Chia-Huei Wu

• PhD University of Western Australia
• Professor (Full) at King's College London

Core self-evaluations (CSE) have been proposed as a static personality trait that influences individuals' work experiences. However, CSE can also be influenced by work experiences. Based on the corresponsive principle of personality development, this study incorporated both dispositional and contextual perspectives to examine longitudinal reciproca...

Researchers have proposed that leader support helps employees behave proactively at work. Leader support can facilitate the opportunities for employees to bring about change, as well as their motivation to do so. Nevertheless, empirical studies have shown mixed effects of leader support on employees’ proactive behavior. In this study, to reconcile...

Why and when do employees respond to workplace ostracism by withholding their engagement in citizenship behavior? Beyond perspectives proposed in past studies, we offer a new account based on a social identity perspective and propose that workplace ostracism decreases citizenship behavior by undermining employees’ identification with the organizati...

When and why do people engage in different forms of proactive behavior at work? We propose that, as a result of a process of trait activation, employees with different types of self-construal engage in distinct forms of proactive behavior if they work in environments consistent with their self-construals. In an experimental Study 1 (N = 61), we exa...

Drawing on Cybernetic Big Five Theory, we propose that chronic job insecurity is associated with an increase in neuroticism and decreases in agreeableness and conscientiousness (the three traits that reflect stability). Data collected from 1,046 employees participating in the Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia survey over a nine-year...

Being proactive involves taking personal initiative to change a situation or oneself. While research to date has paid considerable attention to the frequency with which individuals engage in proactive behaviors, less attention has been given to the ways in which people act proactively to garner positive outcomes. In this paper, we draw on the conce...

Servant leadership has been found to motivate followers to express constructive voice, but why is this the case? Studies so far have identified a ‘can do’ mechanism that enables followers to speak up and a ‘reason to’ mechanism that promote their willingness to do so. Nevertheless, these mechanisms have not considered the role of servant leadership...

This research brings a broad stress appraisal lens to the study of frequent daily work interruptions, offering a unifying theoretical framework to answer why and when work interruptions can engender negative or positive reactions, thereby explaining seemingly contradictory empirical findings. Drawing on cognitive appraisal theory, we propose that f...

Managing workplace safety requires leaders to navigate through competing goals and processes. However, the current conceptualization and measurement of safety leadership do not adequately address this practical reality. To address this issue, we integrate paradox theory and paradoxical leadership research with safety‐management literature to develo...

This study advances our understanding of how a relational work context can promote host country nationals’ (HCNs’) advice-giving behavior. Drawing from social interdependence theory and relational signalling theory, we develop a multilevel model to demonstrate how task interdependence and expatriate advice seeking can jointly influence HCNs’ advice...

Despite the importance of a thriving workforce in sustaining organizational success, prior research pays little attention to how individualized human resource (HR) practices can help individual employees to thrive at work. Drawing on the theoretical underpinnings of conservation of resources theory, we investigate whether, how, and when development...

Associations among cognitive ability, depressive symptoms, and psychological resilience have been found, but the interaction among these variables remains unclear, especially for young adults. The current study aimed to investigate how these variables interact in young adults. A total of 192 participants (97 female) with a mean age of 21.84 years (...

Drawing from the perspective of sociometer theory, we posit that the career consultation behaviour of newcomers can bolster supervisors' organization‐based self‐esteem (OBSE), thereby increasing their access to career mentoring from supervisors. Additionally, we suggest that the impact of newcomers' career consultation behaviour on supervisors' OBS...

Previous research on the psychological effect of job change has revealed a honeymoon–hangover pattern during the turnover process. However, there is a dearth of evidence on how individuals react and adapt to multiple job changes over their working lives. This study distinguishes adaptation to a single job change in the short term from adaptation to...

Peace of mind (PoM) is an index of mental health in Asian culture and emphasizes low arousal, happiness, harmony, and an internal state of peacefulness. While previous studies have found that mindful self-awareness can contribute to PoM, regular physical activity (PA) is also an important factor contributing to one’s PoM due to its function in prom...

Purpose This study aims to examine the role of location autonomy (i.e. autonomy over where to work) in shaping employee mental distress during their working days. Design/methodology/approach A total of 316 employees from 6 organizations in the UK provided data for 4,082 half-day sessions, over 10 working days. Random intercept modeling is used to...

The return from maternity leave to work is a critical career transition period for working mothers. To help their readaptation to work, we developed and examined a training program for cultivating their work–family balance self-efficacy in a pretest–posttest design and investigated the time-lagged effect of the boosted self-efficacy on their employ...

While promotive voice is conventionally considered a favourable work behaviour to the organisation, whether engaging in promotive voice will help employees move up the career ladder is inconclusive across a handful of studies. Drawing on a psychological contract perspective, this study aims to understand why and when employees' promotive voice can...

Associations among cognitive ability, depressive symptoms, and psychological resilience have been found, but the interaction among these variables remains unclear, especially for young adults. The current study aimed to investigate how these variables interact in young adults in Taiwan. A total of 192 participants (97 female) with a mean age of 21....

Experiential avoidance, a personality trait that refers to individuals’ tendency to avoid negative experiences, can have a negative impact on athletes’ goal achievement. For this reason, it is crucial to identify the factors that can mitigate such a tendency. Drawing on self-determination theory and referring specifically to the function of subject...

Individuals often need to be proactive in order to successfully navigate their career development journeys. To what extent one is vocationally proactive has critical implications for his or her attitudes, behaviors, and other outcomes in career and work‐related settings. However, research in career proactivity has been accumulating from divergent p...

Research interests have surged recently to unpack the different elements or forms of career proactivity, which is presumed to carry important implications for one’s career (Klehe et al., 2021). However, as revealed in our bibliometric review (Jiang et al., 2022), career proactivity remains a complex domain which resides in various research themes i...

This research aims to explain whether leader perfectionism toward employees fosters or hinders employee creativity. From a self-regulation perspective, we theorize that depending on employees’ locus of control, leader perfectionism can influence two regulatory states of employees (i.e., engagement and emotional exhaustion) linearly or curvilinearly...

Organizations are increasingly introducing online platforms to facilitate knowledge sharing among employees across organizational boundaries. Nonetheless, individuals do not always share knowledge on such platforms. This study aims to identify the factors that can motivate individuals to share knowledge on an online platform drawing on social excha...

Transactional and relational contract breach occur when organizations fail to deliver on promised personal benefits for employees and are associated with negative behaviors reciprocating such mistreatment. However, recent research suggests that ideological contract breach, a unique form of contract breach, may yield constructive behaviors because i...

Research on the antecedents of organizational identification (OI), individuals’ sense of oneness with the organization, has developed over time with four major categories: organizational characteristics, managerial policies and practices, interpersonal interactions, and personal attributes. OI research has flourished due to the exploration of antec...

Although organisational resilience is crucial to small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in turbulent business environments, research has yet to establish whether and how human resource management (HRM) systems can help build an SME's organisational resilience to influence firm performance. Drawing on the perspective of HRM as an internal capabil...

Studies have reported negative effects of self-control demands on the service-oriented physical and mental well-being of employees. Based on the stressor-detachment model and conservation of resources theory, the present study examined how and when the interplay between leisure crafting and perceived supervisor recreational sports support can lead...

In the quest to get the best from those for whom they are responsible, some parents and managers seek or demand perfection. But do such expectations benefit the targets, in terms of their capacity for creativity? The present research examines how perfectionistic parental and supervisor expectations influence employees’ fear of failure and creativit...

Purpose Regulatory focus theory suggests that regulatory fit influences individuals' decisions. However, little is known regarding the effect of regulatory fit on sports consumers' purchase intention. Accordingly, the authors extend the concept of regulatory fit to the sports context to understand how advertising claims affect amateur badminton pla...

Background The Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) and the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS) are two scales widely used to measure resilience. Although both scales seek to assess an individual's ability to recover from and adapt to disruptions or stressful events, they can capture different aspects of resilience. While the CD-RISC focuses on reso...

Psychological contract breach (PCB) and its consequences have mainly been studied from a social exchange perspective or an affective events perspective. In this study, we use a relative deprivation perspective to capture the experience of loss following PCB and its implications on employees' reactions. Drawing from relative deprivation theory, we p...

The aim of this chapter is to introduce three aspects of attachment theory (Bowlby, 1997 [1969]): the concept of behavioural systems, which Bowlby (1997 [1969]) proposes to explain behaviours; how the attachment behavioural system is developed from early interaction experiences with primary caregivers; and how the development of the attachment beha...

Research on proactivity has so far mainly considered proactivity as an individual's action and used a sell-regulation perspective to understand employee proactive behaviour at work. Nevertheless, proactivity is very often relational, in part because it is often necessary to manage disapproval and resistance from other stakeholders in the work conte...

In today's global economy, organizations must operate within complex environments that require rapid responses to changing external circumstances (Campbell, 2000). To succeed within these increasingly uncertain operating environments, in addition to adapting to changes, employees can proactively respond to challenges (Griffin et al, 2007) to improv...

The aim of this chapter is to build a behavioural system model of proactivity based on attachment theory. Drawing on key propositions reviewed in Chapter Two, this chapter develops a behavioural system model of employee proactivity in two steps. The next section adopts a behavioural perspective (see Chapter One) and elaborates why we can conceptual...

Wu integrates the current understanding of motivational factors in shaping proactive workers, through his introduction to attachment theory, and development of it as a theoretical framework. This compelling approach provides academics with a new way of thinking about employee behaviour while also acting as a guide for practitioners and managers.

The aim of this chapter is to introduce attachment theory (Bowlby, 1997 [1969]) in terms of context-specific attachment styles, and the stability and changeability of attachment style. An attachment relationship exists not only between children and parents, but also in other relationship contexts. Bowlby (1997 [1969]) has suggested that when people...

This chapter aims to look into individual and situational factors of attachment security to offer a relational perspective to explain why there are individual differences in employee proactivity and how managers and organizations can influence employee proactivity. First, the concept of attachment styles is used to explain individual differences in...

Job insecurity is negatively associated with employees’ extra-role behavior. Studies of this negative impact often use a social exchange or stress–strain perspective to explain how job insecurity impairs employees’ extra-role behavior. This study offers an alternative account. Based on a conservation of resources perspective, the authors propose th...

In this research, we simultaneously examined the relative applicability of person-environment fit and relative deprivation theories in explaining the interactive effects of perceived overqualification and collectivism cultural orientations on positive outcomes. We hypothesized that the negative (positive) influence of perceived overqualification on...

Drawing on the social cognitive theory of self‐regulation, we proposed a model considering an inverted U‐shaped relationship between perceived overqualification and constructive voice. We reasoned from the theory that this curvilinear effect would be moderated by leader consultation, which could intensify the upward curvilinear trend and neutralize...

Purpose – While researchers have discussed the association between career change to self-employment and job satisfaction, few have considered how the association is achieved. Therefore, in this study, the authors aim to explain this relationship from the perspective of job quality. The authors build on job design theory to propose and empirically t...

Past research has found that employees who view themselves as overqualified for their jobs tend to hold negative job attitudes and be unwilling to go beyond the call of duty. In challenging situations such as during the COVID-19 crisis, when having “all hands-on deck” may be important to an organization’s survival, mitigating the negative tendencie...

In this chapter we seek to identify work-related factors that shape personality change. We focus on changes occurring in individuals’ personalities as a result of their work and employment experiences and of the socialising pressure of normative demands arising during these experiences – that is, the ‘socialisation effect’. To offer a broad overvie...

In Chapter 3, we reviewed studies that investigated how individuals’ personality development is influenced by a wide range of external factors. These longitudinal studies primarily focused on personality change as a relatively passive process that requires a substantial length of time for such effects to occur. However, is there a possibility for p...

Can your job change your personality? This book provides an overview on how personality can be changed at work by societal, organisational and job-related factors, while considering how individuals can take an active approach in changing their personality at work.

We have discussed in detail the interactive relationship between work and personality change, and articulated how personality change can occur both as a result of multilevel influences from global, national and organisational contexts, and as a result of one's deliberate and intentional efforts, with and without external intervening forces. By this...

As individuals we all have unique characteristics that make us different from one another, and personality forms one of these important characteristics. Because of our personality differences, we tend to have different ways of thinking, feeling, behaving and relating to others and approaching the world. More importantly, personality has important i...

Personality is conventionally regarded as a set of stable and enduring individual characteristics that reliably differentiate individuals from one another. For instance, William James (1890, p 126) said that ‘in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again’. McCrae & Costa (2003, p 3) defined tra...

The Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) and the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS) are two widely used scales to measure resilience. Although both scales seek to assess an individual’s ability to recover from and adapt to disruptions or stressful events, they may capture different aspects of resilience. While the CD-RISC focuses on resources that...

Although a leader’s affective characteristics are believed to influence team processes and outcomes, the impact of leaders’ discrete affective traits on team innovation remains unclear. This study addresses this issue by developing a multi‐stage team‐level model that explains how team leaders’ trait gratitude enhances team innovation. Specifically,...

Reflective learning is a fundamental part of human learning and development and has attracted attention from management scholars as well as practitioners. In this study, we build on trait activation theory and investigate how proactive personality and team task support jointly influence employee reflective learning. Using a questionnaire survey, we...

Although effective leaders are important for reducing employee stress during the COVID‐19, limited studies have examined how follower behaviors can influence leader stress and wellbeing during the COVID‐19. This study draws on defeat‐entrapment theory to examine how followers’ unclear demands during the COVID‐19 consequently impact leaders’ psychol...

Purpose Studies have reported negative effects of felt accountability on employees' extra-role behavior. Deviating from that focus, this study proposes that leadership plays a role in shaping the implications of felt accountability for employees' extra-role behavior. We propose that under high transformational leadership, felt accountability can mo...

Previous research shows that job satisfaction often increases sharply upon initial entry into the new job and gradually falls back to the baseline level over time. In this study we propose that this ‘honeymoon‐hangover’ pattern is affected by both the direction of occupational mobility and the individual’s personality in terms of extraversion and n...

Motivational climate (i.e., mastery and performance climate) has been found to shape athletes’ emotional and physical exhaustion, the core dimension of burnout. However, the interactional effect between mastery and performance climate on emotional and physical exhaustion has been rarely examined. In this study, we proposed that athletes’ gratitude...

This book provides an advanced and contemporary understanding about personality at work, with a particular focus on the change perspective of personality. Thus far, the majority of research focusing on personality at work takes a more static perspective, assuming that personality is fixed and stable. However, an increasingly prominent research line...

This chapter focuses on an emerging domain, that is, how personality can be changed in a more active and intentional manner. It starts from reviewing key factors in individuals’ agency in this volitional change process, such as having goals and desires for change, and the importance of self-regulation in sustaining change. Then, it reviews existing...

The final chapter brings together the literature reviewed in this book to highlight key implications of personality change for future research and practice. First, it identifies unresolved debates and under-studied areas in personality change and provide suggestions for future research. Then, it discusses methodological issues in studying personali...

This chapter focuses on occurring changes in individuals’ personality as a result of their work and employment experiences, and of the socialising pressure of norm demands during these experiences. This chapter starts from a brief review of traditions in organisational and social psychology on the study of work and personality change. Then, it pres...

The first chapter provides foundational knowledge about the conceptualization of personality at work. In particular, it discusses the trait-perspective of personality and reviews personality research in the work context. It also discusses practical implications, highlighting how the knowledge of personality traits has been used to inform personnel...

This book provides an advanced and contemporary understanding about personality at work, with a particular focus on the change perspective of personality. Thus far, the majority of research focusing on personality at work takes a more static perspective, assuming that personality is fixed and stable. However, an increasingly prominent research line...

This chapter introduces the change perspective of personality, through an integrative review of research evidence in supportive of this perspective. It presents what has been found, primarily in the personality and social psychology disciplines, as to personality change during adulthood. It also discusses what types of change is usually observed, a...

Can your job change your personality? This book provides an overview on how personality can be changed at work by societal, organisational and job-related factors, while considering how individuals can take an active approach in changing their personality at work.

Does trait gratitude shape leaders’ behavior and thus followers’ outcomes? We developed and tested a model linking leader’s trait gratitude to ethical leadership and leader–member exchange (LMX), and examine their impacts on followers’ felt psychological safety and thus creativity at work. Using multi-wave, multi-source survey data from 295 subordi...

How can hospitality employees be prevented from engaging in unethical behavior toward customers with the intention of helping their organization (i.e., from displaying unethical pro-organizational behavior directed at customers, UPB-C)? Drawing on ethical decision-making (EDM) theory, we propose that organizational punishment for unethical behavior...

Drawing on similarity-attraction theory, we propose that relationship-building behaviors from newcomers are more positively related to information-sharing behaviors from mentors when they perceive a deep similarity with the newcomers, and that mentors' information sharing is likely to be well received by newcomers when they perceive a deep similari...

The aim of this study was to introduce a concept of self‐interested voice, or voluntarily expressed ideas, solutions, or concerns related to workplace issues that affect the voicer’s personal interests. Three studies were conducted. In the scale development study, we developed and validated a new measure of self‐interested voice with a sample of 36...

This study extends prior research by examining when and why proactive employees are less likely to engage in corner-cutting behaviors. We proposed that proactive personality is negatively related to corner-cutting behaviors via customer orientation, and productivity climate further enhances this negative effect. In Study 1, data collected using a t...

The COVID-19 health crisis has engendered a set of additional health and safety regulations and procedures (e.g. social distancing) to the hospitality industry. The purpose of this paper is to explore in-depth how organizations can facilitate employees’ deep compliance with these procedures. Employing an instrumental case-study approach, we collect...