Stephen E. Humphrey

Pennsylvania State University | Penn State · Department of Management and Organization

The authors developed and meta-analytically examined hypotheses designed to test and extend work design theory by integrating motivational, social, and work context characteristics. Results from a summary of 259 studies and 219,625 participants showed that 14 work characteristics explained, on average, 43% of the variance in the 19 worker attitudes...

Although there are thousands of studies investigating work and job design, existing measures are incomplete. In an effort to address this gap, the authors reviewed the work design literature, identified and integrated previously described work characteristics, and developed a measure to tap those work characteristics. The resultant Work Design Ques...

In this paper, we develop the concept of a power heterarchy, which is a conceptualization of power structures in groups that is more dynamic and fluid than traditional hierarchical structures. Through a study of 516 directional dyads in 45 teams, we demonstrate that heterarchical structures where the expression of power actively shifts among team m...

We examine how team members respond to the inclusion of new members' physical attractiveness and sex. Drawing on Social Exchange Theory, we argue and show that incumbent team members engage in three behaviors (mimicry, ingratiation, and challenging) in response to the inclusion of more or less attractive male or female members in their team. Using...

This paper presents a comprehensive review and meta-analysis of the literature on the influence of cultural dimensions on work design characteristics. With our proposed work design universals typology as a framework, we provide a narrative review and analyze the influence of six cultural dimensions (power distance, individualism–collectivism, mascu...

Despite the importance of negotiation skills for entrepreneurs, the pedagogy of teaching negotiation to entrepreneurship students has not been fully developed. In some entrepreneurship programs, negotiation is covered briefly in a single class. In other programs, courses focused entirely on negotiation are available to entrepreneurship students; ho...

An ongoing discussion in organizational studies has focused on the path-dependent nature of organizational reputation. To date, however, there has been little explanation about when and why some constituents’ reputation judgments remain stable, whereas others are more prone to change. We contribute to this research by developing a relational theory...

Research has offered a pessimistic (although limited) view regarding the effectiveness of ethical champions in teams and the social consequences they are likely to experience. To challenge this view, we conducted two multimethod (quantitative/qualitative) experimental studies in the context of entrepreneurial team decision-making to examine whether...

A significant body of research has described effective leader behaviors and connected these behaviors to positive employee outcomes. However, this research has yet to be systematically integrated with organizational justice research to describe how leader behaviors inform justice perceptions. Therefore, we conduct a meta‐analysis (k = 166, N = 46,0...

Often in the construction industry, staffing for a capital project is structured upon selection of personnel to fulfill roles, leading to the formation of a temporary, project-based network that can be viewed as a single entity behaving like an organization. The primary goal of these organizations is the delivery of one project. This paper seeks to...

Studies of the effects of top management team (TMT) composition on organizational outcomes have yielded mixed and confusing results. A possible breakthrough resides in the reality that TMTs vary in how they are fundamentally structured. Some are structured such that members operate independently of each other, while others are set up such that role...

This symposium brings together researchers who study the emergence of team phenomena using different research methods. Panelists will first provide a conversation starter answering the following questions from their perspectives: 1. What is (not) emergence? 2. What do you think is the biggest challenge in studying emergence? 3. What do we need, as...

In this paper, we examine how flexibility in structure influences innovativeness and performance in new ventures. More specifically, we examine power fluidity and role fluidity, which represent two major structural dimensions and refer to dynamic redistribution of power and roles among new venture members. Through a study of 104 new ventures from R...

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the study of conflict in teams, demonstrating inconsistent insight. A potential innovation to this literature is to reconceptualize relationship conflict as a relational construct representing the disagreement between two team members. We build upon this idea to develop a longitudinal model of intrate...

Team researchers in the field of organizational behavior (OB) seem to be increasingly aware of the need to embrace the organizing nature of teams. In this article, we outline the limitations of the prevailing static collectivist expla-nations in team research and suggest how an increased emphasis on a micro-dynamics-oriented approach that takes int...

The use of teams in organizations has become ubiquitous. Yet, there has been comparatively little research on team selection. This chapter seeks to review the literature on team selection and identify areas for future research. To do this, we first briefly review existing models of team functioning to provide background for selection scholars who m...

This study revisits the commonplace research conclusion that greater team member collectivism, as opposed to individualism, is associated with higher levels of individual-level performance in teams. Whereas this con-clusion is based on the assumption that work in teams consists exclusively of tasks that are shared, typical teamwork also includes ta...

In the context of purchasing ultimatums, consumers may dislike the freedom of choice that comes with proposing offers due to their awareness that the other party may have better information than they do and the fact that the attractiveness of outside alternatives is uncertain. Indeed, across three studies, we find that people prefer to receive rath...

We developed and tested the conditions under which team member change results in flux in team coordination and consequently affects team performance. Results showed that team member change caused high levels of flux in coordination when a member changed to a more strategically core role, or there was low information transfer during the change. Furt...

Personal reputation has been argued to demonstrate important influences on work outcomes. However, substantive research on personal reputation is relatively scarce. This two-study investigation empirically supports and extends existing theory regarding the temporal development of personal reputation (i.e., antecedents and consequences), and thus co...

In this study, we examined the impact of seeding teams to create maximal and minimal levels of extroversion and conscientiousness variance. Using the theories of complementary and supplementary fit, we make predictions regarding the main and interactive effects of extroversion and conscientiousness variance on performance. Testing our hypotheses in...

The leadership literature suffers from a lack of theoretical integration (Avolio, 2007, American Psychologist, 62, 25–33). This article addresses that lack of integration by developing an integrative trait-behavioral model of leadership effectiveness and then examining the relative validity of leader traits (gender, intelligence, personality) and b...

Numerous studies have demonstrated that decision makers will allocate additional resources to failing projects if those projects are close to completion, as opposed to far from completion. The present work considers whether high project completion leads to other effects; namely, decision-maker willingness to conceal negative information about a pro...

This study tested predictions derived from Structural Adaptation Theory (SAT) on the longitudinal effects of centralizing and decentralizing decision-making structures in teams. Results from 93 four-person teams working on a command and control simulation generally supported SAT, documenting that it was more difficult for teams to adapt to a centra...

This article illustrates how the legitimacy of pay and evaluation processes in teams affect the effectiveness of team-based incentive designs in organizational work teams. We present a theoretical model of the development of legitimacy in team-based incentive designs and propose that the development of legitimacy for both pay dispersion in teams (i...

Although numerous models of team performance have been articulated over the past 20 years, these models have primarily focused on the individual attribute approach to team composition. The authors utilized a role composition approach, which investigates how the characteristics of a set of role holders impact team effectiveness, to develop a theory...

Structural Adaptation Theory proposes that it is more difficult for teams to change from competitive to cooperative reward conditions than it is for them to change in the opposite direction, and this has been labeled the cutthroat cooperation effect [Johnson, M. D., Hollenbeck, J. R., Ilgen, D. R., Humphrey, S. E., Meyer, C. J., & Jundt, D. K. (200...

This study examined how the performance of diverse teams is affected by member openness to experience and the extent to which team reward structure emphasizes intragroup differences. Fifty-eight heterogeneous four-person teams engaged in an interactive task. Teams in which reward structure converged with diversity (i.e., “faultline” teams) performe...

The design of work has been shown to influence a host of attitudinal, behavioral, cognitive, well-being, and organizational outcomes. Despite its clear importance, scholarly interest in the topic has diminished over the past 20 years. Fortunately, a recent body of research has sought to reenergize research into work design by expanding our view of...

To date, an empirical link between the broad factor extraversion and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) has not been found. We propose that a facet conceptualization of extraversion including surgency, sociability and positive emotions predict an individual's level of citizenship behaviors in opposing ways, thus masking the predictive abilit...

In this article, the authors argue that there is no one best way to make placement decisions on self-managed teams. Drawing from theories of supplementary and complementary fit, they develop a conceptual model that suggests that (a) maximization principles should be applied to extroversion variance (i.e., complementary fit), (b) minimization princi...

Because of the growth of online discount travel intermediaries (e.g., Priceline), researchers have become interested in how customers react to electronic brokered ultimatum bargaining contexts. This paper investigates how characteristics of the customer and characteristics of the bargaining context might ameliorate customers' (a) perceptions of jus...

To examine social interdependence theory dynamically, we develop a theory of structural adaptation based on "asymmetric adaptability." We suggest that it is more difficult for teams to shift from competitive to cooperative reward structures than from cooperative to competitive structures. We show that teams that switch from competitive to cooperati...

Individuals working in teams often face an equivocal situation in which attention and effort must be divided between personal endeavors and collective pursuits. We propose that individual differences in two types of individualism-collectivism-utilitarian and ontological-influence how team members resolve this equivocality. Results of a study of the...

Bargaining activities now often take place electronically. Many travel-related exchanges occur through discount intermediaries such as Priceline and Hotwire, who offer customers opportunities to acquire travel-related items at reduced cost; in return customers give up prior knowledge regarding what hotel or airline will provide them service. We exa...

This study tested whether teams working on a command and control simulation adapted to structural change in the manner implied by contingency theories. Teams shifting from a functional to a divisional structure showed better performance than teams making a divisional-to-functional shift. Team levels of coordination mediated this difference, and tea...

There has been little research examining customer reactions to brokered ultimatum game (BUG) contexts (i.e. exchanges in which 1 party offers an ultimatum price for a resource through an intermediary, and the ultimatum offer is accepted or rejected by the other party). In this study, the authors incorporated rational decision-making theory and just...

Building on the idea of asymmetric adaptability, this study focused on structural and compositional ways to arrange teams in order to maximize both initial performance and structural adaptability. Based on 64 teams that completed a command and control simulation, our results suggest that hybrid teams (teams structured using non-redundant, complimen...

We present the results of two longitudinal studies that examine how the level of project completion affects decisions and worker outcomes. In a lab study, we find that as a project approaches completion, task completion is rated as increasingly more important and economic motives (e.g., finishing on budget) as increasingly less important. We also f...

This study examined whether the relationship between reward structure and team performance is contingent upon task dimension, team composition, and individual performance level. Seventy-five four-person teams engaged in a simulated interactive task in which reward structure was manipulated. A competitive structure enhanced one task dimension, speed...

In two studies examining resource allocation, support is found for the notion that group decisions are affected in systematic ways depending on whether or not there was individual consideration of the problem before meeting as a group. Specifically, compared to no prior consideration groups, prior consideration groups (1) escalate their commitment...

We found evidence of a mutual suppression effect between anxiety and depression on an individual's level of commitment within escalation dilemmas. On the one hand, our results demonstrate a positive relationship between anxiety and level of commitment; on the other, our results demonstrate a negative relationship between depression and level of com...

Due to the growth of discount travel intermediaries such as Priceline, researchers have become interested in customer reactions to brokered ultimatum bargaining contexts. In this study, utilizing justice theory, we examine how procedural variations in a brokered ultimatum game (BUG) affect customer perceptions of informational and distributive just...

The growth of discount travel intermediaries such as Priceline and Hotwire highlights the importance of studying customer reactions to brokered ultimatum bargaining contexts. We examine how procedural variations in a brokered ultimatum game (BUG) affect customer behaviors (offer made for the current purchase, repatronage behavior, and future biddin...

In this paper, we review the literature on hierarchical team decision making — teams in which a formal leader makes decisions based upon the input from a staff or subordinates or other informed parties. We structure our review around the Multilevel Theory of team decision making (Hollenbeck et al., 1995), integrating the disparate works within this...

This article poses the question which reward structure (cooperative or competitive) has the best effects on team performance under which circumstances. Specifically, a cooperative reward structure is predicted to increase performance on means-interdependent tasks, while a competitive reward structure is predicted to increase performance on means-in...

A contingency model of reward structures is developed, stating that the relationship between reward structure and team performance is contingent upon the performance dimension specified (speed vs. accuracy), team composition (team members' interpersonal orientation in terms of extroversion and agreeableness), and the relative performance level of i...

This study examined the relationship between sexual assault and membership in high-risk fraternities and athletic teams. Although past research has identified fraternities and athletic teams as high-risk groups for sexual assault, the findings have been inconclusive. Based on student perceptions, we separated fraternities and athletic teams into hi...

The authors propose that all team based change is not the same. It is offered that change is generally more difficult from divisional to functional structures than it is from functional to divisional structures. We offer that successful change from divisional to functional structures is contingent upon individual differences. Additionally, we argue...

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