2018 Management & Organization Department Publications
In 2017, the Foster School of Business Management and Organization Department was named the most productive management research faculty in North America. In 2018, the M&O Department ranks as the second most productive department across 5 years. In the last 20 years, the University of Washington Foster School of Business has made an unprecedented climb in research productivity rankings.
Here are the articles published by the Management and Organization faculty in 2018:
Revisiting the Development and Validation of The Authentic Leadership Questionnaire: Analytical Considerations
Avolio, B. J., Wernsing, T. & Gardner, W. L. (2018). Journal of Management.
This article reexamines the original research and results pertaining to the construct validation of the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire. Our reexamination involved analyzing the four factor and higher order model of authentic leadership using more recent recommendations for model tests that have appeared in the literature since the original article was published. We compared the results of these procedures to those used back in 2008, excluding any adjustments to the model specifications based on modification indices. Results of these analyses are interpreted and contextualized within the stream of research accumulated on authentic leadership to the present day. We also offer recommendations for extending further construct validation work on authentic leadership theory, and more general suggestions for reporting the results of these types of analyses.
Team Psychological Safety and Conflict Trajectories’ Effect on Individual’s Team Identification and Satisfaction
Johnson, H. & Avolio, B. J. (2018). Group & Organization Management.
Using a multilevel field study with data collected over a 9-month period, we tested how team psychological safety interacts with levels of team relationship conflict to influence an individual’s team identification and satisfac tion with their team. We propose that team psychological safety measured early in a team’s time together influences what team members can expect to experience in subsequent team interactions. We use identification and team conflict theory to theorize that through sense-making processes, team members evaluate early experiences with their team relative to initial levels of team psychological safety, which then influences their levels of team identification. When team members experience high levels of team psychological safety initially followed by an increasing trajectory of relationship conflict within the team over time, we predicted and found that individual’s team identification decreased, resulting in lower satisfaction with their team. The theoretical and practical implications for aligning early perceptions of team’s psychological safety with patterns of perceived relationship conflict and its effect on team identification and satisfaction with the team are discussed.
Sleep Better Lead Better
Barnes, C. M. (2018). Harvard Business Review.
Written for executives and other managers, this article provides a concrete overview of my research examining sleep and leadership. I briefly summarize my research examining the effect of sleep on abusive supervision, charismatic leadership, and the quality of relationships between leaders and their subordinates. I also discuss my research on how leader sleep can influence more distal outcomes such as the work engagement of their subordinates. I then briefly summarize my research examining how work influences sleep, focusing on the harmful effects of smartphones and the beneficial effects of insomnia treatment programs. This helps map a pathway for leaders to sleep well, and thereby improve their leadership. Finally, I close with a discussion of my ongoing research examining how leaders shape the norms regarding sleep in their organizations, thereby influencing the sleep of their subordinates. My recommendation is for leaders to shape these norms positively, such that their employees will be rested and thus maximally effective at work.
Archival Data in Micro Organizational Research: A Toolkit for Moving to A Broader Set of Topics
Barnes, C. M., Dang, C. T., Leavitt, K. Guarana, C. L. & Uhlmann, E. L. (2018). Journal of Management.
This article is written to help prompt other organizational behavior researchers to use a broader approach to conducting empirical research. We discuss how organizational behavior researchers can address more interesting research questions with more ecologically valid results by using archival data. In doing so, we discuss the strengths and limitations of using archival data, and provide recommendations for how to proceed with such research.
Bad Behavior Keeps You Up at Night: Counterproductive Work Behaviors and Insomnia
Yuan, Z., Barnes, C. M. & Li, Y. (2018). Journal of Applied Psychology.
In this article, we examine how an employee’s own behavior at work can influence his or her ability to sleep well at night. Specifically, we examine how counterproductive work behaviors (a form of negative behavior at work) can lead to anxiety which follows the employee home and leads to insomnia that night. To test this model, we conducted a series of empirical studies using different research designs. Overall, we found strong support for the predicted model; counterproductive behavior on a given workday leads to anxiety that evening which makes it harder to sleep that night.
What’s Wrong with Treating Subordinates Differently? The Basis of Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) Differentiation Matters
Chen, X. P., He, W. & Weng, L. C. (2018. Journal of Management.
In this paper, we challenge the conventional wisdom that treating team members differently is unfair. We propose that it depends on the basis for differentiation. Through two field studies, we show that when leaders rely more on members’ task performance and/or organizational citizenship behavior as the main bases, the effects of differentiation on intragroup relational quality and group proactivity became less negative, so did the members’ perceptions of procedural justice perceptions.
Leadership and Member Voice in Action Teams: Test of a Dynamic Phase Model
Farh, C. I. C., Chen, G., (2018. Journal of Applied Psychology.
In surgical teams, team members may find it difficult to speak up with suggestions or concerns due to the strong power differential between the surgeon and team members, the shifting task demands encountered over different phases of the surgical procedure, and uncertainties of working in a team with little prior familiarity. This study explores the effectiveness of three surgeon leadership behaviors – directing, coaching, and supporting – on facilitating the voice of team members. We find that while directing and coaching enhanced voice (purportedly because these behaviors helped to address task-related barriers to speaking up), supporting did not enhance voice and in fact exhibited negative effects on voice when team members were more familiar with each other (purportedly because they promoted “interpersonal banter” instead of task-related voice).
Whatever It Takes: Leaders’ Perceptions of Abusive Supervision Instrumentality
Watkins, T., Fehr, R. & He, W. (2018) Leadership Quarterly.
Why do leaders abuse their employees? In this study, we demonstrate that some leaders abuse their employees due to “instrumentality beliefs” – a belief that abuse has a positive impact on employee performance. However, when employees are abused by their leaders, we show that they respond by increasing their own counterproductive work behaviors, highlighting the negative effects that tend to emerge when leaders abuse their employees.
Would I Really Make A Difference? Moral Typecasting Theory and Its Implications for Helping Ethical Leaders
Yam, K.C., Fehr, R., Burch, T., Zhang, Y. & Gray, K. (2018) Journal of Business Ethics.
How does ethical leader behavior influence followers’ tendencies to help their leaders? Drawing from moral typecasting theory, we demonstrate an inverted U-shaped relationship between ethical leadership and follower helping behavior. When leaders are either highly ethical or highly unethical, employees help their leaders less, due in part to a belief that they cannot have a positive impact on leaders at the extreme ends of the spectrum. These effects emerge in morally intense contexts, but not less morally intense contexts.
Dispositional sources of managerial discretion: CEO personality, CEO ideology and firm strategies
Gupta, A., Nadkarni, S. & Mariam, M. (2018). Administrative Science Quarterly.
Our study suggests that a CEO’s personality traits – specifically, the extent to which a CEO exhibits Narcissism and extraversion – can magnify his or her managerial discretion over an organization. We find that firms led by narcissistic or extraverted CEOs whose politics lean liberal are more likely to exhibit strategic behaviors associated with liberal values, such as corporate social responsibility (CSR). On the other side of the aisle, firms led by extraverted CEOs who lean politically conservative tend to exhibit more strategic behaviors associated with conservatism, such as downsizing. We find evidence that CEOs who hold exaggerated perceptions of their influence (narcissists) or are able to effectively sell their choices to others (extraverts) enjoy greater latitude in infusing firm strategies with their preferences than CEOs who lack those qualities.
Follow the Leader (or not): The Influence of Peer CEO’s Characteristics on inter-organizational imitation
Gupta, A. & Misangyi, V. F. (2018). Strategic Management Journal.
When companies are uncertain about the costs and benefits of strategic actions this may lead them to imitate the actions of peer companies. But given the uncertainty, the challenge for executives is: which companies to emulate and which to ignore? In a sample of Fortune 500 companies, we find that the charisma or narcissism of a peer company’s CEO positively or negatively influences, respectively, the degree to which the peer company’s strategic actions are imitated. We reason that this is because these particular CEO attributes are widely believed to drive leadership effectiveness or ineffectiveness, respectively. We also find that the effects of these CEO characteristics on imitation are stronger in dynamic industry environments and weaker for companies that already have experience with the given strategy.
The Role of Accelerator Designs in Mitigating Bounded Rationality in New Ventures
Cohen, S. L., Bingham, C. B. & Hallen, B. L. (2018). Administrative Science Quarterly.
In this article we explore how accelerators’ program designs influence new ventures’ ability to access, interpret, and process the external information needed to survive and grow. Through our inductive process, we illuminate the bounded-rationality challenges that may plague all ventures and entrepreneurs—not just those in accelerators—and identify the particular organizational designs that accelerators use to help address these challenges, which left unabated can result in suboptimal performance or even venture failure. Our analysis revealed three key design choices made by accelerators—(1) whether to space out or concentrate consultations with mentors and customers, (2) whether to foster privacy or transparency between peer ventures participating in the same program, and (3) whether to tailor or standardize the program for each venture—and suggests a particular set of choices is associated with improved venture development.
Honor Among Thieves: The Interaction of Team and Member Deviance on Trust in The Team
Schabram, K., Robinson, S. L. & Cruz, K. S. (2018). Journal of Applied Psychology.
In this article, we examine member trust in deviant teams. We contend that a member’s trust in his or her deviant team depends on the member’s own deviant actions; although all members will judge the actions of their deviant teams as rational evidence that they should not be trusted, deviant members, but not honest members, can hold on to trust in their teams because of a sense of connection to the team. We tested our predictions in a field study of 562 members across 111 teams and 24 organizations as well as in an experiment of 178 participants in deviant and non-deviant teams. Both studies show that honest members experience a greater decline in trust as team deviance goes up. Moreover, our experiment finds that deviant members have as much trust in their deviant teams as honest members do in honest teams, but only in teams with coordinated rather than independent acts of deviance, in which deviant members engage in a variety of ongoing dynamics foundational to a sense of connection and affective-based trust.
Reflections on Scientific Misconduct in Management: Unfortunate Incidents or a Normative Crisis?
Honig, B., Lampel, J., Baum, J.A.C., Glynn, M.A. Jing, R., Lounsbury, M., Schüßler, E., Sirmon, D.G., Tsui, A.S., Walsh, J.P., van Witteloostuinh, A. (2018). Academy of Management Perspectives.
Taking as our starting point Merton’s (1942) defense of science facing pressures from totalitarian regimes, we argue that today’s challenge to the integrity of management scholarship does not come from external demands for ideological conformity, rather from escalating competition for publication space in leading journals that is changing the internal dynamics of our community. We invited nine scholars from different countries and with different backgrounds and career trajectories to provide their brief views of this argument. Following an introduction that summarizes the argument, we present their different reactions by dividing and introducing the work into those who took a broad field level perspective, those with a more macro view, and those that suggested possible remedies to our dilemmas. In conclusion, we note that questionable research practices, retractions, and highly publicized cases of academic misconduct may irreparably damage the legitimacy of our scholarship unless the management research community airs these issues and takes steps to address this challenge.
How Competitive Action Mediates the Resource Slack – Performance Relationship: A Meta-Analytic Approach
Carnes, C. M., Xu, K., Sirmon & D. G., Karadag, R. (2018). Journal of Management Studies.
The fungibility of organizational slack provides firms significant latitude in addressing both internal and market pressures. A vast literature suggests that slack influences firm performance; however, the empirical record is mixed, and the underlying mechanism linking slack to performance remains ambiguous. We address these issues by theoretically expanding the slack–performance model to include mediation. Specifically, we develop and test a model in which a firm’s competitive behaviours direct the utilization of slack toward the realization of firm performance. Our meta-analytic-based structural equation model supports partial mediation, showing that competitive behaviours provide some resolution to the conflicted understanding of how slack affects performance. Further, we provide value to the slack literature by consolidating the evidence for the effects of various types and forms of organizational slack. Beyond providing robustness to our theoretical model, doing so offers a more complete understanding of how operationalizations of slack and performance outcomes matter.
Pre‐Exit Bundling, Turnover of Professionals, and Firm Performance
Brymer, R. A. & Sirmon, D. G. (2018). Journal of Management Studies.
Context-emergent turnover theory (CETT) focuses on the contextual factors that influence the turnover-firm performance relationship, yet to date, has not investigated how particular firms weather the detrimental effects of loss more effectively than others. We build on the CETT literature by theorizing that different human resource bundling strategies are central contextual factors that impact the effects of human resource exit. Specifically, we argue that bundling human resources prior to exit in greater concentrations deflects some harmful effects of turnover. Pre-exit bundling ensures that remaining professionals post-exit retain both the capacity necessary to meet job demands and the critical tacit knowledge of firm routines that maintain effectiveness. Our study examines the loss of professionals in a panel of the largest U.S.-based law firms. We find general support for our theory. Results show that losing professionals when the pre-exit bundling had produced greater service-, hiring-, and geographic-concentration lessens the negative effects of loss.
To Help My Supervisor: Identification, Moral Identity, And Unethical Pro-Supervisor Behavior
Johnson, H. H. & Umphress, E. E. (2018). Journal of Business Ethics.
Under some circumstances, individuals are willing to engage in unethical behaviors that benefit another entity. In this research we advance the unethical pro-organizational behavior construct by showing that individuals also have the potential to behave unethically to benefit their supervisors. Previous research has not examined if employees engage in unethical acts to benefit an entity that is separate from oneself and if they will conduct these acts to benefit a supervisor. Our research helps to address these gaps. We also demonstrate that unethical behavior to benefit a supervisor, what we term unethical pro-supervisor behavior, is more likely to occur if individuals are more (versus less) identified with their organization or supervisor. That is, feeling a sense of oneness with one’s organization or supervisor can result in employees engaging in unethical behavior to help their supervisor. Further, this positive relationship is weakened if the employee possesses higher levels of moral identity. We test our hypotheses with a two-part laboratory study, a field study, and a time-lagged field study. Theoretical and practical implications of this work are discussed.
Attention to Change: A Multilevel Theory on The Process of Emergent Continuous Organizational Change
Wee, E. X. M. & Taylor, M. S. (2018). Journal of Applied Psychology.
Increasingly, continuous organizational change is viewed as the new reality for organizations and their members. However, this model of organizational change, which is usually characterized by ongoing, cumulative, and substantive change from the bottom up, remains underexplored in the literature. In this paper, the authors develop a theoretical model to explain the mechanisms behind the amplification and accumulation of valuable, ongoing work-unit level changes over time, which then become substantial changes at the organizational level. Drawing on the concept of emergence, they first focus on the cognitive search mechanisms of work-unit members and managers to illustrate how work-unit level routine changes may be amplified to the organization through 2 unique processes: composition and compilation emergence. The authors then discuss the managers’ role in creating a sense of coherence and meaning for the accumulation of these emergent changes over time. They conclude this research by discussing the theoretical implications of their model for the existing literature of organizational change.
“Matter Battles:” Boundary Objects and the Failure of Collaboration in Two Smart Cities
Zuzul, T. (2018). Academy of Management Journal.
In this paper, I present a longitudinal study of two smart city projects that brought together experts from diverse knowledge domains. Both projects structured collaboration around the development of boundary objects that could integrate actors’ expertise. In both projects, however, the objects sparked conflicts that exacerbated rather than attenuated differences. I develop a process model exploring how and why the development of boundary objects can manifest as divisive conflict that derails collaboration. In both projects, extreme novelty gave rise to concept ambiguity, a lack of shared ideas about what smart cities were, and process ambiguity, a lack of shared ideas about how smart cities should be developed. Ambiguity led actors from diverse domains to form divergent cognitive representations about smart cities. As they developed boundary objects, actors made decisions that violated some cognitive representations, while reifying others into material outcomes. Their efforts to develop the objects manifest as matter battles: high-stakes conflicts about material outcomes that, over time, set the stage for collaboration failure. In advancing these ideas, I provide an alternative perspective to the literature on collaboration across boundaries, which has primarily treated boundary objects as tools of integration rather than weapons of division.
