Kyle J Emich

University of Delaware | UDel UD · Department of Business Administration

Groups must leverage their members’ diverse knowledge to make optimal decisions. However, the gender composition of a group may affect this ability, particularly because solo status female members (one female grouped with males) are generally allocated lower status than their male counterparts, so their knowledge is more likely to be ignored. Where...

The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Emotions provides a state-of-the-art review of research on the role of emotions in creativity. This volume presents the insights and perspectives of sixty creativity scholars from thirteen countries who span multiple disciplines, including developmental, social, and personality psychology; industrial and org...

The attribute alignment approach to team composition allows researchers to assess variation in team member attributes that occurs simultaneously within and across individual team members. This approach facilitates the development of theory testing the proposition that individual members are themselves complex systems comprised of multiple attribute...

Team mediating mechanisms are vital to team functioning as they explain how member attributes transform into collective outcomes. Yet, the field exploring them has grown vast and fragmented. This disunity indicates a lack of intellectual structure, preventing the development of general knowledge. We suggest that two aspects of this literature may c...

To successfully generate creative solutions, teams must reconcile inconsistent perspectives and integrate competing task demands. We suggest that adopting a paradoxical frame - a mental template that promotes recognizing and embracing the simultaneous existence of seemingly contradictory elements - helps teams navigate this process to produce creat...

A growing body of research across multiple disciplines has aimed to better understand the phenomenon of job search. However, little empirical research has examined the combined content and structure of the job search literature to accumulate programmatic knowledge. Unfortunately, this has resulted in redundancies and isolated advances that harm our...

Research methods for studying team composition tend to employ either a variable-centered or person-centered approach. The variable-centered approach allows scholars to consider how patterns of attributes between team members influence teams, while the person-centered approach allows scholars to consider how variation in multiple attributes within t...

We examine work on the relationship between team affect and creativity from three increasingly complex lenses. First, we review work on affective contagion and convergence, assuming homogeneity in affect among team members. However, our review clearly shows that we can no longer neglect affective diversity in teams. Team members experience differen...

Prior research has demonstrated a strong relationship between team performance and team members’ team efficacy beliefs and perceptions of social integration. Performing well increases the feelings of collective ability that comprise team efficacy and the feelings of psychological connectedness that make up social integration, while performing poorl...

At its 50-year milestone, we assess the Small Group Research ( SGR) corpus to reflect on the development of group research over the past half century. To do this, we examine the evolution of the corpus’s context and content. We examine its context by assessing its impact, which journals it communicates with, and the internationality of its authors....

Both sports and organizations rely on teams. As such, the sport psychology and management literatures have contributed greatly to our understanding of team functioning. Despite this, previous reviews based on subsets of articles in these literatures indicate a lack of communication between them. In this article, we assess the state of integration b...

Extant research suggests that individuals employ traditional moral heuristics to support their observed altruistic behavior; yet findings have largely been limited to inductive extrapolation and rely on relatively few traditional frames in so doing, namely, deontology in organizational behavior and virtue theory in law and economics. Given that the...

While it is widely recognized that groups represent strong contexts that influence the affective states of their members, this convergent framing has resulted in the neglect of the systematic study of what occurs when group members' affective states differ. This is an unfortunate oversight. The study of how group members' qualitatively different af...

We propose and test a theory of how diversity in a team’s initial affective composition impacts its creativity by examining how team members’ qualitatively different affective states converge to influence their team’s creative process and outcomes. Three studies involving 1625 participants on 427 teams support an activation-regulatory focus explana...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to expand the nomological network of a relational efficacy construct, transpersonal efficacy, and examine its effect on attitudes and behaviors important for team performance. The authors identify several antecedents to transpersonal efficacy, including task interdependence, agreeableness and conscientiousness....

Richard Kettner-Polley and Charles Gavin founded Small Group Research (SGR) to present research, build theory, and generally advance the study of small groups by combining insights from multiple disciplines. Currently, we evaluate the extent to which this interdisciplinary mission has been upheld over time. To do this, we apply the perspective and...

Sunk cost bias is a pervasive problem in consumer decision making. It occurs when people continue to invest resources toward unsuccessful outcomes merely because they previously invested in them. This tendency exists because people devote too much attention to prior investments without considering how other factors may impact their decision outcome...

This paper explores the impact of two types of voice and gender on peer-rated social status and subsequent leader emergence. Across two studies—a three-wave field study and an experiment—we find that speaking up promotively, but not prohibitively, is positively and indirectly related to leader emergence via status, and that this relationship is con...

Teams are often described using the mean and variance of their member's characteristics. Recently, research has advanced this paradigm by beginning to explore the importance of patterns of team member perceptions regarding themselves, their teammates, and their teams. We highlight this work and suggest several directions for future research.

How might people's moment-to-moment feelings influence the social network contacts they call to mind? Three datasets indicate that experiencing positive affect leads people to cognitively activate larger and more sparsely connected social network structures, while experiencing negative affect leads them to activate smaller, redundant social network...

We develop theory and report the results of two studies using distinctly different samples and methodologies to question the assumption that status is homogenously perceived by members of a given team. First, we collected qualitative responses from 50 MBA students to ascertain whether team members recognize status incongruence and to inductively th...

The purpose of this study was to investigate failed interpersonal affect regulation through the lens of humor. We investigated individual differences that influenced people's affective and cognitive responses to failed humor and their willingness to persist in the interpersonal regulation of positive affect after a failed attempt. Using well-establ...

People routinely exert less effort when working in groups than when working individually. Additionally, groups often encounter problems coordinating the efforts of their members. These deficiencies prevent groups from efficiently utilizing the talents of their members. In two field studies, transpersonal efficacy, or one's confidence in another per...

Two studies examined how intragroup affective patterns influence groups’ pervasive tendency to ignore the unique expertise of their members. Using a hidden profile task, Study 1 provided evidence that groups with at least one member experiencing positive affect shared more unique information than groups composed entirely of members experiencing neu...

Three studies find evidence that positive affect reduces comparative overconfidence (overplacement). This occurs because positive affect attenuates focalism via decreasing people's tendency to overweight information regarding themselves in the light of information concerning others. Specifically, Study 1 provides evidence that positive affect leads...

Studies of interpersonal affect regulation often focus on the ability of individuals to successfully regulate other people’s emotions. However, inadequate attention has been paid to failed interpersonal affect regulation. To address this oversight, we examine the phenomenology of failed interpersonal affect regulation through the lens of humor. Usi...

We propose that positive affect promotes dishonest behavior by providing the cognitive flexibility necessary to reframe and to rationalize dishonest acts. This hypothesis was tested in two studies. The results of Study 1 showed that individuals experiencing positive affect morally disengage to a greater extent than do individuals experiencing neutr...

In addition to self-efficacy, efficacy perceptions of others within a task environment influence task performance. I define such efficacy perceptions of single others as transpersonal efficacy and investigate it in two studies. The first shows transpersonal efficacy can drive performance. The second then builds upon the first by investigating how s...

Groups rarely use the unique knowledge of their members when making decisions, focusing instead on knowledge that members have in common. This tendency to neglect the expertise of group members severely limits the effectiveness of group decision making. Previously, this problem has been addressed by showing that groups will pool task-relevant infor...

Four studies investigate whether decisions for others produce more creative solutions than do decisions for the self and if construal level explains this relation. In Study 1, participants carried out a structured imagination task by drawing an alien for a story that they would write, or alternatively for a story that someone else would write. As e...