Francesco Sguera’s research while affiliated with Nova School of Business and Economics and other places

Rationale Anxiety is an increasingly common problem in society, including at work, yet the effects of an emotional culture of anxiety remain unexplored. We offer a new lens on anxiety in the workplace, examining its collective enactment in the form of an emotional culture of anxiety. Objective This study examines the implications of an emotional culture of anxiety for psychological and financial outcomes within a poorly performing healthcare organization. We also examine whether an emotional culture of companionate love, which helps people “calm and connect”, can counteract the negative effects of an emotional culture of anxiety. Methods Drawing on survey data of 822 employees from 85 departments in a large US medical center and a time-lagged archival measure of financial performance across those departments, we used ordinary least squares regression and random coefficient regression modeling to examine the main effects of these two emotional cultures and the buffering effect of an emotional culture of companionate love on an emotional culture of anxiety for department costs, department psychological safety, and individual employee burnout and satisfaction. Results We find significant direct relationships between an emotional culture of anxiety and an emotional culture of companionate love on employee burnout and satisfaction in the predicted directions. We also find a significant interaction between the two emotional cultures, with a culture of companionate love attenuating the relationship of a culture of anxiety on job satisfaction, burnout, and financial performance in the form of time-lagged department costs. Conclusions Our results indicate that a culture of companionate love can be a protective force against the negative outcomes of an emotional culture of anxiety. Examining these two emotional cultures concurrently offers a better understanding of how to address the pernicious effects of anxiety in organizations.

Managing negative situations is a critical task for managers and organizations, especially since doing so effectively is imperative for “creating a better world” (Academy of Management, 2021). However, there are numerous obstacles that can challenge managers. Our symposium gathers an international panel of scholars from Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Germany, New Zealand, Portugal, The Netherlands, and the United States that leverages diverse perspectives and methodologies to (a) assess what influences managers’ decisions to pursue punishment (vs. procedural justice) when they handle ambiguous allegations of harm, (b) how managerial inaction can be detrimental for employees and managers, (c) how procedural justice issues can influence managers conducting layoffs, (d) how anticipatory moral emotions affect managerial behaviors in “necessary evil” tasks, and (e) how managers can effectively deliver bad news. Following the paper presentations, Dr. Robert Bies will conclude the symposium with an engaging interactive discussion that highlights key insights and future research directions. By showcasing theoretical and practical insights into how managers and organizations can more effectively manage negative situations, we aim to fulfill the Academy of Management’s objective to “create a better world” through responsible management.

The Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism is frequently used in experimental research to measure willingness-to-pay (WTP). The mechanism is very appealing given its incentive compatibility property. However, a growing body of experimental evidence finds that WTP is sensitive to the underlying price distribution of the BDM mechanism. The literature suggests that these findings can be rationalized only if subjects have context-dependent preferences. Under context-dependent preferences, the use of the BDM mechanism momentarily changes subjects’ preferences; subjects do not have incentives to report their intrinsic valuation, which is what the BDM attempts to measure, but instead they report the amount they are willing to pay after their preferences have momentarily changed. This lack of incentive compatibility would raise serious concerns about the validity of the BDM as an elicitation procedure; indeed, virtually all studies that use the BDM mechanism choose that elicitation procedure precisely for its incentive compatibility property. In this paper, we propose that an assumption of context dependence is not necessary to rationalize the aforementioned experimental findings. We provide an alternative plausible theory and experimental evidence to support it. Our theory relies on the premise that subjects need to exert effort to learn their preferences. We find that the price distribution of the BDM mechanism influences the subject’s incentives to exert effort. The results presented here are particularly appealing to the experimental research: our theory is consistent with the experimental findings that WTP is sensitive to the price distribution of the BDM mechanism while preserving the incentive compatibility property. This paper was accepted by Duncan Simester, marketing.

We used a multi‐method approach (i.e. multi‐source survey and two experiments) to investigate the mediating mechanisms that link two distinct facets of organizational politics to employee performance and deviance. Study 1 surveyed 132 employees and their direct supervisors working in a call centre. We found that authenticity mediated the effect of general politics on supervisor‐rated performance and that emotional exhaustion mediated the effect of pay and promotion politics on supervisor‐rated deviance. To address causality concerns from Study 1, Study 2 adopted an experimental design to test the impact of high/low general political behaviour on authenticity and task performance. Authenticity mediated the effect of general politics on task performance. In Study 3, we used a similar experimental design to test if high/low perceptions of politics that are related to pay and promotion influence emotional exhaustion and deviance. Subjects in the condition depicting high politics in pay and promotion reported the highest levels of emotional exhaustion, and emotional exhaustion mediated the effects of pay and promotion politics on deviance. Overall, our findings suggest that distinctive types of perceived political behaviours at work influence individuals in negative ways, eventually inducing employees to lower their performance and engage in deviant practices.

Adverse changes, such as layoffs or wage cuts, can irremediably damage the relationship between employees and their organization. This makes it all the more important for organizations to provide information about these changes to avoid the emergence of organizational cynicism among their employees. Drawing on uncertainty management theory, we argue that informational justice and organizational identification jointly regulate organizational cynicism in the context of adverse change. In addition, we examine whether informational justice influences employee exit intentions through cynicism. We test our hypotheses using a multi‐method approach, encompassing one experiment (Study 1), one large‐scale survey of 1,795 employees undergoing a major restructuring (Study 2), and a five‐wave field survey of 174 workers undergoing layoffs and wage cuts (Study 3). In all three studies, poorer communication from the organization predicted greater exit intentions through increased cynicism for employees who were more (rather than less) identified with the organization. By integrating the literature on informational justice, organizational identification, and cynicism, our research offers a more nuanced understanding of the antecedents and consequences of cynicism in the context of adverse organizational change. Practitioner points Organizations undergoing adverse changes, such as layoffs and wage cuts, should provide employees with timely and detailed explanations for the changes (i.e., informational justice). When employees do not receive timely and detailed explanations for adverse changes, they are more likely to become cynical, and to decide to leave the organization. Providing adequate explanations is especially important for employees who strongly identify with the organizations because they are more sensitive to informational justice. Providing explanations is not as effective in reducing cynicism among employees with low levels of organizational identification. When organizations fail to explain adverse changes, employees who identify strongly with the organization may become as cynical as employees whose identities are less closely tied to the organization.

We investigate team member feelings of collective psychological ownership (CPO) over teamwork products, the psychological paths that lead to it, and its impact on team workers’ evaluations of team effectiveness, turnover intentions, and intentions to champion teamwork products. We focus on the teamwork product as an important target of ownership feelings, building on theories of self‐extension, psychological ownership and team emergent states. In Study 1, we validate measures for three ownership activating experiences (OAE) that have been proposed as paths to CPO (control over, intimate knowledge regarding, and investment in the teamwork product) using two samples of individual team workers (n = 210 and n = 140). In Study 2 (n = 183) and Study 3 (n = 200), we use surveys and a multiwave design to show that team workers’ feelings of CPO mediate the relationship between investment in and intimate knowledge regarding the product and team effectiveness evaluations, team turnover intentions, and intentions to champion the work product. In Study 4 (n = 48 teams), CPO was predicted by the OAEs, at the team level. This research additionally highlights the benefits to organizations of creating conditions for the emergence of employee feelings of shared ownership over teamwork products.