Mixed Blessings In Organizational Behavior

TENG IAT LOI

doi:10.7273/000002478

This three-essay dissertation investigates the potential side effects of positive organizational behavior and practice, as well as the conditions under which these side effects are more or less likely to occur. In the first essay, I examine when and why leader’s prevention focus can lead to abusive behavior. While leaders with a prevention focus (i.e., conservative mindset) are determined to avoid mistakes, regulatory focus and ego-depletion theories suggest it may have unintended and undesirable outcomes. Two multi-wave survey studies support my predictions that adopting a prevention focus increases mental fatigue, which in turn is associated with more abusive supervision. This effect is moderated, however, by the supervisor’s trait positive affectivity (e.g., enthusiasm, energy, confidence). That is, leaders high in positive affect appear to be immune to this effect. The second essay focuses on the negative effects of employee volunteering. Because volunteering is considered altruistic in nature, the dark side of volunteering has received little attention. Drawing from the moral licensing and organizational justice literatures, I conducted two studies and found that volunteering is positively related to workplace deviance via increased moral credits (i.e., people often behave as if they have a moral bank account, such that performing good deeds provides credit whereas bad deeds withdraws credit), and employee with moral credits feel entitled to have earned the psychological license to subsequently act badly. However, when organizational justice is high, the effect between employee volunteering and workplace deviance weakens. The third essay is about organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). I draw on ego depletion theory and propose conditions under which OCBs negatively affect job performance. Results from two studies support my hypotheses that employees working in an environment of high citizenship pressure feel mentally exhausted after engaging in OCBs, which in turn decreases their subsequent job performance. These effects are significantly weaker among employees with high trait resilience.

Mixed Blessings In Organizational Behavior

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