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The sociocultural perspective on social class holds that people from the working class (vs. middle and higher class) show more prosocial behavior because they have an interdependent self-construal (i.e., understanding the self as connected to others). This perspective, however, is challenged by numerous other studies that find that social class is positively related to prosocial behavior, arguing that prosocial behavior requires economic resources. Against this background, in an effort to integrate the disconnected sociocultural and economic perspectives on social class, we argue that both are true, but that (a) sociocultural and economic aspects of social class differently influence the extent to which people from the working class engage in prosocial behaviors, and that (b) these influences differ depending on the situation. Specifically, when directly interacting with someone in need, the interdependent self-construal of people from the working class prompts them to help, but when doing so involves monetary costs, limited economic resources constrain their ability to help. We present three complementary studies—a meta-analysis, an archival data analysis, and an experiment—to support our theorizing. Together, these findings provide an integrated picture of when and why social class is associated with prosocial behaviors.
Despite extensive research streams on leadership and team processes, there is a surprising paucity of studies at their intersection. Both research streams share an increasing attention to the social interactions at the core of these phenomena. Leveraging this behavioral lens, this study draws on respectful inquiry theory to explore how specific leader communication behaviors affect team interaction dynamics during decision-making, as one important team process. We conducted a laboratory study with 22 four-person teams and a confederate leader who engaged in a hidden profile task in a personnel selection scenario. We manipulated the leader’s question asking behavior (open questions vs. statements only) and listening behavior (listening attentively vs. not listening) and randomly assigned teams to one of the four conditions. Team interactions were video-recorded and analyzed at the micro-level of communication. Specifically, we explored how leader communicative behaviors affected (1) the quality of team decision-making, (2) the conversational structure (via speaker turns), and (3) constructive communication patterns. We found that team’s yielded the lowest performance in the “disrespectful inquiry”-condition (i.e., asking questions but not listening). This condition was also characterized by increased levels of interaction amongst team members that could be interpreted as an attempt to compensate for the lack of functional leadership. By adopting a consistent, micro-level behavioral perspective, our findings bridge the literature of leadership and team interactions and suggest an update to extant theorizing on leadership substitutions.
This study advances and tests a micro-foundations model that reveals when and how corporate social responsibility (CSR) will enhance organizational innovation. Challenging the prevalent assumption that CSR uniformly leads to positive outcomes, we posit that the impact of CSR on innovation is contingent upon the interplay between employee-level psychological processes and organizational-level factors. Specifically, we argue that under conditions of good internal organizational communication, CSR facilitates employees' intrinsic motivation. Then, this motivation can increase organizational-level innovation, but only if employees are also allowed to thrive, when they are psychologically empowered. We examine the multi-level model by utilizing a 4-wave, time-lagged data from one of the largest Korean commercial banks, featuring 2545 employees across 379 branches. The data consist of both survey data and centrally audited CSR data. The results of the analyses bolster our hypotheses, but also highlight unexpected backlash effects where CSR negatively affects organizational innovation. Our findings contribute to the CSR literature by unveiling the complex micro-level mechanisms and boundary conditions that shape the CSR-innovation relationship, thereby addressing the inconsistencies in previous research. Practically, our study suggests that managers should carefully align their CSR initiatives with internal communication strategies and employee empowerment practices to foster innovation. Failing to do so may inadvertently undermine the very outcomes CSR is intended to promote. These insights also speak to the ongoing debate on the role of CSR in driving organizational competitiveness and social impact, underlining the need for a more nuanced and contextualized understanding of CSR's effects. In sum, our results facilitate the integration of previously disparate literatures, while simultaneously also underlining that CSR efforts need to be orchestrated with other improvements if any innovation benefits are to be reaped.
Studies have shown that anomie, that is, the perception that a society's leadership and social fabric are breaking down, is a central predictor of individuals' support for authoritarianism. However, causal evidence for this relationship is missing. Moreover, previous studies are ambiguous regarding the mediating mechanism and lack empirical tests for the same. Against this background, we derive a set of integrative hypotheses: First, we argue that perceptions of anomie lead to a perceived lack of political control. The repeated failure to exert control in the political sphere leads to feelings of uncertainty about the functioning and meaning of the political world. This uncertainty heightens people's susceptibility to authoritarianism because, we argue, the latter promises a sense of order, meaning, and the guidance of a "strong leader." We support our hypothesis in a large-scale field study with a representative sample of the German population (N = 1,504) while statistically ruling out alternative explanations. Adding internal validity, we provide causal evidence for each path in our sequential mediation hypothesis in three preregistered, controlled experiments (conducted in the United States, total N = 846). Our insights may support policymakers in addressing the negative political consequences of anomie. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
Leadership is critical to any enterprise, raising the question of when managerial leadership is accepted—specifically, whether managers communicate in ways that earn employee endorsement. The claiming and granting framework suggests managers can claim leadership, but employees may or may not grant it. Yet most research relies on retrospective evaluations and overlooks actual verbal behaviors. Moreover, responses to leadership claims likely depend on a manager's demographics, particularly age and gender. While studies often examine these cues in isolation, their interplay matters. To explore this, we fine-coded 37,277 verbal behaviors from 68 manager-employee dyads during workplace meetings. Male and female managers claimed leadership equally often. However, for female managers younger than their employees, claiming leadership was linked to lower post-meeting endorsement—but not to in-meeting granting. In contrast, older female managers received the highest post-meeting endorsement across all age-gender constellations when claiming leadership. For male managers claiming leadership, age was unrelated to endorsement. These findings highlight how subtle gender and age biases shape leadership acceptance: younger female managers, in particular, may face undermined authority without overt resistance. Raising awareness of these dynamics is key to fostering equitable leadership recognition.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how research is conceived, executed, published, and shared. This editorial examines the “elephant in the room”: the integration of AI across every stage of the research life cycle and publication pipeline. We trace AI’s expanding footprint on the author side, from sparking novel research ideas, mapping literature, and designing studies, to simulating data, analyzing results, and drafting manuscripts. We also consider AI’s growing role on the journal side, including automated manuscript triage, AI-assisted peer review, decision synthesis, and revision checks. And we discuss AI’s impact on research dissemination. Throughout, we highlight not only the unprecedented opportunities for creativity, efficiency, and accessibility, but also the ethical risks, such as epistemic homogenization, challenges to accountability, and the loss of scholarly craft. We urge researchers, editors, and institutions not to fall into the false binary of blind optimism or blanket skepticism. Instead, we call for deliberate engagement: a principled, transparent, and reflexive partnership between human scholars and machine collaborators. The question is no longer whether we want AI to shape the future of scholarship—it already is. The challenge now is to ensure that what it amplifies is not only our productivity, but our judgment, imagination, and collective responsibility in knowledge creation and dissemination.
In this essay, our analysis takes important insights on diversity and inclusion from the behavioral literature but critically contextualizes them against the reality of humanitarian operations. Humanitarian operations are characterized by system immanent diversity, particularly between local and expatriate aid workers, who not only bring valuable different perspectives to the table but also differ along multiple dimensions of diversity into a so-called diversity faultline. Such a faultline, however, provides fertile ground for continued conflict resulting in relational fractures and, ultimately, inefficient collaboration. While, in theory, inclusion could help overcome the negative effects of faultlines, in practice, the time pressure for humanitarian organizations to quickly respond to disasters makes it effectively impossible to engage in it. Against this background, we argue, humanitarian organizations should take preemptive action before disaster strikes. Specifically, we posit that the pre-disaster phase presents an opportunity to engage in inclusion in order to cultivate relational resilience between local and expatriate aid workers. Such resilience would enable them to not only better weather the inevitable relational fractures during a disaster response (and thus stay more functional throughout), but also quickly realign with each other in the post-disaster phase. We conclude with a set of concrete recommendations for practicing inclusion in the pre-disaster phase.
We challenge the assumption that employee flourishing is automatically beneficial to both the organization and wider society. To this end, firstly, we posit that flourishing needs to be bound by some sort of moral guide in order to mitigate unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB). Study 1 (N = 170) supports our proposed moderation hypothesis in that flourishing was related to more willingness to engage in UPB the less central morality was to employees’ identity. Secondly, we posit careerism as a mechanism between flourishing (in interaction with moral centrality) and UPB. Study 2 (N = 208) supports the predicted moderated mediation hypothesis. In a final study, we consider the relevance of context. Specifically, we suggest that internal moral guidance (in the form of moral centrality) will result in lower careerism and hence lower UPB, but only if not overridden by the pressures of a perceived self-interested organizational climate. Study 3 (N = 208) reports evidence consistent with our moderation mediation hypothesis. Overall, we make the case that flourishing needs morality to rein it in. Only then will flourishing represent the original Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia that modern positive psychology wants to promote.
Communication sits at the heart of any coordination within organization. Yet, what are the consequences when employes use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to copilot, i.e., support, their communication? While AI support in human interactions holds much promise for improving communication quality at work, it also fundamentally challenges how much people trust that communication. We, therefore, ask how organizations should introduce AI. In particular, we focus on the responsibility of leaders as stewards of workplace communication. Accordingly, we offer a set of specific hands-on recommendations on how employes should be guided to use AI copiloting effectively so that they do not give in to the temptation of letting go of the “steering wheel” (i.e., allowing AI to [auto]pilot intraorganizational communication).
Immer mehr Unternehmen akzeptieren, dass Manager und Managerinnen sich in der Mitarbeitendenführung durch Künstliche Intelligenz unterstützen lassen. Doch moderne Führung kann nicht nur durch algorithmusbasierte Datenauswertung verbessert werden. Vielmehr übernimmt Künstliche Intelligenz zukünftig eigenständig Führungsaufgaben, und das umfänglich. Diese Entwicklung muss nicht Angst machen, sollte aber gestaltet werden.
Our field has lost its way. Leadership is what people do in order to influence others so that the others can and will contribute to the objectives of the collective. And yet, when looking at recent leadership research, the “what people do” – the behavioral elements as shown in true actions and choices – are almost completely absent. They have been replaced by evaluative surveys that tend to have tenuous links to reality and correspondingly limited policy implications. If our discipline is to advance as a science and achieve impact, we need to move beyond the ritualized use of questionnaires and become true behavioral scientists, with behaviors as the fundamental units of our understanding. Against this background, in this editorial we discuss the theoretical, operational, and empirical limitations of questionnaires for studying leadership. We then highlight examples of how researchers can better measure leadership as behaviors, as well as antecedents and consequences of those behaviors. We synthesize the discussion and offer concrete recommendations to help our discipline become what it is supposed to be: A science that people look to in order to find actionable guidance for improving their leadership.
Was im Englischen „Kiss-up-kick-down“ genannt wird, kennt man hierzulande als das Fahrradfahrer-Prinzip: nach oben buckeln und nach unten treten. Es ist weit verbreitet, gerade im mittleren Management. Aber warum machen die das? Und noch wichtiger: Was kann man dagegen tun?
Although leadership is constructed over time in interactions between managers and their employees, respective leadership claiming and granting behaviors are empirically only considered as static snapshots measured via surveys. This completely ignores the dynamic nature of the leadership process. Drawing on entrainment theory, we put forth that distinct patterns of leadership claiming and granting are likely to unfold throughout a manager-employee interaction. To this end, we use interaction coding to capture verbal leadership claiming and granting behaviors of both interaction partners (manager and employee) in 103 workplace meetings (37,011 interaction points) and compute a relational influence index that reflects the development of the conversational dynamics. Graphical analysis of our data reveals five clearly distinguishable entrainment types, i.e., distinct entrainment patterns of how leadership between managers and employees evolves over time. We discuss how our research advances theoretical perspectives on patterns of behavioral leadership dynamics as well as the power distribution between managers and employees. We end with future research suggestions such as further validating the five entrainment types.
Humor research in organizations focuses on leaders’ humor, but we know far less about followers’ humor. Here, we review and synthesize the scattered work on this "upward humor," offering a novel framing of it as a strategy for followers to deal with hierarchies. We propose a continuum of upward humor from stabilizing (i.e., a friend who uses upward humor to reinforce hierarchies, make hierarchies more bearable or stable) to destabilizing (i.e., a fiend who uses upward humor to question or reshape existing hierarchies) depending on perceived intent (i.e., from benevolent to malicious, respectively) and outline key factors that shape these interpretations. We close with novel questions and methods for future research such as power plays, multi-modal data, and human-robot interactions.
A common explanation for the success of populists is that they rhetorically shift blame for their followers' hardships toward “elites,” therefore creating a culpable outgroup. However, we argue that there are two confounded ef-fects at play here: shifting blame toward an outgroup and shifting blame away from oneself. Therefore, we theorize that above and beyond elite blame, victimization rhetoric heightens leader support because it specifically relieves followers of the pressure of having to take responsibility for negative life outcomes, especially when they subscribe to neoliberal competition ideology. Supporting our pre-dictions, we show via a survey that victim rhetoric in-creases leader support while controlling for elite blame, especially among people subscribing to neoliberal compe-tition ideology. In a subsequent experiment, we replicate the findings causally and show that the effect works by reducing perceived personal responsibility for negative life outcomes. Our results indicate that populist rheto-ric involves shifting blame toward others and away from oneself. This can explain some of the conundrums that have plagued the literature, such as why elites also fall for populist rhetoric. We discuss our findings in relation to cultural differences and differences in left- versus right- wing populism.
Beneath the verbosity of modern leadership theories, there is a simple truth: Leading people is essentially about communication. The respective communicative philosophies underlying leadership theories can be broadly separated into two camps: One arguing that leaders should tell-and-sell and one urging leaders to ask-and-listen. In the present essay, we first define the two communication approaches. Second, we outline how both approaches manage to engage subordinates but in different ways. Third, we review the appropriateness of each of these communication approaches under different circumstances, outlining why communicative flexibility is needed. Lastly, despite the advantages, we discuss that leaders will struggle to adopt communicative flexibility due to widespread simplistic leadership schemas – in research and practice.
There is an emerging consensus that traditional management roles could—and maybe should—be performed by machines infused with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Yet, “true” leadership—that is, motivating and enabling people so that they can and will contribute to the collective goals of an organization—is still predominantly viewed as the prerogative of humans. With our opinion piece, we challenge this perspective. Our essay aims to be a wake-up call for large parts of academia and practice that romanticize human leadership and think that this bastion can never be overtaken by AI. We delineate why algorithms will not (need to) come to a halt before core characteristics of leadership and potentially cater better to employees’ psychological needs than human leaders. Against this background, conscious choices need to be made about what role humans are to play in the future of leadership. These considerations hold significant implications for the future of not only leadership research but also leadership education and development.
In diesem Kapitel beleuchten wir das – für das Verhältnis zwischen Führungskräften und ihren Mitarbeitenden – zentrale Thema des Respekts. Dabei unterscheiden wir zwischen respektvoller und respektierter Führung: Bei respektvoller Führung geht es darum, Mitarbeitenden trotz Hierarchieunterschieds auf Augenhöhe zu begegnen. Bei respektierter Führung geht es darum, dass Führungskräfte von ihren Mitarbeitenden Respekt für ihre Fähigkeiten und Leistungen erhalten. Wir zeigen, welche Konsequenzen Führung in Bezug auf beide Respektformen hat und wie sie zustande kommt bzw. sich fördern lässt.
There are myriad organizational anecdotes about middle managers who advance their careers by ingratiating themselves with their superiors while exploiting and abusing their subordinates. We formally define this behavioral combination as the Kiss-Up-Kick-Down (KUKD) phenomenon and develop a resource-focused framework that not only explains when middle managers will engage in KUKD, but also how such behavior helps their career progression via three resource-related pathways: One path involving sponsorship resource gains from superiors, another path involving productive resource gains from subordinates, and an intra-individual path related to middle managers’ own psychological resources. Staying within the resource framework, we theorize that superiors and subordinates become likely targets of KUKD when the former is resource-poor and the latter is resource-rich. Finally, we deliberate on the role of time as a crucial boundary condition: not only in terms of when middle managers engage in KUKD behaviors, but also how such actions involve diminishing returns.
