ABSTRACT Newcomers comprise substantial portions of modern workforces, yet they represent high exit risks due to their lack of embeddedness in their new firms. Organizations often source new employees via comobility, wherein newcomers join simultaneously from another firm. Despite the prevalence of comobility and other affiliation‐based hiring practices, research to date has not considered if, when, or how those affiliations affect newcomer retention. We also have scant research on the effects of such comobile, affiliation‐based hiring on incumbent retention, a vital consideration for organizations. Integrating comobility and turnover event theorizing, we explore how comobility affects subsequent exit likelihood. We argue that comovers benefit from the embeddedness fortified through shared ties and work structures with other comovers, increasing their retention. Conversely, we posit that the arrival of comovers negatively impacts incumbents’ social and work structures, reducing incumbents’ job embeddedness and increasing their exit likelihoods. We expect these effects to be amplified when comobility groups are larger and have a leader. We test our framework in two archival analyses of United States (U.S.) college football coaches and U.S. law firm partners (2001‐2018). To investigate how comobility affects embeddedness with comovers and incumbents, we conducted an exploratory cross‐industry survey of full‐time U.S. workers and targeted interviews with comovers to illustrate the phenomenon.
ABSTRACT An extensive body of evidence supports the benefits of team training on team outcomes, yet the extent to which individuals themselves benefit from such training remains largely underexplored. Drawing on role and self‐regulation theories, this study examines how team role orientations influence the extent to which team members acquire the targeted competencies of team training. We explain how team role orientations direct team member cognitive and behavioral resources in team training contexts, and team members’ specific role orientations can either aid or hinder individual learning outcomes. From a sample of 84 student teams ( N = 330) engaged in a simulation‐based team training program, we find that the Doer role orientation enhances taskwork knowledge and skill outcomes from team training, the Team Builder orientation enhances teamwork skill and knowledge outcomes, and the Organizer role orientation inhibits taskwork knowledge and skill and teamwork knowledge outcomes. We also hypothesize regulatory learning behavior (i.e., planning, assessing, and adjusting individual contributions to teams) as a key mediating mechanism that explains these effects and find supporting evidence as it relates to the Doer and Team Builder orientations. Further, we find support for the amplifying top‐down influence of team learning effectiveness on the relationships between Doer and Organizer orientations and learning outcomes. Our findings underscore the complexity of individual learning transfer in team training settings, emphasizing the need to consider team contexts, individual tendencies, and regulatory learning behaviors when designing team training interventions.
ABSTRACT First impressions are critical in shaping work‐related outcomes and social judgments in organizational contexts. However, research has generated conflicting findings and left unanswered questions about their dimensional structure, antecedents, consequences, and temporal stability. We meta‐analyzed 204 independent samples from 145 studies to address these ambiguities and generate a stronger foundation for future theoretical development. Results reveal that perceivers tend to form broad evaluations of displayers rather than unique, narrow impressions, as conceptually distinct impression dimensions demonstrated consistently positive and often sizable cross‐dimension correlations. While perceivers rely on a range of informational cues to form first impressions, certain types (i.e., communication cues) exert a more consistent impact than others (e.g., content cues). First impressions strongly predicted both achievement‐oriented and relational outcomes, and although these effects diminished somewhat over time, they remained highly durable even at longer durations (i.e., more than a month). Taken together, these findings help reconcile competing theoretical perspectives on first impressions and provide numerous insights for more coherent theorizing and precise applications in organizational settings.
Many married couples are in a dual-earner situation, where both partners are managing their own jobs and careers. In these families, there are likely to be times when a partner makes concessions pertaining to their own work in order to achieve a shared family objective. This was particularly true during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic when dual-earner couples with young children suddenly found themselves managing work demands without childcare. For most couples, this required some type of work adjustment-work-related sacrifices that hinder goal progress-to handle family responsibilities. Using a sample of 187 dual-earner couples with young children, the present study takes a dyadic approach by considering each spouse's job characteristics as predictors of perceived relative work adjustments within the couple, and by examining the relationship between relative work adjustments and four indicators of couples' well-being. We used dyadic polynomial regression and response-surface analyses to test whether differences between spouses in schedule flexibility and job role indispensability predicted their relative work adjustment, beyond the effects of each spouse's flexibility and indispensability considered separately. Findings revealed that relative work adjustments depended on consideration of one's own schedule flexibility in relation to the schedule flexibility of their spouse, such that the person with greater flexibility was perceived to have adjusted relatively more. Job role indispensability showed a similar trend, but in the opposite direction, such that spouses with greater indispensability adjusted relatively less. Moreover, the negative effects of relative work adjustment on relationship outcomes were generally stronger for women than for men.
New ventures face ongoing demands for exploratory and exploitative activities (i.e., explore new opportunities while also optimizing their existing operations) throughout their establishment and operations. To succeed, entrepreneurial teams must therefore develop and sustain team ambidexterity-the ability to integrate these competing demands-over time. Given that entrepreneurial team formation has a profound and enduring influence on venture growth, this research examines how specific formation strategies shape the ongoing development of team ambidexterity and entrepreneurial effectiveness. Drawing on the dynamic equilibrium model, we propose that the dual formation strategy, which integrates interpersonal attraction and resource complementarity strategies, enables entrepreneurial teams to achieve higher entrepreneurial effectiveness by fostering a more favorable team ambidexterity trajectory slope (i.e., an ongoing increase in team ambidexterity) over time, compared to relying solely on singular strategies. We tested our hypotheses using a mixed-method approach; this included interviews with 53 entrepreneurs from 36 real-world entrepreneurial teams and a longitudinal study of 274 entrepreneurial teams participating in business simulation contests. Both the qualitative and quantitative data provide support for our model. These findings offer several theoretical and practical implications and suggest promising directions for future research.
In this article, we present a curated set of 40 questions on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to address its rapidly evolving role in Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology, Human Resources (HR), and Organizational Behavior (OB) research and practice. We solicited questions from our professional networks and organized the responses into themes: what AI is, its technical components, emerging best practices for AI in research, guidance for reviewing AI-based work, and using AI in reviewing. This is intended to be a sufficiently extensive, though not comprehensive, overview of AI and its use in our field.
Teams are core to modern organizations. Yet, the science of teams has grown increasingly specialized, making it difficult for scholars and practitioners to integrate core insights across levels of analysis and emerging contexts. In this article, we provide concise, evidence-based responses to 40 pressing questions about the scope, design, functioning, leadership, and evolution of teams. We address foundational issues of team definition and enabling conditions; composition, diversity, and reward structures; team cognition, conflict, affect, and learning; leadership and coaching; top management teams and board dynamics; multiteam systems; and the implications of hybrid work and artificial intelligence (AI). Across these domains, several integrative themes emerge: team effectiveness is fundamentally shaped by design; individual capabilities must be activated and integrated to generate collective performance; coordination challenges change qualitatively as systems scale; and technological tools amplify, rather than replace, core teamwork mechanisms. By synthesizing current knowledge, clarifying boundary conditions, and identifying unresolved tensions, we aim to inform practical organizational decisions while advancing a more cumulative, multilevel science of groups and teams.
Extant research primarily focuses on negative work gossip occurring within organizational boundaries. However, due to the social risks associated with sharing gossip in the workplace, employees alternatively share work gossip with their romantic partner at home. Drawing on the control perspective of repetitive thoughts, we examine how sharing negative work gossip with one's partner at home after work influences employees' subsequent behaviors toward the gossip target at work the following day, as well as how the partner's response impacts those influences. We specifically propose that sharing negative work gossip with one's partner elicits both maladaptive repetitive thoughts (in the form of affect-focused rumination) and adaptive repetitive thoughts (in the form of problem-solving pondering). These distinct cognitive processes, in turn, exert opposing effects on employees' interpersonal behaviors toward the gossip target, including their social engagement and helping behavior. Additionally, we propose that the partner's reframing response plays a moderating role by attenuating the maladaptive consequences of negative work gossip while enhancing its adaptive consequences. We test our hypotheses across three complementary studies: a 10-day multi-source experience-sampling study, a recall-based experiment, and a vignette-based experiment. Results across these studies largely support our hypotheses. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.
Integrating the emotions as social information (EASI) theory and the signaling functions of anxiety, we develop and test a within-person dual-path model to unravel the benefits (affiliative consequences) and costs (social distancing consequences) of daily anxiety expression at work within coworker relationships, as well as the boundary conditions that influence these outcomes from an observer's perspective. Observing a coworker expressing anxiety on a given day may elicit an employee's perspective taking due to the signal of neediness, resulting in increased helping behavior directed toward that coworker. The same expression may also evoke perceptions of incompetence because of the signal of weakness, thereby leading to greater ostracism toward that coworker. We hypothesize that the presence of overall rivalry between the employee and the anxious coworker serves as a critical boundary condition that shapes the intensity of these within-person affiliative and socially distancing processes. We tested our theoretical model using a 10-day experience sampling study and a within-person experiment. Our findings inform theory and practice by extending knowledge on the positive and negative reactions to daily coworker anxiety expression and illustrating the pivotal role of rivalry perceptions in modulating reactions to coworker anxiety expression at work.
This study examines the extent to which demographic diversity is related to firm survival in the context of new venture teams (NVTs). Further, the study tests insights from the categorization-elaboration model to examine whether human capital within the NVT moderates the focal relationship. The study utilizes data on 608 new ventures across 3549 venture-years from the Kauffman Firm Survey to assess the main effects of demographic diversity and the moderating effects of human capital on new venture survival. Results indicate that gender diversity is positively related to new venture survival, and this relationship is accentuated by general (GHC) but not industry-specific (ISHC) human capital. Results indicate that racial and age diversity are not directly related to new venture survival; these relationships are conditional on human capital, such that they are positive when GHC and ISHC are higher, and negative when they are lower. These results advance research on the categorization-elaboration model (CEM) and on new ventures by demonstrating the utility of combining human capital and demographic diversity to form strategic resources beneficial to new venture survival.
The existing job insecurity research predominantly focuses on general employees, viewing job insecurity as an intrapersonal phenomenon that primarily affects the person experiencing it. Shifting this focus to leaders, this research aims to examine how and when leader job insecurity may have interpersonal implications on team outcomes. Integrating the job insecurity literature and the emotion as social information (EASI) model, we theorize that job insecurity experienced by team leaders renders their frequent display of anxiety, which in turn induces two parallel emotion-based mechanisms-higher team anxiety and lower team perception of leader effectiveness-that subsequently influence team outcomes (i.e., team task performance and team citizenship behavior). Further, we examine emotional stability of the leader and emotional stability of team members as two important contingencies for such ripple effects. Findings from a field survey study and four vignette-based experiments in different cultural contexts largely support our hypotheses. Our research offers novel insights into the complex ripple effects of leader job insecurity in teams.
Virtual work has become a defining feature of modern organizations, intensifying the need for strategies that support virtual team performance. Communication delays-prolonged intervals between sending and receiving messages-are one of the most persistent and consequential barriers to virtual team performance. However, effective mitigation strategies remain scarce, likely due to an incomplete understanding of the explanatory mechanisms linking delays to team performance. Adopting a dynamic view of teamwork, we propose that delays impair team performance by disrupting collective attention-the synchronous focus of team members on a shared target. Building on the collective attention literature, we identify three factors that help teams sustain collective attention during communication delays: task experience, which strengthens members' capacity to coordinate attention; message simplicity, which increases the clarity of attentional cues; and shared leadership, which enhances social connectivity and mutual engagement. We test our framework in two studies. Study 1, a longitudinal spaceflight simulation, demonstrates that collective attention mediates the negative relationship between communication delay and team performance, and task experience buffers this effect. Study 2 uses a calibrated agent-based model (ABM) to simulate how collective attention networks evolve under varying levels of communication delay, task experience, message simplicity, and shared leadership. Results show that collective attention is best sustained when teams combine high task experience with clear communication and distributed influence. Together, these studies position collective attention as a central mechanism explaining how communication delays degrade team functioning and offer a multi-pronged intervention framework for sustaining it amid the challenges of virtual teamwork.
This study examines whether Large Language Models can serve as reliable supplements to human judgment in evaluating text-based task performance. Through two studies analyzing 744 knowledge-based performance outputs, we compare ratings from multiple LLM architectures (GPT-4, GPT-5, o3, Claude Sonnet 4, DeepSeek v3) against human evaluators (individual and aggregated ratings), with external expert consensus serving as the validity benchmark for both. Our multi-model design reveals that various LLMs demonstrate comparable or superior evaluation capabilities relative to human raters, with newer models showing enhanced performance. Using external expert panels as validation criteria, we find that advanced AI models achieve correlations up to r = 0.62 with expert consensus, surpassing aggregated human ratings (r = 0.50). Different AI systems exhibit higher consistency than human evaluators while showing varying bias resistance: newer models demonstrate minimal susceptibility to halo effects, while earlier models show greater vulnerability (GPT-4 declining 35.6%). Our findings validate LLMs as reliable supplements to human evaluation, establishing external benchmarking protocols and providing evidence-based guidance for selecting appropriate models based on evaluation requirements and bias resistance needs.
Music listening while working is prevalent in contemporary workplaces, with extensive research demonstrating its psychological and behavioral implications. Shifting focus from intra-individual outcomes, the present research examines the social implications of music listening at work. To do so, we adopt a novel third-party perspective to investigate how observers perceive and react to music listeners. Building on attribution theory, we argue that music listening is an ambiguous behavior that invites observers to make leisure or productivity attributions, thereby shaping how they perceive and treat music listeners. We hypothesize that observers perceive music listeners (vs. non-listeners) as less engaged if they attribute the listening to leisure rather than productivity. In turn, these engagement perceptions influence observers' judgments of the listener's performance and withdrawal, resulting in punitive observer reactions: decreased support and enacted incivility toward the listener. A dyadic field study, an online experiment, and a dyadic field experiment supported our hypotheses. Further analyses and supplemental studies identify antecedents of leisure-productivity attributions, consider alternative explanations (including possible positive outcomes), and explore likely boundary conditions (e.g., headphone type, generalizability across roles). We advance theory on music at work, observer attributions, and reactions, while highlighting the unintended social costs of this ubiquitous behavior.
Strategic human resource management (HRM) scholars have extensively examined the impact of a high-performance work system (HPWS) on firm performance outcomes and the conditions that influence this relationship. However, the factors that affect how intensively a firm uses an HPWS remain less understood. Building on Wright and McMahan's (1992) model of strategic HRM, this meta-analytic study examines the relationships of firm strategic (e.g., business strategy) and institutional environmental forces (e.g., environmental dynamism) on firms' HPWS use. Additionally, we examine the relative importance of the two sets of forces in determining a firm's HPWS use while accounting for the correlations among the various factors. Our findings across various types of studies/samples suggest that (a) firms' strategic forces are substantially more influential than institutional environmental forces as antecedents of a firm's HPWS use; (b) factors in the firm resources and capacities domain are relatively more important than those in the business strategy domain; and (c) a differentiation strategy, firm size, past performance, and firm capital intensity are, on average, the most important determinants among all forces. Lastly, we examine whether and how rating sources, HPWS operationalization, and the level of analysis influence the antecedent-HPWS relationships.
Teams researchers, meta-analysts, and others often study relationships between group-level constructs measured by aggregating individual-level variables, but it is well-known that group-mean correlations are influenced by individual-level relationships. We review multilevel issues and current practices in estimating and adjusting group-mean associations. We give special attention to comparisons across levels of analysis, and to adjustments for estimating population parameters. A Monte Carlo simulation study indicates that the two most commonly used adjustments in meta-analysis are ineffective in estimating population-based effect sizes. They frequently overestimate true relationships, sometimes severely. Indeed, simulations show that common adjustments move estimates away from population values in many situations. We suggest an alternative approach to adjustment that produces more accurate and conservative estimates. We apply our approach to examples in the literature and call into question estimates and interpretations in a large body of meta-analyses based on aggregated group-mean variables.
The entrepreneurship literature emphasizes the importance of imprints founders leave on companies; those imprints can change at transformational events such as the initial public offering (IPO). Prior research has found that objective measures (such as structure or compensation systems) can imprint and predict survival post IPO. However, executive value imprinting has received less attention. We theorize that executive values, which are core to the change management literature, are particularly important for post-IPO imprinting. Expanding employee-organization relationships to firm-level outcomes, we argue that optimization (not underemphasis or overemphasis) of the executive values of sense of urgency and valuing employees creates a unique human resource condition that is key to long-term survival after the change event of the IPO. Based on the role of the human resource executive (HRE) as a change agent, we posit that having an HRE in place positively impacts 20-year survival of the firm as its own, independent entity, by bolstering the initial imprint with ongoing support of the imprinted values. We find support for our hypotheses using survey data from executives leading companies from the 1996 IPO cohort and longitudinal archival data. We contribute to the literature on imprinting in IPOs, change management, and human resource management.
Whereas organizational network studies infer employees’ agentic desires through observed network changes, we capture desires to collaborate more closely with co-workers directly through a survey. We argue that formal structures create workflow dependencies between employees as they gather others’ inputs to complete their tasks, and individuals desire to alter their networks to manage those dependencies using the following two main collaborative approaches: (1) collaborating more intensely with existing formal workflow network partners; and (2) engaging in bypassing approaches with specific partners outside of their prescribed formal workflow. We found that employees pursued a tie-strengthening approach with formal partners they already trusted to provide high-quality work inputs in a reliable manner. When using the bypassing approach, employees’ choice of desired partners reduced their workflow dependencies on alters upstream in the formal workflow, detouring around them either by choosing an alter that was structurally equivalent to existing partners or moving two steps further upstream to choose alters that close disadvantageous structural holes, suggesting these potential greater collaboration ties had higher latent structural value . Our study illustrates agentic desires toward dealing with the formal workflow's dependencies through the choice of specific partners with whom to collaborate more closely in the future, using tie-strengthening and bypassing approaches.
