News

Delivering bad news is one of the most challenging tasks for leaders. Recently, the popular press has been awash with examples reflecting poor bad news delivery, such as mass layoffs in the IT sector. While many disciplines have been interested in understanding the delivery of bad news, different emphases across disciplines have resulted in independent silos of research that impeded scholarly and practical advancements. In their interdisciplinary review, Claudia Kitz, Laurie Barclay, and Heiko Breitsohl review 685 articles and identified key challenges in the extant literature while they also provide a path forward by showcasing key opportunities. This is, conceptualizing bad news delivery as a dialectic process that unfolds over time can further enhance theoretical insights and practical guidance for effectively managing bad news delivery in the workplace.

On November 24, 2023, our group is organizing the WAOP conference together with colleagues from the HRM-OB department at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Groningen. This yearly conference of the Werkgemeenschap Arbeids- & Organisatie Psychologie brings together academics and practitioners in our field from the Netherlands and its neighboring countries. Join us for an interesting 1-day program of inspiring talks, research sessions, and science--practice cross-talk sessions in the Forum Groningen. More information is available on the conference website. WAOP: https://waop.nl/

The ubiquity of face masks throughout the Covid-19 pandemic has led to questions about their psychological side effects. As face masks cover large parts of a person’s face, many concerns are focused on their potential consequences for emotion perception. Susanne Scheibe, together with her colleagues Felix Grundmann, Bart Kranenborg, and Kai Epstude, recently demonstrated that such concerns may be unwarranted. The authors found no evidence that face masks negatively impact people’s empathy motives (affiliation, cognitive effort) or cognitive (empathic accuracy) and emotional (emotional congruence, sympathy) empathy for dynamic, context-rich stimuli. At the same time, they found support for the idea that empathic processes are motivated.

You can browse previous publications here.

Her research investigates the effects of conspiracy thinking on psychological contract breach and in turn on prosocial and antisocial work behavior of employees.

The Netherlands has a high percentage of part-time workers compared to other countries, creating personnel shortages in many crucial sectors (e.g. schools, health care). How can we motivate people to work more hours, and is a full-time bonus effective in this regard? Susanne Scheibe was interviewed on these questions by the BNR Nieuwsradio in November 2022.

Real-life examples underscore the primacy effect of candidate competence over warmth in hiring decisions in organizations. For instance, most job interviews focus on the candidate's capabilities and intellectual skills while less effort is put into extracting information about the candidate's social skills. In a recently published paper in Personality and Individual Differences, Kyriaki Fousiani and her colleagues found that teleworking creates conditions that further undermine the importance of workers' social skills, which are inherent to people's wellbeing and organizational progress.

Eric Rietzschel has written a piece for Mindwise, the blog of the Psychology Department at the University of Groningen, about a question that sometimes gets neglected in creativity research: what is an idea?

Individuals differ in their assumptions about the malleability of professional skills and abilities. Some individuals believe that such skills and abilities are flexible and can be developed at any age (i.e., indicative of a growth mindset), while others might think that professional skills and abilities are fixed and difficult to change (i.e., indicative of a fixed mindset). Across four studies, Antje Schmitt and Susanne Scheibe developed and validated a scale to measure individuals’ professional skills and abilities growth and fixed mindsets. The scale showed good psychometric properties. The authors found initial evidence for its relationships with employee career resources (i.e., career adaptability) and management behaviors (i.e., learning and career engagement). The parsimonious 6-item scale can be applied in future research on career management and used by practitioners, such as career counselors and coaches.

Sjoukje van Dellen, together with Barbara Wisse en Mark Mobach explored the effects of lactation room quality on working mothers’ feelings and thoughts related to breastfeeding and work in two experimental studies. In a randomized controlled trial and a field experiment, the authors found that lactation room quality influences mothers’ stress, thoughts about milk expression at work, perceived organizational support, and subjective well-being. It is concluded that not only the availability, but also the quality of lactation rooms is important in facilitating the combination of breastfeeding and work.

A growing body of research has underscored the primacy effect of morality over competence in person perception. Morality informs people about whether or not a target is a threat and it is more diagnostic of behavioral intentions (Leach et al., 2007; Brambilla et al., 2012, 2013; see also Fousiani and van Prooijen, 2019). In their research, Fousiani, Van Prooijen, and Armenta do not dispute that this moral primacy effect is likely to occur in most situations, however, they inform about the boundary conditions of this effect. The present research sought to clarify that the primacy effect of morality (or competence) in social judgment largely depends on an observer’s goals. Apparently, when organizations have goals that require high competence among employees (e.g., profit maximization), people may prioritize a candidate’s competence over morality in the recruitment process.

The literature regarding the effect of power on negotiation strategies remains scattered and inconsistent. In their study, Fousiani, de Jonge, and Michelakis found that the effect of power on negotiation strategies is contingent on contextual variables but also on individual differences among negotiators. Specifically, the authors found that creativity moderates the effect of power such that low-power, as compared to high-power negotiators, use more collaborative and less competitive strategies and further report lower fixed-pie perception (i.e. perception of a counterpart’s goals and interests as diametrically opposite to one’s own goals and interests) when they can be creative. Moreover, the authors showed that negotiators’ age buffers the moderated effect of power.

Eric Rietzschel has written a piece for Mindwise, the blog of the Psychology Department at the University of Groningen. The blog is about the surprising link between camping, affordances, and creativity.

Dieudonnee Cobben, together with Petra Neesen, Diana Rus and Nadine Roijakkers explored how family firms, acting as ecosystem orchestrators, mitigate perceived relational and performance risk via the use of governance mechanisms. Relying on data from a Belgian family firm that initiated an ecosystem in the healthcare sector, the authors find that family-firms use formal and informal governance mechanisms in a complementary fashion to deal with relational and performance risk.

Sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) is a multidimensional personality trait characterized by high emotional reactivity and overarousal, deep information processing, and openness to environmental subtleties. It is based on the view that individuals differ in their susceptibility to and processing of stimuli, regardless of whether the stimuli are positive or negative. Across two studies, Antje Schmitt investigated relationships between the multiple SPS dimensions and employees‘ proactive work behaviors. She also investigated how the established relationship between perceived job complexity and proactive work behavior differs depending on employees‘ SPS.

In this article, the authors (Sebastian Seibel, Judith Volmer, and Antje Schmitt) investigated across two studies if the pleasant anticipation of a positive after-work free-time activity affects employees’ engagement while being still at work. It was found that daily pleasant anticipation of a positive after-work free-time activity was unrelated to daily work engagement, thus, higher pleasant anticipation on one day did not help employees be more engaged in their work on that day. However, employees with a generally higher level of pleasant anticipation of an after-work free-time activity experienced generally higher work engagement than those with lower pleasant anticipation.

Felix Grundmann, together with Rachel Smallman and Kai Epstude, explored how grandiose narcissists think about what could have been. Across four studies, a complex pattern emerged, highlighting the importance of considering the dimensions of grandiose narcissism as well as contextual factors when investigating counterfactual thoughts.

Elissa El Khawli, together with Anita Keller and Susanne Scheibe, have published a new research article coming out of Elissa's PhD project. In two studies, the research team investigated job profiles and well-being. They identified three job profiles: some people have jobs that are motivating (most favorable), others work in jobs that we termed moderately stimulating, and others work in socially taxing jobs (least favorable). In two studies the team discovered that older employees more often have favorable jobs and also respond to these jobs more positively than younger employees. Younger employees, in turn, are more likely to have unfavorable jobs but they are also more tolerant of such jobs.

The Dutch Research Council has recently approved funding for a 10-year, 6-site graviation project "Stress-in-Action: Advancing the Science of Stress by Moving the Lab to Daily Life". In this project, researchers from six universities or medical centers in the Netherland - including the University of Groningen Psychology Department and the UMCG Public Health Department - will study the intricacies of stress in daily life, its sources, its long-term health consequences, and the possibility to generate personalized stress profiles and interventions. The Groningen organizational psychology team (Susanne Scheibe and colleagues) will contribute together with a team of PhD and postdocoral researchers to improve stress theory and study the work context as source and playground for daily-life stress.

In three studies, Kyriaki Fousiani and Jan-Willem van Prooijen examined observers' punitive motives toward offenders with high versus low power. They found that powerful offenders trigger stronger utilitarian (but also retributive) motives for punishment whereas powerless, as opposed to powerful offenders, trigger stronger restorative punishing motives. Moreover, observers are more likely to view powerful (as opposed to powerless) offenders as evil and demonize them. Interestingly demonization is an underlying mechanism explaining the effect of power of an offender on people’s punishing motives. The authors conclude that offender’s power position shapes observer’s motives to punish them.

For an interdisciplinary project on ‘Balancing Additive and Subtractive Innovation’, Diana Rus, Eric Rietzschel, and Bernard Nijstad (Faculty of Business and Economics) are looking for a talented PhD student.

According to the “intuitive retributivism hypothesis” people have the tendency to punish immoral-doers with the aim to make them pay for what they did (retributive punishment) rather than to deter them from offending in the future (utilitarian punishment) or enable them to integrate into society (restorative punishment). In this study, Kyriaki Fousiani and Jan-Willem Van Prooijen find support for the intuitive retributivism hypothesis and further show that power of a suspect of immoral-doing prompts an observer to assign stronger utilitarian rather than retributive or restorative punishments. These results reveal that observers’ motives for punishing high power suspects are grounded on a perception of the powerful as corrupt individuals who are susceptible to break the rules and thus deserve to be constrained rather than punished with the default pattern of retribution.

Research on creativity and innovation commonly studies the way people generate, evaluate, select, or implement ideas. But what are ideas in the first place? Surprisingly, this question is rarely addressed in the research literature. In an interdisciplinary review for Academy of Management Annals, Mel Hua, Sarah Harvey, and Eric Rietzschel develop a ‘wave-particle duality’ model of the way ideas are conceptualized and operationalized in the research literature, and discuss how this model could move research and practice forward.

Kyriaki Fousiani and Jan-Willem Van Prooijen investigated how people's cultural values influence how people react to financial offenders. The researchers conceived individualism-collectivism not as a bipolar dimension but as a multidimensional variable that, when combined with power distance (high or low power distance) can paint a clearer picture of culture’s effects on people’s punishing reactions to financial offenders. Importantly they distinguished between active versus passive responses to crime, and instrumental versus symbolic types of harm. By showing that both of these distinctions matter, the studies presented in this paper underscore some of the subtle complexities that need to be appreciated for a full understanding of how culture shapes individuals’ responses to white-collar criminals.

How leaders construe their power may greatly affect the quality of relationships they have with their followers. Kyriaki Fousiani and Barbara Wisse found that power, when construed by the leader as responsibility can have beneficial effects on the leader-follower relationship quality. However, this effect is stronger particularly in work climates that are perceived as highly competitive.

Status can be seen as power over valued resources or as prestige that lies in the eyes of the beholder. Kyriaki Fousiani and Jan-Willem Van Prooijen examined how status as power versus prestige influence observers’ punishing motives. They found that people have different motives to punish powerful versus prestigious offenders. More specifically, people are more likely to indicate instrumental decision-making when faced with offenders who have access to resources, by seeking to incapacitate them. This is the case especially when offenders are ingroup rather than outgroup members.

Older workers can handle involuntary telework in lockdown periods better than younger workers. This is the core finding from a large-scale survey among Dutch university employees, conducted by Susanne Scheibe together with RUG colleagues Ton Modderman and Jessica De Bloom. This age advantage can be linked to better job resources (job security from having a permanent contract, better equipment in the homeoffice) and older workers' better self-regulation (maintaining work-life-balance and seeing positives, for example framing the pandemic as time for reflection and learning).

Eric Rietzschel, Diana Rus and Barbara Wisse have contributed a chapter to the Handbook of Research on Creativity and Innovation. In their chapter, entitled "Leading groups and teams towards successful innovation”, they review the available research on leadership and team creativity, and outline important future research directions.

End of October 2021, Susanne Scheibe and her colleague Dorien Kooij from Tilburg University hosted the Age in the Workplace Meeting. Despite the ongoing pandemic, this bi-annual meeting of international researchers interested in age, work, and retirement related topics drew more than 40 participants from 11 countries who shared the latest research findings on topics such as HR practices for an age-diverse workforce, effects of Covid-19 and ICT at work in the age-diverse workforce, self-regulation at work across the lifespan, integration of age-diverse workers and knowledge transfer, and career development in later life and retirement. The meeting theme was "A strength-based approach on getting older: Unique contributions of older workers".