Russell E. Johnson

Michigan State University | MSU · Department of Management

The justice literature has paid considerable attention to the beneficial effects of fair behaviors for recipients of such behaviors. It is possible, however, that exhibiting fair behaviors may come at a cost for actors. In this article, we integrate ego depletion theory with organizational justice research in order to examine the consequences of ju...

The literature to date has predominantly focused on the benefits of ethical leader behaviors for recipients (e.g., employees and teams). Adopting an actor-centric perspective, in this study we examined whether exhibiting ethical leader behaviors may come at some cost to leaders. Drawing from ego depletion and moral licensing theories, we explored t...

Work motivation is a topic of crucial importance to the success of organizations and societies and the well-being of individuals. We organize the work motivation literature over the last century using a meta-framework that clusters theories, findings, and advances in the field according to their primary focus on (a) motives, traits, and motivation...

In 1994, R. G. Lord and P. E. Levy proposed a variant of control theory that incorporated human information processing principles. The current article evaluates the empirical evidence for their propositions and updates the theory by considering contemporary research on information processing. Considerable support drawing from diverse literatures wa...

Despite the generally positive consequences associated with justice, recent research suggests that supervisors cannot always enact justice, and responses to justice may not be universally positive. Thus, justice is likely to vary in both how much it is received and the employee reactions it engenders. In order to understand the range of justice res...

Although emerging actor-centric research has revealed that performing morally laden behaviors shapes how employees behave subsequently, less is known about what work behaviors may emerge following employees' unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB)-a unique behavior with competing moral connotations. We integrate the moral self-regulation litera...

The leadership role can be demanding and depleting. Using self-regulation and social exchange theory as a framework, we developed a three-step sequential mediation model that explains how feelings of depletion can degrade leaders’ own performance level, via the reciprocating behavior of their employees. Specifically, we hypothesized that leader dep...

How do leaders lead in a complex environment? Leaders often rely on help from others. However, not all help is necessarily beneficial to leaders, especially when it is offered without being asked (i.e., proactive helping). Unfortunately, theory to date has failed to understand the consequences associated with leaders’ receipt of proactive helping a...

Occupational health and safety are critical in promoting the wellness of organizations and employees. The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most life-threatening viruses encountered in recent history, providing a unique opportunity for research to examine factors that drive employee safety behavior. Drawing from terror management theory, we propose a...

Synthesizing the literature on voice, creativity, and supervisor listening, our research built and tested a theoretical model linking voice opportunity with creative performance, moderated by supervisor listening. Using multisource, multiwave survey data from 347 employees and 91 supervisors in a large company in China, we found that when superviso...

Resource-based theories posit that exerting self-control to regulate one’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors depletes people’s available self-regulatory resources, leaving them depleted and less able to exert self-control in subsequent activities. Although the detrimental effects of depletion are well-established, we challenge this prevailing view...

The experience of justice is a dynamic phenomenon that changes over time, yet few studies have directly examined justice change. In this paper we integrate theories of self-regulation and group engagement to derive predictions about the consequences of justice change. We posit that justice change is an important factor because, as suggested by self...

Mindfulness has received increasing attention from scholars and practitioners, and considerable research has demonstrated the intrapersonal effects of mindfulness at work or at home. Research to date, however, has overlooked potential interpersonal effects of mindfulness across the work and family domains. Drawing on the spillover‐crossover model a...

This paper examines the mediating role of two emergent team states—collective regulatory focus (CRF) and team initiative—for transmitting the effects of transformational and transactional leadership and team members’ chronic-regulatory focus on team creative performance. We conducted two studies. An experimental team-level study of 54 teams (n = 15...

In the original manuscript, the model presented in figs. 1 & 2 erroneously depicted both mediating variables as “Promotion collective regulatory focus”. The second mediator should be “Prevention collective regulatory focus”. There are no changes in the main text nor in the dataset themselves. We apologize for any confusion that may have resulted.

We present an integrative conceptual review that reconciles the organizational support, social exchange, and social support literatures. In particular, we argue that the prevailing, singular conceptualization of organizational support is misaligned with contemporary perspectives on social exchange-which has served as the bedrock for organizational...

Venting—an emotion‐focused form of coping involving the discharge of negative feelings to others—is common in organizational settings. Venting may benefit the self via the release of negative emotion, or by acting as a catalyst for changes to problematic work situations. Nonetheless, venting might have unintended consequences via its influence on t...

Researchers have found the effects of challenge stressors to be contradictory, sometimes showing positive effects and other times showing negative effects. To disclose the nature of this inconsistency, our study takes a resource-based behavioural approach to examine why and when challenge stressors are beneficial or harmful for employees. Specifica...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop a nuanced interpretative frame that can help global managers with recommendations to avoid misapplied power with group and organizational situations. Design/methodology/approach Embodied metaphor is applied in analysis of the theory-praxis nexus to reconceive the bases, processes and resources associ...

Research on abusive supervision that adopts an actor‐centric perspective has found that abusive acts have immediate cognitive and affective consequences for supervisors. Less immediate consequences are also possible when perpetrators engage in later sensemaking by talking with others about their actions that violated interpersonal norms. In this re...

The emotion regulation literature has focused primarily on comparing the methods of surface acting and deep acting, yet scholars have also noted the importance of naturally felt emotions as a means for achieving a desired emotional display. The literature has also mainly examined positive displays, yet there are many situations that call for the di...

During normal and predictable circumstances, employees' occupational calling (i.e., a transcendent passion to use their talent and competencies toward positive societal impact and a sense of meaningfulness derived from working in a chosen occupational domain) is observed to be relatively stable. However, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, cir...

Challenges related to managing work and family demands have become more and more pressing, particularly for those with high work demands, such as those in managerial and leadership roles. While existing research has focused on how family demands may negatively affect employee functioning at work, less attention has focused on characterizing the pro...

Research to date has advanced opposing viewpoints on whether leaders who are psychologically empowered support the autonomy of their subordinates or engage in controlling leader behaviors. Our integration of research on empowerment and social hierarchy suggests that leaders' feelings of empowerment can promote autonomy-supporting and/or controlling...

Scholars are paying increasing attention to the “dark side” of citizenship behavior. One aspect of this dark side that has received relatively scant attention is helping pressure—an employee's perception that s/he is being encouraged to, or otherwise feels that s/he should, enact helping behavior at work. Drawing from theory associated with work st...

While destructive consequences for subordinates have featured prominently in the abusive supervision literature, scholars have insinuated that supervisory abuse may temporarily yield functional results. Drawing from research on motive attribution tendencies that underlie abusive supervision and the control perspective of repetitive thought, we deve...

Promoting shared leadership in teams and enhancing team creativity is aided by complementarity between leader and team member characteristics. We integrate insights from social learning theory and dominance complementarity perspective with the team leadership and creativity literature to explore the facilitating role of formal participative leaders...

Leader behaviors are dynamic and vary over time, and leaders’ actions at a given time can have ramifications for their subsequent behavior. Taking such a dynamic perspective on leader behaviors, we examined daily servant leadership behavior and its downstream effects on the leaders themselves from a within-person self-regulation perspective. Result...

Methodological checklists for improving research quality and reporting consistency - Volume 13 Issue 1 - Lillian T. Eby, Kristen M. Shockley, Talya N. Bauer, Bryan Edwards, Astrid C. Homan, Russell Johnson, Jonas W. B. Lang, Scott B. Morris, Frederick L. Oswald

Workday respite activities are supposed to be beneficial for employees due to their intended relaxing and enjoyable nature, but employees may find it difficult to agilely switch their awareness and attention between work tasks and respite activities during work hours. Based on affective events and mindfulness-to-meaning theories, we propose workday...

Drawing from the social cognitive theory of self‐regulation, we develop a model linking experienced incivility to emotional exhaustion and supportive behaviors via self‐blame, with observed incivility experienced by coworkers as a first‐stage moderator and trait emotional control as a second‐stage moderator. We contend that employees will experienc...

Throughout its storied history, the leadership literature has predominantly treated leader behaviors as static and owing to stable antecedents like personality traits and organizational norms. In recent years however, this assumption has been challenged as researchers have acknowledged that leader behaviors are more dynamic than previously thought....

The consensus in the emotional labor literature is that surface acting is "bad" for employees. However, the evidence on which this consensus is based has been derived from contexts emphasizing the display of positive emotions, such as customer service. Despite the acknowledgment that many contexts also require the display of negative emotions, scho...

Russell Johnson of Michigan State University and his coresearchers asked managers to track the help they gave colleagues over 10 days and how recipients responded. The team found that when people lent a hand without being asked, they were less likely to be shown gratitude than when they helped upon request. Study participants also felt less sociabl...

Prior research suggests that psychological detachment buffers the detrimental effects of negative work events and stressors on employees’ subsequent performance and well‐being. This, however, assumes that employees are motivated to reengage in their work following detachment, which may not always be true. Our paper examines the potential dark side...

Although previous research suggests that regulatory focus matters for organizational citizenship behaviors, it is unclear how promotion and prevention focus relate to such behaviors. Integrating regulatory focus theory with theories of self-regulation, we propose a conceptual model that links trait promotion and prevention foci with specific citize...

Whereas much of upper echelons research focuses on the background characteristics and traits of executives to explain their strategic choices, much less is understood about the information filtering process by which those characteristics manifest in strategic decisions. We develop theory to explain how executives process information by integrating...

Research on the work-life interface has exploded over the past five decades due to trends in the nature of gender roles, families, work, and careers. However, work-life theory has not kept up with the explosion in research. The purpose of the Special Topic Forum is to offer a corrective by developing new theory to make sense of the research to date...

Complementing prior quantitative and qualitative reviews of the leadership literature, we conduct a bibliometric analysis of leadership articles. Our bibliometric review provides a different perspective by portraying the landscape and developmental trajectory of leadership research over time via co-citation and co-occurrence analyses. Using a scien...

Over the past 30 years, the nature of communication at work has changed. Leaders in particular rely increasingly on email to communicate with their superiors and subordinates. However, researchers and practitioners alike suggest that people frequently report feeling overloaded by the email demands they experience at work. In the current study, we d...

Although gratitude is a key phenomenon that bridges helping with its outcomes, how and why helping relates to receipt of gratitude and its relation with helper’s eudaimonic well-being have unfortunately been overlooked in organizational research. The purpose of this study is to unravel how helpers successfully connect to others and their work via r...

The traditional “great man” approaches to leadership emphasize qualities of individual leaders for leadership success. In contrast, a rapidly growing body of research has started to examine shared leadership, which is broadly defined as an emergent team phenomenon whereby leadership roles and influence are distributed among team members. Despite th...

Although academics can receive considerable training in selecting appropriate research designs, types of data to collect, methods for analyzing data, as well as guidance on preparing scholarly manuscripts, there is a dearth of information on how to initiate and manage partnerships with organizations in order to conduct high-quality applied research...

Purpose Regulatory focus is a crucial self-regulation variable that influences employee workplace behavior. However, research findings to date have been equivocal with respect to the relation of prevention focus with counterproductive work behavior (CWB). On the one hand, prevention focus sensitizes people to experience high activation negative emo...

Few studies to date have directly addressed the effects of justice change. This paper integrates the self-regulation theories and the approach- avoidance motivation model to examine the the consequences of justice change. We argue that justice change is an important factor beyond justice level because it helps to regulate employees’ approach and av...

Research on abusive supervision has predominantly focused on the consequences for victims while overlooking how leaders respond to their own abusive behavior. Drawing from the literature on moral cleansing, we posit that supervisors who engage in abusive behavior may paradoxically engage in more constructive leadership behaviors subsequently as a r...

Locus of control—a fundamental individual difference variable that reflects individuals' beliefs about the degree of control they have over events in their lives—has been formally studied for more than 50 years. Early scholarship demonstrated that locus of control was a key predictor of various work‐related outcomes, ranging from job attitudes and...

Despite the importance of leader vision communication to effective leadership, little is known about what prompts leaders to communicate a vision in the first place. Drawing from construal level theory, we examined the within-person relationship of leader construal level in the morning with vision communication during that workday. Leadership self-...

Person-centered approaches to organizational scholarship can provide critical insights into how sets of related constructs uniquely combine to predict outcomes. Within micro topics, scholars have begun to embrace the use of latent profile analysis (LPA), identifying constellations of constructs related to organizational commitment, turnover intenti...

In order to perform work tasks successfully and interact effectively with coworkers, it is necessary for employees to exert self-control over their feelings, thoughts, and behaviors while at work. For example, self-control helps employees maintain focus on their current goals and assignments, block out distractions and irrelevant information, align...

Drawing from the transactional model of stress, we examined how the social context moderates employees’ behavioral responses to workplace incivility. On the basis of data from 384 employees nested in 41 groups, we observed a 3-way, cross-level interaction between individually experienced incivility, group incivility differentiation, and group silen...

Issues pertaining to the self are ubiquitous at work. Consider the case of Maggie, a senior manager at a large accounting firm who is hoping to be promoted to partner. Although the promotion comes with a pay raise, Maggie especially desires the position because of the boost it would give her self-esteem and because of the greater power and autonomy...

Drawing upon functional theories of attitudes and the organizational justice literature, the current research suggests that people's attitudes toward justice likely serve an instrumental function (grounded in self-interest, rewards maximization, and punishment minimization) as well as a value-expressive function (grounded in the expression of self-...

In this chapter, we focus on the use of implicit measures in leadership research. Leadership scholars are among the earliest to acknowledge the importance and value of implicit processes. The most prominent is the implicit theory of leader categorization, which argues that individuals rely on their implicit expectations and prototypes of personalit...

Although empirical evidence has accumulated showing that abusive supervision has devastating effects on subordinates' work attitudes and outcomes, knowledge about how such behavior impacts supervisors who exhibit it is limited. Drawing upon conservation of resources theory, we develop and test a model that specifies how and when engaging in abusive...

We apply a social mindfulness lens (Van Doesum, Van Lange, & Van Lange, 2013) to understand the phenomenon of perceived customer mistreatment. Recognizing that both recall of prosocial acts and perspective taking invoke the motivation to be mindful in social interactions, we investigated whether these two types of interventions affect customer serv...

Scholars have paid an increasing amount of attention to organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB), with a particular emphasis on helping others at work. Additionally, recent empirical work has focused on how OCB is an intra-individual phenomenon, such that employees vary daily in the extent to which they help others. However, one limitation of thi...

In other chapters in this volume, authors talked about the importance of regulating various self-referenced identities, goals, needs, motives, emotions, and behaviors. To do so, it requires that employees have sufficient self-control at their disposal. However, this may not always be the case, especially when employees feel depleted from prior inst...

Regulatory focus is critical at work and is shaped by cues in the environment. We examine how supervisor regulatory foci can activate analogous foci in subordinates. We test this idea across five studies. In Study 1 we find that supervisor regulatory focus predicted change in new hires’ regulatory focus in the first three months after organizationa...

A widespread methodological concern in the organizational literature is the possibility that observed results are due to the influence of common-method variance or mono-method bias. This concern is based on a conception of method variance as being produced by the nature of the method itself, and therefore, variables assessed with the same method wo...

Incivility at work—low intensity deviant behaviors with an ambiguous intent to harm—has been on the rise, yielding negative consequences for employees’ well-being and companies’ bottom-lines. Although examinations of incivility have gained momentum in organizational research, theory and empirical tests involving dynamic, within-person processes ass...