Wu Liu

A critical challenge for diverse teams is ensuring that members coordinate their work effectively. While research has examined how diversity triggers social categorization that harms coordination, we know little about how the social status attached to these differences influences coordination, especially when members hold different ranks across multiple attributes simultaneously. We introduce a construct called dyadic status incongruence , which occurs when two team members hold conflicting ranks across different status hierarchies (e.g., one has higher education but shorter organizational tenure than the other). Drawing on status inconsistency theory, we argue that this incongruence generates ambiguity and disagreement over who has higher status, which in turn reduces interpersonal liking and ultimately hinders dyadic coordination. We further propose that team specialization mitigates these adverse effects by clarifying task roles and redirecting members' attention from status‐based comparisons to respective expertise for task execution. We tested our hypotheses using round‐robin data from 743 dyads among 221 members in 57 teams at a technology firm, employing polynomial regression, response surface analysis, and social relations modeling. These results were supplemented by a qualitative study using semi‐structured interviews with 15 employees from this firm to provide contextual evidence for the observed effects. Our findings support the proposed model, advancing a more precise, status‐based account of why coordination breaks down in diverse teams and how these effects can be mitigated.

Summary: Although leader anger expression targeted at employees' unethical behavior is pervasive in the workplace, we still know little about its theoretical meaning and consequences. To address this theoretical blind spot, we drew on fairness heuristic theory to investigate whether, how, and when unethical‐behavior‐targeted (UB‐targeted) leader anger expression affects team outcomes. Our findings from two time‐lagged field studies suggest that a punishment‐based distributive justice climate mediates the positive effects of UB‐targeted leader anger expression on team organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and team viability. Moreover, leader moral decoupling weakens these indirect relationships. Specifically, the indirect relationships are weaker when the leader separated judgments of performance from those of ethics. These findings highlight the importance of a fairness perspective in understanding the consequences of leader anger expression targeted at unethical behaviors.

Summary: Does receiving knowledge necessarily catalyze the recipient's creativity? Drawing upon the literature on knowledge management, we propose a dyadic‐level contingency model in which the type of received knowledge (i.e., explicit vs. tacit) from the partner and the recipient's psychological closeness to the partner jointly determine the recipient's knowledge elaboration and consequent creativity as catalyzed by the partner's knowledge (i.e., catalytic creativity). Results based on three samples from various settings show that receiving tacit knowledge from a partner leads a recipient to elaborate the received knowledge, and this relationship is stronger when the recipient's psychological closeness to the partner is higher. This dyadic‐level knowledge elaboration in turn boosts the recipient's catalytic creativity. In contrast, receiving explicit knowledge from a partner generally has a much weaker effect on the recipient's elaboration of the knowledge, regardless of whether the recipient's psychological closeness to the partner is high or low. We extend research on dyadic‐level creativity by illustrating (a) the differential effects of explicit versus tacit knowledge receiving and (b) the recipient's knowledge elaboration as a mechanism and dyadic psychological closeness as a boundary condition for such differential effects.

Summary: The role of time pressure on individual employees' creativity remains ambiguous, with prior studies reporting positive, negative, and curvilinear relations. The present research aims to address this issue. Drawing from the attentional focus model, we (a) distinguish the consequences of time pressure for radical versus incremental creativity and (b) introduce external and internal knowledge scanning as distinct mediating mechanisms. Moreover, we cast employees' long‐range and short‐range planning as moderators of the indirect time pressure–creativity linkages. Time‐lagged data from 203 employees and their supervisors revealed that time pressure hampered employees' radical creativity by undermining their external scanning, with long‐range planning alleviating this negative indirect relationship. In contrast, we found an indirect, inverted U‐shaped linkage between time pressure and incremental creativity through internal scanning. Unexpectedly, this indirect relation was not contingent on employees' short‐range planning. These results offer a new theoretical perspective that helps to reconcile previous, seemingly contradictory findings on the relationship between time pressure and creativity. Moreover, our results offer practical implications for modern workplaces that require employees' creative contributions under conditions of time scarcity.

“So why the f doesn’t it do that?!” On a summer day in 2008, Steve Jobs questioned his team angrily when he found out that MobileMe (an online service provided ...