Leaders laughing in the line of fire: An emotional aperture perspective on leader laughter in response to critical questions.

Leaders are frequently put in the difficult position of repudiating critical questions in front of their followers. To help manage this situation, leaders sometimes express laughter in the hopes that it will "lubricate" their interaction and reduce perceptions that they are aggressive or confrontational with the critical questioner. Ironically, leaders' laughter may backfire by diminishing their apparent friendliness and approachability in the eyes of the witnessing followers. In this article, we employ an emotional aperture perspective to examine two seemingly contradictory theoretical perspectives regarding the potential impact of laughter on the witnessing followers' perception of a leader's warmth and effectiveness. Findings from nine studies across 2,012 adults show that leader laughter-even expressed briefly-bolsters or damages leader effectiveness depending on one important contingency: whether the leader's laughter is shared by the questioner. Unshared laughter reduces leader effectiveness by undermining leaders' apparent warmth, while shared laughter increases leader effectiveness by enhancing leaders' apparent warmth. We discuss implications for the literature on emotion expression, leadership events, and leader perception and influence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Perceived overqualification and experiences of incivility: Can task i-deals help or hurt?

We examined why overqualified employees may report heightened levels of experienced incivility, particularly when they have successfully negotiated task i-deals from their employers. Adopting a person-job fit perspective, we examined our proposed model in two studies with employees in the higher education industry (Study 1) and workers from a range of industries and occupations (Study 2). In Study 1 (N = 229), the moderated mediation model showed that task i-deals attenuated the positive relationship between perceived overqualification and boredom sensations, which was associated with reduced experienced incivility. In Study 2 (N = 222), using a time-lagged design, we expanded on Study 1 findings by examining dimensions of person-job fit, namely, demands-abilities fit and needs-supplies fit, as well as perceptions of being envied by coworkers as mechanisms. Supporting our theorizing, we showed that task i-deals buffered the negative relationship between perceived overqualification and demands-abilities fit. Ironically, the provision of i-deals intensified overqualified employees' perceptions of being envied by coworkers, which in turn explained their reported experiences of incivility. These results highlighted the complexity of reducing interpersonal stressors, wherein the provision of task i-deals minimized the misfit and associated boredom sensations of overqualified employees. Yet, such customized working arrangements intensified overqualified employees' feelings of being envied and their reports of experienced incivility. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Savvy investments or formative endowments? Disentangling causal direction in the association between parental support and self-efficacy in STEM university students.

Conventional wisdom views the parent-child relationship as unilateral: Parents' actions upstream flow downstream to shape their children's development. However, scholars have proposed that this view of parenting is lopsided; children may influence their parents no less than parents influence children. We apply this bilateral perspective in a reexamination of the robust finding that confident people report having had more supportive parents. The social-cognitive explanation for this finding is that parents endow their children with support that builds confidence. However, evolutionary accounts suggest that confident children-displaying more promise and potential-ought to attract their parents' investments of support. We examined these predictions in a four-wave longitudinal study drawing on both archival and field survey data from 350 STEM students (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) in the Philippines. Results were consistent with the bilateral perspective, in which parental support endowed children with confidence, but also children's confidence attracted parental support in equal measure. These reciprocal relations also had implications for whether or not students persisted in their computer science degrees. The results indicate that parental endowments of confidence and parental investments of support form a virtuous cycle, consistent with the perspective that self-efficacy operates not only as an intrapsychic resource allocator but also as an interpersonal resource attractor. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).