Wing Lam

Previous research has suggested that employees tend to ‘catch’ burnout from their coworkers and then to perform less satisfactorily. This burnout contagion mechanism cannot, however, explain why some individuals are able to take preemptive actions to defend themselves against a vulnerable environment. Using a social information processing perspective of the conservation of resources theory, we theorized that coworker burnout (i.e., the average burnout level of all team members, excluding the focal employee) serves as a social cue that guides individuals regarding the amount of effort they should put into their work in order to maintain a high level of work performance. The results revealed that coworker burnout was negatively related to employee work performance through reduced work effort when most coworkers (rather than a few) within a work group experienced high levels of burnout (i.e., there was a high consistency of coworker burnout) and when the focal employees had low levels of mastery goal orientation. This negative indirect relationship was buffered when either the coworker burnout consistency was low or the employees' mastery goal orientation was high. This conditional, indirect linkage between coworker burnout and employee work performance, via work effort, maintained its significance even after controlling for the burnout contagion mechanism (i.e., the extent to which the focal employee caught coworker burnout).

With the rapid development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), organizations increasingly embrace novel, human–robot, dual leadership models, such that teams of employees receive instruction from both human and robot leaders simultaneously. Even as its adoption increases in practice, little research has determined the impacts of such a dual leadership model on team dynamics or functioning. Drawing on leader identification and congruence frameworks, this study takes a first step toward expanding leadership literature to include human–robot dual leadership considerations. With a polynomial regression of time-lagged data from 481 team members across 111 teams, this research reveals a positive relationship between congruent identification with both human and robot leaders and enhanced perceptions of collective future work selves and proactive engagement. This congruence effect also is amplified by effective collaboration between the leaders. Lower satisfaction with the explanatory capability of the robot leaders intensifies the congruence effect. These findings thus highlight the importance of complementarity and balance between human and robot leaders that seek to guide an employee team’s directions and proactive engagement.

Previous research has predominantly focused on the overt acts of supervisory abuse or has taken a general approach that fails to differentiate between its distinctive forms. Integrating the literature on hot versus cold identity threats and identity threat appraisal, we examine how different forms of abusive supervision influence employee outcomes. We argue that active-aggressive abusive supervision, characterized by supervisors’ overt acts of abuse, embodies a hot identity threat that stimulates employees’ identity-protection responses, such as supervisor-directed aggression, a form of derogation. By contrast, passive-aggressive abusive supervision, involving covert acts of abuse, represents a cold identity threat that triggers employees’ identity-restructuring responses, manifesting as feedback seeking directed at coworkers and work withdrawal. These two pathways operate through distinct mechanisms—decreased group self-esteem and increased self-uncertainty, respectively—and are influenced by different moderators. The results from two experiments and one field study largely supported the hypothesized relationships. By differentiating between two forms of abusive supervision and examining their distinct effects, this study enhances our understanding of the nuanced nature of abusive supervision, its impacts, underlying mechanisms, and contingencies.

This research introduces the concept of future organizational identification (FOI), an extension of organizational identification (OI) that emphasizes its forward‐looking aspect. FOI refers to an individual's projection of their self‐definition based on the continuity of their organizational membership. Drawing on construal level theory (CLT) and a future‐oriented approach, this research investigates how visionary leadership, which offers vision communication and vision of continuity, may enhance followers' FOI through future focus. Study 1, comprising Studies 1a and 1b, validates the measurement of FOI in workplace contexts. With a three‐wave, time‐lagged investigation, Study 2 demonstrates that leaders' vision communication fosters followers' FOI by promoting future focus, and vision of continuity positively moderates this mediation effect. These findings advance literature on organizational identification, visionary leadership, and CLT. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our findings and proposing directions for future research.

Despite the growing frequency of leadership transitions and their significant impact on team and organizational performance, little research has examined why and how teams develop identification with a new leader, or their subsequent receptiveness to the new leader’s change initiatives. Drawing from the contrast and congruence effects and the theoretical perspectives of leader identification, this study empirically tests a model in which the congruence of new leaders’ and their teams’ proactive personalities foster new leader identification, as well as the team’s behavioral responses to the new leader’s change agenda. This effect is strongest when the new leader’s proactive personality is higher than that of the former leader’s proactive personality (positive contrast). Our findings of a four-wave “before-and-after” transition survey of 155 hotel employees and 51 new leaders, achieved through polynomial regression analyses, proved very insightful. We found that the congruence between a new leader’s and hi...

This study investigates person–job (P–J) fit and person–organization (P–O) fit perceptions and relates these perceptions to employees' emotional labor and customer service performance. Data from a two‐point, time‐lagged study of 263 employees and 690 customers reveal that both P–J and P–O fit relate positively to deep acting and negatively to surface acting, in accordance with an emotional labor perspective. In addition, P–J and P–O fit are jointly associated with emotional labor, such that the positive link between P–J fit and deep acting is stronger, and the negative link between P–J fit and surface acting is weaker when P–O fit is high. Emotional labor partially mediates the interactive effects of P–J and P–O fit on service interaction quality and customer satisfaction; service interaction quality relates positively to customer satisfaction. These findings have multiple theoretical and practical implications.

Leader succession often occurs during organizational change processes, but the implications of leader succession, in terms of reactions to the change, rarely have been investigated. Employee attitudes and behaviors during organizational change may be influenced jointly by a former leader who recently has transitioned out of the team and the new leader who recently has transitioned into it. We predict an interaction between former and new leaders' transformational leadership on employees' behavioral resistance to and support for change. On the basis of contrast effect theory, a highly transformational former leader constrains the potential effectiveness of the new leader, but a former leader low in transformational leadership enhances this potential effectiveness. We also propose conditional indirect effects transmitted through commitment to the changing organization. Our research was conducted in a large Chinese hospitality organization that was implementing radical organizational change, during which virtually all aspects of processes and products are changed. We collected a 2-wave multisource data from employees who had recently experienced a leader succession and their newly assigned leaders. On the basis of a final sample of 203 employees from 22 teams, we found empirical support for the proposed interaction effects. The conditional indirect effects were also consistent with our expectations, but the effect on behavioral resistance to change was stronger than the effect on behavioral support for change. (PsycINFO Database Record

Employees often assess whether the social context is favorable for them to speak out, yet little research has investigated how the target's mood might influence the actor's voice behavior. From an affect-as-social-information perspective, we explored such potential effects of the target's mood on the actor's promotive voice in 2 empirical studies. In a scenario-based study with 142 MBA students (Study 1), the target's positive mood was positively associated with the actor's intentions to engage in promotive voice toward that target, mediated by the actor's perceived psychological safety. This mediated relationship was stronger when (a) the quality of the relationship between the actor and the target was poor or (b) the actor had a lower social status than the target. We replicated these results in Study 2, a correlational field study with 572 dyads nested within 142 members of 30 teams, where the actor's promotive voice behaviors (rather than intentions) were measured.