The success of work teams is often contingent on how they handle disruption. Although research has examined how teams respond to disruptive events, there is surprisingly little clarity about the nature of team disruption as a construct. Through an integration of Event-System Theory (EST) with team-based theories and frameworks, we define team disruption in terms of misalignment of team member coordination relative to task demands due to shifts in coordination, task demands, or both. We describe how event novelty and criticality create team disruption, and explore the temporal and spatial conditions under which team disruption is promoted or mitigated. The proposed conceptualization of team disruption offers a unifying definition of the construct that complements existing research on team adaptability, membership change, team interventions, and related approaches. The framework offers a way to understand past research in new ways, provides specific directions for future research, and contributes actionable guidance for practice.

We review over 10 years of published multilevel results where authors have provided correlation tables containing both lower-level and higher-level correlations of the same variables. We use these 630 correlations to determine the degree of heterology in the strength of relationships across levels. Across all studies, we find that aggregate correlations are larger than lower-level correlations, but the effect size is modest (correlation difference of .02 in the weighted analyses). This finding suggests that heterologous relationships are not always observed simply as a function of aggregating variables and suggests that finding evidence of differences across levels likely reflects important theoretical processes. We further explored whether heterologous correlations were more likely to be observed for certain types of variables such as whether they are observable or whether they assess affect, behavior, cognition, or trait variables. Finally, we examine the role of specific study characteristics such as group size, whether the items had an individual or group referent, and whether the study was lab or field based. Results identified specific areas of research that appear particularly ripe for developing theory about why relationships differ across levels.

This symposium brings together preeminent scholars within the domain of organizational trust to develop novel constructs and methods in the trust literature, as well as to further explore trust in the turbulent workplace of the present and the potentially ominous future. The papers vary in levels of analysis and provide different perspectives on factors affecting trust or factors affected by trust.

The purpose of this paper is to simultaneously advance theory and practice by understanding the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on new hire engagement, along with State- and individual-level moderators of such effects. Prior research suggests starting a new job is an uncertain experience; here we theorize that the COVID-19 pandemic creates additional environmental uncertainty that leads new hires to reduce their engagement. First, we hypothesize that new hires become less engaged in uncertain times, such that engagement negatively covaries with unemployment rates caused by the pandemic. Second, drawing from strategic management theory, we test whether U.S. States that introduce stronger COVID policies help reduce uncertainty and thus enhance the engagement of new hires. Third, we theorize that the effects of the pandemic become more disruptive on new hire engagement as they gain tenure within the organization. Examining a U.S. national sample of 12,577 newly hired (90 days or less) quick service restaurant employees over nine months (January to September, 2020), we find support for these hypotheses. Together, these findings advance new research directions for understanding relationships between macro contextual influences on new hire perceptions and socialization. They also offer practical implications by helping organizations understand the importance of explicitly managing environmental uncertainty, particularly in terms of COVID policy.

The purpose of this article is to simultaneously advance theory and practice by understanding how the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic relates to new hire engagement. Prior research suggests starting a new job is an uncertain experience; we theorize that the COVID-19 pandemic creates additional environmental stressors that affect new hire engagement. First, we hypothesize that the occurrence of COVID-19 and unemployment rates relate negatively to engagement. Second, we theorize that the effects of the pandemic become more disruptive on new hire engagement as they gain tenure within the organization. Third, drawing from strategic management theory, we test whether States that introduce stronger COVID-19 policies help enhance the engagement of new hires. Examining a U.S. national sample of 12,577 newly hired (90 days or less) quick service restaurant employees across 9 months (January-September, 2020), we find support for these hypotheses. Subsequent model comparisons suggest there may be health stressors that shape engagement more strongly than purely economic stressors. These findings may be important because they highlight the experiences of workers more likely to be exposed to the pandemic and affected by COVID-related policies. Should the results generalize to other samples and jobs, this study offers potentially new research directions for understanding relationships between macro stressors and new hire perceptions and socialization. It also offers practical implications by helping organizations understand the importance of explicitly managing job insecurity, particularly in terms of COVID-19 policy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).