The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science

Although the construct of leader humility has received increased attention in organizational scholarship, there are large gaps in the empirical studies of leader humility and employee creativity. In this study, we find that leader humility substantially contributes to organizational effectiveness in both normal and crisis situations. Building on social information processing theory and the process model of emotion regulation, we test a model linking leader humility to employee creativity based on 451 member–leader dyads of 129 emergency medical task forces involved in the Wenchuan earthquake. We find that leader humility is positively related to employees’ perspective taking and creativity. We also find that employees’ cognitive reappraisal moderates the relationship between leader humility and employees’ perspective taking, and employees’ perspective taking mediates the interactive effect of leader humility and employees’ cognitive reappraisal on creativity. We also discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.

Despite the proliferation of leadership research in the past 75 years, investigating the ways in which women and men leaders enact and experience leadership continues to surface unanswered questions. Through the framework of selection, development, leadership style, and performance, we report gender-related findings from a broad survey of existing literature from the past three decades. Findings include differential rates of selection for women and men leaders; leader development considerations that vary by gender; evidence in favor of general similarities in leadership style (with noted exceptions) between women and men leaders; and similar performance outcomes between women and men leaders. The importance of context, be it job type, group composition, organizational culture, or industry/sector, was also revealed. Implications for practitioners and academics alike are offered throughout this report.

This study examined the impact of two types of psychological contract breach (organizational policies and social atmosphere breach) on resistance to change and engagement in the anticipatory phase of change and assessed whether supervisory informational justice mitigated the negative effects of breach. Employees from three departments of a Dutch financial institution (n = 141) who were in the first phase of a change initiative participated in the study. Results showed that social atmosphere breach was positively related to affective resistance to change and negatively related to engagement, while organizational policies breach was positively related to cognitive resistance to change. These findings point to the importance of distinguishing between different types of psychological contract breach. In addition, it was found that supervisory informational justice mitigated the adverse effect of social atmosphere breach on cognitive resistance to change, pointing to the important role of managers in the first phase of change.

Corruption recovery is a critical but understudied organizational change. We gained unique access to a company that experienced multiple corruption incidents in the months prior to our survey rollout that garnered 2,300+ respondents (71%) across 19 business units. We explored how employee perceptions of leaders’ enactment of a core set of values and of CEO and business unit leaders’ ethical leadership were associated with organizational commitment as these leaders implemented change following corruption. Results indicated that ethical leadership and values enactment were associated with increased organizational commitment. Group-level membership in units implicated in corruption was associated with reduced commitment while membership in business units with increased customer contact was associated with increased commitment. Shared employee perspectives of the ethical leadership of business unit leaders, but not the CEO, were also associated with higher commitment. We also discuss future research, limitations, and implications for management.

Organizational demands on productivity, innovations, and safety may seem paradoxical. How can the organization support employees to cope with such paradox? Based on organizational climate measures of safety, occupational health, innovativeness, and production effectiveness, we explored if a second-order organizational climate could be identified, that was associated with staff safety, health, innovations and team effectiveness, and if such a climate could be represented by an organizational climate of perceived organizational support (POS). Questionnaire data were collected from 137 workgroups in four Swedish companies in construction and mining. Analyses (structural equation modeling) were done at the workgroup level and a split sample technique used to investigate relations between climates and outcomes. A general second-order organizational climate was identified. Also, an organizational climate constructed by items selected to represent POS, was associated with team effectiveness, innovations, and safety. A POS-climate may facilitate employees’ coping with paradoxes, and provide a heuristic for managers in decision making.