Getting bang for your buck : the specificity of compensation and benefits information in job advertisements

Even though some organizations are trying to attract high-level applicants through offering superior compensation and benefits, reward statements in job advertisements are sometimes rather general and vague. On the basis of person-environment fit theories, we examine whether providing more specific information on attractive reward packages in job advertisements leads to higher perceived person-reward fit and subsequent job pursuit intentions. Furthermore, based on signaling theory, we propose that person-reward fit allows job seekers to make inferences about broader person-organization fit. Applying an online experimental design among 283 experienced potential applicants, we find that more specific compensation and benefits information results in higher job pursuit intentions and that this relationship is fully mediated by person-reward fit perceptions. In turn, the effect of person-reward fit is partially mediated by perceptions of person-organization fit, indicating that people might use reward information as signals for other organizational attributes in early stages of recruitment

What I do or how I do it:The effect of accountability focus on individual exploration

Because accountability is a central feature of many management practices, feeling accountable is a fact of life in modern organizations. Accountability has been found to have many beneficial outcomes, yet it may also increase certain cognitive biases. Building on the social contingency model of accountability, we examine the effect of accountability on manager’s individual decision making about exploration vs. exploitation. We distinguish between outcome and process accountability and examine them as independent predictors of exploration behaviour. Although previous work suggests that outcome accountability may lead managers to quickly switch to old ways of working (i.e., exploitation), we propose that process accountability will increase individual exploration. Furthermore, employing the concept of disfluency, we propose that this positive effect of process accountability will be especially strong when outcome accountability is also high. Combining two survey studies (n = 361, n = 438) with employees and a lab experiment (n = 211), we find overall support for our hypotheses. Specifically, we find that process accountability increases exploration while outcome accountability decreases it (and increases exploitation). We also find partial support for a positive interaction of process and outcome accountability

Tensions and paradoxes in creativity and innovation

Most often understood as the generation of novel and useful ideas and their implementation, research on creativity and innovation has mushroomed in recent years. Although these studies provided useful insights into how organizations can enhance both phenomena, there is a growing consensus in the literature suggesting that rather than inherently beneficial, creativity and innovation are in fact ripe with tensions and competing demands. These tensions may put individuals and teams under pressure as they try to a) come up with novel, but also useful and implementable ideas, b) complete their core tasks efficiently, but also suggest novel and useful ideas for their improvement, and c) bring uniqueness to the table, but at the same time form cohesive collectives. In this integrative review, we illustrate these tensions with research evidence and provide recommendations about how we can manage them in order to benefit from individual and team creative and innovative efforts