News

Want to explore more stories and insights from our team?

Artificial intelligence (AI) stands at the forefront of the fourth industrial revolution, where organizations are strategically integrating it as a vital tool to address a diverse range of daily management and work-related challenges. Yet, despite the advantages of AI, employees frequently perceive AI as a double-edged sword with unintended consequences. Kyriaki Fousiani and colleagues investigated how work climate influences employee attitudes toward AI and actual AI use. They found that a competitive climate increases AI acceptance over time (i.e., positive attitude and use), but only when leaders use their power as a responsibility to serve their team rather than as an opportunity to promote their agenda. The results of this study underscore the organizational factors that are required in order for employees to shape favorable attitudes towards AI and actually use AI at work.

Despite the growing body of research on human–animal studies in various disciplines, attempts to systematically include animals in organization studies have been limited. In this article, Kandel, Dlouhy, and Schmitt build on organizational role theory and propose a typology of five roles of animals in human organizations (i.e., animals as commodities, clients, co-workers, companions, and acquaintances) as a framework for analyzing organizational human–animal relations.

We recently published two papers testing fundamental stress processes over time across multiple longitudinal samples. In the first study, we found that employees are more strongly affected by losses in work quality than gains which has relevant implications for how we think about interventions and job redesign. In the second study, we found that employees are resilient to short-term stress pile-up. Although we found consistent support for negative effects of high workload within one day, these effects did not pile up (i.e., accumulate) across days or the work week, lending further support to the importance of recovery experiences.

Psychological abuse by supervisors occurs when employees are subjected to verbal and non-verbal aggression over an extended period (Tepper, 2000). This includes behaviors such as outbursts of anger, ridiculing employees, invading their privacy, falsely blaming them, as well as manipulating, ignoring, and isolating them. International research shows a prevalence of destructive leadership of 13.6% (Schat et al., 2006). It may seem wise for an abused employee to leave as soon as possible or take other actions to end the psychological abuse. However, this is easier said than done due to various barriers that make it difficult, if not impossible, to leave.

Staying employable throughout the course of one’s career has become more important than ever. Whereas adaptability appears to be critical to employability, our understanding of the conditions under which employees’ work-related adaptive behaviour renders them employable in the eyes of their leaders is underdeveloped. We argue that leader-rated employability is contingent on the extent to which employee adaptive behaviours are compatible with leader behaviours that either facilitate or constrain adaptability. Results of a multi-source field study of Dutch leader-subordinate dyads (N = 292) indicate that exploration career role enactment is positively related to leader-rated employability. Moreover, we find support for our complementary fit hypotheses: employee enactment of exploration career roles is positively related to employability evaluations when leader behaviour complements rather than supplements employee exploratory behaviours.

This meta-analysis investigates the relationship between self-construal, conflict management strategies, and face concerns. Using meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM), the study analyzed data from two hundred fifty-four effect sizes based on thirty-three studies. The results showed that individuals with stronger independent self-construal and self-face concerns tend to use forcing, while those with stronger interdependent self-construal and other-face concerns are inclined towards problem-solving and yielding strategies. The study contributes to the understanding of face-negotiation theory and interpersonal conflict resolution.

In May 2023, the EU Cost Action has awarded 70 new Cost Actions, among them the Action LeverAge. Through this Action, Susanne Scheibe and her colleagues from 32 European and international partner countries will receive funding to build a network of work and aging scientists and practitioners to tackle the essential psychological and managerial aspects of the aging, age-diverse workforce – one of Europe’s greatest challenges of the 21th century. The Action will establish five Working Groups focusing on key topics, including work and organizational practices for an age-diverse workforce, successful aging at work, integration of age-diverse workers and knowledge transfer, aging and technology at work, and career development in later life and retirement. The network is open to all interested researchers, practitioners and policy partners who share an interest in the multi-age workforce.

Primary psychopathy in leaders, also referred to as successful psychopathy or corporate psychopathy, is a key determinant of corporate misconduct. In contrast to the general notion that primary psychopaths’ destructiveness cannot be controlled, we posit that psychopathic leaders’ display of self-serving and abusive behavior can be restrained by organizational contextual factors. Specifically, we argue that the positive relationship between leader primary psychopathy on the one hand and self-serving behavior and abusive supervision on the other will be weaker to the extent that the organizational context (clear rules and policies, sanctionability of misconduct, and transparency of behavior) is stronger. Three studies (one experiment, one survey of leader–subordinate dyads, and one survey of teams) showed that clear rules in particular weakened the positive association between leader primary psychopathic traits and their self-serving and abusive behavior.

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.

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.