When being politically correct at work depletes employees and backfires at home

Avoiding potentially divisive language and encouraging tolerance are critical steps to creating an inclusive work environment, but they carry a downside. Being politically correct can deplete employees and lead them to act both angrily towards and withdraw from their spouse that evening at home. Joel Koopman, Klodiana Lanaj, and colleagues write that the depletion that employees feel after being politically correct is problematic and should be of concern to managers

Helping colleagues brings many benefits, but it may carry a cost

Those who help risk not finishing their work, argue Joel Koopman, Klodiana Lanaj and Brent A. Scot

Benefits of transformational behaviors for leaders: A daily investigation of leader behaviors and need fulfillment

Although a large body of work has examined the benefits of transformational leadership, this work has predominantly focused on recipients of such behaviors. Recent research and theory, however, suggest that there are also benefits for those performing behaviors reflective of transformational leadership. Across 2 experience-sampling studies, we investigate the effects of such behaviors on actors' daily affective states. Drawing from affective events theory and self-determination theory we hypothesize and find that engaging in behaviors reflective of transformational leadership is associated with improvement in actors' daily affect, more so than engaging in behaviors reflective of transactional, consideration, initiating structure, and participative leadership. Behaviors reflective of transformational leadership improved actors' affect in part by fulfilling their daily needs. Furthermore, extraversion and neuroticism moderated these effects such that extraverts benefitted less whereas neurotics benefitted more from these behaviors in terms of affective changes. We consider the theoretical and practical implications of these findings and offer directions for future research

The good and bad of being fair: effects of procedural and interpersonal justice behaviors on regulatory resources

The justice literature has paid considerable attention to the beneficial effects of fair behaviors for recipients of such behaviors. It is possible, however, that exhibiting fair behaviors may come at a cost for actors. In this article, we integrate ego depletion theory with organizational justice research in order to examine the consequences of justice behaviors for actors. We used an experience-sampling method in a sample of managerial employees to examine the relations of performing procedural justice and interpersonal justice behaviors with subsequent changes in actors’ regulatory resources. Our results indicate that procedural justice behaviors are draining, whereas interpersonal justice behaviors are replenishing for actors. Depletion, in turn, adversely affected the performance of citizenship behavior, and depletion mediated relations of justice behavior with citizenship. Furthermore, 2 traits that impact self-regulatory skills—extraversion and neuroticism—moderated the replenishing effects of engaging in interpersonal justice behaviors. We conclude by discussing implications and avenues for future research

Resource-based contingencies of when team-member exchange helps member performance in teams

We integrate social exchange theory with social capital theory to present a resourcebased contingency model of when team-member exchange (TMX) helps individual performance in teams. We argue that strong TMX produces obligations to utilize resources (e.g., task information) provided by one's teammates, and these obligations enhance performance when (a) teammates provide resources of high quality or (b) the quality of resources available from individuals outside of the TMX relationship (i.e., the leader) are low, purportedly because TMX-based obligations protect individuals from over-utilizing low-quality resources from the leader. We tested our model in two studies. In Study 1, multisource team data revealed that TMX enhanced member performance when teammates possessed attributes associated with high-quality resources (i.e., high cognitive ability) or when the leader did not. In Study 2, we replicated these findings in a scenario experiment, showing that TMX impacted performance under different resource conditions via felt obligation to utilize teammates' resources. Our findings advance the literature by delineating the teammate- and leader-resource conditions under which TMX benefits member performance, as well as demonstrating that felt obligation to utilize teammates' resources is an important mechanism underlying these effects. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed

When lending a hand depletes the will: the daily costs and benefits of helping

Employees help on a regular daily basis while at work, yet surprisingly little is known about how responding to help requests affects helpers. Although recent theory suggests that helping may come at a cost to the helper, the majority of the helping literature has focused on the benefits of helping. The current study addresses the complex nature of helping by simultaneously considering its costs and benefits for helpers. Using daily diary data across 3 consecutive work weeks, we examine the relationship between responding to help requests, perceived prosocial impact of helping, and helpers’ regulatory resources. We find that responding to help requests depletes regulatory resources at an increasing rate, yet perceived prosocial impact of helping can replenish resources. We also find that employees’ prosocial motivation moderates these within-person relationships, such that prosocial employees are depleted to a larger extent by responding to help requests, and replenished to a lesser extent by the perceived prosocial impact of helping. Understanding the complex relationship of helping with regulatory resources is important because such resources have downstream effects on helpers’ behavior in the workplace. We discuss the implications of our findings for both theory and practice

Regulatory focus and work-related outcomes: a review and meta-analysis

Regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997) has received growing attention in organizational psychology,necessitating a quantitative review that synthesizes its effects on important criteria. In addition, there isneed for theoretical integration of regulatory focus theory with personality research. Theoretical integrationis particularly relevant, since personality traits and dispositions are distal factors that are unlikelyto have direct effects on work behaviors, yet they may have indirect effects via regulatory focus. Thecurrent meta-analysis introduces an integrative framework in which the effects of personality on workbehaviors are best understood when considered in conjunction with more proximal motivational processessuch as regulatory focus. Using a distal–proximal approach, we identify personality antecedentsand work-related consequences of regulatory foci in a framework that considers both general andwork-specific regulatory foci as proximal motivational processes. We present meta-analytic results forrelations of regulatory focus with its antecedents (approach and avoid temperaments, conscientiousness,openness to experience, agreeableness, self-esteem, and self-efficacy) and its consequences (workbehaviors and attitudes). In addition to estimates of bivariate relationships, we support a meta-analyticpath model in which distal personality traits relate to work behaviors via the mediating effects of generaland work-specific regulatory focus. Results from tests of incremental and relative validity indicated thatregulatory foci predict unique variance in work behaviors after controlling for established personality,motivation, and attitudinal predictors. Consistent with regulatory focus theory and our integrativetheoretical framework, regulatory focus has meaningful relations with work outcomes and is notredundant with other individual difference variables

The Team Descriptive Index (TDI): A Multidimensional Scaling Approach for Team Description

The literature on teams is filled with many alternative team type taxonomies, and the persistence of so many conflicting taxonomies serves as evidence for the lack of consensus in the field about how to describe and differentiate teams in any standardized way. This paper presents the Team Descriptive Index (TDI) as an approach for rigorous team description based upon the Three-Dimensional Team Scaling Model (3DTSM) developed by Hollenbeck, Beersma, and Schouten (Academy of Management Review, 37, 92–106). The use of a continuous scaling approach to team description eliminates the need for researchers to force the teams they study into discrete categorical types that, more often than not, fail accurately to capture their nature in a precise way. We report the results of five different studies that provide construct validation evidence for a set of standardized measures for the 3DTSM with diverse samples that reflect the wide variety of contexts in which teams are studied