Employees Safe During Health Crises: The Effects of Media Exposure, HR Practices, and Age.

Occupational health and safety are critical in promoting the wellness of organizations and employees. The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most life-threatening viruses encountered in recent history, providing a unique opportunity for research to examine factors that drive employee safety behavior. Drawing from terror management theory, we propose and test a moderated mediation model using data collected from employees working during a peak of the pandemic.

Battling ingroup bias with effective intergroup leadership.

Intergroup conflict and bias often occur between subgroups nested within a superordinate group. In these situations, the leader of the superordinate group plays a key role, as an intergroup leader, in reducing conflict. To be effective, an intergroup leader should avoid (1) threatening the subgroups' distinctive identities, and (2) being viewed by one or both groups as 'one of them' rather than 'one of us'.

From member creativity to team creativity? Team information elaboration as moderator of the additive and disjunctive models.

One of the most fundamental questions in team creativity research is the relationship between individual member creativity and team creativity. The two answers that team creativity research has advanced-teams are more creative when their average member creativity is higher (the additive model) and teams are more creative when their most creative member is more creative (the disjunctive model) are straightforward. Surprising, however, is that neither the additive model nor the disjunctive model is consistently supported, begging the question of what moderates the predictive power of these models.

A motivational lens model of person × situation interactions in employee creativity.

The idea that individual creativity derives from the interaction of personal traits and the situation in which the individual operates, is one of the most prominent themes within the creativity literature. A review of the literature highlights 5 distinct interaction patterns observed in person-in-situation creativity research (trait activation, trait inhibition, trait substitution, trait channeling, and curvilinear interactions). Yet at present there is no integrative theory that can predict and explain all 5 interaction patterns.

Respectful leadership: Reducing performance challenges posed by leader role incongruence and gender dissimilarity.

We investigate how respectful leadership can help overcome the challenges for follower performance that female leaders face when working (especially with male) followers. First, based on role congruity theory, we illustrate the biases faced by female leaders. Second, based on research on gender (dis-)similarity, we propose that these biases should be particularly pronounced when working with a male follower.

Intergroup Leadership Across Distinct Subgroups and Identities.

Resolving intergroup conflict is a significant and often arduous leadership challenge, yet existing theory and research rarely, if ever, discuss or examine this situation. Leaders confront a significant challenge when they provide leadership across deep divisions between distinct subgroups defined by self-contained identities-The challenge is to avoid provoking subgroup identity distinctiveness threat. Drawing on intergroup leadership theory, three studies were conducted to test the core hypothesis that, where identity threat exists, leaders promoting an intergroup relational identity will be better evaluated and are more effective than leaders promoting a collective identity; in the absence of threat, leaders promoting a collective identity will prevail.

A century of work teams in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Work groups are a vital link between individuals and organizations. Systematic psychological research on the nature and effects of work groups dates back at least to the Hawthorne studies of the 1920s and 1930s. Yet little to none of this work appeared in the Journal of Applied Psychology until the 1950s when groups were treated primarily as foils against which to compare the performance of individuals.

In the moral eye of the beholder: the interactive effects of leader and follower moral identity on perceptions of ethical leadership and LMX quality.

Previous research indicated that leader moral identity (MI; i.e., leaders' self-definition in terms of moral attributes) predicts to what extent followers perceive their leader as ethical (i.

Outperforming whom? A multilevel study of performance-prove goal orientation, performance, and the moderating role of shared team identification.

Performance-prove goal orientation affects performance because it drives people to try to outperform others. A proper understanding of the performance-motivating potential of performance-prove goal orientation requires, however, that we consider the question of whom people desire to outperform. In a multilevel analysis of this issue, we propose that the shared team identification of a team plays an important moderating role here, directing the performance-motivating influence of performance-prove goal orientation to either the team level or the individual level of performance.

Heard it through the grapevine: indirect networks and employee creativity.

Social networks can be important sources of information and insights that may spark employee creativity. The cross-fertilization of ideas depends not just on access to information and insights through one's direct network-the people one actually interacts with--but at least as much on access to the indirect network one's direct ties connect one to (i.e.

Team-oriented leadership: the interactive effects of leader group prototypicality, accountability, and team identification.

We examined the interactive effects of leader group prototypicality, accountability, and team identification on team-oriented behavior of leaders, thus extending the social identity perspective on leadership to the study of leader behavior. An experimental study (N = 152) supported our hypothesis that leader accountability relates more strongly to team-oriented behavior for group nonprototypical leaders than for group prototypical leaders. A multisource field study with leaders (N = 64) and their followers (N = 209) indicated that this interactive effect is more pronounced for leaders who identify more strongly with their team.

Creative self-efficacy and individual creativity in team contexts: cross-level interactions with team informational resources.

We propose a cross-level perspective on the relation between creative self-efficacy and individual creativity in which team informational resources, comprising both shared "knowledge of who knows what" (KWKW) and functional background diversity, benefit the creativity of individuals more with higher creative self-efficacy. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a multi-level study with 176 employees working in 34 research and development teams of a multinational company in 4 countries. In support of our hypotheses, the link between creative self-efficacy and individual creativity was more positive with greater shared KWKW, and this interactive effect was pronounced for teams of high rather than low functional background diversity.

Fostering team creativity: perspective taking as key to unlocking diversity's potential.

Despite the clear importance of team creativity for organizations, the conditions that foster it are not very well understood. Even though diversity, especially diversity of perspectives and knowledge, is frequently argued to stimulate higher creativity in teams, empirical findings on this relationship remain inconsistent. We have developed a theoretical model in which the effect of a team's diversity on its creativity is moderated by the degree to which team members engage in perspective taking.

On angry leaders and agreeable followers. How leaders' emotions and followers' personalities shape motivation and team performance.

Do followers perform better when their leader expresses anger or when their leader expresses happiness? We propose that this depends on the follower's level of agreeableness. Anger is associated with hostility and conflict-states that are at odds with agreeable individuals' goals. Happiness facilitates affiliation and positive relations-states that are in line with agreeable individuals' goals.

Transformational leadership and team innovation: integrating team climate principles.

Fostering team innovation is increasingly an important leadership function. However, the empirical evidence for the role of transformational leadership in engendering team innovation is scarce and mixed. To address this issue, the authors link transformational leadership theory to principles of M.

Motivated information processing in group judgment and decision making.

This article expands the view of groups as information processors into a motivated information processing in groups (MIP-G) model by emphasizing, first, the mixed-motive structure of many group tasks and, second, the idea that individuals engage in more or less deliberate information search and processing. The MIP-G model postulates that social motivation drives the kind of information group members attend to, encode, and retrieve and that epistemic motivation drives the degree to which new information is sought and attended to, encoded, and retrieved. Social motivation and epistemic motivation are expected to influence, alone and in combination, generating problem solutions, disseminating information, and negotiating joint decisions.

Bridging faultlines by valuing diversity: diversity beliefs, information elaboration, and performance in diverse work groups.

Although there are numerous potential benefits to diversity in work groups, converging dimensions of diversity often prevent groups from exploiting this potential. In a study of heterogeneous decision-making groups, the authors examined whether the disruptive effects of diversity faultlines can be overcome by convincing groups of the value of diversity. Groups were persuaded either of the value of diversity or the value of similarity for group performance, and they were provided with either homogeneous or heterogeneous information.

Group member prototypicality and intergroup negotiation: how one's standing in the group affects negotiation behaviour.

How does a representative's position in the group influence behaviour in intergroup negotiation? Applying insights from the social identity approach (specifically self-categorization theory), the effects of group member prototypicality, accountability and group attractiveness on competitiveness in intergroup bargaining were examined. As representatives of their group, participants engaged in a computer-mediated negotiation with a simulated out-group opponent. In Experiment 1 (N=114), representatives with a peripheral status in the group sent more competitive and fewer cooperative messages to the opponent than did prototypical representatives, but only under accountability.

Work group diversity.

Work group diversity, the degree to which there are differences between group members, may affect group process and performance positively as well as negatively. Much is still unclear about the effects of diversity, however. We review the 1997-2005 literature on work group diversity to assess the state of the art and to identify key issues for future research.

A special gift we bestow on you for being representative of us: Considering leader charisma from a self-categorization perspective.

Two experiments tested hypotheses, derived from social identity and self-categorization theories, regarding the attribution of charisma to leaders. In Experiment 1 (N=203), in-group prototypical leaders were attributed greater levels of charisma and were perceived to be more persuasive than in-group non-prototypical leaders. In Experiment 2 (N=220), leaders described with in-group stereotypical characteristics were attributed relatively high levels of charisma regardless of their group-oriented versus exchange rhetoric.

The possessive self as a barrier to conflict resolution: effects of mere ownership, process accountability, and self-concept clarity on competitive cognitions and behavior.

The authors propose that people have difficulty managing conflict because they quickly develop ownership of arguments and positions they use in the dispute, that these arguments and positions become part of their (extended) self-concept, and that any opposition or counterargumentation therefore becomes an ego-threat. Four studies reveal that individuals value arguments and beliefs more when these are associated with the self and that anticipated or real opposition triggers ego-defensive cognition and behavior, including competitive communication, retaliatory responses, negative perceptions of the partner, and attitude polarization. These effects were weaker when epistemic needs were raised through process accountability or when individuals had high rather than low self-concept clarity.

Leader self-sacrifice and leadership effectiveness: the moderating role of leader prototypicality.

Self-sacrificing behavior of the leader and the extent to which the leader is representative of the group (i.e., group prototypical) are proposed to interact to influence leadership effectiveness.

Rewarding leadership and fair procedures as determinants of self-esteem.

In the present research, the authors examined the effect of procedural fairness and rewarding leadership style on an important variable for employees: self-esteem. The authors predicted that procedural fairness would positively influence people's reported self-esteem if the leader adopted a style of rewarding behavior for a job well done. Results from a scenario experiment, a laboratory experiment, and an organizational survey indeed show that procedural fairness and rewarding leadership style interacted to influence followers' self-esteem, such that the positive relationship between procedural fairness and self-esteem was more pronounced when the leadership style was high in rewarding behavior.

Work group diversity and group performance: an integrative model and research agenda.

Research on the relationship between work group diversity and performance has yielded inconsistent results. To address this problem, the authors propose the categorization-elaboration model (CEM), which reconceptualizes and integrates information/decision making and social categorization perspectives on work-group diversity and performance. The CEM incorporates mediator and moderator variables that typically have been ignored in diversity research and incorporates the view that information/decision making and social categorization processes interact such that intergroup biases flowing from social categorization disrupt the elaboration (in-depth processing) of task-relevant information and perspectives.