ABSTRACT Executive retirement represents a pivotal career transition with significant implications. However, our understanding of the antecedents of executive retirement remains limited. We contend that, different from the retirement of general employees, it is important to position executive retirement within an achievement context and consider factors such as firm performance and achievement goal orientations. Drawing on late adulthood developmental psychology, we propose an achievement goal framework to theorize the relationship between firm performance and executive retirement, and the moderating roles of goal orientations. We theorize that firm performance is associated with two distinct mechanisms: the legacy fulfillment mechanism (salient for executives with high performance) and the selective prioritization mechanism (salient for executives with low performance), which together result in a U‐shaped relationship between firm performance and the likelihood of executive retirement. We further consider executives’ goal orientations as boundary conditions to probe the underlying mechanisms. We found general support for our theory using an archival dataset of 1840 chief executive officers from S&P 1500 firms (Study 1) and a two‐wave survey of 363 executives (Study 2). By integrating developmental psychology theories into the executive retirement literature, our research sheds light on executive retirement decisions through a developmental psychology lens.
ABSTRACT Scholars emphasize inclusive leadership's benefits for leaders and employees, yet existing theory largely overlooks the challenges leaders face when addressing disparities experienced by historically marginalized employees. Drawing on an inductive study of 47 historically marginalized STEM employees and 14 leaders they identified as inclusive, we model inclusive leadership as a three‐part process: (1) leaders’ inclusion efforts (attentive learning, talent amplification, and structural debiasing); (2) resistance to these efforts (skepticism, gatekeeping, fit critiques, and non‐compliance); and (3) leader strategies to mitigate resistance and protect inclusion (explaining value, co‐crafting strategies, evaluating fit critiques, and managing change momentum). We triangulate findings and test our theory's boundary conditions using qualitative data from three additional STEM samples: racial minority men, lower‐ranking women, and White males. The first two samples replicate our model; the third reveals that White men may perceive inclusive leadership differently than historically marginalized employees. By centering the perspectives of those most affected by bias, our study extends inclusive leadership theory. We offer a processual view that moves beyond detailing inclusive behaviors to highlight the challenges leaders face enacting them.
ABSTRACT How included employees feel at work fluctuates meaningfully from day to day. Emerging research demonstrates that these fluctuations have important implications for employee well‐being. Yet little is known about the cognitive processes through which these effects extend beyond the workday. Drawing on Ilies and colleagues' (2024) model of work‐derived well‐being, we propose that evening work reflection constitutes a key mechanism linking daily perceptions of workgroup inclusion to next‐morning well‐being. We further argue that daily fluctuations in perceived workgroup inclusion carry greater psychological significance for employees who perceive themselves as underrepresented or non‐prototypical within their immediate work environment (i.e., contextual minorities), thereby exerting a stronger influence on subsequent work reflection and well‐being. Using a daily diary design with morning, afternoon, and evening surveys ( n = 3480 days; N = 389 employees), multilevel path analyses supported the proposed model, demonstrating that positive and negative evening work reflection explain how daily workgroup inclusion carries over to next‐morning well‐being. By identifying positive and negative work reflection as distinct pathways linking daily workgroup inclusion to employee well‐being, and establishing contextual minority status as a boundary condition of these processes, we advance understanding of how , and for whom , the effects of daily workgroup inclusion extend beyond the workday. Together, these findings underscore the importance of fostering day to day workgroup inclusion to support employee well‐being in increasingly diverse workplaces.
ABSTRACT This article presents a curated set of 40 questions on diversity, equity, and inclusion in organizations (DEI) to address myths and misperceptions about its role in Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology and Management research and practice. We crowdsourced questions from our professional networks and organized the responses into themes including foundations of DEI, the business case, DEI effectiveness, DEI resistance, legal interpretations, DEI pullback, measurement, and programs and vehicles. Though the review is not entirely comprehensive, the aim is to utilize the most up‐to‐date literature to answer many of the most pressing questions about DEI.
Despite progress toward gender equity, women remain disadvantaged in gaining workplace recognition. We theorize that prosocial motivation helps women achieve parity in workplace recognition by providing a role-congruent path to becoming valued advice sources. Drawing on social role theory and role congruity theory, we propose that women are less likely than men to occupy central positions in advice networks, but that high prosocial motivation closes this gap. Advice centrality, in turn, functions as a peer-conferred signal of workplace recognition that supports leadership emergence and performance ratings. Across a time-lagged, multi-source field study and two online experiments, we find support for this model. Study 1 (n = 275) shows that women occupy less central positions in advice networks than men, but that high prosocial motivation closes this gap. Advice network centrality further mediates the interactive effects of gender and prosocial motivation on leadership emergence and performance ratings. Two online experiments (Study 2a, n = 247; Study 2b, n = 248) provide converging causal evidence for these effects. These findings show that prosocial motivation helps women achieve parity with men in workplace recognition, while raising the possibility that such parity may rest on demands that fall asymmetrically on women.
