Decision Adversity: a Character Strengths Perspective on Decision Uncertainty and Error

Adversarial growth and learning from error is an essential capability for individuals in organizations, and carries particular challenges for anyone in a leadership position. This paper focuses on a strengths based perspective to Decision Adversity (DA) in the workplace. Decision adversity encompasses the stress and consequences of making and pursuing wrong business decisions; wrong decisions that are, in hindsight, incompatible with corporate goals and deplete resources. It reviews topics and studies on the challenges of decisions, including: dealing with uncertainty, difficulties in recognizing when a decision that is no longer advantageous, the anxiety of questioning a potentially wrong path, and coping with an outcome of a decision that was, in hindsight, the wrong choice. It will propose how a focus on character strengths can influence positive responsive behaviors, emotions, and actions. Interviews with experienced professionals will explore questions of DA from the perspective of those making and implementing decisions, highlighting opportunities and use of character strengths when coping with and responding to these situations. The paper will conclude with strengths focused recommendations, and suggest opportunities for further exploration of the use of strengths in addressing decision adversity

Making things happen : a model of proactive motivation

Being proactive is about making things happen, anticipating and preventing problems, and seizing opportunities. It involves self-initiated efforts to bring about change in the work environment and/or oneself to achieve a different future. The authors develop existing perspectives on this topic by identifying proactivity as a goal-driven process involving both the setting of a proactive goal (proactive goal generation) and striving to achieve that proactive goal (proactive goal striving). The authors identify a range of proactive goals that individuals can pursue in organizations. These vary on two dimensions: the future they aim to bring about (achieving a better personal fit within one’s work environment, improving the organization’s internal functioning, or enhancing the organization’s strategic fit with its environment) and whether the self or situation is being changed. The authors then identify “can do,” “reason to,” and “energized to” motivational states that prompt proactive goal generation and sustain goal striving. Can do motivation arises from perceptions of self-efficacy, control, and (low) cost. Reason to motivation relates to why someone is proactive, including reasons flowing from intrinsic, integrated, and identified motivation. Energized to motivation refers to activated positive affective states that prompt proactive goal processes. The authors suggest more distal antecedents, including individual differences (e.g., personality, values, knowledge and ability) as well as contextual variations in leadership, work design, and interpersonal climate, that influence the proactive motivational states and thereby boost or inhibit proactive goal processes. Finally, the authors summarize priorities for future researc

The Role of Regret and Its Applications in IS Decision Making

Although IS studies have begun to recognize the role of emotion in decision making, the research in this area is still in its infancy. The exploration of IS decision making phenomena through the lens of regret can offer rich implications to both research and practice. The presence of regret, for instance, can explain how and why IS decision makers choose a certain option. Motivated by the gap in the literature, the three papers in this dissertation investigate the role of regret in decision making in IS contexts. Specifically, the three projects investigate the following: IT real options decision in the context of RFID investment in libraries, whistle-blowing decision in the context of violations of heath information privacy, and process documentation decision in the context of investment in process improvement initiatives in an IT project. The contributions and implications of the three studies are presented further

Regret in Dynamic Decision Problems

The paper proposes a framework to extend regret theory to dynamic contexts. The key idea is to conceive of a dynamic decision problem with regret as an intra-personal game in which the agent forms conjectures about the behaviour of the various counterfactual selves that he could have been. We derive behavioural implications in situations in which payoffs are correlated across either time or contingencies. In the first case, regret might lead to excess conservatism or a tendency to make up for missed opportunities. In the second case, behaviour is shaped by the agent’s self-conception. We relate our results to empirical evidence

Escalation of Commiement in Software Projects: An Examination of Two Theories

Escalation of commitment is common in many software projects. It stands for the situation where managers decide to continue investing in or supporting a prior decision despite new evidence suggesting the original outcome expectation will be missed. Escalation of commitment is generally considered to be irrational. Past literature has proposed several theories to explain the behaviour. Two commonly used interpretations are self-justification and the framing effect. While both theories have been found effective in causing the escalation of commitment, their relative effect is less studied. The purpose of this study is to further investigate the primary factor that causes the escalation of commitment in software project related decisions. An experiment was designed to examine whether the escalation of commitment exists in different decision contingencies and which theories play a more important role in the escalation. One hundred and sixty two subjects participated in the experiment. The results indicate that both self-justification and problem framing have effects on commitment escalation in software projects but the effect of self-justification is stronger. Significant interaction effect is also found. A commitment is more likely to escalate if the problem is framed positively

Emotion and the Tripartite Emotion-functioning Capacities in Debiasing Sunk-cost Fallacy: A Trait-level Review

The study was aimed at examining the interplay of emotion and three emotion-functioning capacities in debiasing sunk-cost fallacy at trait-level. An online survey was used to study 378 US adults and found that dispositional positive and negative affectivity, trait-mindfulness, trait-EI and reappraisal were associated with debiasing sunk-cost fallacy. Among these factors, trait-mindfulness was found to be the most prominent attribute in association with debiasing sunk-cost fallacy. A deeper review of the participants’ characteristics revealed that prolonged practice of mindfulness meditation fostered trait-mindfulness, trait-EI and reappraisal in conjunction with upregulating dispositional positive affect and downregulating dispositional negative affect. This study suggests that training which pays attention to the emotional underpinnings of decision biases and in particular mindfulness techniques may have greater promise. The study also offers interesting insight for future research directions through which the tripartite emotion-functioning capacities can be better investigated

Work-related risk factors for workplace bullying : The moderating effect of laissez-faire leadership

Workplace bullying has been described as repeated and systematic exposure to negative social acts over time, which the target has difficulties defending against (Einarsen et al., 2020). Previous research has established that bullying in the workplace is related to a wide range of negative outcomes, and bullying has been classified as a more crippling and devastating problem for employees than all other work-related stress put together (Hauge et al., 2010; Wilson, 1991). Yet, the field still lacks systematic and thorough knowledge of the mechanisms that may explain how situational antecedents are related to the occurrence and development of the workplace bullying process. Drawing on the work environment hypothesis, studies have shown that bullying seems to thrive in demanding workplaces where employees experience organizational constraints and contradictory expectations and demands. Furthermore, leadership practices are expected to have a significant impact on the presence of stress at work. For example, poor and destructive leadership has been identified as a root cause of subordinate stress (Kelloway et al., 2005; Skogstad et al., 2014), and may, as such, act as a strong stressor in its own right. However, leaders may also impact the level of stress at work indirectly, either by influencing the opportunities employees have to cope with those stressors present, or by either aggravating or alleviating the stressors already present in the work environment. The main aim of this PhD-project has been to improve our understanding of the phenomenon of workplace bullying, by investigating some mechanisms and conditions which allow bullying to flourish and escalate. The present thesis is comprised of three scientific papers, all of which employ self-report questionnaire data. The overreaching research question in all three papers was whether laissez-faire leadership can act as a moderator in the relationship between various prevailing workplace stressors and subsequent experiences of negative acts and workplace bullying. Moreover, Paper 2 examines the role of the inter-relationship between two prevailing role stressors in the development of workplace bullying, by testing the mediating effect of role conflicts in the relationship between role ambiguity and subsequent exposure to bullying behaviours. In addition, Papers 2 and 3 also investigated the potential buffering effect of transformational leadership, a constructive form of leadership that is in stark contrast to laissez-faire leadership. In paper 1, the main objective was to investigate the prospective relationship between co-worker conflict at time 1 and individuals who self-reported as new victims of bullying two years later, and whether this relationship was exacerbated by the individuals’ reports of laissez-faire leadership behaviour enacted by their immediate supervisor. Results from a logistic regression analysis on a representative sample of Norwegian workers (N = 1772) showed a significant positive relationship between conflict with co-workers and subsequent new victims of workplace bullying. Furthermore, the results showed that this relationship was only present for employees who reported high (vs. low) levels of laissez-faire leadership behaviour from their immediate supervisor. Paper 2 had two main objectives. First, we aimed to investigate the mechanisms through which role stressors lead to workplace bullying, by testing the hypothesis that the impact of role ambiguity on employees’ exposure to negative acts is mediated through their experiences of increased levels of role conflicts. Second, we tested whether laissez-faire leadership exacerbated, while transformational leadership attenuated, this relationship. In this study, we employed a national probability sample of 1,164 Norwegian workers, with three measurements across a 12-month period. The results supported our hypotheses, in that the relationship between employees’ role ambiguity and subsequent exposure to bullying behaviours was mediated by an increase in employees’ experience of role conflicts. Moreover, we found that laissez-faire leadership exacerbated, while transformational leadership attenuated, the indirect relationship between role ambiguity and subsequent exposure to bullying behaviours through role conflicts. Finally, the objective of Paper 3 was to test whether it is possible to detect these mechanisms even on a daily basis. Accordingly, this study investigated the day-to-day relationship between employees’ work pressure and their exposure to bullying-related negative acts and tested the hypotheses that even daily levels of laissez-faire leadership exacerbated while daily levels of transformational leadership attenuated this relationship. Using data from a sample of 61 naval cadets, who completed a daily diary questionnaire on 36 consecutive days (N = 1509 daily observations), we tested the day-to-day relationships between work pressure and exposure to bullying-related negative acts, and the moderating effects of daily transformational and laissez-faire leadership. The results of multilevel analyses showed a positive relationship between daily work pressure and daily exposure to bullying-related negative acts, and a positive moderating effect of daily laissez-faire leadership behaviour. More specifically, our analyses showed that the positive relationship between daily work pressure and daily exposure to bullying-related negative acts was only present on days when the subordinates reported higher levels of laissez-faire behaviour from their immediate leader. Finally, we did not find support for a moderating effect of daily transformational leadership behaviour. Taken together, these findings yield support to the theoretical notion of the work environment hypothesis, in that situational stressors represent prevailing risk factors for individuals to be exposed to negative acts and bullying in the workplace (Einarsen et al., 1994; Leymann, 1996). Moreover, our findings support the theoretical assumption that laissez-faire leadership is an important facilitator in the development of workplace bullying. Indeed, our results indicate that laissez-faire leadership may be of greater consequence in exacerbating the bullying process than transformational leadership is in attenuating the negative consequences of workplace stressors. If leaders neglect their inherent responsibility to adequately address employees’ experiences of stressful situations and ongoing interpersonal conflicts that merit attention, the risk of workplace bullying is likely to increase. Furthermore, our results show the same trends across samples and research designs, thereby strengthening the robustness of our findings. Finally, the results from Paper 2 improve our understanding of the inter-relationship between role ambiguity and role conflict in relation to bullying, by supporting the hypothesis that employees’ experience of role conflicts mediates the role ambiguity-bullying relationship. This finding indicates that role conflicts may be the more proximal, while role ambiguity may be a more distal antecedent of workplace bullying.Doktorgradsavhandlin