Journal of Applied Psychology

Integrating theory and evidence about Machiavellianism (Mach) into executive pay-setting research, we theorize about how chief executive officers (CEOs) higher in Mach may be both more motivated to initiate negotiations and more effective in utilizing social influence tactics in the pay-setting process, thus positively relating to their own pay outcomes. Specifically, we first theorize that CEO Mach positively associates with a CEO’s total pay and severance pay. Moreover, because paying top management team (TMT) members more is also in CEOs’ interests—such as to help build TMT loyalty and cooperation, aid hiring, and ease retention while also narrowing the CEO-TMT pay differential to thus provide an impetus for a CEO pay raise—we argue that CEO Mach positively relates to TMT pay as well. Using a longitudinal sample of S&P 500 firms and clinical psychologists trained to assess CEO Mach from publicly available data, we find evidence supporting our theorizing.

The powerful effects of electronic word of mouth on employer branding and prehire outcomes suggest a need for employers to formulate effective responses to employer reviews on social media. Using machine learning and text-mining techniques, we identified three distinct types of employer responses to negative reviews (i.e., excuses, apologies, prosocial behavior) and two other types of responses to positive reviews (i.e., ingratiation, exemplification) from a Glassdoor data set. Integrating research on organizational impression management and stereotype content, we developed and tested a theoretical model of response types and their effects on talent attraction across two vignette experiments with undergraduate (Study 1) and working adult job seekers (Study 2). Across both studies, not responding to negative reviews resulted in the worst outcomes for employers. Results demonstrate that the effectiveness of responses differed by the target population; prosocial behavior was most effective among job-seeking professionals, whereas excuse and apology were more effective among students. While exemplification had positive effects in the student sample, neither assertive tactic had a significant effect on hypothesized outcomes in sample of job-seeking professionals. Furthermore, warmth and sincerity, but not competence, mediated the effect of responses on key prehire outcomes of employer reputation, organizational attraction, and job pursuit intentions. Taken as a whole, our study suggests that employer reviews represent both a threat and an opportunity.

Workplace disparities persist for marginalized individuals—people from groups historically excluded from dominant social, economic, educational, and/or cultural life—who report lower well-being, strained relationships, and worse career outcomes compared to their advantaged counterparts. Allyship behaviors, often defined as actions by advantaged individuals to support marginalized individuals, have been promoted as solutions to such disparities. However, scholarly understanding of allyship behaviors’ consequences remains fragmented due to unclear definitions and conceptualizations, a predominant conceptual focus on antecedents, and limited integration with organizational theorizing. Consequently, we develop the mitigation–signaling model, which synthesizes definitions, categorizes behaviors, and disentangles conceptual overlaps to clarify why, how, and when allyship behaviors impact marginalized individuals’ work outcomes. The mitigation path focuses on the role of allyship behaviors in reducing mechanisms of disadvantage, that is, interpersonal discrimination, structural discrimination, and unequal access to resources. The signaling path emphasizes socioemotional signals (e.g., social value and safety) that marginalized individuals interpret from allyship behaviors. By bridging allyship and organizational scholarship, we provide a framework that clarifies conceptual boundaries, identifies empirical limitations, and offers a roadmap for advancing theory and practice. Our review highlights opportunities for organizationally relevant research and actionable interventions to address workplace disparities for marginalized individuals.

We offer a relational perspective on how power shapes voice in the employee–manager dyad. We argue that to properly understand the impact of employees’ power on voice, it must be analyzed alongside the power held by their managers. We propose that although voice increases when employees hold high power, its form—whether constructive or destructive—depends on their managers’ power. We posit that employees’ dependence on managers for rewards and sponsorship reflects the power that managers hold over employees, while managers’ reliance on employees for expertise and knowledge signifies the power that employees hold over managers. We argue that when employees’ power increases in the context of high managerial power, they are more likely to develop interdependent and contextualized self-evaluations, such as organization-based self-esteem. These self-evaluations promote a constructive voice that involves challenging the status quo in a functional and actionable manner. Conversely, when employees’ power increases in the context of low managerial power, they may develop independent and inflated self-evaluations, such as ego inflation. This can lead to destructive voice that involves merely expressing negativity as a way of questioning the status quo. We find support for our theory through a complementary set of studies, including a preregistered experimental study and a two-wave multisource field study. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and practice.

Researchers and practitioners have long grappled with balancing the goals of selecting a high-performing and diverse workforce. Recently, Rottman et al. (2023) proposed a new approach to address these goals, which we refer to as multipenalty optimized regression (MOR). MOR extends ridge regression by adding a penalty term that minimizes group differences when fitting the model. Although MOR has shown potential, there are unknowns, including whether MOR is consistently effective in typical selection settings, what conditions impact MOR effectiveness, and whether MOR performs similarly to other multiobjective optimization methods, such as Pareto-normal boundary intersection (Pareto-NBI). Using Monte Carlo simulations (Study 1), we investigated MOR effectiveness and compared it with traditional scoring methods (ridge regression, ordinary least squares, unit weighting) and Pareto-NBI across several factors: (a) number of scales (and corresponding items), (b) operationalization (item or scale), (c) magnitude of predictor criterion-related validity, (d) magnitude of predictor subgroup differences, (e) calibration sample size, and (f) proportion of minorities in the calibration sample. Compared with traditional methods, MOR frequently produced solutions with comparable criterion-related validity but with consistently less adverse impact risk. Pareto-NBI and MOR were similarly effective in performing dual optimization, though MOR was more effective at very small sample sizes (e.g., N < 150) with item-level scoring. Pareto-NBI also became computationally intensive with many predictors, making MOR better suited for big data. Finally, in Study 2, MOR exhibited similar criterion-related validity and lower adverse impact risk relative to other methods across six real-life assessment contexts. We provide recommendations for using multiobjective optimization methods in personnel selection.

Interracial interactions are often laden with concerns about being assimilated by group stereotypes. This study examines the “White-and-prejudiced” stereotype threat, which can be triggered in White customers when interacting with Black frontline employees. Our findings, derived from two field studies and two experiments, reveal short-term positive effects of the White stereotype threat on the job performance effectiveness of Black frontline employees. For example, White customers buy more and intend to tip more when interacting with a Black relative to a White frontline employee. These short-term positive behavioral shifts toward Black frontline employees are especially present when the frontline employee is categorized in terms of race but diminished when the frontline employee is individuated. The implications of our findings are managerially relevant because employees from marginalized racial groups are often overrepresented in frontline and in service occupations in several countries including Europe and the United States.

A multiverse analysis allows researchers to systematically evaluate the support for a hypothesis across a range of sensible ways in which data can be prepared for statistical analysis and/or be analyzed. Accordingly, multiverse analysis provides insights into the relevance of different approaches to, for instance, dealing with outliers or attrition, creating scales, or using different measures for the same construct. The goal of this article is to illustrate the usefulness of multiverse analysis for research in applied psychology and to guide researchers in conducting a multiverse analysis. To do so, we provide a detailed process model of the typical stages involved in conducting a multiverse analysis (along with a shortened version depicting multiverse analysis “at a glance”), as well as a designated, corresponding preregistration template for multiverse analysis. To showcase the merits of a multiverse analysis, we also evaluate two exemplary hypotheses regarding employees’ experience of commuting to and from work. We observed that the results of these hypothesis tests varied strongly depending on how common decisions were made. As such, multiverse analysis represents an important tool for exploring the robustness of knowledge at the level of individual studies, even before a replication is conducted. Hence, multiverse analysis can strengthen the transparency and openness of empirical work.

Connections to exceptionally high-performing industry stars facilitate individuals’ job attainment. But what are the career consequences for people who benefit initially from star connections? Using balance theory, we integrate social network and basking-in-reflected glory research to examine how high expectations resulting from the persistence of reflected glory affect the evaluation of star-connected employees’ performance long after their work associations with stars have ceased. To preserve cognitive balance, evaluators may discount the poor performances of the star-connected. Good performances, on the other hand, affirm positive cognitive associations in the minds of evaluators between stars and those who once worked with them. Using the career trajectories of assistant and head coaches in the National Basketball Association (NBA) from 1976 to 2015, we found that star-connected head coaches, relative to their nonconnected peers, were protected from being fired when underperforming but benefited less when overperforming. Study 2 showed experimentally that a star-connected employee, relative to a nonconnected peer, was buffered from the effects of work performance because of the high work performance expectations held by evaluators. We contribute new evidence concerning the effects of star performers on colleagues and move research beyond the fleeting impressions that have occupied prior basking-in-reflected glory work. Further, we contribute to integrating the social network emphasis on advantageous network connections with research on merit-based advancement. The overall conclusion from these two studies is that the reflected glory of star connections influences careers long beyond the hiring stage in ways that buffer individuals from their own performance outcomes.

Grounded in and expanding upon the allostatic load model, the present study examined how repeated exposure to work and nonwork stressors (i.e., stressor pile-up) across an 8-day study period relates to daily strain-related outcomes—diurnal cortisol, physical symptoms, and sleep quantity and quality—in both parents and their adolescent children. Nonlinear associations between daily stressor pile-up and daily strain were explored. Data from the Work, Family, and Health Network study (N = 131 parent–child dyads, n = 1,014 daily survey observations, n = 465 daily observations with cortisol) were used to test the study hypotheses. Parent work stressor pile-up and adolescent stressor pile-up were associated with increased daily physical symptom likelihood in parents and adolescents, respectively. Counter to expectations, parent nonwork stressor pile-up was associated with steeper daily cortisol slopes. Additionally, we found curvilinear crossover effects for sleep quantity, such that parent nonwork stressor pile-up and adolescent stressor pile-up were associated with shorter sleep duration among adolescents and parents (respectively), but this relationship plateaued and reversed as daily pile-up increased to more extreme levels. Our article explores conceptual and operational pile-up definitions (level of analysis, length of time window, inclusion of the current-day stressor events). Individual-level analyses supported more consistent, positive linear relationships between stressor pile-up and strains. Time window had little consequences for conclusions, but inclusion of the current day yields some alternative conclusions. We discuss implications for understanding stressor pile-up across domains and across parent–child dyads as it relates to daily strain within the family system.

Common method variance (CMV) substantially impacts how scholars conduct and review research. Several procedural and statistical remedies have been proposed to address the potential biasing effects that can result from CMV in data procured from a single source on a single occasion. Among them, temporal separation and distinct source designs have been the most popular. Psychological separation (PS) has also been proposed as a way to address CMV, by diverting respondents’ attention from previously accessed memories, disrupting response consistency patterns, and improving effortful responding. The present research attempted to create efficacious PS through a cognitive interference task administered midway through a survey, thereby attenuating correlations that could be affected by CMV to varying degrees. In an initial study and a constructive replication, our results show that a PS intervention of at least 7.5-min attenuated several relationships to levels significantly lower than those in a single source on a single occasion design, but to an extent consistent with the attenuation achieved by temporal separation or distinct source designs. These findings suggest that under appropriate circumstances, PS is an effective strategy to address certain forms of CMV. We conclude by providing a decision guide for responsibly choosing a research design in light of various theoretical, methodological, and logistical considerations, as well as offering several additional PS task examples that can be deployed in future studies.

Recent advancements in range restriction (RR) correction research suggest that Case V (Dahlke & Wiernik, 2020; Le et al., 2016) is one of the most accurate approaches to correct for (indirect) RR. However, researchers have had difficulty applying the Case V approach, especially in validation and meta-analytic (including validity generalization) studies, because of the lack of information regarding one of its key components: the RR ratio of the criterion (uY), particularly in the context of job performance ratings. In the present study, we provide a solution to this problem by presenting a mixed approach using Case IV to estimate the uY of job performance ratings, a critical input in implementing Case V correction (by doing so, mixing Cases IV and V). The premise for this mixed approach hinges upon prior findings that Case IV yields the same unbiased estimates as does Case V as long as its “full mediation” assumption is met. The accuracy of the approach is then tested and compared to those of existing RR correction approaches (Cases II, IV, and V) using Monte Carlo simulations covering a wide range of conditions researchers may realistically encounter in their research. We discuss the present study’s implications for personnel selection research and practice, along with study limitations and future research directions.

In an effort to extend experiential learning theory to the team level, we develop and test a model capturing and explaining the relative effects of two alternative team learning-based interventions, namely, after-action reviews (AAR) and design thinking (DT; a team problem-solving approach which we argue can be repurposed as a team development intervention). Integrating experiential learning theory with research on episodic team learning, we propose that by engaging the team in a more comprehensive set of experiential learning elements in each performance episode, relative to AAR, DT drives enhanced normative and cognitive team emergent states, and as a result, a greater short-term (i.e., 6-month) improvement in team performance, particularly for teams characterized by greater team task variety. Results from a multiwave field experiment of teams in a manufacturing company largely support this model, indicating that over the 6-month study period: (a) A DT intervention was associated with greater improvement in team performance than that associated with AAR, and (b) these effects are partially explained by differential changes in both team learning climate and transactive memory system specification. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Employees, especially in the service sector, often work long hours exposed to background music that they have little control over because it is usually selected to enhance customer experience. How does this affect employees’ daily work experience? This research focuses on how a misfit between the type of music employees need and the background music played in their workplace impacts their psychological states and behaviors. Integrating stimulus–organism–response theory with the research on self-regulation of attention in the workplace, we theorize that workplace music misfit can lower employees’ positive affect and increase cognitive depletion, further impacting their organizationally directed citizenship and counterproductive work behaviors. We also theorize that these adverse effects of workplace music misfit are stronger for employees who have lower stimulus screening ability. The test of our hypotheses across two studies—an online experimental study and a 3-week experience sampling methodology field study—broadly supported our theory. Our research offers a novel and dynamic account of workplace background music and its effects on employees’ psychological states and workplace behavior.

Sexual harassment bystander intervention (SHBI) has been deemed critical to addressing persistent incidents in the workplace, yet scholarly knowledge of this behavior remains sporadic and limited. To move this field of research forward, the present study departs from the traditional variable-centered approach and instead adopts a latent profile approach to answer three key questions: (1) Which combinations (profiles) of actions do bystanders take to intervene? (2) When do bystanders intervene with specific profiles of SHBI? and (3) What happens when bystanders intervene with different behavioral combinations? We first developed and validated a scale to measure five distinct SHBI behaviors (i.e., confronting, distracting, supporting, reporting, and discussing) with two scenario-based pilot studies. Then, using this scale and latent profile analysis, we identified three distinctive profiles (i.e., active intervention, low-risk intervention, and no/limited intervention) in a field survey study (N1 = 381). In two additional field survey studies (N2 = 312; N3 = 326), by integrating social cognitive theory with the moral lens, we not only replicated the three similar profiles but also examined antecedents (i.e., organizational norms about sexual harassment and gender, and bystanders’ anger, empathy, and harassment-curbing expectancy) and outcomes of the profile memberships (i.e., aggression from the harasser, target gratitude, third-party elevation, and bystander guilt and pride). Overall, this research provides new insights into the nature of SHBI, its distinct patterns in the workplace, and potential organizational practices related to SHBI profiles.

Leadership and historical narrative studies suggest that leaders strategically use history as a source of narratives to facilitate change. Yet the dynamic microprocess of how leaders craft and recraft their historical narratives to shift the organizational members’ understanding of current reality and thereby facilitate change remains unexplored. Using the case of a Korean Buddhist temple that confronts significant societal change and financial shortage, this study investigates how the head monk—the leader of the temple—strategically creates and modifies historical narratives to achieve change and how the organizational members respond to the leader’s narratives. To deeply immerse myself in the context, I engaged in 4 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Korean Buddhist temple where the tension between tradition and change was most salient. The findings show that some narratives effectively reshaped the members’ understanding of the need for change while others unexpectedly failed. By theorizing this sensegiving and sensemaking process, this study reveals that crafting effective historical narratives is a messy process, which manifests as an evolving trial-and-error process of leaders’ sensegiving and members’ sensemaking.

To date, little is known about what interventions can help individuals attain leadership roles in organizations. To address this knowledge gap, we integrate insights from the communication and leadership literatures to test debate training as a novel intervention for leadership emergence. We propose that debate training can increase individuals’ leadership emergence by fostering assertiveness —“an adaptive style of communication in which individuals express their feelings and needs directly, while maintaining respect for others” (American Psychological Association, n.d.)—a valued leadership characteristic in U.S. organizations. Experiment 1 was a three-wave longitudinal field experiment at a Fortune 100 U.S. company. Individuals (N = 471) were randomly assigned to either receive a 9-week debate training or not. Eighteen months later, the treatment-group participants were more likely to have advanced in leadership level than the control-group participants, an effect mediated by assertiveness increase. In a sample twice as large (N = 975), Experiment 2 found that individuals who were randomly assigned to receive debate training (vs. nondebate training or no training) acted more assertively and had higher leadership emergence in a subsequent group activity. Results were consistent across self-rated, group-member-rated, and coder-rated assertiveness. Moderation analyses suggest that the effects of debate training were not significantly different for (a) U.S.- and foreign-born individuals, (b) men and women, or (c) different ethnic groups. Overall, our experiments suggest that debate training can help individuals attain leadership roles by developing their assertiveness.

Yao and Ma (2023) recently reviewed and reanalyzed 31 studies published in top-tier journals utilizing polynomial regression and response surface methods. Their work offers a useful holistic framework for how to test and categorize various forms of congruence; however, they ultimately advance cautionary conclusions about the extent to which 28 of the 31 studies provide “evidence of congruence” and call into question whether the practical implications of these studies are valid (p. 446). In this commentary, we clarify this inference stems largely from theoretical and empirical oversights made in Yao and Ma (2023). We bring to light issues surrounding (a) proposals that exact correspondence is the theoretical goal (despite 26 of the 31 studies explicitly hypothesizing deviation from that form) and (b) suggestions that authors did not adequately consider empirics they did report. Most critically, Yao and Ma suggested their reanalysis provides conclusions that differ from the reviewed studies in 28 (of 31) instances. We demonstrate that, when one accounts for the form of congruence the authors explicitly theorized, the type of congruence supported as well as the inferences discussed in the studies differ from those in Yao and Ma’s reanalysis in only nine of 31 studies (rather than 28). This commentary seeks to rectify the theoretical, empirical, and inferential misconceptions in Yao and Ma (2023) that may lead readers to inaccurately assess past work and threaten future work in this vein. We outline a path for scholars interested in applying this method moving forward.

Our recent article on congruence research (Yao & Ma, 2023) advocated the need to adopt a holistic approach to studying congruence effects and to developing stronger congruence theories. Matta and Frank (2025) offered an insightful commentary on our article, highlighting theoretical and empirical/inferential concerns. These concerns include (a) whether the exact correspondence effect is the theoretical goal and (b) when researchers should consider applied conditions or reported conditions in congruence research. While Matta and Frank acknowledged the value of the holistic perspective, they recommended testing one’s hypothesized form of congruence as the goal of future congruence research. We thank Matta and Frank for bringing up these issues. These issues have gained increased relevance and urgency especially after Yao and Ma (2023) identified several common issues in published congruence studies and offered suggestions for improvements. This reply is intended to clarify and extend our arguments on the holistic perspective, illustrating how this perspective can help address the concerns they raised and further advance congruence research.

Existing research presents mixed perspectives on the impact of abusive supervision climate on team processes and effectiveness. This discrepancy prompts an important question: when, why, and how does abusive supervision climate become more or less detrimental to teams? By integrating the social functional perspective of gossip with recent theoretical advancements on abusive supervision climate, we develop a novel theoretical model to explain how leader-targeted negative team gossip—defined as the extent to which team members share negative evaluations of the leader’s behaviors with each other when the leader is absent—can mitigate the adverse effects of abusive supervision climate on teams. Our model posits that leader-targeted negative team gossip serves its social function in two key ways: (a) It diminishes team members’ perception of the leader as a role model, thereby reducing the influence of abusive supervision climate on team aggressive behavior, and (b) it fosters perceived similarity among team members regarding their negative attitudes toward the leader, which lessens the impact of abusive supervision climate on team affective trust. We further argue that these buffering effects of leader-targeted negative team gossip have significant downstream implications for team effectiveness, specifically in terms of team performance and team voluntary turnover. Our model was tested using two multiwave, multisource field studies employing a round-robin design, with samples of 111 and 237 work teams, respectively. The results largely supported our model. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.

The predominant view in the employee proactivity literature highlights the importance of personality as well as a trio of agentic forces—namely, “can do,” “reason to,” and “energized to” motivation—that drive employee proactive behavior. Complementing existing theoretical frameworks, we introduce the concept of proactivity permission, defined as an employee’s tacit perception of the extent to which they are “allowed to” perform proactive behaviors at work. In this article, we investigate the psychological experience of proactivity permission. Directly drawn from the dominance theory of deontic reasoning, we model a set of individual (employee status, psychological entitlement), relational (leader–member exchange), and group-level predictors (organizational rule consistency, normative tightness) of proactivity permission and demonstrate the construct’s value in predicting proactive behavior over and above many well-established antecedents from the literature. In a field study of 388 employees and 110 supervisors in 35 organizations, we found support for our predictions. We discuss implications of our work for the literature on employee behavior and proactive work behavior.

The literature on psychological contracts has focused on employees’ perceptions of their employers’ obligations, but not on employees’ perceptions of their own obligations. Hence, perceived general obligation has seldom been theorized. This study argues that workplace support (i.e., from the organization, supervisors, and coworkers) and morally relevant traits (i.e., moral identity, conscientiousness, and agreeableness) predict perceived general obligation, that perceived general obligation predicts performance outcomes, and that the effects vary across cultures. Meta-analytic data collected from 148 samples (N = 45,671) provide preliminary support for the proposed relationships. I also examine the incremental validity of perceived general obligation in predicting performance outcomes beyond other correlates (e.g., normative commitment, positive and negative affect), the mediating role of perceived general obligation in its nomological network, and alternative models for linking the study variables. This study therefore illustrates the value of perceived general obligation in psychological contract research.

Do unions facilitate or hamper the effectiveness of high-performance work systems (HPWS)? Despite the long-standing interest among labor and human resource scholars on this matter, relevant studies are limited and dated. This research investigates whether and how the interplay between HPWS and unions affects both organizational performance and employee well-being outcomes. The authors argue while unions may attenuate the HPWS effects on organizational performance due to decreased performance climate, the overall impacts of unions are likely beneficial, as they facilitate cooperative climate that contributes to organizational performance and enhances employee well-being, which positively affects longer term organizational outcomes. Analyzing longitudinal data with 934 observations from 287 South Korean firms, the authors show that unions indeed facilitate the positive effects of HPWS on organizational performance and employee well-being, mediated by enhanced cooperative climate. They did not find statistically meaningful evidence that unions mitigate HPWS’ effects on performance climate and subsequent organizational performance.

Work design scholarship has demonstrated that work characteristics are important determinants of a wide range of individual outcomes including well-being, motivation, satisfaction, and performance. Yet this scholarship has also revealed substantial and unaccounted for variance in these effects, prompting calls for theory and research that applies multilevel and contextual perspectives to expand our understanding of work designs. We develop theory that spans occupation, job, and individual levels to connect the influences of both context and personal attributes (e.g., skills) on work design consequences. Central to our multilevel theory is the concept of attribute relevance, which reflects the extent to which different attributes are prioritized within occupational and job contexts in which individuals enact their roles. Results across three studies spanning 3,838 incumbents and 339 unique occupations reveal that attribute relevance systematically moderates the relationships between work designs and individual outcomes and thus demarcates factors that account for variability in the main effects observed in previous work design research. We bring much-needed theory and evidence to open questions about how worker requirements and individual differences are connected to work designs.