Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior - Volume 8, 2021

I am quite gratified to be asked to provide this personal account of a career focusing on the role of individual differences in the workplace. I open with an account of my career journey and then offer a highly idiosyncratic perspective on substantive developments in the field over the past four decades, sneaking in observations about my own contributions. After surveying substantive developments, I offer some comments on changes in how the field goes about its business (e.g., the journal publication process, expectations for graduate student contributions to scholarship).

In the past 20 years, there has been a growing interest in the phenomenon of workplace envy. This article provides an overarching review and analysis of the workplace envy literature. We first consider conceptual and measurement challenges facing envy researchers. We then review the current knowledge base in the research with a focus on synthesizing what we have learned regarding workplace envy's transmutations, highlighting directions for future research. We explore two relatively understudied areas in the envy literature—antecedents of envy and the experience of being envied. We discuss methodologies used in the literature to study envy and outcomes and conclude with a focus on cross-cultural and practical implications.

Learning is the engagement in mental processes resulting in the acquisition and retention of knowledge, skills, and/or affect over time and applied when needed. Building on this definition, we integrate the science of training and the science of learning to propose a new science of workplace instruction, linking the design of instructional events to instructional outcomes such as transfer and job performance through the mediating effects of learner events and learning outcomes. We propose three foundational elements: the learner, instructional principles, and training delivery (methods and media). Understanding and applying instructional principles are the primary methods for enhancing training effectiveness; thus, we detail 15 empirically supported principles. We then discuss the erroneous pursuit of aptitude-by-treatment interactions under the guise of learner styles and age-specific instruction. Finally, we offer suggestions for future research that draw on the foundation of instructional principles to optimize self-directed learning and learning in synthetic learning environments.

Work-life balance is a topic eliciting much attention and scholarship. Yet what scholars mean by work-life balance is wide-ranging. This review focuses on work-life balance scholarship published primarily between 2000 and 2020. To understand what constitutes balance, we integrate this research with work on enrichment and depletion, two constructs that contribute to work-life balance. We identify four configurations of enrichment and depletion that undergird different levels of work-life balance: (a) low enrichment and high depletion (no balance), (b) low enrichment and low depletion (minimal balance), (c) high depletion and high enrichment (balance), and (d) low depletion and high enrichment (balance/flourishing). We examine how other factors, such as cognitive and behavioral factors, other individual differences, and organizational factors, relate to enrichment, depletion, and work-life balance. We conclude with future research directions and practical implications, urging scholars and practitioners to consider novel work-life concerns from the lenses of enrichment and depletion.

Self-report measures are characterized as being susceptible to threats associated with deliberate dissimulation or response distortion (i.e., social desirability responding) and careless responding. Careless responding typically arises in low-stakes settings (e.g., participating in a study for course credit) where some respondents are not motivated to respond in a conscientious manner to the items. In contrast, in high-stakes assessments (e.g., prehire assessments), because of the outcomes associated with their responses, respondents are motivated to present themselves in as favorable a light as possible and, thus, may respond dishonestly in an effort to accomplish this objective. In this article, we draw a distinction between the lazy respondent, which we associate with careless responding, and the dishonest respondent, which we associate with response distortion. We then seek to answer the following questions for both careless responding and response distortion: (a) What is it? (b) Why is it a problem or concern? (c) Why do people engage in it? (d) How pervasive is it? (e) Can and how is it prevented or mitigated? (f) How is it detected? (g) What does one do when one detects it? We conclude with a discussion of suggested future research directions and some practical guidelines for practitioners and researchers.

Emotion work, the management of feelings and emotional displays in response to emotion work requirements, can have both positive and negative effects on well-being and performance. Adopting a work psychology perspective and drawing on work stress and work design literatures, we outline an expanded model of emotion work, regarding emotion work requirements as job characteristics and as part of broader task requirements. The challenge-hindrance stressors framework helps explain positive effects of emotion work in terms of professional role fulfillment. We emphasize the importance of negative events and negative emotions for outcomes of surface acting conditions, and we highlight the often-neglected role of automatic emotion regulation in emotion work. Research on culture suggests that existing results are mostly valid for Western cultures. Practical and research implications refer to a stronger emphasis on conditions at work in general, including stressors and resources, which together determine the meaning of emotion work conditions.

We conduct a comprehensive review of the chief executive officer (CEO) succession literature and update a CEO succession typology that incorporated manuscripts published through 2014. Our review illustrates that most of our understanding of succession and related processes stems from research based primarily in macro research traditions. We highlight ways that scholars can develop deeper understandings of CEO successionprocesses by capitalizing on knowledge and practices that are visible from more micro lenses such as industrial and organizational (IO) psychology, human resources (HR), and organizational behavior (OB). Specifically, we advocate applying lessons about recruitment, training, fit, culture, selection, turnover, human capital resources, and decision making from IO psychology, HR, and OB research to extend our understanding about CEO succession and board decision making.

Extending interactionist principles and targeting situational specificity of trait–performance linkages, trait activation theory (TAT) posits personality traits are expressed as valued work behavior in response to trait-relevant situational cues, subject to constraints and other factors, all operating at the task, social, and organizational levels. Review of 99 key sources citing TAT spanning 2011–2019 reveals diverse applications (e.g., bidirectionality, trait specificity, team building) and an overall 60% significance rate for 262 TAT-based moderator effects reported in 60 of 75 empirical studies. Applying five key aspects of TAT (e.g., behavior/performance distinction, need-based motivation) to five lines of personality dynamics research (e.g., personality states, self-regulation models of motivation) supports TAT as a vehicle for advancing understanding of within-person variability over brief and extended timelines. Critical research needs include personality-oriented work analysis, longitudinal study of trait-situation processes, trait activation in teams, within-job bidirectionality, and situation relevance as a unifying principle in advancing person–workplace fit.

Despite the centrality of technology to understanding how humans in organizations think, feel, and behave, researchers in organizational psychology and organizational behavior even now often avoid theorizing about it. In our review, we identify four major paradigmatic approaches in theoretical approaches to technology, which typically occur in sequence: technology-as-context, technology-as-causal, technology-as-instrumental, and technology-as-designed. Each paradigm describes a typically implicit philosophical orientation toward technology as demonstrated through choices about theory development and research design. Of these approaches, one is unnecessarily limited and two are harmful oversimplifications that we contend have systematically weakened the quality of theory across our discipline. As such, we argue that to avoid creating impractical and even inaccurate theory, researchers must explicitly model technology design. To facilitate this shift, we define technology, present our paradigmatic framework, explain the framework's importance, and provide recommendations across five key domains: personnel selection, training and development, performance management and motivation, groups and teams, and leadership.

Both perceived and objective measures of employee overqualification can impact job attitudes, various workplace behaviors, and work relationships. Utilizing motivation and capability-based theoretical approaches, this review summarizes research regarding the antecedents (demographic influences, personality traits, relational influences, job characteristics) and outcomes (individual health and well-being, turnover intentions and turnover, job performance, organizational citizenship behaviors, interpersonal relationships, innovative behaviors, counterproductive work behaviors, and career success) of overqualification. In addition, we review work done to date regarding the moderators and mediators of these relationships. Finally, we offer future directions for research.

Sexual harassment was once conceptualized solely as a sexual problem: coercive sexual advances that spring from natural feelings of sexual desire or romance. Research has since shown that by far the most common manifestation of sexual harassment is gender harassment, which has contempt at its core; this conduct aims to put people down and push them out, not pull them into sexual activity. With findings such as these, we have made many strides in the scientific study of sexual harassment. That body of scholarship is the focus of this article, which is organized around the following questions: What is sexual harassment, both behaviorally and legally? How common is this conduct in work organizations, and what are its consequences? What features of the social/organizational context raise the risk for sexual harassment? What are some promising (and not-so-promising) solutions to this pervasive problem? And finally, what are important directions for this area of research moving forward?

Item response theory (IRT) is a modeling approach that links responses to test items with underlying latent constructs through formalized statistical models. This article focuses on how IRT can be used to advance science and practice in organizations. We describe established applications of IRT as a scale development tool and new applications of IRT as a research and theory testing tool that enables organizational researchers to improve their understanding of workers and organizations. We focus on IRT models and their application in four key research and practice areas: testing, questionnaire responding, construct validation, and measurement equivalence of scores. In so doing, we highlight how novel developments in IRT such as explanatory IRT, multidimensional IRT, random item models, and more complex models of response processes such as ideal point models and tree models can potentially advance existing science and practice in these areas. As a starting point for readers interested in learning IRT and applying recent developments in IRT in their research, we provide concrete examples with data and R code.