Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior - Volume 1, 2014

This article presents a personalized view of the history, development, and current shape of the related fields of industrial–organizational (I/O) psychology and organizational behavior (OB) by two authors who have personally experienced many of the events and changes that have occurred in these fields over the past 50 or so years. Particular attention is given to the interconnections and differences between I/O psychology and OB and to the implications of those differences and overlaps for research and professional practice. The article concludes with some thoughts about areas of potential advances that could be made in the future and a discussion of some of the challenges to be faced in making those kinds of progress.

Psychological safety describes people’s perceptions of the consequences of taking interpersonal risks in a particular context such as a workplace. First explored by pioneering organizational scholars in the 1960s, psychological safety experienced a renaissance starting in the 1990s and continuing to the present. Organizational research has identified psychological safety as a critical factor in understanding phenomena such as voice, teamwork, team learning, and organizational learning. A growing body of conceptual and empirical work has focused on understanding the nature of psychological safety, identifying factors that contribute to it, and examining its implications for individuals, teams, and organizations. In this article, we review and integrate this literature and suggest directions for future research. We first briefly review the early history of psychological safety research and then examine contemporary research at the individual, group, and organizational levels of analysis. We assess what has been learned and discuss suggestions for future theoretical development and methodological approaches for organizational behavior research on this important interpersonal construct.

Conclusions about the validity of cognitive ability and personality measures based on meta-analyses published mostly in the past decade are reviewed at the beginning of this article. Research on major issues in selection that affect the use and interpretation of validation data are then discussed. These major issues include the dimensionality of personality, the nature and magnitude of g in cognitive ability measures, conceptualizations of validity, the nature of the job performance domain, trade-offs between diversity and validity, reactions to selection procedures, faking on personality measures, mediator and moderator research on test–performance relationships, multilevel issues, Web-based testing, the situational framing of test stimuli, and the context in which selection occurs.

Power is a critical resource for organizational actors. Given the profound importance of power to individual functioning, it is essential to understand how some individuals acquire power when others do not, why some individuals retain their power once they have attained it, and why others fall from their lofty positions in spite of the political advantages power provides. In this review, we conceptualize power as a process that unfolds over time and review research that speaks to three distinct but related dynamics: the acquisition, maintenance, and loss of power. We address and attempt to reconcile a burgeoning set of findings that appear to conflict with each other, especially findings vis-à-vis the maintenance and loss of power. We conclude by addressing overlooked topics and areas for future research.

Theory, constructs, and research with regard to individual work–family boundary management dynamics are reviewed with the goal of promoting a greater understanding and integration of the existing literature. The article begins by noting trends that have contributed to interest in the topic, and then outlines major theoretical perspectives on boundary management and boundary characteristics, integration/segmentation, and associated constructs. It next notes limitations of existing research and concludes with recommendations for future research.

This article provides a review of the literature addressing the impact of coworkers’ deviant, dysfunctional, or counterproductive behaviors upon individual employees. We provide a framework for the collection of findings on this issue, revealing that coworker deviant behavior negatively impacts individual employees’ attitudes, affect, and actions through three routes: (a) direct impact, whereby an employee is the target of coworkers’ deviant behaviors; (b) vicarious impact, whereby an employee is impacted by witnessing or learning of coworkers’ deviant behaviors; and (c) ambient impact, whereby an employee is impacted by working in an environment characterized by collective coworker deviant behavior. In our discussion of these routes of influence, we outline the relevant empirical findings for and theoretical perspectives of each, as well as the moderators of these effects. We conclude our review by identifying recommended future research directions based upon our critical assessment of this literature.

This article puts forth an agenda for the psychological study of strategy and competitive advantage. It centers this agenda within the microfoundations program, a program originating within strategy that seeks to understand firm heterogeneity and competitive advantage by examining individuals and their interrelationships. The article first reviews key theories and frameworks in strategy by taking a functionalist view, that is, by starting with a focus on organizational criteria (operational performance, organizational performance, competitive advantage). It then discusses the importance of resources and how psychology may contribute to an understanding of these resources. Organizational psychology and organizational behavior research that links to higher-level outcomes or resources is reviewed next. The article concludes with questions that we believe will fascinate scholars of organizational psychology and organizational behavior as well as with implications for practice. We hope this article helps stimulate a paradigmatic shift in organizational psychology and organizational behavior, as their theories and findings are much more strategic than is currently appreciated.

When employees voluntarily communicate suggestions, concerns, information about problems, or work-related opinions to someone in a higher organizational position, they are engaging in upward voice. When they withhold such input, they are displaying silence and depriving their organization of potentially useful information. In this article, I review the current state of knowledge about the factors and motivational processes that affect whether employees engage in upward voice or remain silent when they have concerns or relevant information to share. I also review the research findings on the organizational and individual effects of employee voice and silence. After presenting an integrated model of antecedents and outcomes, I offer some potentially fruitful questions for future research.

In this article, we examine the history and development of job embeddedness, beginning with the story of the idea’s conception, theoretical foundation, and original empirical structure as a major predictor of employee voluntary turnover. We then consider more recent expansions in the theoretical structure and empirical measurement of job embeddedness, exploring job embeddedness as a causal indicator model versus a reflective model. Next, we review some promising expansions of embeddedness to new domains (e.g., family embeddedness) as well as important contingency factors that enhance or diminish its impact. Finally, we describe how job embeddedness affects important organizational outcomes beyond turnover, including job performance, organizational citizenship behavior, innovation, and the development of social and human capital. Throughout the article, we provide our opinions on how the theory and research on embeddedness have progressed as well as ideas on how it can be improved.

We review prior research that has examined virtuality in teams (e.g., pertaining to the use of electronic media) or the global nature of teams (e.g., national and cultural differences), demonstrating that very few scholars have examined both simultaneously. Given that the global and virtual elements often coincide in the same team, this is a critical gap in research, particularly because these two features may interact in important ways, amplifying or mitigating the effects of each other. After elaborating on potential interactions, we set forth future research directions, which incorporate both global and virtual elements of teams and in doing so, better address the complexity of working in these increasingly common collaborative forms.

Human capital resources are key for organizations to gain a competitive advantage. Learning based on formal training and development programs, informal learning, and knowledge sharing influences the development of human capital resources. This article provides a selective review of research on learning that occurs in many different forms and at the individual, team, and organizational levels. It is organized around five themes—thinking differently about learning, reconsidering the form and design of learning, facilitating learning in the workplace, expanding the scope of learning outcomes, and improving methodology in learning research. These themes provide a framework for understanding how learning can contribute to the development of human capital resources and organizations’ competitive advantage. For each theme, relevant research is reviewed, and limitations and future research directions are provided.

Compassion is an interpersonal process involving the noticing, feeling, sensemaking, and acting that alleviates the suffering of another person. This process has recently received substantial attention by organizational researchers and practitioners alike. This article reviews what researchers currently know about compassion as it unfolds in dyadic interactions in work organizations. We begin by reviewing what we know about the benefits of compassion for the person who is suffering, for the provider of compassion, and for third parties who witness or hear about compassion at work. The heart of the article focuses on what research tells us about embedding compassion in the personal, relational, and organizational contexts in which compassion takes place. We conclude by discussing implications for practice and for the future research agenda regarding this vital interpersonal process.

The challenges associated with managing talent in modern labor markets are a constant source of discussion among academics and practitioners, but the literature on the subject is sparse and has grown somewhat haphazardly. We provide an overview of the literature on talent management—a body of work that spans multiple disciplines—as well as a clear statement as to what defines talent management. The new themes in contemporary talent management focus on (a) the challenge of open labor markets, including issues of retention as well as the general challenge of managing uncertainty, (b) new models for moving employees across jobs within the same organization, and (c) strategic jobs for which investments in talent likely show the greatest return. We review the conceptual and practical literature on these topics, outline the evolution of talent management over time, and present new topics for future research.

Workplace creativity exhibited by individual employees and teams is a key driver of organizational innovation and success. After briefly touching upon issues related to the historical roots of research on workplace creativity, we focus on reviewing empirical work published since 2000 by researchers in the field of organizational psychology and management. We observe that although earlier research tended to take either an actor-centered or a context-centered approach, continuing to do so may have diminishing returns. To understand creativity in all its complexity and potential, an interactionist perspective that emphasizes actor–context interactive effects on creativity holds much promise. Moreover, after reviewing existing work taking an interactionist approach, we conclude that the nature of the actor–context interaction needs further theoretical advancement and refinement. Toward this end, we propose a typology that reveals a complex and intriguing set of actor–context interactions, including ones that are synergistic, antagonistic, inhibitory, remedial, and configurational, as well as ones that show patterns of diminishing gains and diminishing losses. We also discuss future research directions and practical implications.

This article proposes a perspective on careers that recognizes the interdependencies between work and home over the life course and is particularly suitable to contemporary careers. We first discuss the meaning of a work–home (WH) perspective and elaborate on the economic, organizational, and workforce changes that have affected contemporary careers. We then illustrate the implications of adopting a WH perspective for four streams of scholarship relevant to contemporary careers (career self-management, career success, global careers, and sustainable careers), suggest directions for future research in each area, and discuss the practical implications of adopting a WH perspective. We conclude that contemporary careers can be better understood by considering how employees’ home lives influence and are influenced by career processes and that the adoption of a WH perspective requires understanding the role of gender norms in prescribing and sanctioning women’s and men’s participation in the work and home domains in a given culture.

Whereas burnout refers to a state of exhaustion and cynicism toward work, engagement is defined as a positive motivational state of vigor, dedication, and absorption. In this article, we discuss the main definitions and conceptualizations of both concepts used in the literature. In addition, we review the most important antecedents of burnout and work engagement by examining situational and individual predictors. We also review the possible consequences of burnout and engagement and integrate the research findings using job demands–resources theory. Although both burnout and work engagement are related to important job-related outcomes, burnout seems to be more strongly related to health outcomes, whereas work engagement is more strongly related to motivational outcomes. We discuss daily and momentary fluctuations in burnout and work engagement as possibilities for future research.

In this review of the psychology of entrepreneurship, we first present meta-analytic findings showing that personality dimensions, such as (general) self-efficacy and need for achievement, and entrepreneurial orientation are highly associated with entrepreneurship (business creation and business success). We then discuss constructs that were developed within entrepreneurship research, such as entrepreneurial alertness, business planning, financial capital as resources, and entrepreneurial orientation, and how they can be better understood by taking a psychological perspective. Next, we elaborate how traditional psychological constructs have been utilized in entrepreneurship and how this may enhance our knowledge in industrial and organizational psychology (with respect to, for example, knowledge, practical intelligence, cognitive biases, goals and visions, personal initiative, passion, and positive and negative affect). Finally, we provide an overall framework useful for the psychology of entrepreneurship, and implications for future research.

In this article, the organizational socialization literature is reviewed through the lens of newcomer capital. We give an overview of the socialization literature and examine established and proposed linkages among four components of newcomer personal capital: human, social, psychological, and cultural capital. Then, we theoretically explore and discuss how the socialization adjustment process, consisting of newcomer experience, role clarity, social acceptance, and self-efficacy, is affected by these types of capital for newcomers, veteran employees, and organizations. We hope that identifying and summarizing these links in one review article will help to advance research in both the capital and organizational socialization literatures.

Emotional intelligence (EI) is a set of abilities that pertain to emotions and emotional information. EI has attracted considerable attention among organizational scholars, and research has clarified the definition of EI and illuminated its role in organizations. Here, I define EI and describe the abilities that constitute it. I evaluate two approaches to measuring EI: the performance-based and self-report approaches. I review the findings about how EI is associated with work criteria, organizing the findings according to three overarching models: the validity generalization, situation-specific, and moderator models. The support for the latter two models suggests that the organizational context and employee dispositions should be considered in order to fully explain how EI relates to criteria. I identify controversies in this area, describe how findings address some controversies, and propose future research to address those that remain. I conclude by listing best practices for future research on the role of EI in organizations.