Social Category Diversity Promotes Premeeting Elaboration: The Role of Relationship Focus

A purported downside of social category diversity is decreased relationship focus (i.e., one’s focus on establishing a positive social bond with a coworker). However, we argue that this lack of relationship focus serves as a central mechanism that improves information processing even prior to interaction and, ultimately, decision-making performance in diverse settings. We introduce the construct of premeeting elaboration (i.e., the extent to which individuals consider their own and others’ perspectives in the anticipation of an interaction) and explore its link with social category diversity and relationship focus. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that when disagreement occurs, social category diversity increases premeeting elaboration, with relationship focus as a central causal mechanism. Experiment 3 shows that premeeting elaboration has important implications for performance: disagreeing dyads with social category diversity elaborate more prior to meeting and, as a result, perform better on a decision-making task than those with social category homogeneity. We discuss the value of studying early-stage interaction and propose a reconsideration of the “downside” of social category diversity.Kellogg School of Managemen

Rising Above vs. Falling Below: When and Why Status Change Affects Interpersonal Helping in Workgroups

The current research sheds new light on how and why status hierarchies impact interpersonal helping by examining people’s reactions to recently experienced status change. Specifically, we incorporate findings from research on the self-serving attributional bias to theorize about how the direction of status change (i.e., a gain or a loss) can shape the extent to which people accept or deflect personal responsibility for their change in status, which we argue will then impact other-concern and, thus, their willingness to help. Further, we identify status change legitimacy as a key contingency that will strengthen or weaken the psychological and behavioral effects of status change. Among firefighter teams (Study 1), participants in the laboratory (Studies 2 and 3), and student teams (Study 4), we show that (1) status change impacts interpersonal helping through its impact on changes in other-concern and (2) status change legitimacy moderates the effect of status change on both other-concern and interpersonal helping. Additionally, we document an asymmetry with regards to the effects of status change on both other-concern and helping behavior (i.e., with the negative impact of a status loss being stronger than the positive impact of a status gain). Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.Immediate accessThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Trying Harder for Different Reasons

Past investigations of performance on a conjunctive physical persistence task have yielded consistent evidence of motivation gains in the less able worker - a pattern first seen in data collected over 70 years ago (Köhler, 1926, 1927). Moreover, recent work indicates that these gains are due to the increased instrumentality of the weaker participant's efforts. The present study sought to demonstrate that another potential factor in the work context - the sex composition of the group, which is known to moderate self-presentation concerns - could also affect such motivation gains. Male and female members of work teams performed a physical persistence task. In one condition they performed work trials as individuals. In others, they first worked on the task alone and then were paired with a more capable same- or other-sexed teammate to perform the task conjunctively - i. e., this trial was over as soon as either person stopped. As expected, these less capable participants worked significantly harder under conjunctive task demands, irrespective of coworker sex. However, also as predicted, males tended to show even greater motivation gain when paired with a more capable female, while females' efforts tended to vary the most when they were paired with a male. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the potentially multifaceted bases for motivation gains in collective work contexts

An Exploration of the Structure of Effective Apologies

Violations of trust are an unfortunate but common occurrence in conflict and negotiation settings: negotiators make promises that they do not keep; parties in conflict behave in unexpected ways, escalating tensions and breaking past trust. What often follows these violations is some form of an account, specifically an apology, in an effort to repair that trust. But are some apologies more effective than others? Two studies reported here examine the structural components of apologies. Six components of an apology were defined from previous research and presented to subjects — singly and in combination — in the form of component definitions and in the context of a trust violation scenario. Results indicate that not all apologies are viewed equally; apologies with more components were more effective than those with fewer components, and certain components were deemed more important than others. Moreover, apologies following competence-based trust violations were seen as more effective than apologies following integrity-based violations. Implications and future directions for research in the structure of effective apologies are presented