In practice, firms' managers are key decision-makers and are often plagued by optimistic bias. In collaborative innovation, this optimism manifests in both alignment and divergence among parties, which affects the efficiency and stability of collaborative innovation. However, the conditions and mechanisms underlying these effects remain unclear. To explore this issue, we consider a collaborative supply chain in which the supplier and the downstream manufacturer are realistic or optimistic. This article demonstrates the positive promotion of managerial optimism in innovation and shows that optimistic managers can innovate even when the profit in the supply chain is negative. Moreover, aligned optimism allows the supplier to shift the burden of innovation and cost to the manufacturer, increasing the manufacturer's innovation level. However, compared to aligned optimism, divergent optimism can lead to win-win outcomes under certain conditions. Furthermore, our findings suggest that when the optimism bias in consumer innovation preference is high, the supplier should choose a collaborator with an aligned attitude. Similarly, when the bias is moderate, the manufacturer should make the same choice. In both cases, aligned attitudes help synchronize decisions, which can benefit both firms due to higher innovation levels and reasonable prices.

Based on self-verification theory, this study examines whether compatibility between a supervisor leadership style (i.e., abusive supervision) and a subordinate dispositional characteristic (i.e., negative affectivity) relates to subordinates’ job satisfaction. The present study proposes and finds that the effects of abusive supervision on subordinate job satisfaction are attenuated when the subordinate has high negative affectivity. Field studies from the United States and China reveal that the negative relationship between abusive supervision and subordinate job satisfaction is weakened (i.e., becomes less negative) when the subordinate has higher levels of negative affectivity compared to when the subordinate has lower levels of negative affectivity.

Existing research has predominantly framed defensive silence as an avoidance response to interpersonal mistreatments. Moving beyond this view, this study theorizes defensive silence as a proactive strategy for managing interpersonal relationships through the lens of sociometer theory. We posit that workplace ostracism will reduce employees’ organization-based self-esteem (OBSE), which in turn increases their subsequent defensive silence to avert further damage to relationships. In addition, we also expect a moderating role of the sense of power in mitigating the negative impact of workplace ostracism on OBSE. Based on the multi-wave, multi-source data of 345 employees and their 82 immediate supervisors, we tested all the hypotheses. Results from multilevel modeling indicated that OBSE mediated the indirect effect of workplace ostracism on defensive silence, and also supported the moderation role of sense of power. Our theoretical model provides a novel perspective that deepens the understanding of defensive silence and suggests implications for managerial practices.

Leaders' use of directive leadership has been found to increase when they face an unprecedented crisis. However, extant literature has failed to answer how directive leadership functions in this specific situation. Using the return-to-work after COVID-19 lockdown as an example, we drew upon regulatory focus theory and conducted three studies to investigate the temporal effects of directive leadership on followers' regulatory foci and work role performance. In Study 1, we conducted an experience sampling method (ESM) study tracking a sample of 250 employees over 1 week when the COVID-19 was originally reported in China. In Study 2, we conducted another ESM study on 125 employees over 2 weeks when the Omicron variant was surging in China. Both studies showed that the positive effect of daily directive leadership on followers' work promotion focus was strongest on the first day upon returning to work after lockdowns but decreased over time. In contrast, the positive effect of daily directive leadership on followers' work prevention focus increased throughout our sampling periods and became strongest on the last day. Moreover, our results indicate that daily directive leadership interacts with the elapsed time to influence two forms of work role performance - task proactivity and task proficiency - through the mediating roles of promotion focus and prevention focus, respectively. In Study 3, we conducted a vignette experiment employing a within- and between-subject design on a sample of 171 U.S. participants. The results further supported the moderating role of elapsed time after returning to work in the differential effects of directive leadership on followers' two regulatory foci.

In this study, we explore how and when abusive supervision may dampen two types of voice behavior: promotive and prohibitive voice. Drawing on social cognitive theory, we propose that employee voice self-efficacy (VSE) may mediate the negative relationships between abusive supervision and promotive/prohibitive voice. Furthermore, according to the conservation of resources theory, we argue that employees’ psychological resilience may buffer the negative indirect effects of abusive supervision on the two voice behaviors via follower VSE. Third, we propose that employees’ moral disengagement propensity (MDP) may attenuate the moderating effects of resilience, such that the buffering effects of resilience may occur only when MDP is low. We tested our conditional process model with time-lagged and multisource data collected from 656 employees and 99 supervisors in China. The results largely supported our hypotheses. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed.

In response to increased public consciousness around racism after George Floyd’s killing, many organizations released public statements to condemn racism and affirm their stance on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). However, little is known about the specific thematic contents of various diversity statements and their implications on important organizational outcomes. Taking both inductive and deductive approaches, the current research conducted two studies to advance our understanding in this area. We first employed novel unsupervised machine learning techniques and comprehensively analyzed the texts of diversity statements publicly released by Fortune 1000 companies in early June 2020. Our structural topic modeling uncovered six underlying latent semantic topics: 1) general DEI terms, 2) supporting Black community, 3) acknowledging Black community, 4) committing to diversifying the workforce, 5) miscellaneous words, and 6) titles and companies. Furthermore, drawing from the identity-blind and consciousness diversity ideologies framework and leveraging tens of millions of employee rating data points on Glassdoor.com, we further found evidence that companies that released (vs. did not release) diversity statements and companies whose diversity statements emphasized identity-conscious (vs. identity-blind) topics were more positively evaluated by their employees online. Our findings shed light on important theoretical implications for current diversity research and offer practical recommendations for organizational scientists and practitioners in diversity management.

Narcissism is widely considered to be a trait that is commonly found in leaders, but also a characteristic that is frequently a source of problems for their organizations. However, there is accumulating consensus in the organizational literature that, rather than a necessary evil, narcissism can potentially be a mixed blessing for leaders. The present study sets out to reconcile the paradoxical effects of leader narcissism by exploring when and how leader narcissism hampers or helps follower job performance. Utilizing a social cognitive approach to leadership and drawing upon the inferential model of leadership perceptions, we propose that leader effectiveness can shape followers’ dual collective leadership perceptions in response to leader narcissism and that these shared perceptions in turn influence follower job performance in opposing manners. The results of multi-wave, multi-source, and multilevel data showed that when leader narcissism was accompanied by low levels of leader effectiveness, followers collectively tended to perceive their leaders as being more narcissistic. However, when leader narcissism was accompanied by high levels of leader effectiveness, followers collectively tended to perceive their leaders as more charismatic. Followers’ dual collective leadership perceptions then mediated the joint effects of leader narcissism and leader effectiveness on follower job performance.

Although text data are ubiquitous in organizations, the advancement of text analysis methods has created an unfortunate bottleneck for many organizational researchers. This paper introduced the Structure Text Model (STM; Roberts et al., 2014), a cutting-edge text modeling method that uses an unsupervised machine learning model to statistically derive latent semantic topics underlying a collection of text documents. More importantly, the STM method has the advantage of modeling document-level variables (i.e., metadata) as covariates, which is critical for organizational research. We also demonstrated the application of STM in diversity research: comprehensively analyzing a large number of diversity statements publicly released by Fortune 1000 companies. Our structural topic modeling uncovered six underlying latent semantic topics: 1) general DEI terms, 2) supporting Black community, 3) acknowledging Black community, 4) committing to diversifying workforce, 5) miscellaneous words, and 6) titles and companies. We further explored and found that the prevalence of these topics varied as a function of company characteristics, including industry sector, CEO race, corporate political orientation, etc. Our paper not only demonstrates the promising application of Structural Text Models in organizational research, but also provides important theoretical implications for current diversity research through the meaningful findings.

Following the deaths of many Black Americans in spring 2020, public consciousness rose around the societal mega-threat of racism. In response, many organizations released public statements to condemn racism and affirm their stance on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). However, little is known about the specific thematic contents covered in such diversity statements and their implications on important organizational outcomes. Taking both inductive and deductive approaches, we conducted two studies to advance our understanding in this area. Study 1 employed structural topic modeling (STM)—an advanced unsupervised machine-learning text-mining technique—and comprehensively analyzed the latent semantic topics underlying the diversity statements publicly released by Fortune 1000 companies in late May and early June 2020. The results uncovered six underlying latent semantic topics: (1) general DEI terms, (2) supporting Black community, (3) acknowledging Black community, (4) committing to diversifying the workforce, (5) miscellaneous words, and (6) titles and companies. Furthermore, drawing from the identity-blindness and identity-consciousness theoretical frameworks and leveraging millions of data points of employees’ DEI ratings retrieved from Glassdoor.com, Study 2 further tested and supported hypotheses that companies were more positively rated by their employees on organizational diversity and inclusion if they (1) released (vs. did not release) diversity statements and (2) emphasized identity-conscious (vs. identity-blind) topics in their diversity statements. Our findings shed light on important theoretical implications for the current research and offer practical recommendations for organizational scientists and practitioners in diversity management.

Synthesizing the literature on voice, creativity, and supervisor listening, our research built and tested a theoretical model linking voice opportunity with creative performance, moderated by supervisor listening. Using multisource, multiwave survey data from 347 employees and 91 supervisors in a large company in China, we found that when supervisors were attentive and listened to their subordinates, voice opportunity was positively related with creative process engagement, which in turn resulted in creative performance. Exploring the link between voice opportunity and creative performance with supervisor listening as a boundary condition of the relationship, our study contributes to the successful transition of voice inputs into creative outcomes.

Drawing on the identity perspective, we investigate the roles of organizational and moral identification in the relationship between abusive supervision and subordinates' organizational deviance. By conducting a multiwave study of 182 subordinate-supervisor dyads, we found that organizational identification partially mediated the relationship between abusive supervision and subordinates' organizational deviance after controlling for perceived leader social support as an alternative mediator. In addition, we demonstrated that organizational identification interacted with moral identification in affecting organizational deviance in the workplace and that moral identification moderated the indirect effect of abusive supervision on organizational deviance via organizational identification. However, we did not find a mediating effect of moral identification, and we call for future studies to explore the impact of more specific facets of identities in abusive supervision situations. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Politics pervade our organizational lives. Thus, as Mintzberg noted, to survive and thrive in organizations, individuals need to possess both political skill and political will. However, political skill has received the lion’s share of scholarly attention. With the current research, we aim to advance the field toward empirical and theoretical balance as it relates to political will and its antecedents and evaluate its short- and long-term effects. We draw on social cognitive and social information processing theories and propose that political will is a learned individual characteristic. Furthermore, we extend the motivation, ability, opportunity framework by suggesting that political will interacts with political skill to shape opportunities, which in turn enhance job/contextual performance, and career success. Results across three studies, including five samples from three different cultural settings (USA, China, and Europe), provide support for a social information processing theory perspective, in that perceptions of supervisor political behavior and individuals’ history with organizational politics predict political will. In addition, we find support for the joint effect of political will and political skill on task performance and citizenship behavior, via leader-member exchanges. Finally, we demonstrate that political skill moderates the effect of political will on objective career success (overall and organization-specific) through career engagement. Our research contributes to a more nuanced understanding of political will and its role as an individual difference within an organizational politics paradigm and carries important implications for management theory and practice.

Researchers have predominantly examined the outcomes of workplace ostracism. A smaller stream focuses on the antecedents of workplace ostracism. Understanding the potential antecedents of workplace ostracism is the first step to prevent and control this subtle yet detrimental workplace aggressive behavior. In this chapter, we followed a triadic social process to examine the antecedents of workplace ostracism from the actor, the victim, and the work context's perspectives. We summarized the individual, the relational, and the contextual antecedents of workplace ostracism. First, we examined individual characteristics that predict the experience of workplace ostracism. This includes the victim's big-five personality traits, positive and negative affects, dark personality traits of psychopathy, narcissism, and paranoia, approach and avoidance tendencies, warmth and competence, and social abilities and skills. Second, we examined relational factors that predict workplace ostracism. From the victim's perspective, we examined workplace mistreatments such as incivility and interpersonal conflicts as possible antecedents of workplace ostracism. From the actor's perspective, we concluded that others' bad interpersonal and work behaviors elicit workplace ostracism. Third, we examined context factors that could incubate workplace ostracism, such as corporative versus competitive goal interdependence, social interactions based on interdependence theory and game-theoretic models, non-traditional work environments, and language barriers.

In today’s dynamic economic environment, enterprises must maintain sensitivity and flexibility when responding to the market through continuous strategic change. Anchored in the approach–inhibition theory of power, this study explores the relationship between CEO power and corporate strategic change and examines the moderating effects of company underperformance and product market competition. The study uses data from all A-share listed companies in China during 2006–2017. The results indicate that first, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between CEO power and corporate strategic change. Appropriate centralization of CEO power helps promote corporate strategic change, whereas excessive centralization hinders strategic change. Second, low underperformance strengthens the inverted U-shaped relationship between CEO power and strategic change. Finally, high product market competition strengthens the inverted U-shaped relationship between CEO power and strategic change.

With the explosion of online exchange of products, the sharing economy is experiencing ever-increasing growth. Despite the increasing popularity of lateral exchange market platforms as part of the sharing economy, research has not yet adequately investigated cultural effects on how consumers' intentions to purchase products on these platforms. Using two studies, this paper examines whether consumers high in individualism versus consumers high in collectivism respond differently to platforms with low versus high consociality and how individualistic and collectivistic consumers respond differently to two types of promotions that relate to self-maximization. Findings in Study 1 indicated that consumers high in individualism (collectivism) have higher patronage intentions toward a platform low (high) in consociality. Findings in Study 2 suggested that in the presence of a promotion, collectivistic consumers respond comparably to promotional types across platforms, whereas individualistic consumers respond more positively to collective (individual) promotions when consociality is low (high). Further, felt commitment to others as a result of the consociality/promotional type relationship explains these effects. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.