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Personnel Psychology Autumn (Fall) Issue

  • 1.  Personnel Psychology Autumn (Fall) Issue

    Posted 08-18-2020 14:26

    Dear HR Division Colleagues,

    The Autumn (Fall) 2020 issue of Personnel Psychology is now published. This issue contains five original articles and four book reviews. We hope you enjoy them!

     

    Berrin Erdogan, Ph. D.
    Editor-in-Chief, Personnel Psychology
    Express Employment Professionals Professor
    The School of Business
    Portland State University
    berrine@pdx.edu


    Impact factor: 6.57
    Ranking: 2019:13/226 (Management) 6/84 (Psychology, Applied)

    ORIGINAL ARTICLES

    Motivated to be socially mindful: Explaining age differences in the effect of employees' contact quality with coworkers on their coworker support
    Ulrike Fasbender, Anne Burmeister, Mo Wang

    In this research, we examine how high‐quality contact can facilitate employees' coworker support and explain why the benefits of high‐quality contact are contingent upon age. First, we employ a social mindfulness lens to decipher the motivational mechanisms of high‐quality contact with coworkers on providing coworker support via coworker‐oriented perspective taking and empathic concern. Second, we utilize socioemotional selectivity theory to overcome the current age‐blind view on workplace interactions and examine the indirect moderating effect of age via future time perspective on the link between contact quality, social mindfulness, and coworker support. We tested our hypotheses based on data from a sample of 575 employees collected in three waves. Results showed that both coworker‐oriented perspective taking and empathic concern mediated the positive effects of contact quality on coworker support. The effect of contact quality on coworker‐oriented empathic concern was stronger for older employees with a more constrained future time perspective as compared to younger employees with a more extensive future time perspective. Overall, we extend research on aging, workplace interactions, and support behavior by linking the literature on these topics using a social mindfulness lens and by adding employee age and age‐related mechanisms as important boundary conditions that qualify the outcomes of positive workplace contact.

    How help during pregnancy can undermine self‐efficacy and increase postpartum intentions to quit
    Kristen P. Jones, Judith A. Clair, Eden B. King, Beth K. Humberd, David F. Arena

    Pregnancy reflects a common experience for women in today's workforce, yet recent data suggest that some women scale back or leave the workforce following childbirth. Considering these effects on women's careers, researchers have sought to understand the underlying dynamics of these decisions. Here, we explore a paradoxical reason for weakened postpartum career attitudes: help that women receive during pregnancy. We integrate stereotype threat and benevolent sexism theories to explain how the effects of help on postpartum intentions to quit may be transmitted through reductions in work self‐efficacy. In doing so, we consider the role of perceived impact-or the extent to which help interferes with versus enables women's perceived ability to continue performing their work role. Results of a weekly diary study of 105 pregnant employees suggest that work‐interfering help led to decreased self‐efficacy for work during the following week. Furthermore, there was an indirect effect of average help received at work during pregnancy on postpartum intentions to quit the workforce through reductions in work self‐efficacy that was stronger insofar as help was work‐interfering versus work‐enabling. Taken together, our results highlight unintended negative consequences that occur when others provide ineffective support to women at work during pregnancy.

    Proactive yet reflective? Materializing proactive personality into creativity through job reflective learning and activated positive affective states
    Fuli Li, Tingting Chen, Nancy Yi‐Feng Chen, Yun Bai, J. Michael Crant

    Studies linking proactive personality to creativity have primarily taken a future‐oriented perspective, describing a process where individuals assess future opportunities and risks of creative endeavors. Complementing this approach, we draw on an attribution theory perspective to delineate how proactive personality relates to employee creativity through the serial mediating effects of job reflective learning-a backward‐looking cognitive process-and activated positive affective states. Job reflective learning captures backward‐looking self‐assessments and the underlying internal causal attributions, and it is differentiated into two valences: job reflective learning from successes and from failures. Based on two separate multi‐wave, multi‐source field studies, our findings consistently show a serial mediation process linking proactive personality to creativity through both valences of job reflective learning and activated positive affective states. Job reflective learning from successes breeds joviality, whereas job reflective learning from failures arouses attentiveness. Joviality and attentiveness-both types of activated positive affective states-in turn promote creativity. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of how proactive employees manifest their proactivity trait into actual creativity through backward‐looking cognitive and affective processes.

    Maybe not so independent after all: The possibility, prevalence, and consequences of violating the independence assumptions in psychometric meta‐analysis
    Zhenyu Yuan, Frederick P. Morgeson, James M. LeBreton

    Psychometric meta‐analysis assumes that moderators are unrelated to study artifacts (e.g., criterion reliability), and that study artifacts are independent of true validities. Meeting these assumptions is important for researchers seeking to accurately partition the variance in effect sizes due to study artifacts from the variance due to meaningful moderators. Despite the critical role of these assumptions, we know very little about their tenability. To address this basic gap in the literature, we conducted three studies to determine if there are potential violations of the independence assumptions (Study 1), the prevalence of such violations (Study 2), and the consequences of violating the independence assumptions via a series of Monte Carlo simulations (Study 3). We found that violations of the independence assumptions are not only plausible but also routinely detected across a wide array of topics. Simulation results indicate that violating the independence assumptions can result in biases under certain circumstances, which are further accentuated due to the lack of stability in the estimators. We offer suggestions for the future use of psychometric meta‐analysis and discuss the implications for research focused on refining psychometric meta‐analysis.

    Revisiting predictive bias of cognitive ability tests against Hispanic American job applicants
    Christopher M. Berry, Peng Zhao, Juan Carlos Batarse, Craig Reddock

    Previous studies have concluded that cognitive ability tests are not predictively biased against Hispanic American job applicants because test scores generally overpredict, rather than underpredict, their job performance. However, we highlight two important shortcomings of these past studies and use meta‐analytic and computation modeling techniques to address these two shortcomings. In Study 1, an updated meta‐analysis of the Hispanic–White mean difference (d‐value) on job performance was carried out. In Study 2, computation modeling was used to correct the Study 1 d‐values for indirect range restriction and combine them with other meta‐analytic parameters relevant to predictive bias to determine how often cognitive ability test scores underpredict Hispanic applicants' job performance. Hispanic applicants' job performance was underpredicted by a small to moderate amount in most conditions of the computation model. In contrast to previous studies, this suggests cognitive ability tests can be expected to exhibit predictive bias against Hispanic applicants much of the time. However, some conditions did not exhibit underprediction, highlighting that predictive bias depends on various selection system parameters, such as the criterion‐related validity of cognitive ability tests and other predictors used in selection. Regardless, our results challenge "lack of predictive bias" as a rationale for supporting test use.


    BOOK REVIEWS

    Autism works: A guide to successful employment across the entire autism spectrum
    (1st edition) Feinstein, Adam New York: Routledge, 2018.
    Bharati B. Belwalkar

    The Oxford handbook of organizational identity
    Pratt, Michael G., Schultz, Majken, Ashforth, Blake E., and Ravasi, Davide (Eds.), New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
    Matthew Grimes

    The dark side of the workplace: Managing incivility
    Roter, Annette B., New York: Routledge, 2019.
    Victoria Buenger

    The early years of industrial and organizational psychology
    Vinchur, Andrew J., New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
    Michael J. Zickar