Measures of masculinity contest culture (MCC) examine the degree to which workplace norms align with traditional tenets of masculinity. Past research suggests MCC is negatively related to job satisfaction. Informed by theories of MCC, we begin to unravel the moderating variables through which this relationship is attenuated or strengthened via testing gender and two forms of perceived success at work (in-role competence and social embeddedness), informing on whether MCCs relate to lesser job satisfaction for all employees or primarily among subsets of those who perceive they perform poorly within them. Hypotheses were tested using a three-timepoint survey with a sample of 408 full-time employed adults. Results from a 5,000 bootstrap linear regression suggest the relationship between MCC and job satisfaction is moderated by gender. The relationship is strongest among men with lower perceived social embeddedness and is not statistically significant among men with higher perceived social embeddedness. In contrast, the relationship is not significant among women who report social embeddedness scores that approach the minimum but is consistently negative otherwise. Moreover, there was no evidence that social embeddedness was a moderator absent gender. Additionally, there were no moderation effects associated with perceived in-role competence, potentially reflecting that in-role performance may not buffer employees against the potential harms of MCC environments. Implications for employee wellbeing, employee performance, and theories of masculinity contest culture are discussed.
How does a project team’s response to the timing of task alterations affect its receptiveness to these alterations? In addition, what role do creative team processes play in determining the team’s response? The purpose of the present research is to explore answers to these questions. We start our theoretical analysis with the assumption that creative project teams facing a deadline progress through varying levels of divergent and convergent team processes, manifesting in process-specific trajectories. In Study 1a, we empirically demonstrate these trajectories for 20 creative project teams. We then examine how creative project teams respond to task alterations at two times of heightened readiness—early or at the temporal midpoint of a team project (Study 1b). In a sample of 68 creative project teams, we find that optimal information integration requires teams to recalibrate some of those processes that are disturbed when a task alteration occurs. Specifically, midpoint (relative to early) intervention teams integrated more novel information when they engaged in idea implementation right after the task alteration, whereas early (relative to midpoint) intervention teams integrated more novel information when they engaged in problem formulation. Higher levels of information integration, in turn, predicted creative outcomes. We discuss implications for team creativity and team adaptation.
Leader perfectionism is receiving increasing research attention, yet scholars continue to debate whether, when, and how it enhances or undermines follower performance. Adopting a meaning-centric perspective, we theorize that leader vision—a leader-originated and follower-perceived meaning cue—conditions whether leader perfectionism is associated with follower task reflexivity or ego depletion, which in turn implicates follower performance. Through a behavioral experiment involving 412 participants completing a work task (study 1) and a three-wave field study involving 72 supervisors and 280 employees (study 2), we consistently found that leader perfectionism was positively associated with follower task reflexivity when leader vision was strong. In study 2, task reflexivity further accounted for a positive conditional indirect association between leader perfectionism and follower job performance. In study 1, the effect of leader perfectionism on follower ego depletion was stronger when leader vision was weak, but this moderating effect was not replicated in study 2; although ego depletion was negatively related to follower performance, the corresponding conditional indirect effect was not supported. Overall, the findings of the two studies indicate that leader vision shapes how leader perfectionism is experienced by followers, revealing the circumstances under which this leader trait functions as a catalyst versus a constraint in follower performance. We discuss the implications of the findings for both theory and practice.
Employees reshape their roles to help others; yet existing theories explain either proactive self-directed job redesign or prosocial behavior within existing role boundaries. We introduce Prosocial Job Crafting (PSJC), a distinct form of role-based job crafting through which individuals proactively modify their jobs’ task, relational, and cognitive boundaries to create opportunities to benefit others. PSJC draws on the three dimensions of prosociality, linking perceived prosocial impact, prosocial motivation, and prosocial behavior. The paper presents two empirical studies: in Study 1, we develop and validate a new scale measuring PSJC with data collected from employees in the USA (N = 500), and in Study 2, we test our theoretical model with matched data collected from Hungarian academic library employees (N = 262) and performance rating from their direct supervisors (N = 8). Perceived prosocial impact predicted all three forms of PSJC; however, only task PSJC positively predicted performance. Findings suggest that the dimensions of PSJC have distinct behavioral implications and PSJC is not a uniform phenomenon. We establish Job Crafting as not exclusively pro-self, and that prosociality can be enacted through proactive job redesign.
Work teams are increasingly characterized by diverse cultural backgrounds. Although research has established that cultural diversity holds the potential to enhance team performance through information elaboration—the exchange, discussion, and integration of task-relevant information—prior work has treated elaboration as an undifferentiated process, leaving unspecified whether it occurs across or within cultural boundaries. We develop a differentiated elaboration perspective that distinguishes cross-culture information elaboration between culturally dissimilar members from same-culture information elaboration between culturally similar members. Using a multi-source, multi-wave study of 104 culturally diverse teams comprising 587 members, we found that, as expected, cross-culture elaboration was more strongly related to team performance than same-culture elaboration. Moreover, team learning orientation predicted both forms of elaboration, and its indirect association with team performance was stronger through cross-culture elaboration. These findings advance a differentiated elaboration perspective to demonstrate that elaboration that crosses cultural boundaries is more important for diverse teams than same-culture elaboration. This points to opportunities for future research on reaping the benefits of diverse teams.
