Leaders laughing in the line of fire: An emotional aperture perspective on leader laughter in response to critical questions.

Leaders are frequently put in the difficult position of repudiating critical questions in front of their followers. To help manage this situation, leaders sometimes express laughter in the hopes that it will "lubricate" their interaction and reduce perceptions that they are aggressive or confrontational with the critical questioner. Ironically, leaders' laughter may backfire by diminishing their apparent friendliness and approachability in the eyes of the witnessing followers.

Perceived overqualification and experiences of incivility: Can task i-deals help or hurt?

We examined why overqualified employees may report heightened levels of experienced incivility, particularly when they have successfully negotiated task i-deals from their employers. Adopting a person-job fit perspective, we examined our proposed model in two studies with employees in the higher education industry (Study 1) and workers from a range of industries and occupations (Study 2). In Study 1 ( = 229), the moderated mediation model showed that task i-deals attenuated the positive relationship between perceived overqualification and boredom sensations, which was associated with reduced experienced incivility.

Savvy investments or formative endowments? Disentangling causal direction in the association between parental support and self-efficacy in STEM university students.

Conventional wisdom views the parent-child relationship as unilateral: Parents' actions upstream flow downstream to shape their children's development. However, scholars have proposed that this view of parenting is lopsided; children may influence their parents no less than parents influence children. We apply this bilateral perspective in a reexamination of the robust finding that confident people report having had more supportive parents.