Individuals embedded in networks rich in structural holes are well positioned to broker referrals between otherwise disconnected others. Yet these hole-rich networks create a paradox: although they help brokers identify valuable opportunities, they also undermine the trust required for others to accept a referral—an action that makes recipients vulnerable to the broker's judgment and motives. We address this paradox by examining how brokers use network self-promotion, strategically highlighting their network quality and matchmaking competence, to mitigate trust deficits. Across a field study and two experiments, we show that network structure and network self-promotion jointly shape referral acceptance. Specifically, network self-promotion has asymmetric effects across the facets of trust: it substitutes for the reputational cues of a broker's ability where shared contacts cannot supply them, but amplifies the integrity-based trust that shared network ties convey where those ties are present, and does not condition the role of benevolence-based trust. By situating brokerage within the psychological literature on trust, we demonstrate how brokers' strategic impression management interacts with network structure to overcome the trust deficits inherent in networks that are rich in structural holes.
Theory suggests work-life outcomes are shaped by three beliefs regarding how work and personal life relate to each other: fixed-expandable-pie beliefs (whether work and life compete with versus enhance one another), segmentation-integration beliefs (whether work and life operate as separate versus related domains), and work-life priority beliefs (whether work versus personal life takes precedence over the other domain). Yet no measure of work-life beliefs exists, which is an impediment to understanding their ability to advance the work-life literature. In 15 studies (N = 6,568), using samples drawn from different populations (adults and students in the United States, adults with diverse cultural backgrounds in the United Kingdom, adults in Ghana, adults in South Korea), we develop measures of three work-life beliefs and document their utility for understanding the work-life interface. We find that work-life beliefs can be conceptualized as three or six dimensions, and that the measures have a replicable factor structure, are reliable, and have discriminant validity, in that they are distinct from other work-life constructs and beliefs about hard work and leisure. The work-life belief measures also have criterion validity; they contribute to understanding of work-life experiences and behaviors, both indirectly and directly. Our research advances the literature by providing insight into the nature of work-life beliefs and demonstrating their relevance for understanding the work-life interface. By developing measures, we also provide tools that can be used in future work to develop, test, and refine theory regarding the implications of work-life beliefs for understanding any number of additional phenomena.
Time is a critical yet often assumed fixed resource in the workplace. Prior research has largely treated temporal resources as objective and equally distributed, emphasizing how employees allocate a limited pool of time across tasks. Building on emerging work on subjective time, we introduce time extension self-efficacy (TESE)-individuals' beliefs in their capability to extend the temporal boundaries of their day (e.g., I can wake up earlier or go to bed later than usual)-as a psychological construct that reframes how temporal resources are understood at work. Drawing on self-efficacy theory and circadian process theory, we identify chronotype as an antecedent of morning versus evening TESE and examine organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) as a behavioral context through which these beliefs shape when discretionary effort is enacted across the day. Across three sets of studies, we show that earlier chronotypes report higher morning TESE, whereas later chronotypes report higher evening TESE, which in turn predicts whether individuals are more likely to engage in discretionary behavior during the morning versus evening. We further examine two boundary conditions (prior-night sleep duration and communion striving) and test an intervention designed to enhance TESE even when it conflicts with one's chronotype, demonstrating that, unlike chronotype, TESE can be experimentally strengthened. Together, our findings suggest that when employees choose to act depends not only on objective time demands, but also on their beliefs about whether they can extend their available time within the day.
Negotiation research has often emphasized the instrumental value of a strong Best Alternative to a Negotiation Agreement (BATNA), yet emerging evidence suggests that its psychological benefits are not uniformly distributed across individuals. Although social class origin is a foundational characteristic that shapes expectations and behavioral tendencies, its influence on how negotiators interpret structural leverage, such as BATNA, remains underexplored. Integrating deservingness theory and social cognitive theory of social class, we propose that strong BATNAs enhance deservingness, which in turn elevates negotiation first offers; however, this effect is more pronounced among negotiators from lower social class than those from higher social class. For negotiators from lower social class, a strong BATNA provides a rare external confirmation of personal worth, which reassures them that their aspirations are legitimate and justified, and ultimately leads to higher negotiation first offers. In contrast, negotiators from higher social class often enter negotiations with higher baseline deservingness, which translates to minimal psychological uplift from the same structural leverage. Through an archival study of job seekers (Study 1) and a pre-registered, quasi-experiment in the field (Study 2), we find consistent support for our proposed relationships. Our findings challenge the canonical view of BATNA as a uniformly empowering tool and highlight the importance of social class origin in shaping how structural power is psychologically interpreted and behaviorally enacted in negotiations.
Expertise evaluation - the interpersonal assessment of others' domain-specific knowledge, skills, and abilities - is a critical mechanism for leveraging knowledge in organizations. Despite its importance, research on expertise evaluation is fragmented across disciplines, plagued by construct proliferation, and hampered by inconsistent terminology, limiting cumulative theory building. To address this challenge, we synthesize operationalizations from 105 articles and propose a three-dimensional framework that captures core assumptions underlying expertise evaluation: Verification Level (the degree to which the interpersonal evaluation is corroborated by a direct assessment of the target's expertise), Reference Explicitness (the degree to which the frame of reference for the evaluation is made explicit), and Degree of Interdependence (the degree to which the evaluation is seen as a socially constructed process whereby evaluators influence each other's assessment). This framework provides a common language for scholars, clarifies conceptual tensions, and enables examination of temporal, contextual, and interactive relationships among dimensions. By situating expertise evaluation within this multidimensional space, we advance theory development, improve construct accuracy, and offer practical guidance for designing evaluation systems that enhance the utilization of expertise in organizations.
Leaders have displayed diverging reactions to remote work, with some supporting it and others resisting it. Surprisingly little research has examined the personality roots of leader opposition to virtual work. Integrating the extended agency model of narcissism with media richness theory, we hypothesize that narcissistic leaders resist remote work because it threatens their motivations for power and status. In Study 1, an archival analysis of 259 Fortune 500 CEOs, unobtrusive measures of narcissism via photo size, signature size, and relative compensation predicted greater resistance to remote work in public statements early in the COVID-19 pandemic. This relationship was partially explained by exploratory proxies for narcissistic leaders' power and status motivations, contingent on their industry not depending on frontline workers. Study 2, a preregistered three-wave survey with 359 leaders, constructively replicated and extended these results. Leader narcissism predicted resistance to remote work, mediated by power and status motivations-even after controlling for trust, the Big Five, and the remaining Dark Triad traits. In Study 3, a preregistered experiment with 546 leaders, manipulating state narcissism evoked resistance to remote work via power but not status motivation. Our findings extend knowledge about remote work and narcissistic leadership.
Change agents at various organizational levels engage in bottom-up change, which refers to upward, self-initiated, and communicative behaviors intended to improve their unit or the organization. Although these behaviors share core characteristics, research has been fragmented across the micro (e.g., voice and creativity), meso (e.g., issueselling and whistleblowing), and macro (e.g., institutional entrepreneurship) communities. This fragmentation has led to inconsistent conceptualizations and theoretical confusion regarding what truly matters to bottom-up change success. To address these issues, we synthesize the disparate research traditions to identify key predictors of bottom-up change success, specifically distinguishing two types of success: endorsement (positive attitudes toward bottom-up change) and implementation (the realization of bottom-up change). We then theorize the relative importance of change agents' human capital and social capital in predicting success in bottom-up change. Meta-analytic evidence from 105 studies (N = 33,186) reveals that although both human capital and social capital predict endorsement, social capital emerges as the dominant driver of implementation. Additionally, traditional indicators of human capital and social capital (i.e., rank, education, and work experience) are less predictive of endorsement and implementation than human or social capital themselves. By integrating previously fragmented literatures, we develop a comprehensive framework to guide future organizational research on bottom-up change success.
Through an inductive study of knowledge professionals who work excessively, we develop a theoretical model explaining how individuals’ identity defenses generate and sustain workplace distress. We find that informants uniformly describe excessive work as distressing and rooted in a doer identity—a personal identity defined by the act of doing itself—which they constructed in childhood as a response to their caregivers’ excessive demands to do. In their accounts of these early experiences, we identify three distinct narratives of distress—centered on self-worth, safety, or recognition. In each narrative, we theorize that the doer identity functions as a false self defense, rooted in a specific intrapsychic dynamic—conforming, dissociative, or reflexive—that was effective in childhood. These false selves are carried into working life, where they prove ineffective: they are linked to different emotional experiences of excessive working and ways of relating to others at work that reproduce or amplify distress rather than ameliorate it. Our study integrates and expands theories of distress and identity defenses at work, excessive work, and psychodynamics.
How do people use ranking information when making evaluations? In eight preregistered experiments, we find a persistent preference for options ranked within shorter (vs. longer) lists. For instance, participants reported preferring to hire a prospective employee ranked 3rd of 12 employees over one ranked 6th of 24, despite both having the same relative position within their respective lists (25th percentile). We propose that when people evaluate rankings, they primarily consider the option’s position relative to the best option on the list (i.e., distance from the top-ranked alternative). Thus, they tend to prefer options ranked in shorter lists, even when their relative percentile ranking is the same as—or even worse than—an alternative ranked in longer lists. Accordingly, we find that the effect attenuates when we: (a) draw attention to the distance from the bottom-ranked option by highlighting the number of alternatives ranked below the focal option, and (b) emphasize the focal option’s relative position on the list. These findings are theoretically important for advancing the understanding of how people process ranking information and practically important to managers and other practitioners who construct and communicate ranked lists and use rankings in evaluations themselves.
Emotional acknowledgment, verbally recognizing others’ emotions, improves interpersonal outcomes, yet is surprisingly rare in work teams. To understand who in a team is most likely to engage in emotional acknowledgment, we examine how prescriptive norms tied to hierarchical rank shape team members’ responses to one another’s emotions. We propose and show that higher-ranked members engage in more emotional acknowledgment toward lower-ranked members than vice versa because norms more strongly prescribe emotional acknowledgment for those higher, rather than lower, in rank. Additionally, we show that when lower-ranked members positively deviate from prescriptive norms by acknowledging higher-ranked members’ emotions, higher-ranked members reciprocate by increasing their own emotional acknowledgment toward lower-ranked members beyond normatively expected baseline levels. This helps their teams develop positively deviant emotional cultures, and, as we show, elevates team performance beyond that of teams that adhere to prescriptive rank-based norms for emotional acknowledgment. Three pre-registered, multi-method studies, including a team experiment and a two-wave field study, support our hypotheses. Overall, our findings highlight the surprising impact of lower-ranked members in shaping team emotional dynamics and performance.
Giving serves not only to benefit others and society but also to foster social connections between givers and recipients. However, more giving is not necessarily merrier. This research finds that social connection depends not only on the act of giving but also on how many others receive the gesture from the same giver. Rare givers—those who give to fewer recipients—are perceived as more socially connected to each recipient than broad givers—those who give to many (the rare giving effect). This effect emerges across diverse contexts, including interpersonal gift exchanges in both new and existing relationships and corporate donations. As a result, rare givers enjoy a relational advantage: their gifts are valued more, and they are more likely to receive reciprocation (e.g., a gift in return or purchasing from the firm), even though they are perceived as less generous than broad givers. However, the negative effect of the number of recipients on perceived connection is attenuated when recipients are closely connected (e.g., donations to multiple charities supporting the same cause) or when gifts reinforce connections between recipients (e.g., friends sharing items in a matching set). These findings highlight an overlooked cost of broad generosity, with implications for managing interpersonal relationships and firms’ giving strategies.
People are often exposed to advice and opinions from both “novices”—people with relatively limited domain experience—and “experts”—people with relatively deeper domain experience. This manuscript explores whether people (i) rely on both groups equally, (ii) consistently favor one over the other, or (iii) rely on novices in certain contexts and experts in others. Across six preregistered studies, we find evidence for the third possibility, and show that the fit between the advice generation process and expertise affect reliance on advice. Specifically, people rely more on novices for advice and opinions from direct lived experience and experts for advice or opinions from data synthesis and extrapolation. This is because people think novices have experiences that are more similar to the ones they will have, while experts do not, but may be better at synthesizing and extrapolating from data. Notably, this distinction is not simply about the domain being advised, but is specific to the advice generating process—in a given domain, people’s reliance on novices and experts can be manipulated by changing their understanding of how the advice or opinion was generated. This pattern of results is generalizable to many domains (e.g., job choice, product ratings). Further, our results build on previous work highlighting from whom people seek advice and opinions, and provide practitioners with insight into when people may be more or less likely to rely on their advice and opinions.
This paper examines how what people disclose about their successes or failures depends on what others have disclosed. We propose that these decisions are guided less by self-focused motives and more by a concern for how one’s words will affect the other person’s emotions. Across nine studies (N = 8,229, including preregistered experiments, 2,216 self-written responses, and 473 real conversation dyads), we find that responders are consistently more likely to disclose matching outcomes (e.g., failures in response to failures) than non-matching ones (e.g., failures in response to successes), but with two asymmetries not predicted by prior theories. First, responders are more likely to disclose matching failures (failures in response to failures) than matching successes (successes in response to successes). Second, when experiencing non-matching outcomes, responders are more likely to disclose failures in response to successes than they are to disclose successes in response to failures. These patterns reflect other-focused attempts to comfort those who have failed and avoid exacerbating their distress. Beyond whether they disclosed, responders also adjusted how they disclosed, for instance, softening success disclosures in response to failures with consolation or apologies. These effects generalized across domains (e.g., health, career, financial), across relationships varying in closeness and status, and emerged in choices between pre-written responses, self-generated responses, and live conversations involving actual interpersonal disclosures. Disclosure decisions were moderated by factors such as liking and domain relevance. By demonstrating that responders’ outcome disclosures are systematically shaped by concern for the well-being of others, this work reframes disclosure as an intended conversational tool for protecting others’ emotions rather than managing self-presentation.
Much research has examined the role of help in creativity, highlighting the benefits of receiving help, often under the assumption that helping behavior is intended to benefit recipients. We apply the autonomous-dependent distinction, which describes how help is delivered-either autonomously or in a controlling manner-and examine their differing effects on recipients' creativity in subsequent tasks through intrinsic motivation. Across two field studies and one experiment, we consistently find that receiving dependent help from coworkers hinders creativity in subsequent tasks, whereas receiving autonomous help enhances it. These effects are mediated by recipients' intrinsic motivation. Our findings reveal a detrimental consequence of receiving dependent help: it can impose motivational costs that ultimately stifle creativity in subsequent tasks in the same domain. We conclude that the manner in which help is delivered is crucial, extending beyond its contents, sources, and technical adequacy.
Although performance standards and expectations at work are not solely self-determined, prior research on perfectionism has typically adopted an employee-centric approach, producing mixed empirical evidence. In this study, we adopt a role theory perspective to examine how the dyadic congruence and incongruence between employee and supervisor perfectionism impact employees at work. Specifically, integrating the perfectionism literature with tenets of role theory, we propose that higher congruence between an employee’s self-oriented perfectionism and their supervisor’s other-oriented perfectionism reduces role ambiguity, which in turn predicts higher job satisfaction, lower emotional exhaustion, and subsequently higher task performance. The incongruence effects were hypothesized to be asymmetric, such that the negative implications were stronger for low employee self-oriented perfectionism-high supervisor other-oriented perfectionism configurations (vs. high employee self-oriented perfectionism-low supervisor other-oriented perfectionism configurations). Results from analyses using multi-source time-lagged data from 357 employees and 98 supervisors suggest that the impact of employee perfectionism at work is better understood alongside consideration of supervisor other-oriented perfectionism, as supervisors are a critical source of evaluative standards and expectations shaping employee role perceptions in the workplace.
Organizations frequently aim to display their allyship with the LGBTQ+ community, often through campaigns, advertisements, and statements, particularly during Pride Month. Although existing research typically focuses on the content of such allyship displays, we integrate theories of attribution and identity safety to reveal how the perceived authenticity of organizational allyship depends on when organizations display it. Across six preregistered experiments using field, laboratory, and online samples, we find that both LGBTQ+ observers (Experiments 1, 3, 5, and 6) and LGBTQ+ employees (Experiments 2 and 4) perceive organizational allyship displays as less authentic when displayed during Pride Month as opposed to other times, even when the content of the allyship display is held constant. We further find that the timing of organizational allyship displays shapes perceived authenticity because timing shapes the extent to which LGBTQ+ individuals attribute values-driven motives to the organization's allyship (Experiments 3 and 4), a process that, in turn, impacts employees' sense of belonging and organizational commitment (Experiment 4). Lastly, we find that this effect is unique to LGBTQ+ individuals: non-target groups, such as cis-straight observers, evaluate the authenticity of allyship displays similarly, regardless of timing (Experiments 5 and 6). This work advances research on allyship and has implications for how perceptions of allyship are influenced by social identity. To be an authentic ally, it is not just what an organization says, but also when an organization says it.
Drawing on experiential learning theory and a nonwork-work enrichment perspective, this research examines if and how employee crisis volunteering as nonwork volunteering efforts to address public crisis situations fosters resilience that then enhances change-oriented behaviors at work. We propose that crisis volunteering can represent an experiential learning opportunity as it provides concrete and meaningful experiences that enable individuals to develop effective responses to adversity and derive positive meaning. Such processes strengthen resilience, which further enhances adaptive and creative performance at work. We further highlight the importance of context, proposing that employees' perceived crisis strength and organizational culture of companionate love may amplify the effect of crisis volunteering. Evidence from five complementary field studies supports our theoretical model. A field experiment (Study 1) and a field quasi-experiment (Study 2) establish the causal effect of crisis volunteering on resilience and demonstrate the moderating roles of perceived crisis strength and companionate love culture. Two time-lagged, multisource field surveys conducted in distinct crisis contexts (Studies 3 and 4) provide converging support for the hypotheses. Finally, a qualitative study (Study 5) details the experiential learning processes through which crisis volunteering cultivates resilience and reveals broader transformative implications beyond the workplace.
