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Personnel Psychology Award Winning Papers

  • 1.  Personnel Psychology Award Winning Papers

    Posted 08-15-2022 18:01


    Dear OB Division Colleagues,

    It is my great pleasure to announce Personnel Psychology award-winning papers for this year. All papers listed below are currently free to read. We hope you enjoy them!

    Personnel Psychology Best Paper Award:

    We selected our best paper award recipient among the papers we published in 2020. The winner of the award and the two finalists are listed below:

    Winner:

    Connie R. Wanberg, Edwin A. J. van Hooft, Songqi Liu, & Borbala Csillag (2020). Can job seekers achieve more through networking? The role of networking intensity, self-efficacy, and proximal benefits. Personnel Psychology, 73, 559-585.


    The authors develop and evaluate an online networking intervention, Building Relationships and Improving Opportunities (BRIO), built in conjunction with the networking literature and social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986, 1999). A field experiment using 491 unemployed job seekers shows that the intervention increases networking intensity, networking self-efficacy, and proximal networking benefits. Further, the intervention generates higher quality reemployment through its positive effects on networking self-efficacy. Individuals who completed the intervention and were also lower in extraversion showed the most positive improvements in networking self-efficacy and reemployment quality. The study advances the literature by uncovering the mechanisms through which a networking intervention may result in improved reemployment success, and demonstrating the moderating role of individual differences in affecting intervention outcomes. The study helps practice by providing a publicly available, research-based training to improve job search networking.


    Finalists:

    Joel Koopman, Christopher C. Rosen, Allison S. Gabriel, Harshad Puranik, Russell E. Johnson, D., & Lance Ferris (2020). Why and for whom does the pressure to help hurt others? Affective and cognitive mechanisms linking helping pressure to workplace deviance. Personnel Psychology, 73, 333-362.

    Scholars are paying increasing attention to the "dark side" of citizenship behavior. One aspect of this dark side that has received relatively scant attention is "helping pressure"-an employee's perception that s/he is being encouraged to, or otherwise feels that s/he should, enact helping behavior at work. Drawing from theory associated with work stress, we examine affective and cognitive mechanisms that potentially explain why helping pressure, counterintuitively, may lead employees to engage in deviant behavior instead. Beyond examining these possible mechanisms, we also answer calls to identify a potential buffer to these effects. Drawing from self-determination theory, we examine how an employee's intrinsic motivation for citizenship may lessen the deleterious consequences of helping pressure at work. In two studies (a within-individual experience-sampling study and a two-wave between-individual study), we find consistent evidence that helping pressure has a positive indirect relationship with deviant behavior through increased negative affect. Further, we find evidence that intrinsic motivation for citizenship weakens the positive relationship of helping pressure with negative affect, buffering the indirect effect on subsequent deviant behavior. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings for the study of helping pressure at work are discussed.


    Maribeth Kuenzi, David M. Mayer, & Rebecca L. Greenbaum (2020). Creating an ethical organizational environment: The relationship between ethical leadership, ethical organizational climate, and unethical behavior. Personnel Psychology, 73, 43-71.

    The purpose of this research is to provide a richer lens on the ethical organizational environment by examining the relationship between ethical leadership and unit-level unethical behavior through ethical organizational climate (EOC), with collective moral identity as a boundary condition. In testing our theoretical model, we first develop and validate a measure of EOC to address concerns with existing measures of ethical climate. Second, we examine the role of collective moral identity as a moderator of the relationship between EOC and unit unethical behavior. We discuss implications regarding the importance of developing a more comprehensive conceptualization of EOC.

     

    AOM HR Division Scholarly Achievement Award:

    It was our great pleasure to learn that Academy of Management's HR division awarded their best paper award to an article published in Personnel Psychology:


    Lynn A. McFarland, & Youngsang Kim (2020). An examination of the relationship between applicant race and accrued recruitment source information: Implications for applicant withdrawal and test performance. Personnel Psychology, 74, 831-861.

    We examine the role of accrued recruitment source diagnosticity (i.e., cumulative information from recruitment sources) and show its importance in enhancing diversity in recruitment and selection. First, based on social network and homophily theories, we propose that racial minority candidates will be less likely to use diagnostic recruitment sources, and this lack of use contributes to less organizational attraction and greater withdrawal. Second, based on the realism hypothesis, we theorize that racial differences in accrued recruitment source diagnosticity contribute (in part) to racial differences in selection test performance. Using a sample of candidates in a high-stakes selection context, we find that White applicants are significantly more likely to use the most diagnostic sources (compared to non-Whites). Further, applicants with higher accrued recruitment source diagnosticity show greater organizational attraction (before and after testing), withdraw from the hiring process in fewer numbers, and perform significantly better on the selection tests. Altogether, these findings have important theoretical implications because they identify a fairly neglected determinant of recruitment and selection outcomes (accrued recruitment source diagnosticity) and may yield practical implications by suggesting actionable ways organizations can help reduce subgroup differences and enhance diversity.

     



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    Berrin Erdogan, Ph. D.
    Editor-in-Chief, Personnel Psychology
    Express Employment Professionals Professor
    The School of Business
    Portland State University
    berrine@pdx.edu
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