Brian W. Swider’s research while affiliated with University of Florida and other places

Although recruitment and perceptions of fit are inherently social—as they reflect the interactions between applicants and recruiting firms—applicants’ social networks during recruitment can exert both positive and potentially negative consequences for subsequent applicant perceptions and behaviors. In this study, we examine the role of applicants’ friends’ perceptions of fit with the same recruiting organizations. Integrating ideas from social information processing theory and the person-organization (P-O) fit literature, we argue that friends’ P-O fit perceptions drive social learning and social influence processes for applicants, thus predicting applicant perceptions and behaviors toward recruiting firms. In addition, we posit that the direct and indirect relationships between friends’ P-O fit perceptions and applicants’ own fit perceptions and job choices with recruiting firms are further strengthened by how centrally connected applicants are within their friend networks. Using a sample of 576 applicant-firm observations from 178 job applicants, we found that friends’ P-O fit perceptions are positively related to applicant P-O fit perceptions and job choice decisions. Furthermore, applicants’ position in their network—assessed via applicants’ outdegree centrality within their friend group—strengthened the relationship between friends’ P-O fit and applicant P-O fit as well as with their job choice decisions. Our research provides important theoretical and empirical findings on the influence of applicants’ friends during recruitment.

The increased incorporation of time, theoretically and empirically, has dramatically advanced our understanding of management. Trajectories, which describe longitudinal change in constructs using functions of time, have become one of management scholars’ most widely used methodological tools to examine if, how, and why constructs change. Yet, despite the rapid growth of trajectory research, we lack a coherent framework for understanding how trajectories can be used to generate valuable insights into change-related work phenomena. In this article, we review more than two decades of trajectory research to develop a taxonomy that delineates the theoretical extensions offered by different trajectory-related research questions. In addition, although seminal method articles offered initial how-to instructions for conducting trajectory analyses, there has since been no systematic review of the methodological practices actually used in trajectory research. Our review distinguishes eight critical methodological choices required in every trajectory study, catalogs the frequency of methodological choices made in prior research, identifies problematic practices that persist, and offers actionable recommendations to develop rigorous trajectory research. Finally, we discuss eight pressing issues in current trajectory research, including several prominent practices that must be abandoned, and suggest how to avoid or minimize these concerns in future studies. Together, our review provides management scholars with an organizing platform for developing trajectory-related research questions and a comprehensive guide to rigorous study designs and analyses.

As organizational research continues to globalize, scholars increasingly must translate established scales into languages other than those in which the scales were originally developed. In organizational psychology research, back-translation is the dominant procedure for translating scales. Back-translation has notable strengths in maintaining the psychometric properties of an established scale in a translated version. However, cross-cultural methodologists have argued that in its most basic form, back-translation often does not result in translations with acceptable levels of equivalence between original and translated research materials. Fortunately, there are complementary procedures to back-translation that can evaluate and strengthen the extent to which scale translations have achieved equivalence between original and translated versions of scales. But how often organizational researchers use and report these procedures in tandem with back-translation is unclear. This article aims to address this lack of clarity by evaluating the state of the use of back-translation in organizational psychology research by reviewing every study in Journal of Applied Psychology that has employed translation over the past nearly 25 years (k = 333). Our findings suggest that the majority of the time that researchers engage in translation procedures, they report having done so. At the same time, the details of these procedures are commonly underreported, making it unclear whether additional techniques beyond back-translation have been used to examine and demonstrate equivalence between original and translated versions of scales. Based on the results of our review, we develop a set of recommendations for conducting and reporting scale translations in organizational research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Although the various factors that predict applicant attitudes and decisions during recruitment have been explored, far less is known about the decision‐making process applicants go through to develop attitudes to facilitate job choice decisions. In a field sample (Study 1), applicant initial preferences across four firms predicted the trajectory of subsequent organizational attraction toward the firms over the 5‐month recruiting cycle. Further, these initial preferences significantly predicted job choice decisions at the end of the recruiting cycle. Applicants’ organizational attraction trajectories that developed during the entire recruiting process mediated this relationship. Findings in a laboratory sample (Study 2) were consistent with research on predecisional information distortion (PID). Applicants evaluated the information presented about two hypothetical recruiting companies and overly favored the company that was installed as applicants’ initial preference. Initial preferences had a significant indirect effect on job choice through total PID when the information about the two companies was equivalent and when the initially preferred company was moderately worse. However, the indirect effect was not significant when the initially preferred company was presented as severely worse. Applicants arriving at job choice decisions using biased information evaluations driven by initial preferences can adversely affect both organizations and applicants’ careers.

The study of first impressions, which consistently demonstrate meaningful and surprisingly durable impacts on attitudes, behaviors, and cognitions, is pervasive across psychological disciplines. In this integrative conceptual review, we focus on first impressions within the organizational psychology literature, which have been explored across an impressive variety of topical domains (e.g., selection, socialization, leader-subordinate relationships, job performance, and teams) though largely in fragmented ways. Our review attempts to resolve major differences in how researchers have approached first impression effects to build consensus on what first impression effects are, how they occur, and how long they take to develop. In synthesizing this seemingly disparate body of research, we develop an integrative framework of first impression effects comprising four fundamental elements-cues, motives, processes, and outcomes-that must be considered both individually and collectively to understand first impression effects in organizational settings in their entirety. Using this framework, we take stock of the existing literature and identify important through lines, including the focus on displayer- or perceiver-centric effects and whether first impression effects are presumed to be biased or valid. Our fundamental elements framework can be used to systematically catalog and reconcile prior work, as well as develop stronger, more theoretically cohesive studies in the future. We outline major implications for theory and practice on first impressions in the workplace. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).