Kenneth Law

• Chinese University of Hong Kong

Contemporary organizations are paying greater attention to improving environmental sustainability. Recognizing the value of employee engagement in enhancing sustainability, organizations emphasize the involvement of employees in environmental protection. Academic literature and anecdotal evidence have suggested that employees may come to work with...

Mindfulness-based training programs have been found to provide numerous benefits, such as reducing stress, improving productivity, and enhancing interpersonal relationships. However, how these effects occur remains unclear. By referring to the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, one of the most widely used mindfulness training progra...

Past research suggests that personal Internet usage (PIU) at work can carry both costs and benefits for employees, but offers no explanation for these mixed results. In this research, we argue that the competing findings might be due to the existence of different types of PIU. We take a daily approach and propose that hedonic PIU (HPIU, i.e. relaxi...

Research on pro-environmental behavior (PEB) in the workplace is increasing. However, the prevailing research is typically based on the assumption that PEB are relatively stable, suggesting that employees consistently engage in PEB over time. In contrast to viewing employees as being consistently green or not, we focus on investigating within-perso...

With the growing importance of environmental sustainability, organizational research on employees’ pro-environmental behavior (PEB) also continues to grow. While past studies have scrutinized organizations’ pro-environmental strategies, they have overlooked variations in employees’ attribution of their firm’s initiatives. This oversight may hamper...

This research aims to understand why both low and high subordinate performance can induce abusive supervision. Drawing on the framework of affective events theory and research on anger and envy, we posit that low performance incurs abuse due to supervisor anger, whereas high performance elicits abuse due to supervisor envy. More specifically, subor...

Drawing on social identity theory, we present an integrative framework that simultaneously examines the beneficial intragroup effects and detrimental intergroup effects of leader group prototypicality. We use multiphase, multisource, multilevel data to show that leader group prototypicality strengthens group members’ group identification, which, in...

Drawing on social identity theory, we present an integrative framework that simultaneously examines the beneficial intragroup effects and detrimental intergroup effects of leader group prototypicality. We use multi-phase, multisource, multilevel data to show that leader group prototypicality strengthens group members' group identification, which, i...

We study employee taking charge behavior in a team context and investigate how it influences social consequences in work teams. Drawing on the person perception perspective and the warmth–competence framework, we develop a theoretical model outlining how coworkers view and react to those team members who take charge more at work. We conducted two s...

We focus on two other-focus emotional triads: contempt, anger, and disgust (CAD) and empathy, sympathy, and pity (ESP) to investigate how supervisors’ CAD and ESP affect their subordinates’ performance, including task proficiency, adaptivity, proactivity, and counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs). Based on emotional contagion theory, we argue tha...

We focus on two other-focus emotional triads: contempt, anger, and disgust (CAD) and empathy, sympathy, and pity (ESP) to investigate how supervisors' CAD and ESP affect their subordinates' performance, including task proficiency, adaptivity, proactivity, and counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs). Based on emotional contagion theory, we argue tha...

With the growing global emphasis on welfare‐to‐work policies, an increasing number of people with disabilities (PWD) have entered the workforce. However, studies on PWD have focused primarily on company practices to accommodate PWD, with a limited understanding of factors affecting psychological integration of PWD into the workplace. This scarcity...

Job engagement denotes the extent to which an employee invests the full self in performing the job. Extant research has investigated the positive outcomes of job engagement, paying little attention to its potential costs to the organizations. Integrating the extended self theory and the literature on psychological ownership as our overarching theor...

Leader influence is considered to be a critical factor of leadership effectiveness, while its potential negative effects have been overlooked. We shed light on the role of the dark side of leader influence in inter- group settings by examining how leader group prototypicality (a typical kind of leader influence) may weaken group members’ inter-grou...

Abstract To explore the most updated work performance model (Griffin, Neal, & Parker, 2007), we investigate the role of two other-focus emotion triads: contempt, anger and disgust (CAD) and empathy, sympathy and pity (ESP) and unfold how supervisor’s and subordinate’s CAD and ESP affect subordinate’s performance, including task proficiency, adaptab...

Job prosocial impact, as a job social characteristic, arouses increasing interests in organizational research. Using proactive motivation model as an overarching framework, we investigate how job prosocial impact influence employee proactive work behavior. Analysis of lagged, multisource data of 357 employees from diverse job types showed that job...

Abstract This study focuses on the relationships among subordinate’s performance, supervisor’s envy and anger, and abusive supervision. Specifically, we draw on the "trigger – emotions – behavior" chain and posit that a subordinate’s high performance provokes supervisor’s envy while low performance provokes supervisor’s anger. We argue that if a su...

Based on the job-crafting perspective, we theorized a serial curvilinear mediated moderation model that links underemployment to two outcomes that benefit the organization: creativity and organizational citizenship behavior. A three-waved time-lagged survey of teachers and a field study of technical workers provided convergent support for this mode...

In the past decade, there has been call for Asian researchers to be more confident and not limit themselves to follow only the footsteps of Western studies. In this paper, we follow up the discussion in Western literature about the importance of testing mediators with longitudinal data. The prevailing way of testing mediation is the use of time-lag...

In the past decade, there has been call for Asian researchers to be more confident and not limit themselves to follow only the footsteps of Western studies. In this paper, we follow up the discussion in Western literature about the importance of testing mediators with longitudinal data. The prevailing way of testing mediation is the use of time-lag...

Since the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and open policy” started in 1978, China’s economy has been growing rapidly and today is the second largest economy in the world. In the globalization age, China s economy has become more integrated and increasingly interdependent with the rest of the world. In this historical transformative mome...

Overqualification denotes situations in which job incumbents have higher qualifications than those required for the job. Drawing on the self-regulatory perspective, we proposed that employees' perception of overqualification positively affects their proactive behavior through the mechanism of role-breadth self-efficacy and that this indirect effect...

Drawing on job crafting perspective, we theorized an integrative model linking perceived underemployment to three behavioral outcomes, creative performance, organizational citizenship behavior and destructive deviance. Using data collected from two sources (327 teachers and their immediate supervisors) via a three-wave time-lagged research design,...

We used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to assess employees’ implicit attitudes towards counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs) and contrasted employees’ explicit attitudes with their implicit attitudes towards those behaviors. We hypothesized that employees’ implicit attitudes would predict employees’ self-rating and supervisory rating of CWB....

In this study, we propose and test the idea that a strong relationship between a leader and a follower will be associated with the subordinate's burnout. We base the study on the leader-member exchange framework (LMX), resource exchange theory, and the job demands-resources (JD-R) model of burnout, and conceptualize that a strong LMX is associated...

61 self-managing teams with 489 employees were recruited from the production department of an electronic manufacturer to complete surveys assessing conflict approaches, conflict efficacy, and team effectiveness measures. The authors hypothesized that (1) teams that rely on a cooperative approach to conflict develop feelings of efficacy that they ca...

Based on the widely accepted relationship between procedural justice and organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB), this study examines and compares two mechanisms—social exchange with organization and organizational identification, through which employees are motivated to engage in organizational citizenship behaviour. A total of 152 teachers and...

Two studies are presented in this research to integrate the unidimensional and multidimensional perspective of leader-member exchange (LMX). We posit that the dimensions of multidimensional LMX (LMX-MDM) are the exchange currencies of global LMX and investigate their joint effects on task performance and extra-role behaviors of employees. The resul...

This study considers the debate about whether emotional intelligence (EI) has incremental validity over and above traditional intelligence dimensions. We propose that EI and general mental abilities (GMA) differ in predicting academic performance and the quality of social interactions among college students. Using two college student samples, we fi...

Localization in the corporate setting is the extent to which expatriate managers are replaced by local employees originally held by expatriate managers. We sampled 229 multinational enterprises (MNEs) in the People's Republic of China and investigated the antecedents of localization success based on resource dependency theory. We developed a 40-ite...

Organizations form different degrees of social and economic exchange relationships with their employees. In this study, we unpack employee responses to organizational-level mechanisms of executive leadership style, organizational culture, and employment approaches by examining the mediating role of employees' perceptions of social and economic exch...

: In this study, the authors developed a dual-concern (i.e., maintenance and performance) model of human resources (HR) management. The authors identified commonly examined HR practices that apply to the middle manager level and classified them into the maintenance- and performance-oriented HR subsystems. The authors found support for the 2-factor...

In this study, we employed the multidimensional view of LMX (LMX-MDM) to develop a model that captured different antecedents and outcomes of task and contextual performance. We tested this model with a sample drawn from subjects from the People's Republic of China. The results indicated that the affect dimension of LMX-MDM was positively associated...

This study examines antecedents and outcomes of leader—member exchange (LMX) in China by relating the theory of co-operation and competition and the research on organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) to LMX. One hundred and seventy supervisor—subordinate dyads in a watch-case manufacturing factory in southern China were studied. Co-operation and...

To demonstrate the utility of the emotional intelligence (EI) construct in organizational studies, this study focuses on the effect of EI on job performance among research and development scientists in China. We argue that EI is a significant predictor of job performance beyond the effect of the General Mental Ability (GMA) battery on performance....

On top of not defining explicitly the relationship between multidimensional constructs and their dimensions, many management researchers have conducted their analyses of multidimensional constructs at the dimension level only and assumed that these analyses would be valid at the construct level. This article discusses the potential problems of thes...

Taking a relational perspective on the employment relationship, we examined processes (mediation and moderation) linking high-performance human resource practices and productivity and turnover, two indicators of organizational performance. Multilevel analysis of data from hotels in the People's Republic of China revealed that service-oriented organ...

Emotional intelligence (EI) has been an emerging topic for psychological, educational, and management researchers and consultants in recent years. However, there is a lack of scientifically valid measures of this concept, especially for those that have practical utility in the Asian context. Recently, a 40-item forced-choice instrument was develope...

Findings based on 186 teams involving 689 employees, working in twelve Chinese state-owned factories in three cities, indicated that a cooperative in contrast to a competitive approach was related to perceived team effectiveness, as measured by both team managers and team members. The role of conflict types for team effectiveness, on the other hand...

As our editorial team completes its first year of receiving manuscripts, we believe it would be helpful to reflect upon and share answers to the most frequently asked questions regarding publication goals and processes at Academy of Management Journal (AMJ). This editorial deals with everything one has always wanted to know about AMJ. AMJ aspires t...

We developed a model in which leader-member exchange mediated between perceived transformational leadership behaviors and followers' task performance and organizational citizenship behaviors. Our sample comprised 162 leader-follower dyads within organizations situated throughout the People's Republic of China. We showed that leader-member exchange...

This section provides information on the international management research history of the Academy of Management Journal (AMJ). Several trends evident in past international management research are discussed, and the successful transition of AMJ from being primarily North American in focus to being a truly international journal is described. This tra...

The localization of human resources has been a major objective for many transnational corporations (TNCs) in the People's Republic of China (PRC). After a review of related literature and in-depth interviews with six TNCs, Wong and Law (1999) developed a model explaining the localization process in the PRC. Based on this localization model, this st...

In this study, the authors reviewed the definition of emotional intelligence (EI) and argued that El is conceptually distinct from personality. In Study 1, the authors showed that EI was related to yet distinct from personality dimensions and that it had incremental predictive power on life satisfaction. The authors examined the construct validity...

Emotional intelligence (EI) has been an emerging topic for psychological, educational, and management researchers and consultants in recent years. Unfortunately, there have been relatively few empirical studies on EI conducted with scientific rigor, especially in Asia. A recent study clarified the definition of EI as a set of mental abilities relat...

This paper investigates the significance of how firms manage their human resources (HRs) within the confines of powerful social institutions in a transitional economy, the People's Republic of China (China). We propose that two dimensions, the role of human resource management (RHR) and followers' perception of the leader (TOP), are important contr...

Collectivistic and individualistic values are theorized to have far reaching effects on teamwork and organizations. This study proposes that cooperative and competitive goal interdependence mediates the relationship between these values and group interaction and outcomes. Working in State Owned Enterprises in three regions of China, 689 employees i...

Based on a repeated measure of 164 Chinese university seniors on an established biodata instrument, it was found that subjects would fake in order to increase their chances of getting a job offer in addition to simply giving a socially desirable impression. It was also found that those who scored low on the biodata scale had a much higher magnitude...

Recently, increasing numbers of scholars have argued that emotional intelligence (EI) is a core variable that affects the performance of leaders. In this study, we develop a psychometrically sound and practically short EI measure that can be used in leadership and management studies. We also provide exploratory evidence for the effects of the EI of...

The high rate of turnover has been a substantial problem in managing Chinese employees in joint ventures in the People’s Republic of China. Organizations operating in the PRC face a dilemma of whether it is worthwhile to invest in better compensation packages and training and development programs if their employees will leave the organizations anyw...

The Chinese value of harmony is often considered literally as the need to avoid conflict. Recent experiments have shown that Chinese people can value and use conflict to explore issues, make effective decisions, and strengthen relationships when they communicate that they want to manage the conflict for mutual benefit rather than win at the other’s...

There has been continuous interest in studying occupational classifications and the match between individuals' vocational orientation and occupational environment. However, it is also believed that modifications of a Western developed vocational model are necessary in other cultures. Unfortunately, there is little study on how human resource practi...

The present study examined the relationship between promotion, perceived instrumentality of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) for promotion, and employees' OCB before and after promotion. A field quasi-experiment involving 293 tellers of a multinational bank was conducted. Both supervisors and employees provided OCB ratings 3 months before...

As China is becoming an important market and there are a lot of foreign ventures operating there, different lines of research have been providing useful information for foreign ventures to manage effectively in China. In this paper, we discuss one of the critical factors leading to successful management of Chinese subordinates, i.e. building and ma...

A sample of Hong Kong employees was used to test the hypotheses that power-distance orientation and gender moderate the relationships between justice perceptions and the evaluation of authorities (trust in supervisor) and the organization (contract fulfillment). Results indicated that 1) the relationship between procedural justice and contract fulf...

This article contrasts the composite view of the relationship between multidimensional constructs and their facets/dimensions with the factor view. The composite view assumes that facets are components of the composite constructs, while the factor view assumes that facets are manifestations of latent constructs. An empirical study is used to illust...

A total of 431 independent supervisor and subordinate dyads from the United States, Australia, Japan, and Hong Kong evaluated the perceived job role boundary of the subordinates. Participants rated the degree to which they agreed that the behavior described in the organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) scale developed by P. M. Podsakoff, S. B. M...

Raju, Burke, and Normand (1990) proposed a new procedure for estimating the dollar value contribution of personnel selection programs. This paper sug gests some modifications to their procedure following applications in two Aus tralian samples and contributes to the ongoing development and refinement of these models. The results show that, dependin...

This article contrasts the composite view of the relationship between multidimensional constructs and their facets/dimensions with the factor view. The composite view assumes that facets are components of the composite constructs, while the factor view assumes that facets are manifestations of latent constructs. An empirical study is used to illust...

The localization of top management positions is an important objective for many Transnational Corporations (TNCs). Despite its importance, there is little systematic discussion of how the localization process should be managed. Based on a review of related literature and in-depth interviews with six TNCs in the PRC, we developed a three-stage model...

In this paper, we contrast the effects of leader-member exchange (LMX) with the effects of perceived job mobility on in-role performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). We further model negative affectivity as the antecedent of both LMX and perceived job mobility and suggest that LMX and perceived job mobility mediated the relationsh...

Structural equation modeling has become a common technique to test the reciprocal relations between two constructs using cross-sectional data in management research. Although there are pros and cons to this application, it appears clear that sometimes it is necessary to use a cross-sectional nonrecursive model as an approximation of the cross-lagge...

We conducted a survey across a two-year period to examine the attitudinal effects of skill-based pay (SBP) plans in a consumer products company in the Northeast region of the United States. We examined the relationship between SBP plan characteristics and employees’ evaluation of (and reactions to) the pay system; fairness perceptions were consider...

M. Deutsch's (1949) theory of cooperation and competition may be usefully extended to the study of effective, empowering, managerial leadership in Chinese settings. Results of structural equation modeling and other analyses on data collected from interviews of Chinese managers and employees in Hong Kong indicated that cooperative goals contributed...

We propose a taxonomy of multidimensional constructs based on the relations between the construct and its dimensions. Multidimensional constructs that exist at deeper levels than their dimensions we term latent model. We call constructs formed as algebraic functions of their dimensions aggregate model, whereas constructs formed as different profile...

According to motivation theories, remuneration managers have to understand which pay referents their firm's employees are comparing their pay with in order to keep the employees satisfied with their pay level. This study argues that despite the importance of information on pay referent selection in designing the pay structure, two of the most commo...

While Holland's model has been widely tested and found broad support in the West, it has not been tested in Hong Kong. Using a sample of 1813 entering freshmen, we investigated the cross-cultural validity of Holland's models of six interest or personality types in Hong Kong. Results indicated: (a) Holland's model as operationalized by UNIACT has co...

Although past job design research has demonstrated that job perception and job satisfaction are related, there is considerable debate on the causal direction of this relationship. Three alternative specifications of the causal direction can be deduced from three different theories: (1) job perception is the cause (deduced from the job characteristi...

Two approaches for estimating the relative importance of various referents in affecting pay satisfaction are reviewed. The first approach uses the most frequently reported referents by the respondents as the most important referents. The logic of this approach is questioned because frequency of using a referent is different from his/her relative im...

Self-managing teams have the challenge to make decisions regarding their tasks and to manage their internal affairs. Findings on 60 self-managing teams with 540 employees indicate that the theory of cooperation and competition is useful for identifying the social processes that help these teams grapple with problems and work effectively. Specifical...

This paper addresses the issue of interpreting dollar value utility estimates using the Brogden utility equation. It shows that estimates of the standard deviation of job perfor Mance in dollars (SDy) must be compatible with the effect size measure in order to produce meaningful final utility estimates. With this interpretation of the utility estim...

This paper applied the cluster analysis technique to group jobs with similar value to the organization into pay grades. The cophenetic correlation was used to select the clustering algorithm that was most similar to the original data matrix. A modification of the total sum of squares within groups was used to determine the statistically optimal num...

Over the past few years, there has been some dispute as to whether Fisher’s Z or the Pearson correlation (r) should be used in Schmidt-Hunter–type meta-analyses. The two major reasons that Z has not been recommended are the possibly larger positive bias in estimating mean population correlation (Mρ) and the problem of estimating the standard deviat...

This study used Monte Carlo simulation to examine the increase in accuracy resulting from 2 statistical refinements of the interactive Schmidt-Hunter procedures for meta-analysis: the use of the mean correlation instead of individual correlations in the estimation of sampling error variance, and a procedure that takes into account the nonlinear nat...

Evaluated an improved procedure for range-restriction corrections in meta-analysis. When population correlations were approximately normally distributed, the new nonlinear range correction procedure improved the accuracy of the Schmidt-Hunter (S-H) interactive method in estimating both the mean ( Mρ) and standard deviation ( SDρ) of population corr...

S. L. Martin and N. S. Raju (see record 1992-18379-001) proposed a procedure for setting the cutoff score that maximized the total utility of a selection program by including a continuous function of recruiting costs. In the present article, the authors comment on some limitations of Martin and Raju's approach and suggest a modified procedure that...

S. L. Martin and N. S. Raju (see record 1992-18379-001) proposed a procedure for setting the cutoff score that maximized the total utility of a selection program by including a continuous function of recruiting costs. In the present article, the authors comment on some limitations of Martin and Raju's approach and suggest a modified procedure that...

This paper develops and discusses two statistical aids that can be used by compensation specialists for determining the optimal number and width of pay grades. The aids assume that the point method of job evaluation has been used. The first aid is the adjusted ratio of the between-grade to within-grade sum of squared deviation of job evaluation poi...