Keeping it between us: Managerial endorsement of public versus private voice.

When employees use public settings such as team meetings to engage in voice-the expression of work ideas or concerns, they can spur useful discussions, action planning, and problem solving. However, we make the case that managers, whose support is essential for voice to have a functional impact, are averse to publicly expressed voice and prefer acting on voice that is privately brought up to them in one-on-one settings. Drawing on face management theory (Goffman, 1967), we argue that voice expressed in front of an audience, compared with that expressed one-on-one, is more threatening to the image that managers seek to portray as competent and unerring leaders, and that leads managers to respond more defensively to public voice and endorse it less. This, we propose, is especially true when the relationship quality between manager and employee is weak as public voice from relationally distant employees is perceived as a stronger challenge. Across five studies (correlational and experimental), we find support for our arguments and rule out alternative explanations such as that managers are aversive to public voice because it threatens their ego or that managers feel more accountable to act on publicly provided input. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Do Interpersonal Conflict, Aggression and Bullying at the Workplace Overlap? A Latent Class Modeling Approach.

In this paper, we tackle an important but unresolved research question: How distinct are workplace conflict, aggression and bullying? We study this question by means of latent class (LC) analysis using cross-industry data from 6,175 Belgian workers. We find a two-factor solution (conflict-aggression versus bullying) to provide the best fit to the data. Employees with low exposure to conflict-aggression and bullying perceived the phenomena as mostly overlapping. Employees who were exposed more frequently to the phenomena reported them to be more distinct - especially so for workplace bullying. We also find conflict-aggression and bullying to have distinct relationships with well-being and strain outcomes. These findings entail that a simple unifying approach or a single label for all three phenomena is not appropriate, at least from a measurement point of view and from the perspective of those exposed. Our results have important implications for the theoretical understanding of conflict, aggression and bullying, and for practitioners who provide support to affected employees including policymakers who help prevent and manage these problems at the workplace.

Shared Authentic Leadership in Research Teams: Testing a Multiple Mediation Model.

Research teams face complex leadership and coordination challenges. We propose shared authentic leadership (SAL) as a timely approach to addressing these challenges. Drawing from authentic and functional leadership theories, we posit a multiple mediation model that suggests three mechanisms whereby SAL influences team effectiveness: shared mental models (SMM), team trust, and team coordination. To test our hypotheses, we collected survey data on leadership and teamwork within 142 research teams that recently published an article in a peer-reviewed management journal. The results indicate team coordination represents the primary mediating mechanism accounting for the relationship between SAL and research team effectiveness. While teams with high trust and SMM felt more successful and were more satisfied, they were less successful in publishing in high-impact journals. We also found the four SAL dimensions (i.e., self-awareness, relational transparency, balanced processing, and internalized moral perspective) to associate differently with team effectiveness.

When Task Conflict Becomes Personal: The Impact of Perceived Team Performance.

Although potentially beneficial, task conflict may threaten teams because it often leads to relationship conflict. Prior research has identified a set of interpersonal factors (e.g., team communication, team trust) that help attenuate this association. The purpose of this article is to provide an alternative perspective that focuses on the moderating role of performance-related factors (i.e., perceived team performance). Using social identity theory, we build a model that predicts how task conflict associates with growth in relationship conflict and how perceived team performance influences this association. We test a three-wave longitudinal model by means of random coefficient growth modeling, using data from 60 ongoing teams working in a health care organization. Results provide partial support for our hypotheses. Only when perceived team performance is low, do task conflicts relate with growth in relationship conflict. We conclude that perceived team performance seems to enable teams to uncouple task from relationship conflict.

The role of punishment and reward sensitivity in the emotional labor process: a within-person perspective.

In this diary study, we tested the possibility that dispositional reward and punishment sensitivity, two central constructs of reinforcement sensitivity theory, would modify the relationship between emotional labor and job-related well-being (i.e., work engagement, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization). Specifically, based on a social functional account of emotion, we hypothesized that surface acting entails the risk of social disapproval and therefore may be more detrimental for high than for low punishment-sensitive individuals. In contrast, deep acting is hypothesized to hold the promise of social approval and therefore may be more beneficial for high than for low reward-sensitive individuals. Hypotheses were tested in a sample of 237 service workers (N = 1,584 daily reports) who completed a general survey and daily surveys over the course of 10 working days. Multilevel analyses showed that surface acting was detrimental to well-being, and more strongly so for high than for low punishment-sensitive individuals. The results are consistent with the idea that heightened sensitivity to social disapproval aggravates the negative effects of surface acting.