One of the challenges in virtual teams is the struggle to build and maintain effective interpersonal relationships in the context of communication constraints and physical separation. Addressing this challenge, this study examines the influence of four team relational climates - communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing - on the virtual team performance growth over time. While theory and empirical evidence suggest that relational climates influence outcomes at the organizational level and individual prosocial behaviors, there is a lack of research on how relational climates at the team level affect team performance. Based on longitudinal multilevel analyses of a six-country sample of 291 virtual teams engaged in an online strategy game, we find that communal sharing and authority ranking team relational climates positively influence team performance growth over time. We advance the literature by investigating how team relational climates differentially affect virtual team performance over time. Our findings suggest that organizations should consider designing virtual team tasks, cultures, and authority structures to support the emergence of communal sharing and authority ranking team relational climates.

Creative leadership, leading others toward the attainment of creative outcomes, manifests differently depending on the context. Theory suggests that contextual features can produce three distinct manifestations of leadership - integrative, facilitative, and directive - but that context may vary in strength, potentially allowing for multiple manifestations of creative leadership. This study reports on the development and validation of a scale for measuring the three manifestations and their differential effects on creativity and innovation. The investigation occurred within a relatively weak context wherein multiple manifestations of creative leadership are possible. Examining 646 research unit members nested in 259 research units from nine German universities, this study reveals that the research units' idea generation was positively related to the facilitating and integrating creative leadership manifestation, while the units' innovative outcome was positively related to the directing and integrating creative leadership manifestation. This study contributes to understanding and measuring creative leadership and the distribution of creative and supportive tasks between leaders and followers. This study presents a scale for measuring the creative leadership manifestations currently present within a research unit. Measuring the creative leadership manifestations can help organizations evaluate the distribution of creative and supportive contributions between their leaders and followers. This is important, as different manifestations of creative leadership can be useful in different ways depending on the aim of the unit. This study indicates that the followers should make creative contributions and the leader can either make creative contributions or not if the research unit aims for creativity. If the research unit aims to produce innovative outcomes, this study suggests that it is particularly important for leaders to make creative contributions. Understanding this can help organizations create a context in which the creative tasks are distributed between leaders and followers in a purposeful way. Further, making leaders aware of creative leadership manifestations and their influence on their followers' work can help them create a work environment that supports the unit in their creative and innovative tasks.

Digital transformation is changing the employee skills that organizations need to succeed. In this context, it is increasingly important for employees to proactively develop their skills. The emerging research on employee proactive skill development has largely ignored the possible role of employees' perceptions of large-scale changes in organizations' environments in their motivation to engage in such valuable behavior. We address this gap using cognitive-affective personality system theory to explain how macrolevel development affects employee behavior. Existing data on industry digital maturity were combined with survey data of 710 higher education graduates from various organizations and industries collected at two separate time points. The results support the hypothesized positive indirect effects of industry digital maturity on proactive skill development via employees' interpretation of digitalization as controllable and as an opportunity for their organization. We discuss the implications for research and organizational practice.

Research and higher education institutions are becoming increasingly transparent with the adoption of the governance mechanisms of New Public Management and digital technologies. As transparency research has documented both positive and negative effects of transparency within organizations, it is not clear how transparency might affect faculty members and their job attitudes. To address this question, we develop and test hypotheses regarding the effect of perceived transparency on professors’ job satisfaction and intent to leave their university. Our results, based on the answers of over 1600 professors, support our hypothesized positive relationship between transparency and job satisfaction, a negative relationship between transparency and intent to leave, and an indirect effect of transparency on intent to leave via job satisfaction. Exploratory moderation analyses indicated that the effects of transparency are present across two different types of universities (research universities and universities of applied sciences). We discuss results regarding their implications for the management of higher education and research institutions as well as for the retention of faculty members.

Organizational trust research is an area of strong scholarly interest and presents significant opportunities for researchers covering numerous scholarly areas of focus. This symposium looks at two important facets of trust across multiple levels. First, trust is influenced by the social and organizational context that have cross-level influences on individual level trust, i.e., influencing the impact of relationships between leaders and followers. The second cross-level influence is on within-individual dynamics or the effect of personality change on the development of trustworthiness. Additionally, trust is a dynamic phenomenon, ebbing and flowing as a function of interactions between parties. Thus, an additional – and elemental – level of analysis in trust is the interaction or episode itself that captures intra-individual changes. Our symposium submission offers several fresh approaches to trust research as it relates to organizational and within-individual trust development and extends scholarship on this topic. Building Organizational Trust: Towards Understanding Religious Cultural Diversity Presenter: Roger C. Mayer; North Carolina State U. Presenter: Adam Cohen; - Presenter: Joseph Barbour; Arizona State U. Supervisor’s Control as Driver for Trust and Distrust – the Influence of Control and Communication Presenter: Ann-Marie Nienaber; Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry U. Presenter: Martina Hartner-Tiefenthaler; TU Wien Beyond the Fraud Triangle: The Role of Trust in Predicting Employee Theft Presenter: Edward C. Tomlinson; West Virginia U. Presenter: Nancy H. McIntyre; West Virginia U. Presenter: Huaizhong Chen; Tulane U. Spiraling Up, and Slowing Down? The Dynamics of Trust Development in Teams Presenter: Kai Frank Uhlemann; TUM School of Management, Technische U. München Presenter: Marcus Armin Drescher; Heilbronn U. of Applied Sciences Presenter: Maria Strobel; TUM School of Management, Technische U. München Presenter: Isabell Melanie Welpe; Technical U. of Munich Trust Tests: An Active Approach to Evaluating Trustworthiness Presenter: Mark Hiatt; Kennesaw State U. Presenter: Lisa Schurer Lambert; Oklahoma State U. The Timing of Accelerating Events in Trust Growth Presenter: M Audrey Korsgaard; U. of South Carolina Presenter: Paul Bliese; Darla Moore School of Business, U. of South Carolina Presenter: Jason Kautz; U. of South Carolina

Organizing and leading creative collaboration is a key challenge for organizations producing innovative outcomes. In a large-scale review, Mainemelis, Kark, and Epitropaki (2015) identified three distinct contexts of creative leadership: facilitating, directing, and integrating. As these types of creative collaboration typically occur in different contexts, they have not been investigated in direct comparison. Thus, we lack knowledge on their functionality within a given setting. To address this gap, we build on Mainemelis et al.’s (2015) theory to define and theorize on creative leadership modes (CLM) as modes of organizing creative collaboration between leaders and followers that become effective as group norms. We developed and validated a scale for measuring these three CLMs. Furthermore, we differentially tested their effects on followers’ outcomes, investigating 1.163 junior scholars nested in 774 scientific team in 49 faculties in 5 German universities. Our data reveals that idea generation is positively affected by facilitating and integrating CLM, while idea implementation is positively affected by directing and facilitating CLM. Furthermore, integrating CLM positively affects job satisfaction, while directing CLM affects it negatively. Our study contributes to understanding and measurement of creative collaboration between leaders and followers, particularly in highly creative work groups.

Employees’ ambidexterity has been postulated to foster organizations’ competitiveness and adaption to change in dynamic environments and is thus important to investigate in the current dynamic developments such as the digital transformation. Building on intellectual capital theory this paper contributes to emerging research on predictors of individual ambidexterity by investigating the direct effect of employees’ human capital, namely employees’ variety of professional experiences, as well as person-context interactions as drivers of individual ambidexterity. Using data from a four-wave panel survey over four consecutive years among doctorates graduated from German universities, our sample consists of 2,011 participants with professional experiences in a broad range of occupational fields, firms and industries who responded to all four survey waves. Results of this study suggest that employees’ overall career variety, as well as its facets firm, industry and country variety affect individual ambidexterity positively. Further, our analyses reveal that these positive effects of overall career, firm, industry and country variety hold irrespective of whether employees have a leadership position and irrespective of employees’ decision-making autonomy. We discuss theoretical contributions to individual ambidexterity, career and micro-organizational behavior literature in the remainder of the paper and provide practical implications for human resource management in organizations aiming to attain contextual ambidexterity.

Proactive strategic scanning is an important aspect of employee proactivity and contributes to engaging employees in the organisation-wide strategy process. It also contributes to strategic renewal and innovation by helping to identify potential strategic opportunities and threats. However, little is known about its antecedents and how HRM may support this valuable resource. To address this gap, we develop and test a model of individual and contextual antecedents of proactive strategic scanning. We hypothesise and find a positive effect of future-focused personality on strategic scanning which is mediated by promotion-focused self-regulation at work. Moreover, we investigate how work design functions as a contextual boundary condition of this mediated effect. The effect is strengthened under high social support but is not influenced by the level of decision-making autonomy. Our findings point to specific variables which can be targeted by HRM to enhance employees' strategic engagement and innovative behaviour.

With job demands and skill requirements changing at unprecedented speed, it becomes increasingly important for employees to continually and proactively develop their own work-related skills. Digitization has become an issue of strategic relevance to numerous organizations which not only affects technologies and business models, but frequently also requires employees to acquire new skills. This paper applies a sensemaking perspective to investigate how employees’ proactive skill development (PSD) is influenced by strategic scanning behavior and their interpretation of digitization’s effects on their organization. In a survey of 575 higher education graduates from different fields of study working across different industries, we hypothesize and find a positive effect of strategic scanning on proactive skill development. Moreover, the effects of employees’ interpretation of digitization as an opportunity, a threat, or controllable were differentially moderated by job satisfaction. The results advance our understanding of antecedents of PSD and underscore the importance of considering employees’ perceptions and interpretations of an organizations’ broader strategic environment. Our findings have practical implications for both fostering PSD and communicating digitization as a strategic issue within organizations.

Research with European Caucasian samples demonstrates that attractiveness-based biases in social evaluation depend on the constellation of the sex of the evaluator and the sex of the target: Whereas people generally show positive biases toward attractive opposite-sex persons, they show less positive or even negative biases toward attractive same-sex persons. By examining these biases both within and between different ethnicities, the current studies provide new evidence for both the generalizability and the specificity of these attractiveness-based social perception biases. Examining within-ethnicity effects, Study 1 is the first to demonstrate that samples from diverse ethnic backgrounds parallel the finding of European Caucasian samples: The advantageous or adverse effects of attractiveness depend on the gender constellation of the evaluator and the evaluated person. Examining between-ethnicity effects, Study 2 found that these attractiveness-based biases emerge almost exclusively toward targets of the evaluator’s own ethnic background; these biases were reduced or eliminated for cross-ethnicity evaluations and interaction intentions. We discuss these findings in light of evolutionary principles and reflect on potential interactions between culture and evolved cognitive mechanisms.

Future-oriented cognition has been shown to be an important driver of several functional behaviors. In the present article, we build and test theory empirically on the influence of dispositional future focus on organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). We integrate future focus research with regulatory focus theory to examine the two regulatory foci (i.e. promotion and prevention focus) as mediating mechanisms through which future focus influences five distinct organizational citizenship behaviors (i.e. altruism, civic virtue, conscientiousness, courtesy, and sportsmanship). In line with our hypotheses, results from a study of 845 employees show that future focus has a positive influence on altruism, civic virtue, and courtesy over and above important predictors of OCB identified in previous research. Mediation analyses support our theoretical model, indicating that different OCBs are influenced by future focus through either promotion or prevention focus at work.

New ventures have to rely on highly skilled employees to overcome initial resource constraints. However, start-ups face hiring difficulties due to lack of visibility and legitimacy and because they often cannot compete with established organizations in offering potential applicants competitive job attributes (e.g., salary). This article develops a theoretical model that focuses on job and organizational attributes throughout the different life cycle stages of new ventures and how they impact a start-up’s organizational attractiveness. The model also shows how applicants’ personalities, values, goals, and needs moderate the relationship between job and organizational attributes and organizational attractiveness. Finally, the model suggests that depending on the individual preferences of the applicant, start-ups can compensate for some disadvantageous attributes by their more positive ones, while showing that other attributes cannot be compensated for.

Relational climates refer to shared perceptions of individuals regarding the practices that affect interpersonal relationships. We build theory to examine how relational climates provide a context for the development of team trust from individual beliefs of team members. In particular, we focus on how different relational climates can either buffer or enhance the negative effect of individual social cynicism on team trust. Cross-level interactions of relational climates (i.e., communal sharing climate and equality matching climate) at the team level (N = 270) with social cynicism at the individual level (N = 1886) support our hypotheses, indicating that communal sharing climate buffers the negative effect of social cynicism on team trust, whereas equality matching climate enhances this adverse effect.

Team climate for innovation is an important concept in management research and has stimulated a plethora of studies investigating how it influences performance. However, empirical research on the influence of team climate for innovation on team performance has produced inconsistent results. To clarify the nature of this relationship, the present study applies meta-analysis. An exhaustive research of the team, innovation, and performance literature yielded 35 independent studies with a total of 106 correlations. The sub-dimensions of team climate for innovation – participative safety, vision, support for innovation, and task orientation – were all positively related to team performance criteria (ρs between .13 and .46). Moreover, we found several moderating effects of this relationship for study characteristics (e.g., measurement method and study design) as well as sample characteristics (i.e., team size). We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings and offer avenues for future research.

Proactive behavior in organizations is important, but employees may refrain from proactivity when they fear negative consequences for themselves. Building on this notion, we introduce the concept of fear of negative evaluation to the proactivity literature. We develop and test theory that explains how the adverse effect of fear of negative evaluation on proactive behavior may be mitigated by internal (regulatory focus) and external (work design) sources of self-regulation. In particular, we theorize that high levels of regulatory focus may mitigate the negative effect of fear of negative evaluation and that a lack of regulatory focus may be compensated for by work design features. Our empirical results (N = 845) support the buffering effect of regulatory focus and the compensating role of social work design features. However, contrary to our prediction, task characteristics of work design constitute a precondition rather than a compensation for regulatory focus. We derive theoretical and practical implications of our findings.

Research has shown close connections between personality and subjective well-being (SWB), suggesting that personality traits predispose individuals to experience different levels of SWB. Moreover, numerous studies have shown that self-efficacy is related to both personality factors and SWB. Extending previous research, we show that general self-efficacy functionally connects personality factors and two components of SWB (life satisfaction and subjective happiness). Our results demonstrate the mediating role of self-efficacy in linking personality factors and SWB. Consistent with our expectations, the influence of neuroticism, extraversion, openness, and conscientiousness on life satisfaction was mediated by self-efficacy. Furthermore, self-efficacy mediated the influence of openness and conscientiousness, but not that of neuroticism and extraversion, on subjective happiness. Results highlight the importance of cognitive beliefs in functionally linking personality traits and SWB.

In light of continuing corporate scandals, the study of ethical leadership remains an important area of research which helps to understand the antecedents and consequences of ethical behavior in organizations. The present study investigates how social distance influences ethical leadership evaluations, and how in turn ethical leadership evaluations affect leader–member exchange (LMX) after a leader’s moral transgression. Based on construal level theory, we propose that higher social distance will lead to more severe evaluations of immoral behavior and therefore entail lower ethical leadership ratings. More- over, we hypothesize that ethical leadership will positively affect LMX. Participants read a scenario describing a moral situation in which a leader, who was presented in either high or low social distance, behaves unethically toward an employee. We tested our predictions using a structural equation modeling approach. As expected, participants in the high social distance condition judged leaders more harshly (i.e., they gave lower ethical leadership ratings) than in the low social distance condition. Thus, social distance moderated the extent to which leaders are perceived as ethical leaders after moral transgression. Moreover, in accordance with our proposition, ethical leadership ratings had a positive influence on LMX.

Although attracting talented personnel is one of the biggest challenges for start-ups, little is known about how nascent ventures can successfully build an employer brand. This study investigates which distinctive job attributes start-ups can use for their employer branding. We identify the unique job attributes distinguishing entrepreneurial firms from large firms and calibrate the relative value of these job attributes from the potential employees’ perspective. Using conjoint analysis we demonstrate that a communal team climate and the early assignment of responsibilities are a start-up’s most attractive job attributes for prospective applicants. We contribute to the entrepreneurial marketing literature by bringing forward the concept of entrepreneurial employer branding, by examining entrepreneurial firms’ unique and attractive job attributes, and by discussing how start-ups can make use of these attributes in their recruiting and employer branding activities.

Research has shown close connections between personality and subjective well-being (SWB), suggesting that personality traits predispose individuals to experience different levels of SWB. Moreover, numerous studies have shown that self-efficacy is related to both personality factors and SWB. Extending previous research, we show that general self-efficacy functionally connects personality factors and two components of SWB (life satisfaction and subjective happiness). Our results demonstrate the mediating role of self-efficacy in linking personality factors and SWB. Consistent with our expectations, the influence of neuroticism, extraversion, openness, and conscientiousness on life satisfaction was mediated by self-efficacy. Furthermore, self-efficacy mediated the influence of openness and conscientiousness, but not that of neuroticism and extraversion, on subjective happiness. Results highlight the importance of cognitive beliefs in functionally linking personality traits and SWB.