Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies

This article is a career legacy interview of Kenneth R. Thompson, the 2016 Midwest Scholar.

Leading in in extremis situations, when lives are in peril, remains one of the least addressed areas of leadership research. Little is known about how leaders make sense in these dangerous situations and communicate these contexts to others. Because most of the literature on in extremis is theoretical, we sought empirical evidence of how sensemaking proceeds in practice. A qualitative study was conducted based on interviews with 30 Army leaders who had recently led teams in combat. Our findings suggest that during these life-threatening situations, sensemaking and sensegiving are actually occurring simultaneously, the type of training leaders receive is critical, and a sense of duty can influence a person’s role as a leader. Our findings have implications for both theory and practice since crisis leadership is now a coveted executive quality for leadership competency.

This study investigates how each dimension of transformational leadership directly and indirectly influences followers’ change-oriented behaviors. Using a sample of 329 independent leader–follower dyads from a wide range of Chinese organizations, we examine followers’ identification with leader as an intervening variable between the four dimensions of transformational leadership (“core” transformational behaviors, high-performance expectations, individualized support, and intellectual stimulation) and followers’ taking charge behaviors. Results showed that intellectual stimulation had the highest relative effect size that was largely due to its direct effect on taking charge. Individualized support only exerted a significant indirect effect. Additionally, the negative direct and positive indirect effects of high-performance expectations rendered its total effect nonsignificant. Furthermore, the direct, indirect, and total effects of “core” transformational behaviors were nonsignificant. We also found that followers’ value of modernity moderated the effect of identification with leader on taking charge. The indirect effects of intellectual stimulation, individualized support, and high-performance expectations were significant when modernity was high but nonsignificant when it was low. Implications for theory, practice, and future research are discussed.

The present study examines whether and why leaders’ transparent behavior influences employee creativity. Field survey data from 51 teams and 199 employees in a large IT company located in China showed that both psychological safety and ability to focus attention mediated the positive relationship between leaders’ transparent behavior and employee creativity. Furthermore, leaders’ transparent behavior was found to be positively related to employee psychological safety, which in turn affected employee ability to focus attention and creativity. Finally, theoretical and practical implications were discussed.

Drawing on the social learning theory, the current research proposes that employees learn specific ethical behavior by observing others (leader and peers), thus influencing their job embeddedness. This study examined the mediating and moderating contextual variables in the relationship between ethical leadership and job embeddedness using a sample of 343 employees from 40 different companies. Results revealed that ethical leadership is related to job embeddedness and that perceived supervisor support mediated the influence of ethical leadership on job embeddedness. Also, peer unethical behavior moderated the indirect ethical leadership–job embeddedness relationship at the group level of analysis. Implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed. Specifically, this study proposes that there is a need to select middle managers that are focused on people’s needs and to train and motivate supervisors to support and stimulate their subordinates.

Despite the large number of factors at work that have been linked to personal Internet use (PIU), ethical leadership has not yet been examined. The first aim of this study is to test whether ethical leadership is associated with employees’ participation in PIU, specifically with cyberloafing and e-citizenship. The article then proposes an explanation for this linkage. The prediction is made that ethical leadership influences the way followers perceive corporate culture, which, in turn, leads them to PIU. Questionnaire data from 300 employees at 100 investment banks in the City of London on ethical leadership, Cameron and Quinn’s corporate cultures, cyberloafing, and e-citizenship were analyzed. Results found a significant negative relationship between ethical leadership and cyberloafing, and a positive relationship with e-citizenship. Once corporate culture was entered into the model as a mediator, ethical leadership also showed significant links with corporate culture, which, in turn, acted as a significant mediator. All the culture types performed as partial mediators in ethical leadership’s association with cybercivism, and only adhocracy culture performed as a full mediator in the case of cyberloafing. A practical implication is that managers should pay explicit attention to the advantages of supervising PIU with ethical values and, especially in the case of cyberloafing, with the innovative values of adhocracy culture.

The present study aims to investigate the mediating role of job crafting, namely the set of proactive behaviors aimed at shaping the job role according to one’s preferences, in the relationship between psychological capital (PsyCap) and career success. This latter was operationalized as both a worker’s subjective perception (i.e., job satisfaction) and an objective attainment (i.e., change of hierarchical level, namely promotion). A two-wave study on 349 employees from a large service organization, working as middle managers, was conducted matching participants’ self-reported data (i.e., PsyCap, job crafting, and job satisfaction) with their hierarchical level, provided by the HR department. The results from the longitudinal structural equation model supported the posited links among variables and thus confirmed the positive influence of PsyCap on crafting behaviors, which in turn positively affected both job satisfaction and promotions over time. Moreover, job crafting reciprocally and positively influenced PsyCap. Finally, job crafting fully mediated the effect of PsyCap on job satisfaction, as well as those on promotions, pointing to the key role of agentic behaviors in translating one’s psychological resources in subjective and objective career success. Future research directions and practical implications for organizations are discussed.

Although research has established that self-interest and prosocial motives between benefactors and recipients increases organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), less is known about the extent to which these motives explain variance in OCBs. As such, the purpose of the current research is to examine self-interest and prosocial motives in relation to other antecedents examined in extant OCB literature. The results from this study demonstrate that both self-interest and prosocial motives explain additional variance in OCBs beyond employees’ affective reactions and work environment perceptions. Implications for theory and practice are also discussed.

This article examines how workplace cynicism moderates the relationship between interactional fairness and perceptions of organizational support (POS). Using a sample of full-time employees, I found a positive, direct effect between interactional fairness and POS. Furthermore, the moderating effect suggests the relation between interactional fairness and POS was stronger for less cynical employees. Incorporating a social exchange framework, this article discusses how the typically positive effect of interactional fairness is lost on cynical employees. This result was confirmed using a controlled scenario-based protocol, which replicated the results of the field study. Practical implications and directions for future research are discussed.

While prior research has focused on the effect of CEO overconfidence on innovation, few studies have been conducted to reveal how and whether an overconfident CEO affects ambidextrous innovation, which means the simultaneous and balanced pursuit of both exploratory and exploitative innovation. By observing firms’ patenting behavior, we investigate the effect of CEOs’ psychological attribute of overconfidence on innovation ambidexterity. In addition, we examine how a firm’s governance system moderates the relationship between CEO overconfidence and ambidextrous innovation. The results show that overconfident CEOs are more apt to create or magnify an imbalance in innovation ambidexterity. Furthermore, the results regarding the moderating effects of governance and monitoring mechanisms indicate that an independent board and dedicated institutional ownership mitigate the positive relationship between CEO overconfidence and a firm’s ambidextrous imbalance, while transient institutional ownership enhances this relationship. We also find that analyst following does not effectively monitor an overconfident CEO’s tendency toward an ambidextrous imbalance.