Subrahmaniam Tangirala’s research while affiliated with University of Maryland, College Park and other places

Teams often need to adapt to planned discontinuous task change or fundamental alteration of tasks, tools, and work systems. Although team adaptation theories have made substantive progress in explaining how teams can respond to change, they have not adequately considered the unique impact that discontinuous task change can have on teams. Such change can render not only collective but also individual task capabilities obsolete and necessitate a multilevel task relearning process. Drawing on the team compilation model, we suggest that adaptation to discontinuous task change is akin to team (re)development. We posit that teams are more effective when they approach discontinuous task change by first focusing on the rebuilding of individual task capabilities and only later shifting their attention to the rebuilding of team-level task capabilities. Moreover, we argue that the uncertainty caused by discontinuous task change makes reward fairness salient such that equity and equality in rewards are particularly useful in motivating members to (re)develop individual and collective task capabilities, respectively. We provide support for these arguments using survey, qualitative, and archival data from 115 manufacturing teams and discuss the implications of our findings for both research and practice. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1621 .

Employees can be proactive in establishing good working relationships with their managers to enhance their own effectiveness. We propose that an important way that they can do so is by engaging in behaviors we refer to as “Managing Your Boss” (MYB) that involve employees taking the initiative to understand their managers’ goals, needs, and working styles and adapt their job priorities and actions accordingly. We integrate theories on proactivity and followership to lay the conceptual foundation for the study of MYB. We underscore the conceptual distinctiveness of MYB from related constructs. Moreover, we propose that MYB can help employees improve their performance by enabling them to develop high quality leader‐member exchanges (LMX) and argue that these effects are amplified in unstructured work environments where jobs are not standardized or when managers fail to provide adequate task structure. Using 1313 working adults across a set of four studies and seven samples, we develop a validated measure of MYB, establish its nomological network, and demonstrate support for key elements of our theoretical model. We discuss the implications of our findings for research and practice.

Recent voice research has noted that providing adequate job rewards for speaking up can sustainably motivate voice from employees. We examine why managers who seek out voice at work might not always properly reward the behavior. Drawing on theories of dispositional attribution, we propose that, in general, managers tend to reward voice because it signals to them that employees possess a valued underlying trait: proactivity, which is characterized by change-orientation and foresight. However, we argue that when managers engage in more voice solicitation-that is, explicitly ask for voice and take a listening posture toward it-their tendency to infer proactivity from employees' voice weakens. Thus, we make a case that voice solicitation, a managerial behavior intended to set facilitating conditions for speaking up at work, inadvertently weakens the (indirect) relationship between employee voice and job rewards. We establish support for our theory in a set of two studies with complementary designs. Study 1 was a preregistered between-subjects experiment that used a realistic vignette design with an online panel of 592 working adults based in the United States. Study 2 was a multisource field survey with a sample of 385 employees and their managers working at the Indian branch of a global technology company in the oil and gas industry. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our results. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

In press at Journal of Applied Psychology. Recent voice research has noted that providing adequate job rewards for speaking up can sustainably motivate voice from employees. We examine why managers who seek out voice at work might not always properly reward the behavior. Drawing on theories of dispositional attribution, we propose that, in general, managers tend to reward voice because it signals to them that employees possess a valued underlying trait: proactivity, which is characterized by change-orientation and foresight. However, we argue that when managers engage in more voice solicitation—that is, explicitly ask for voice and take a listening posture toward it—their tendency to infer proactivity from employees’ voice weakens. Thus, we make a case that voice solicitation, a managerial behavior intended to set facilitating conditions for speaking up at work, inadvertently weakens the (indirect) relationship between employee voice and job rewards. We establish support for our theory in a set of 2 studies with complementary designs. Study 1 was a pre-registered between-subjects experiment that used a realistic vignette design with an online panel of 592 working adults based in the United States. Study 2 was a multisource field survey with a sample of 385 employees and their managers working at the India branch of a global technology company in the oil and gas industry. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our results.