CEO Intellectual Stimulation and Employee Work Meaningfulness

Abstract

This study examines the influence of CEOs’ intellectually stimulating behavior, namely, encouraging followers to bring up new perspectives and innovative approaches at work, on employees’ perceptions of the meaningfulness of their work. Drawing from a collective sensemaking lens, we predicted that such CEO behavior would have a greater impact on experienced meaningfulness of work in contexts in which inputs to attributing meaning are less certain and clear-cut. Specifically, we examined the moderating roles of firm performance and industry dynamism. We surveyed the CEOs and employees from 43 firms in innovation-driven industries. Our results show lower firm performance or rapid and unpredictable changes in the industry are associated with a stronger positive relationship between CEO intellectual stimulation and employee work meaningfulness. We discuss the implications of our findings for organizational leadership practices.

Keywords

work meaningfulness CEO leadership intellectual stimulation organizational context

According to a recent global workplace report by Gallup, more than 80% of workers in the United States were unhappy with and little engaged in their work (Gallup, 2013), and the number of “actively disengaged” employees was nearly twice the number of “engaged workers.” People often become disenchanted with their jobs and employers when they perceived their work does not provide a fulfilling sense of purpose (Kompier, 2005). Scholars have suggested that people seek for a deeper sense of purpose and greater intrinsic values in their work lives, and this recognition has encouraged greater attention among management scholars and psychologists to employees perceptions of the meaningfulness of their work (Barrick, Mount, & Li, 2013; Pratt & Ashforth, 2003; Rodell, 2013; Rosso, Dekas, & Wrzesniewski, 2010). The trend toward employees’ more openly and assertively seeking meaningfulness has also been recognized as having implications for organizational practices (Cartwright & Holmes, 2006; Chalofsky & Krishna, 2009).

Research to date has focused on how individuals’ own values and beliefs and, separately, the characteristics of the job influence individuals’ perceptions of work meaningfulness (see Rosso et al., 2010, for a review). The Job Characteristics Model (JCM; Hackman & Oldham, 1976) and the literature testing this model, for example, have established that core features of the job determine the level of work meaningfulness. Scholars have more recently highlighted how one’s interactions with others at work (e.g., coworkers or leaders) may contribute to an individual’s making sense of the purpose and value of their work (Pratt & Ashforth, 2003; Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001; Wrzesniewski, Dutton, & Debebe, 2003). Yet, as noted by Rosso et al. (2010), “there remains little empirical scholarship on the topic” (p. 102; see the exceptions by Arnold, Turner, Barling, Kelloway, & McKee, 2007; Nielsen, Randall, Yarker, & Brenner, 2008). This is surprising considering how top leaders are perceived as transformational based on their ability to convey important meaning to their workforces, in the sense of connecting their individual work roles to broader organizational aims and societal purposes (Bass, 1985; Burns, 1978). In this article, we draw on the literature associated with collective sensemaking (Weick, 1995; Zohar & Hofmann, 2012) and research concerning the role of social interactions in creating meaning at work (Wrzesniewski et al., 2003) to formulate a lens for understanding how organizational members may respond to CEO leadership in ways that impact their perceptions of work meaningfulness. Our findings thus offer insights into how higher level management may affect micro-level employee outcomes, a topic that has been rarely examined empirically.

Our study also addresses calls for more scholarly attention to organizational contexts in leadership research (e.g., Porter & McLaughlin, 2006). We investigate how firm performance and industry dynamism shape the relationship between CEO intellectual stimulation and employees’ perceptions of work meaningfulness. We argue that poor firm performance and high levels of industry dynamism each heighten the salience and relevance of CEO intellectual stimulation in the collective sensemaking processes through which employees enact personal meanings from their work.

Moreover, much research on the topic of strategic human resource management has emphasized the importance of a motivated workforce to achieving organizational objectives (Huselid, 1995; Whitener, 2001; Wright & McMahan, 1992). The idea that strategic leaders stimulate frontline employees through their words and actions to be more innovative has much currency in popular thinking. However, given the lack of published studies on how CEO behavior may be related to the motivation of individual employees across the organization, this conventional wisdom about how strategic leaders influence their workforce appears not to be taken seriously by management scholars. We therefore sought to take an initial step toward testing a popularly held notion that has been neglected by researchers and to identify boundaries of this relationship.

To summarize, we propose and test a model in which CEO intellectual stimulation and organizational contexts interact in affecting employee perceptions of meaningfulness at work (see Figure 1). We surveyed CEOs and their employees from small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that focused on technology and product innovations. A SME typically refers to companies that employ 20 to 500 workers (Lubatkin, Simsek, Ling, & Veiga, 2006). Because employees in these companies must continually adapt to changing technologies and/or contribute to innovations themselves, intellectual stimulation conveyed by organizational leaders may have direct relevance to how employees enact meaning from their work.

Figure 1.

Theoretical model.

Literature Review and Hypotheses Development

CEO Intellectual Stimulation and Meaningfulness at Work

Research on meaningful work has spanned multiple disciplines, and as a result there are various conceptualizations of work meaningfulness (see reviews by Lips-Wiersma & Wright, 2012; Rosso et al., 2010). Much of the early attention to work meaningfulness was associated with the JCM, wherein experienced meaningfulness of work was postulated to be a core psychological state that mediated the influence of certain job characteristics (i.e., skill variety, task identity, and task significance) on employee job satisfaction and other outcomes. Within the JCM, meaningfulness of work was defined as “the degree to which the individual experiences the job as one which is generally meaningful, valuable, and worthwhile” (Hackman & Oldham, 1976, p. 256). Lips-Wiersma and Wright (2012) offered a definition that conveys the common elements of most contemporary formulations of work meaningfulness, stating that it refers to “an individual subjective experience of existential significance or purpose of work” (p. 657). Individuals experience meaningfulness when they view their work roles and activities as having a positive impact on their own life and/or the life of others (Pratt & Ashforth, 2003; Rosso et al., 2010).

Scholars have theorized that social contexts contribute to how individuals attribute meaning to their work (Pratt & Ashforth, 2003; Wrzesniewski et al., 2003). Through interacting with others and/or observing their behaviors, an individual obtains social cues that inform the purpose and value of his or her work. Transformational leadership behaviors, for example, have been found to be positively associated with the direct reports’ perceptions of meaningfulness at work (Arnold et al., 2007; Nielsen et al., 2008). Other studies have offered suggestive evidence that leader behaviors influence variables that are associated with work meaningfulness, such as intrinsic motivation and perceived autonomy at work (e.g., Amabile & Kramer, 2012; Piccolo & Colquitt, 2006; Piccolo, Greenbaum, Hartog, & Folger, 2010).

Building on existing research that has focused on the behaviors of the lower level leaders, we examine whether intellectual stimulating behaviors of CEOs affect employees’ perceptions of work meaningfulness. Intellectual stimulation is one of the four dimensions of transformational leadership (Bass, 1985), focusing on leader behaviors that stimulate followers’ intellectual curiosity, encourage reexamining and challenging old assumptions, and rewarding critical thinking and innovative approaches (Bass & Riggio, 2006). Leaders who exhibit intellectual stimulating behaviors thus motivate their followers to explore new ways to approach their jobs. Compared with other transformational leadership dimensions (i.e., idealized influence, inspirational motivation, and individualized consideration), intellectual stimulation is more task-focused as it is directed toward changing how employees think about their work activities and roles.

To understand the influence of CEO intellectual stimulation, it is useful to think of it through the same lens as contemporary theories of climate constructs. These theories propose that members’ understandings about their work derive from ongoing sensemaking processes (see Ostroff, Kinicki, & Tamkins, 2003; Schaubroeck et al., 2012). These processes derive in part by the top-down efforts of leaders to transmit their intentions through their direct communications, the practices they seek to routinize, and the policies they create. Zohar and Hofmann (2012) referred to these cultural transmission processes as espousals. Bottom-up and lateral processes through which members engage in sensemaking by interacting with others in the organization further support the transmission of work-related understandings. These constitute employee enactment processes. Enactment and espousal processes both promote consensus in understandings among employees that serve as a filter through which individual members perceive their own work. In this way, even employees who have little firsthand information about their CEO’s behavior may develop similar beliefs about his or her intellectual stimulation behavior.

Lord and Shondrick (2011) suggested that when individuals’ beliefs and behaviors derive from common sources, and there is a high agreement among them, they have more potential cognitive pathways to activate personal meanings. Conversely, if an individual develops her own beliefs about CEO intellectual stimulation and these differ from those of other members, this may have a weaker impact on her perceptions of her work because others do not continually reinforce her beliefs. Hence, CEO intellectual stimulation may function in much the same manner as is theorized for climate constructs that can influence individuals’ perceptions, and like climate constructs, it may be formulated as a composition construct (Kozlowski & Klein, 2000) and operationalized by aggregating to the mean of the perceptions of multiple members.

Organizational leaders who are seen intellectual stimulating often use language tools such as metaphors and stories (Fairhurst & Starr, 1996) to frame the way organizational members think of the purposes of their work. Employees, for example, may be encouraged to reflect on how their tasks contribute to a bigger organizational cause and/or benefit humankind. In theory, when the espousals and/or actions of chief executives encourage members to consider how their own actions contribute to important organizational outcomes such as product innovation, this creates meaning for these members (Cleavenger & Munyon, 2013). Leaders who are seen intellectually stimulating also seek to encourage employees to reflect on how they do their work and to think of new approaches that may help them perform it more effectively. Through exploring different approaches and practices, employees may perceive meaning by discovering new elements and challenges in their work and recognizing that they are able to apply a broader range of skills and knowledge to fulfill their work role. Moreover, CEOs who encourage unconventional thinking and innovation are likely to involve employees in collective decision making and delegate them authority to confront emerging challenges (Avolio, Zhu, Koh, & Bhatia, 2004; Kark, Shamir, & Chen, 2003). This creates a sense of empowerment that often motivates employees to bring up innovative ideas and practice them in their organizations (Burpitt & Bigoness, 1997; Damanpour, 1991). Such processes, in turn, promote a deeper feeling of purpose about one’s work.

Organizational leaders may also facilitate their employees’ perceptions of work meaningfulness by instilling a strong collective identity through personal charisma (i.e., idealized influence) and by articulating an appealing collective vision (i.e., inspirational motivation). However, the mechanism linking CEO intellectual stimulation to employee work meaningfulness is distinct. Specifically, idealized influence and inspirational motivation create a sense of purpose primarily by aligning employees’ personal values and goals with those of the collective. This often involves appealing the employees at the emotional level. In contrast, CEO intellectual stimulating behaviors affect employees’ perceptions of work meaningfulness primarily through a cognitive lens in which the employee explores and recognizes new elements of their work and their relationship to it.

Based on these theoretical processes associated with leaders’ intellectual stimulation, we predict that CEO intellectual stimulation as understood by organizational members will be positively associated with employees’ perceived meaningfulness at work. We therefore form our first hypothesis as follows:

Hypothesis 1: CEO intellectual stimulation is positively associated with employee perceived work meaningfulness.

Moderating Effect of Organizational Context

As we have argued in the previous section, when viewed from the perception of organizational members, most of whom have little direct knowledge of his or her behavior, the CEO’s intellectual stimulation forms and functions in a manner similar to climate constructs in that shared perceptions of such behavior derive from collective sensemaking processes. This perspective highlights the crucial role of other employees in how individuals come to view the meaningfulness of their own work (Wrzesniewski et al., 2003). Drawing further from this guiding theoretical framework, we argue in this section that the influence of CEO intellectual stimulation depends on the organizational contexts that make such beliefs about the CEO more or less salient and relevant to the members. In this study, we examine two specific organizational contexts: firm performance and industry dynamism.

Firm performance

Whereas organization performance has typically been examined as a consequence of CEO leadership (e.g., Ling, Simsek, Lubatkin, & Veiga, 2008; Waldman, Ramirez, House, & Puranam, 2001), it is also important to consider how the existing performance level of a company serves as a context that constrains or enhances the influence of organizational leadership. When the organization is not performing well, this often indicates an overall unfavorable environment for employees, as they tend to be concerned about not only the company but also their personal security and welfare within it (Cameron, Sutton, & Whetten, 1988; Weitzel & Jonsson, 1989). Perceived insecurity and uncertainties cause employees to look for informational cues, such as the assurance of their organizational leaders about their future prospects in the organization. Employees in currently poor performing organizations may be most receptive to CEO behaviors that support and encourage adaptive organizational responses, such as behaviors that stimulate employees to reflect on ways they can more effectively innovate in their own spheres or change their behaviors in ways that support organizational innovation.

In addition, the poor performance of the organization may itself serve as an impetus for collective enactment processes among employees because it serves as a salient signal that the organization is not effectively achieving its mission. This is a concern to employees and the dissonance it creates promotes a desire to come to an understanding of cause–effect relationships, including those that have contributed to the low performance and others that may contribute to improving performance. The enactment processes among employees are particularly intense when there is ambiguity concerning cause–effect relationships (Weick, 1995). Poor firm performance is normally a departure from the routine and can normally be attributed to a wide range of variables. Thus, considering the stakes involved for employees, intense collective sensemaking processes may be activated by poor firm performance. These processes will include appraisals of the behavior of the chief executive, such as CEO intellectual stimulation, and such assessments will be particularly salient for employees in how they view their work. Employees’ collectively perception that a CEO exhibits a high level of intellectual stimulation is therefore likely to be based on attributions concerning how organizational performance may be improved and how their own work is linked to such improvements.

In contrast, a high level of firm performance creates neither dissonance nor ambiguity of interpretation. Any plausible explanation for good performance may be acceptable to employees. They are little motivated to assess the current circumstance and to evaluate how their own work may relate to change in the circumstance. Thus, when the organization is performing well, CEO’s behavior is less likely to be an accessible factor that influences employees’ evaluation of their work. Our arguments above lead us to predict that CEO intellectual stimulation has a stronger positive influence on employees’ work meaningfulness when firm performance is lower.

Hypothesis 2: Firm performance moderates the relationship between CEO intellectual stimulation and employee work meaningfulness, such that the relationship is more positive among firms that exhibit lower performance.

Industry dynamism

A dynamic industry is characterized by unpredictable and rapid change. This may derive from various factors, but frequent innovation in technology and products is seen to be most common (Burns & Stalker, 1961; Thompson, 1967). Research has focused on how a dynamic environment influences the strategic choices made by the top management team (e.g., Bourgeois & Eisenhardt, 1988; Miller, 1988). Yet, a dynamic industrial environment may also influence employees at lower organizational levels. Frontline workers and middle managers are often involved in identifying and anticipating changes in the industry environment and providing information that aids the decision making of the top management (Thompson, 1967). Technology innovations also require the organization to update its systems, which ultimately change how employees do their work. Even in the absence of technological change, industry dynamism associated with competition often requires organizations to reevaluate their product and service offerings in ways that change employees’ job content.

Because employees in dynamic organizational environments face more contingencies and ambiguities than those in stable environments, they are more prone to activating enactment processes (Weick, 1995). Scholars have long recognized that unpredictable change and the uncertainties it creates for employees encourage them to look to leadership as a buffer against the uncertainties and as a source of reassurance (Dess & Beard, 1984; Milliken, 1987). CEOs who are seen as intellectually stimulating encourage employees to think about how their work relates to how the organization seeks to navigate in a dynamic environment. When employees recognize that top management is promoting means for employees to thrive in the context of change, collective sensemaking processes tend to be oriented toward embracing change rather than resisting it (DeCelles, Tesluk, & Taxman, 2013). They are likely to frame the frequent changes that are associated with a dynamic environment as opportunities for them to grow and contribute greater value to the organization’s success. Through intense collective sensemaking, individual employees thus are able to interpret how changes relate to their own work and to identify means of framing their work that are meaningful for themselves. On this basis, we predict that industry dynamism enhances the positive influence of CEO intellectual stimulation on employee work meaningfulness.

Hypothesis 3: Industry dynamism moderates the relationship between CEO intellectual stimulation and employee work meaningfulness, such that the relationship is more positive when the industry is more dynamic.

Method

Participants and Procedure

We contacted 174 CEOs from the SMEs based in a northern region of China who had agreed on participating in a separate and unrelated research project led by one of the authors. After being informed of the purpose and procedures of this study, CEOs from 43 firms volunteered to participate in the study. The response rate of 24.7% is not high, but it is compatible to those reported in similar studies in which CEOs are surveyed; Agle, Nagarajan, Sonnenfeld, and Srinivasan (2006) reported a response rate of 26% and Ling et al. (2008) had a response rate of 24%. With the permission from the CEO and the assistance of the human resource department, the researchers obtained informed consent from five to six additional employees in each company. These employees included one senior manager, one or two frontline managers, and several other employees. We attempted to sample individuals across different managerial levels within each company to represent its members’ overall perceptions.

Two researchers administered the surveys at each site using a paper–pencil format. The researchers made a short appointment with each organization before their visit to accommodate the schedules of the participants. The CEOs completed a short survey in which they provided basic information about themselves and the companies. They also rated the performances of their companies (i.e., firm performance). During their work breaks, the employee participants completed a different survey in which they reported on CEO intellectual stimulation behaviors, their perceptions of work meaningfulness, and the degree of rapid change in their industries.

The 43 companies represented a variety of industries; 45.9% were in the electronics industry, 24.5% chemical and pharmaceutical, 18.9% machinery, and the remaining were from other industries, including the automobile, transportation, and informational technology industries. All of these companies were privately owned and technology-based SMEs, based on the governmental categorization system. Except for 1 firm with 597 employees, the sizes of these SMEs ranged from 20 to 480, with a median of 61. In fact, 39 (i.e., 90.7%) out of the 43 firms had 200 or fewer employees. These SMEs had been in operation for a range of 3 to 46 years. The majority of the CEOs (79%) were male and their average age was 46.3 years (SD = 8.3). All had a community college degree or above, 49% had a university degree, and 37% had a master or PhD degree. The average organizational tenure of the CEOs was 8 years. We obtained six employee responses from 1 company and five responses from all the remaining companies. The overall sample was thus comprised of 216 employees and 43 CEOs. The average organizational tenure of the employee participants was 3.4 years (SD = 2.9). Among these employees, 22% of them hold a senior managerial position and 20% were R&D personnel.

The survey items were translated from English to Chinese by one of the researchers. Following conventional back-translation procedures (Brislin, Lonner, & Thorndike, 1973), one bilingual person who was blind to the research questions translated the Chinese items back to English. Any inconsistencies between the original items and those back-translated items were discussed and resolved.

Measurements

CEO intellectual stimulation was measured using three items from the intellectual stimulation scale developed by Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Moorman, and Fetter (1990) and one item from Garcia-Morales, Matias-Reche, and Hurtado-Torres (2008). These items include the following: [The CEO of our firm] “has stimulated me to rethink the way I do things,” “has ideas that have challenged me to reexamine some of basic assumptions about my work,” “challenges me to think about old problems in new ways,” and “expresses appreciation when I think creatively.” The last item was from Garcia-Morales et al.’s study and it refers to the positive reinforcement that the leader uses to promote creativity. Employees from each company rated their CEOs on a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 7 (almost always). The alpha reliability for this scale was .85. Because CEO intellectual stimulation was conceptualized at the organizational level as the members’ shared understanding but was assessed by members’ reports on their own perceptions, our decision to aggregate members’ reports to organization level follows the direct consensus composition model (Chan, 1998). We thus used the mean of the employees’ ratings within the same company to index the organizational level CEO intellectual stimulation. The interrater agreement (r_wg(j)) was examined before the aggregation (James, Demaree, & Wolf, 1984). With a mean r_wg(j) value of .71 (median r_wg(j) = .83) across the 43 companies, the results supported the decision to aggregate this variable. The interclass correlation values, ICC(1) = .20, ICC(2) = .55, also suggest that a significant amount (20%) of the variation in CEO intellectual stimulation was explained by organizational membership, further supporting the decision to use the aggregate measure.

Work meaningfulness was reported by the company employees. We used a three-item subscale of the psychological empowerment instrument developed by Spreitzer (1995). The items include “The work I do is very important to me,” “The work I do is meaningful to me,” and “My job activities are personally meaningful to me.” This scale had a reliability of .83.

Firm performance

As with other studies of firm performance for which reliable public information about firm performance was not available (e.g., Isobe, Makino, & Montgomery, 2000; Krishnan, Martin, & Noorderhaven, 2006), CEOs were asked to evaluate how their companies performed during the past year, as compared with the average industry performance. We developed this six-item scale based on items used in prior research (Baer & Frese, 2003; Wall et al., 2004). CEOs rated each aspect of their companies following the instruction: Compared to average companies in this industry, [performance dimension] of my company over the past 12 months was . . . They indicated their opinions on a Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (much lower than average) to 7 (much higher than average). These six company dimensions include “profit growth,” “sales growth,” “operational efficiency,” “operational profit,” “market share growth,” and “reputation.” This scale had an alpha reliability of .89.

Industry dynamism was rated by the employee participants, using four items adapted from the measures of technological and market turbulence developed by Moorman and Miner (1997). This measure captures the features of rapid changes and constant technology and product innovations. The items are as follows: “In our industry, professional technology changes very fast”; “In our industry, market demand changes very fast”; “In our industry, competitors are always coming up with new ways to compete”; and “Our company has to innovate continuously in order to remain competitive.” Employees from each company rated the levels of the dynamism in their industry environment on a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). This scale has an alpha reliability of .79. As with CEO intellectual stimulation, we followed the direct consensus composition model to compute a firm-level variable of industry dynamism. We examined the levels of agreement among the organizational members (M r_wg(j) = .73, median r_wg(j) = .84) and the portion of between-firm variance, ICC(1) = .13, ICC(2) = .43. Results showed adequate consensus on reports of industry dynamism among the raters, and therefore we averaged the organizational members’ reports on this measure to form an index of industry dynamism.

Control variables

We controlled for employee organizational tenure and senior managerial position in all the analyses. Because employees who do not perceive an alignment between their own values and those honored by the organization tend to leave, those with longer tenure may perceive a higher fit with the organizational values and missions and experience more meaningfulness at work. Being in a senior managerial position is often associated with a greater range of job resources and challenges, which may be related to the levels of work meaningfulness (Clausen & Borg, 2010). Results showed that these two demographic variables were significantly related to work meaningfulness reported by the participants. We did not control for other demographic variables including firm size, firm age, CEO tenure, CEO age, CEO gender, and CEO education level because none of them correlated with the dependent variable of work meaningfulness. Supplementary analyses also showed that the results from testing the hypotheses were not affected by controlling for these variables.

Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA)

We conducted CFAs on the measures that were rated by the organizational members, including CEO intellectual stimulation (four items), work meaningfulness (three items), and industry dynamism (four items). Due to the nested structure of our data, we specified a two-level three-factor CFA model in MPLUS 7.2, representing both the organization level and the individual level variance among the items representing each construct. In this three-factor model, all items loaded on their corresponding latent factors and the three factors were also correlated. In addition, the same measurement model was estimated simultaneously at the within-organization level and the between-organization level based on covariance matrices computed at each level. This two-level three-factor model fits the data reasonably well, χ²(82) = 161.29, p < .01, comparative fit index (CFI) = .92; root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = .07. Results thus support the hypothesized measurement structure.

Results

Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics of and zero-order correlations between the study variables. Notably, CEO intellectual stimulation is significantly correlated with work meaningfulness (r = .25, p < .01).

Table 1.

Means, Standard Deviations, and Correlations Among the Study Variables (n = 216).

	M	SD	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12
1. Firm size^a	107.99	119.54
2. Firm age^a	9.94	7.96	.30**
3. CEO tenure^a	7.97	5.06	.35**	.67**
4. CEO age^a	46.40	8.15	.19**	.21**	.34**
5. CEO education^a	3.33	.84	.23**	.25**	.16*	−.11
6. CEO gender^b	1.79	.41	.17*	.23**	.31**	.05	.14*
7. Employee tenure	3.36	2.92	−.01	.12	.19**	.13*	.02	−.02
8. Senior manager^c	.22	.41	−.03	−.01	−.02	−.04	−.01	.00	.66**
9. R&D personnel^d	.20	.40	.10	.19**	.10	−.06	.16*	.01	−.18*	−.27**
10. CEO intellectual stimulation^a	5.64	.48	.01	.08	.17*	−.10	.01	.06	−.03	−.04	.04
11. Firm performance^a	5.68	.64	.13	.00	.11	−.15*	.18*	−.10	.07	.01	−.02	−.05
12. Industry dynamism^a	5.70	.39	−.08	.22**	.24**	−.12	.17*	−.06	−.02	−.02	.08	.59**	−.09
13. Work meaningfulness	5.89	.92	.05	.00	.00	−.01	.06	.05	.19**	.27**	−.07	.25**	.09	.18**

Individuals within each firm (43 firms in total) were assigned the same value on this variable to compute the correlations.

CEO gender: 1 = female, and 2 = male.

Senior manager: 1 = holding a senior managerial position, and 0 = otherwise.

R&D personnel: 1 = being involved in R&D activities, and 0 = otherwise.

p < .05. **p < .01.

We tested the hypotheses using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM 6; Raudenbush, Bryk, Cheong, Congdon, & du Toit, 2004) because individual employee responses, which were not aggregated, were nested within companies. The first step is to examine the levels of within- and between-company variance for the dependent variables by computing ICC indexes. Work meaningfulness has an ICC(1) of .12 and ICC(2) = .39. Given that the dependent variables demonstrate a significant amount of variance both between companies and among individuals within the same company, HLM is more appropriate than ordinary least squares (OLS) regression because it considers the nonindependence of the error terms in estimation.

We tested the hypotheses using random effects models in which all the Level 1 effects (i.e., between individuals) were allowed to vary at Level 2 (i.e., between companies). In all of the two-level models, employee job position (i.e., senior manager or not) and organizational tenure were grand mean centered at Level 1, and all the other independent variables (i.e., CEO intellectual stimulation, firm performance, industry dynamism, and the two interaction terms) were entered at Level 2. We also computed the pseudo-R² for each model. This index approximates the amount of variance explained by the variables in a multilevel model (Singer, 1998). Table 2 summarizes the HLM results.

Table 2.

HLM Results Testing the Main and Interactive Effects in Predicting Employee Work Meaningfulness.

	Model 1		Model 2		Model 3		Model 4
	γ	SE	γ	SE	γ	SE	γ	SE
Variables
Intercept	5.91**	.07	5.91**	.06	5.91**	.06	5.92**	.06
Level 1
Employee tenure	.04*	.02	.03	.02	.04	.02	.03	.02
Senior manager	.45**	.13	.46**	.13	.45**	.13	.46**	.13
Level 2
CEO IS	.35*	.16	.38*	.15	.19	.19	.23	.17
FP			.08	.08			.10	.07
ID					.22	.20	.20	.18
IS × FP			−.54*	.26			−.47*	.23
IS × ID					.65**	.23	.62**	.25
Pseudo-R² (total)	.18		.19		.19		.21
Pseudo-R² (Level 2)	.27		.39		.34		.42

Note. N = 43 firms (Level 2) and n = 216 individuals (Level 1). Senior manager was coded: 1 = holding a senior managerial position, 0 = otherwise. HLM = hierarchical linear modeling; IS = intellectual simulation; FP = firm performance; ID = industry dynamism.

p < .05. **p < .01.

Hypothesis 1 predicts CEO intellectual simulation behavior will be positively associated with work meaningfulness. As shown in Table 2, after controlling for employee organizational tenure, intellectual simulation is positive associated with employees’ perceived meaningfulness at work (γ = .35, p < .05, Model 1), supporting Hypothesis 1.

Hypothesis 2 posits that the positive relationship between CEO intellectual stimulation and employee perceived meaningfulness is lower when firm performance is higher. As shown in Model 2, the interaction between CEO intellectual stimulation and firm performance is significant in predicting work meaningfulness (γ = −.54, p < .05). We plotted this interaction in Figure 2. The pattern of this interaction shows that CEO intellectual simulation has a stronger positive association with employee perceived meaningfulness when the firm has a lower level of performance. Hypothesis 2 is therefore supported.

Figure 2.

Interaction of CEO intellectual stimulation and firm performance predicting employee perceived work meaningfulness.

Hypothesis 3 predicts that the positive relationship between CEO intellectual stimulation and employee perceived work meaningfulness will be stronger when industry dynamism is higher. Consistent with this prediction, we observed a significant interaction between CEO intellectual stimulation and industry dynamism in predicting work meaningfulness reported by the organizational members (γ = .65, p < .01, Model 3). Consistent with our prediction, CEO intellectual simulation has a stronger positive cross-level effect on employees’ perceived work meaningfulness when the industry environment is more dynamic (see Figure 3). These results support Hypothesis 3.

Figure 3.

Interaction of CEO intellectual stimulation and industry dynamism predicting employee perceived work meaningfulness.

Supplementary analyses with firm size

There was significant variation in size (ranging from 20 to 597) among the firms we surveyed. It is possible that participants have more personal contact with the CEO in smaller firms, and that collective sensemaking processes may be less likely to ramify across the various units of a company when it is very large. Thus, participants from smaller firms could potentially exhibit higher interrater agreement, and the positive relationship between CEO intellectual stimulation and work meaningfulness could be stronger in smaller firms. Ruling out the first possibility, our supplementary analysis showed that firm size was not related to the degree of agreement in ratings of CEO intellectual stimulating behaviors (r = .04, N = 43). The second speculation was also not supported, as firm size did not moderate the linkage between CEO intellectual stimulation and employee perceived meaningfulness. In addition, controlling for firm size in testing our hypotheses did not affect the findings.

In a separate set of analyses, we replaced the continuous variable of firm size with a dummy variable (1 = firms with 50 or fewer employees, 0 = otherwise) to differentiate the small firms from the medium-sized firms. In our sample, 46.5% of the firms had 50 or fewer employees and were coded as small firms. Comparing the small firms with the rest of the medium-sized firms can examine whether our findings were primarily driven by the small firms. We found that this dummy variable was related to neither the mean level (r = .03, N = 43) nor level of agreement (r = −.10, N = 43) of the member reports on CEO intellectual stimulation. It also did not moderate the relationship between CEO intellectual stimulation and work meaningfulness. In sum, our analyses show that the influence of CEO intellectual stimulation was comparable between small and medium-sized firms in our sample.

Discussion

In this study, we found a positive relationship between intellectual stimulating behaviors displayed by CEOs and their employees’ reports of work meaningfulness. This relationship is moderated by firm performance and, separately, industry dynamism. CEO intellectual stimulation has a stronger positive association with employee work meaningfulness when the company is performing relatively poorly, or when the industry environment is more dynamic. We discuss the specific findings, future research, and implications in the following sections.

Theoretical and Practical Implications

Whereas interest in employees’ perceptions of the meaningfulness dates back many years (e.g., Hackman & Oldham, 1980), it has only recently become a focal outcome variable for organizational scholars (e.g., Barrick et al., 2013; Rodell, 2013; Rosso et al., 2010). We extended previous literature on work meaningfulness by examining how employees’ shared perceptions of their chief executives’ behavior affect their levels of perceived meaningfulness. It seems to be a prevailing view in the popular press that what the CEO says and does has a significant impact on how employees down and across the organization view their work. However, to our knowledge, our study is the first to provide an evidentiary basis for this popular belief. Leadership research, including studies of transformational leadership, has generally focused on the behavior of leaders to whom employees report directly. In such contexts, a follower’s report of leader behavior may derive for the most part from direct observation of the leader and one’s interaction with him or her. Few employees have the opportunity to watch or engage with the CEO of their company, and thus one might reasonably conclude that the CEOs’ behavior has little impact on employees. Yet, the evidence from this study suggests that employees sampled from across small to medium size companies exhibit a good deal of agreement concerning their CEOs’ intellectual stimulation behavior. As we have suggested based on conceptual work concerning collective sensemaking in organizations (Weick, 1995; Zohar & Hofmann, 2012), this is possible because the behavior of top leaders is inferred not only from personal interactions and direct observations but also by recognizing their actions, policies, and practices, many of which reverberate down and across the organization (Schaubroeck et al., 2012). The CEOs’ communications, role modeling, and other embedding processes thus partially shape this shared perception of employees concerning whether the CEO is intellectually stimulating.

This top-down embedding process is supplemented by informal communications among employees that seek to interpret the implications of the espousals within the context of more specific operational requirements at lower levels. The enactment processes that occur within peer networks also affect how employees develop convergent beliefs about his or her behavior. Ultimately, these processes help explain how beliefs about the CEO’s behavior become widespread, but more importantly, how intense collective sensemaking provides employees with richer interpretations of cause–effect relationships that implicate their own actions (Zohar & Tenne-Gazit, 2008). Specifically, individuals revise and customize these collective interpretations to fit the nature of their work tasks and their own recent personal experiences. These processes produce unique and often richer cognitive schemas about how one’s work relates to how the organization innovates and adapts to changing needs.

We further suggest that the stronger relationships we observed between CEO intellectual stimulation and work meaningfulness when either firm performance was low or industry dynamism was high may reflect the important role that employee motivation plays in how perceptions of top executives’ behavior influence personal assessments such as work meaningfulness. When employees perceive ambiguity in cause–effect relationships and are more motivated to resolve it, such as when the organization is performing poorly or discomfiting changes are being implemented as part of an effort to adapt to changing market conditions, intense collective sensemaking promotes the development of complex, individualized cognitive schemas in which espousals of the CEO potentially fit. When CEO behaviors, as conceived through the lens of collective enactment processes, play a role in employees’ cognitive schemas about their work, for better or for worse, their understanding of the CEO will influence how they view their own work. Yet, when employees’ cognitive schemas are not sufficiently rich to enable them to connect the behaviors of the top leaders to their work, such as when they are little motivated to engage in a collective sensemaking, these will have little impact on their perceptions of work meaningfulness.

Following a reviewer’s suggestion, we conducted a supplementary analysis to examine if individual perception of CEO intellectual stimulation interacts with the organizational contexts (i.e., firm performance and industry dynamism) in predicting work meaningfulness. Despite of a significant main effect of individual level perceptions of CEO intellectual stimulation on work meaningfulness, the interaction was not significant for either context variable. We would suggest based on our theoretical framework that ambiguity in the context drives individuals to search for consonance between their own effort and actions and the firm’s aims and values, and that this is understood through the collective sensemaking of their CEO’s espousals. In other words, idiosyncrasies in individuals’ perceptions of CEO intellectual stimulation may be less powerful in activating the collective sensemaking process that creates personal meaning because these idiosyncratic perceptions are not continually reinforced by social information. From this perspective, under more ambiguous circumstances it is the collective (vs. individual) understanding of CEO espousals that drives a search for meaning at work.

One practical implication of our sensemaking perspective on CEO behavior is that top managers’ espousals that seek to encourage innovative thinking must be directed toward encouraging employees’ reflection within the context of their own work. Even then, whether such espousals have a favorable impact on the extent to which employees find their work meaningful depends considerably on whether the workforce is socially connected through dense interlocking peer networks. This is important because much of the academic and popular literature on organizational leadership either presumes that top leaders influence employees’ perceptions of the meaningfulness of their work quite directly through their communications and other espousal processes, as in the heroic leadership tradition. Other perspectives assume that CEOs can only influence the behavior of members of the top management team, and they can influence the company by making sound strategic decisions in conjunction with this team (e.g., Agle et al., 2006; Hambrick, 2007; Ling et al., 2008). We suggest that top leaders can influence employees’ meaningfulness perceptions through their espousals, but this occurs only when intense collective enactment processes filter them. For espousals to have a desired impact on lower level employees, there must be enough ambiguity to motivate intense collective sensemaking throughout the organization, and ultimately the interpretations that arise from these processes must not be at odds with the espousals. Thus, the “informal organization” is not necessarily an impediment to how top leaders’ espousals are received by employees as is sometimes suggested; rather, it can under certain conditions amplify the desired impact of these espousals by enabling them to connect more directly to how employees perceive their work.

The findings of our study also have practical implications for managerial practices. As indicated by our results, top-level leader intellectual stimulation promotes feelings of work meaningfulness among the employees at different organizational levels. Novelli and Taylor (1993) indicated that a leadership style that promotes critical and creative thinking is particularly valuable when companies operate in rapidly changing industries. Despite certain personal characteristics that can constrain the extent to which CEOs engage in intellectually stimulating their employees, CEOs can change the ways they communicate to become more intellectually stimulating. For example, CEOs can interact with employees at the lower level of the organization in meetings and impromptu conversations, and they can schedule public addresses in which they speak about how employees’ innovative ideas can improve company performance. It is important for leaders not only to be seen as exhorting employees to be innovating but also to stimulate their thinking with concrete ideas and by providing them with a “line of sight” between their actions and the success of the organization. CEOs can also amplify the impact of their own leadership behaviors by serving as role models for middle- and frontline-level managers (Schaubroeck et al., 2012; Waldman & Yammarino, 1999) and providing them with training designed specifically to help them be more intellectually stimulating to their employees.

Limitations and Future Research

Among the limitations of this study, CEO intellectual stimulation and employee work meaningfulness were measured at the same time from the same rating sources, and as a result causal inferences are not definitive and our inferences are based on covariation alone and the judged merits of our theoretical processes. Our finding of a positive influence of CEO intellectual stimulation on employee work meaningfulness may also be inflated due to the shared variance produced by the common method. However, this is a not likely to have had a material influence on the interaction findings for two reasons. First, Evans (1985) demonstrated that correlated errors resulting from common sources of measurement cannot create spurious interaction effects (see also Siemsen, Roth, & Oliveira, 2010). Second, the aggregation of CEO intellectual stimulation scores within each company would substantially reduce such correlated errors for particular individuals.

Space constraints required us to measure only our focal construct of intellectual stimulation. Compared with other transformational leadership dimensions, leader intellectual stimulation may be more relevant to employees’ perceived meaningfulness of their work, particularly in the high technology companies we studied. It is possible that similar results would be obtained using measures of other dimensions of transformational leadership, such as inspirational motivation and idealized influence, given the very high correlations between dimensions that lead researchers to form composite indexes of transformational leadership for analyses (see the review by van Knippenberg & Sitkin, 2013). In any case, we encourage future research on a wide array of other dimensions of CEO leadership to assess the extent to which the pathway suggested in this article provides a viable approach to promote perceived work meaningfulness and other important employee outcomes.

The measure of leader intellectual stimulation consists of generic statements about leader behaviors. Although this was necessary to permit greater generalizability across organizations, it provides limited insights into the specific behaviors of CEOs through which they may stimulate employees intellectually. For example, whereas some CEOs may be seen as intellectual stimulating by introducing product and technology changes in the organization, others may stimulate members’ thoughts through their speeches or written words. Similarly, employees may infer low CEO intellectual stimulation when they consider how organizational policies or practices have prevented innovative ideas from being implemented. Future research may use qualitative methods such as dairy studies and open-ended questions whereby participants record the specific incidents in which they feel that the CEO has stimulated them intellectually. Findings from such research could make scholars and practitioners aware of a broader range of leadership behaviors and practices that stimulate employee thought.

Research on leadership, and organizational behavior in general, would benefit by a deeper understanding of how leaders may promote subordinates’ perceived meaningfulness in the work environment. Given that work meaningfulness is a “particularly encompassing psychological state” (Johns, Xie, & Fang, 1992, p. 667), future research is needed to systematically uncover the shared organizational or group level antecedents (e.g., leadership, culture) of meaningfulness at work (Rosso et al., 2010). To do so, scholars need to utilize multilevel analytic frameworks to test whether these organizational variables influence work meaningfulness over and beyond individual difference variables (e.g., personal status, traits). Using such frameworks, researchers can also explore how individual difference variables may have more or less effect on work meaningfulness under different organization or group contexts by testing a cross-level interaction effect. Such findings could aid in identifying when organizational practices may need to be customized toward different groups of employees.

Future research may also examine the role that job characteristics may play in mediating relationships between top management behaviors and experienced meaningfulness. As we have suggested, employees’ shared perceptions of CEO intellectual stimulation may affect their experienced meaningfulness partly by promoting their perceptions of their tasks and work roles. This would not suggest job characteristic variables are a relevant cause within our analysis whose omission introduces bias. Incorporating variables that are plausible mediators of the influence of one focal variable on another as controls will also tend to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” (see Spector & Brannick, 2011, p. 290). However, while mediation was not the focus of our study, constructive replications of this study should consider potential mediating variables such as task significance or skill variety.

Finally, these research data were collected in China, which has a collectivistic societal culture with high power distance, and further research may examine whether our findings also hold in more individualistic societal cultures such as are found in Europe and North America. On one hand, Bass (1985) theorized that transformational leadership, of which intellectual stimulation is a part, is universal across different societies. His claim received support from the GLOBE study across 62 societies (House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004; also see a review by Bass, 1997). This view suggests our findings should be generalized to other society cultures. On the other hand, scholars argued that the values and beliefs endorsed by a society affect the types of leader behaviors being accepted and enacted in that society (e.g., Fu et al., 2004; Hofstede, 2001; Triandis, 1995). We would suggest, however, that our primary findings, which concern interactions between CEO intellectual stimulation and organizational context variables, may generalize quite well because the theoretical mechanism concerns collective sensemaking processes that have been most frequently studied using “Western” samples and are presumed to be shared by cultures throughout the world (see Maitlis & Christianson, 2014, for a review). Nevertheless, it is useful if future research were to put these assumptions to test by seeking to replicate our findings in societal settings that are appreciably different from China, such as Europe or the United States.

Conclusion

Our findings indicate that CEOs can have a significant impact on the psychological states of the employees at lower hierarchical levels of the organization. This represents a pathway through which CEOs can affect outcomes at the organizational level that is distinct from those typically considered by scholars and practitioners. Our study extends the literature by proposing and testing a process through which CEOs’ intellectual stimulation enhances employees’ experienced work meaningfulness and by identifying contextual variables that moderate this relationship. We hope this study serves as a foundation for future studies to consider how top organizational leaders influence rank-and-file employees’ views of their own work.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Associate Editor: Lisa Finkelstein

Author Biographies

Ann C. Peng (PhD, Michigan State University) is an Assistant Professor at Richard Ivey School of Business, Western University. Her research interests include leadership, organizational justice, job stress, and emotions in the workplace.

Hsing-Er Lin (PhD, Tilburg University, The Netherlands) is an assistant professor in the Department of Business Management at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. Her current research interests focus on organizational capabilities, ambidexterity and innovation, and knowledge strategy in different cultural context.

John Schaubroeck (PhD, Purdue University). He is currently the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Management at Michigan State University. His research interests relate to leadership processes, employee well-being, and ethical behavior.

Edward F. McDonough III (PhD, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) is a professor in the College of Business Administration at Northeastern University. His research focuses on executing innovation strategies and managing the global new product development process.

Baomin Hu (PhD, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, China) was a professor in the School of Management at Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, China. His research interest includes technological innovation and national innovation system. Dr. Hu passed away in 2013.

Aiguo Zhang (PhD, Tianjin University, China) is a lecture in the School of Management Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, China. His research interest is in technological innovation.

References

Agle

B. R.

Nagarajan

N. J.

Sonnenfeld

J. A.

Srinivasan

(2006). Does CEO charisma matter? An empirical analysis of the relationships among organizational performance, environmental uncertainty, and top management team perceptions of CEO charisma. Academy of Management Journal, 49, 161-174.

Amabile

Kramer

(2012). How leaders kill meaning at work. McKinsey Quarterly, 1, 124-131.

Arnold

K. A.

Turner

Barling

Kelloway

E. K.

McKee

M. C.

(2007). Transformational leadership and psychological well-being: The mediating role of meaningful work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12, 193-203.

Avolio

B. J.

Zhu

Koh

Bhatia

(2004). Transformational leadership and organizational commitment: Mediating role of psychological empowerment and moderating role of structural distance. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 25, 951-968.

Baer

Frese

(2003). Innovation is not enough: Climates for initiative and psychological safety, process innovations and firm performance. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 24, 45-68.

Barrick

M. R.

Mount

M. K.

(2013). The theory of purposeful work behavior: The role of personality, higher-order goals, and job characteristics. Academy of Management Review, 38, 132-153.

Bass

B. M.

(1985). Leadership and performance beyond expectations. New York, NY: The Free Press.

Bass

B. M.

(1997). Does the transactional-transformational leadership paradigm transcend organizational and national boundaries? American Psychologist, 52, 130-139.

Bass

B. M.

Riggio

R. E.

(2006). Transformational leadership (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

10.

Bourgeois

L. J.

Eisenhardt

K. M.

(1988). Strategic decision processes in high velocity environments: Four cases in the microcomputer industry. Management Science, 34, 816-835.

11.

Brislin

R. W.

Lonner

W. J.

Thorndike

R. M.

(1973). Cross-cultural research methods. New York, NY: John Wiley.

12.

Burns

J. M.

(1978). Leadership. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

13.

Burns

Stalker

G. M.

(1961). The management of innovation. London, England: Tavistock.

14.

Burpitt

W. J.

Bigoness

W. J.

(1997). Leadership and innovation among teams the impact of empowerment. Small Group Research, 28, 414-423.

15.

Cameron

K. S.

Sutton

R. I.

Whetten

D. A.

(1988). Issues in organizational decline. In Cameron

K. S.

Sutton

R. I.

Whetten

D. A.

(Eds.), Readings in organizational decline: Frameworks, research, and prescriptions (pp. 3-19). Cambridge: MA: Ballinger Press.

16.

Cartwright

Holmes

(2006). The meaning of work: The challenge of regaining employee engagement and reducing cynicism. Human Resource Management Review, 16, 199-208.

17.

Chalofsky

Krishna

(2009). Meaningfulness, commitment, and engagement: The intersection of a deeper level of intrinsic motivation. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 11, 189-203.

18.

Chan

(1998). Functional relations among constructs in the same content domain at different levels of analysis: A typology of composition models. Journal of Applied Psychology, 83, 234-246.

19.

Clausen

Borg

(2010). Do positive work-related states mediate the association between psychosocial work characteristics and turnover? A longitudinal analysis. International Journal of Stress Management, 17, 308-324.

20.

Cleavenger

D. J.

Munyon

T. P.

(2013). It’s how you frame it: Transformational leadership and the meaning of work. Business Horizons, 56, 351-360.

21.

Damanpour

(1991). Organizational innovation: A meta-analysis of effects of determinants and moderators. Academy of Management Journal, 34, 555-590.

22.

DeCelles

K. A.

Tesluk

P. E.

Taxman

F. S.

(2013). A field investigation of multilevel cynicism toward change. Organization Science, 24, 154-171.

23.

Dess

G. G.

Beard

D. W.

(1984). Dimensions of organizational task environments. Administrative Science Quarterly, 29, 52-73.

24.

Evans

M. G.

(1985). A Monte-Carlo study of correlated error in moderated multiple regression analysis. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 36, 305-323.

25.

Fairhurst

G. T.

Starr

R. A.

(1996). The art of framing: Managing the language of leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

26.

P. P.

Kennedy

Tata

Yukl

Bond

M. H.

Peng

T. K.

. . . Cheosakul

(2004). The impact of societal cultural values and individual social beliefs on the perceived effectiveness of managerial influence strategies: A meso approach. Journal of International Business Studies, 35, 284-305.

27.

Gallup. (October, 2013). Retrieved from http://www.gallup.com/poll/165269/worldwide-employees-engaged-work.aspx

28.

Garcia-Morales

V. J.

Matias-Reche

Hurtado-Torres

(2008). Influence of transformational leadership on organizational innovation and performance depending on the level of organizational learning in the pharmaceutical sector. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 21, 188-212.

29.

Hackman

J. R.

Oldham

G. R.

(1976). Motivation through the design of work: Test of a theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16, 250-279.

30.

Hackman

J. R.

Oldham

G. R.

(1980). Work redesign. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

31.

Hambrick

D. C.

(2007). Upper echelons theory: An update. Academy of Management Review, 32, 334-343.

32.

Hofstede

(2001). Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

33.

House

R. J.

Hanges

P. J.

Javidan

Dorfman

P. W.

Gupta

(2004). Culture, leadership and organizations: The GLOBE study of 62 societies. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

34.

Huselid

(1995). The impact of human resource management practices on turnover, productivity, and corporate financial performance. Academy of Management Journal, 38, 635-672.

35.

Isobe

Makino

Montgomery

D. B.

(2000). Resource commitment, entry timing and market performance of foreign direct investments in emerging economies: The case of Japanese international joint ventures in China. Academy of Management Journal, 43, 468-484.

36.

James

L. R.

Demaree

R. G.

Wolf

(1984). Estimating within-group interrater reliability with and without response bias. Journal of Applied Psychology, 69, 85-98.

37.

Johns

Xie

J. L.

Fang

(1992). Mediating and moderating effects in job design. Journal of Management, 18, 657-676.

38.

Kark

Shamir

Chen

(2003). The two faces of transformational leadership: Empowerment and dependency. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88, 246-255.

39.

Kompier

(2005). Dealing with workplace stress. In Cooper

C. L.

(Ed.), Handbook of stress medicine and health (pp. 349-374). London, England: CRC Press.

40.

Kozlowski

S. W. J.

Klein

K. J.

(2000). A multilevel approach to theory and research in organizations: Contextual, temporal, and emergent processes. In Klein

K. J.

Kozlowski

S. W. J.

(Eds.), Multilevel theory, research and methods in organizations: Foundations, extensions, and new directions (pp. 3-90). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

41.

Krishnan

Martin

Noorderhaven

N. G.

(2006). When does trust matter to alliance performance. Academy of Management Journal, 49, 894-917.

42.

Ling

Simsek

Lubatkin

M. H.

Veiga

J. F.

(2008). The impact of transformational CEOs on the performance of small- to medium-sized firms: Does organizational context matter? Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 923-934.

43.

Lips-Wiersma

Wright

(2012). Measuring the meaning of meaningful work development and validation of the Comprehensive Meaningful Work Scale (CMWS). Group & Organization Management, 37, 655-685.

44.

Lord

R. G.

Shondrick

S. J.

(2011). Leadership and knowledge: Symbolic, connectionist, and embodied perspectives. The Leadership Quarterly, 22, 207-222.

45.

Lubatkin

M. H.

Simsek

Ling

Veiga

J. F.

(2006). Ambidexterity and performance in small-to medium-sized firms: The pivotal role of top management team behavioral integration. Journal of Management, 32, 646-672.

46.

Maitlis

Christianson

(2014). Sensemaking in organizations: Taking stock and moving forward. The Academy of Management Annals, 8, 57-125.

47.

Miller

(1988). Relating Porter’s business strategies to environment and structure: Analysis and performance implications. Academy of management Journal, 31, 280-308.

48.

Milliken

F. J.

(1987). Three types of perceived uncertainty about the environment: State, effect, and response uncertainty. Academy of Management Review, 2, 133-143.

49.

Moorman

Miner

A. S.

(1997). The impact of organizational memory on new product performance and creativity. Journal of Marketing Research, 34, 91-106.

50.

Nielsen

Randall

Yarker

Brenner

S. O.

(2008). The effects of transformational leadership on followers’ perceived work characteristics and psychological well-being: A longitudinal study. Work & Stress, 22, 16-32.

51.

Novelli

Taylor

(1993). The context for leadership in 21st-century organizations. American Behavioral Scientist, 37, 139-147.

52.

Ostroff

Kinicki

A. J.

Tamkins

M. M.

(2003). Organizational culture and climate. In Borman

W. C.

Ilgen

D. R.

Klimoski

R. J.

(Eds.), Handbook of psychology (Vol. 12, pp. 565-593). New York, NY: John Wiley.

53.

Piccolo

R. F.

Colquitt

J. A.

(2006). Transformational leadership and job behaviors: The mediating role of core job characteristics. Academy of Management Journal, 49, 327-340.

54.

Piccolo

R. F.

Greenbaum

Hartog

D. N. D.

Folger

(2010). The relationship between ethical leadership and core job characteristics. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 31, 259-278.

55.

Podsakoff

P. M.

MacKenzie

S. B.

Moorman

R. H.

Fetter

(1990). Transformational leader behaviors and their effects on followers’ trust in leader, satisfaction, and organizational citizenship behaviors. The Leadership Quarterly, 1, 107-142.

56.

Porter

L. W.

McLaughlin

G. B.

(2006). Leadership and the organizational context: Like the weather? The Leadership Quarterly, 17, 559-576.

57.

Pratt

M. G.

Ashforth

B. E.

(2003). Fostering meaningfulness in working and at work. In Cameron

K. S.

Dutton

J. E.

Quinn

R. E.

(Eds.), Positive organizational scholarship (pp. 309-327). San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

58.

Preacher

K. J.

Curran

P. J.

Bauer

D. J.

(2006). Computational tools for probing interactions in multiple linear regression, multilevel modeling, and latent curve analysis. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 31, 437-448.

59.

Raudenbush

S. W.

Bryk

Cheong

Y. F.

Congdon

du Toit

(2004). HLM6: Hierarchical linear and nonlinear modeling. Chicago, IL: Scientific Software International.

60.

Rodell

(2013). Finding meaning through volunteering: Why do employees volunteer and what does it mean for their jobs? Academy of Management Journal, 56, 1274-1294.

61.

Rosso

B. D.

Dekas

K. H.

Wrzesniewski

(2010). On the meaning of work: A theoretical integration and review. Research in Organizational Behavior, 30, 91-127.

62.

Schaubroeck

J. M.

Hannah

S. T.

Avolio

B. J.

Kozlowski

S. J.

Lord

R. G.

Treviño

L. K.

. . .Peng

A. C.

(2012). Embedding ethical leadership within and across organizational levels. Academy of Management Journal, 55, 1053-1078.

63.

Siemsen

Roth

Oliveira

(2010). Common method bias in regression models with linear, quadratic, and interaction effects. Organizational Research Methods, 13, 456-476.

64.

Singer

(1998). Using SAS PROC MIXED to fit multilevel models, hierarchical models, and individual growth models. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 24, 323-355.

65.

Spector

P. E.

Brannick

M. T.

(2011). Methodological urban legends: The misuse of statistical control variables. Organizational Research Methods, 14, 287-305.

66.

Spreitzer

G. M.

(1995). Psychological empowerment in the workplace: Construct definition, measurement, and validation. Academy of Management Journal, 38, 1442-1465.

67.

Thompson

J. D.

(1967). Organizations in action. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

68.

Triandis

H. C.

(1995). Individualism and collectivism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

69.

van Knippenberg

Sitkin

S. B.

(2013). A critical assessment of charismatic-transformational leadership research: Back to the drawing board? Academy of Management Annals, 7, 1-60.

70.

Waldman

D. A.

Ramirez

G. G.

House

R. J.

Puranam

(2001). Does leadership matter? CEO leadership attributes and profitability under conditions of perceived environmental uncertainty. Academy of Management Journal, 44, 134-143.

71.

Waldman

D. A.

Yammarino

F. J.

(1999). CEO charismatic leadership: Levels-of-management and levels-of-analysis effects. Academy of Management Review, 24, 266-285.

72.

Wall

T. D.

Michie

Patterson

Wood

S. J.

Sheehan

Clegg

C. W.

West

(2004). On the validity of subjective measures of company performance. Personnel Psychology, 57, 95-118.

73.

Weick

K. E.

(1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

74.

Weitzel

Jonsson

(1989). Decline in organizations: A literature integration and extension. Administrative Science Quarterly, 34, 91-109.

75.

Whitener

E. M.

(2001). Do high commitment human resource practices affect employee commitment? A cross-level analysis using hierarchical linear modeling. Journal of Management, 27, 515-535.

76.

Wright

P. M.

McMahan

G. C.

(1992). Theoretical perspectives for strategic human resource management. Journal of Management, 18, 295-320.

77.

Wrzesniewski

Dutton

J. E.

(2001). Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26, 179-201.

78.

Wrzesniewski

Dutton

J. E.

Debebe

(2003). Interpersonal sensemaking and the meaning of work. Research in Organizational Behavior, 25, 93-135.

79.

Zohar

Hofmann

(2012). Organizational culture and climate. In Kozlowski

S. W. J.

(Ed.), Oxford handbook of industrial and organizational psychology (pp. 643-666). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

80.

Zohar

Tenne-Gazit

(2008). Transformational leadership and group interaction as climate antecedents: A social network analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 744-757.