Ann Chunyan Peng

Cognition-Based and Affect-Based Trust as Mediators of Leader Behavior Influences on Team Performance

We develop a model in which cognitive and affective trust in the leader mediate the relationship between leader behavior and team psychological states that, in turn, drive team performance. The model is tested on a sample of 191 financial services teams in Hong Kong and the U.S. Servant leadership influenced team performance through affect-based trust and team psychological safety. Transformational leadership influenced team performance indirectly through cognition-based trust. Cognition-based trust directly influenced team potency and indirectly (through affect-based trust) influenced team psychological safety. The effects of leader behavior on team performance were fully mediated through the trust in leader variables and the team psychological states. Servant leadership explained an additional 10% of the variance in team performance beyond the effect of transformational leadership. We discuss implications of these results for research on the relationship between leader behavior and team performance, and for efforts to enhance leader development by combining knowledge from different leadership theories.

Resilience to traumatic exposure among soldiers deployed in combat.

We examined the influence of positive psychological capital (PsyCap), a metaconstruct that combines established psychological predispositions to be resilient to stress, on the well-being of soldiers during combat deployment. Among U.S. Army personnel deployed in Iraq, cognitive appraisal of stress mediated the effects of trait PsyCap on health symptoms. The indirect effects through appraisal were moderated by levels of exposure to potentially traumatic stimuli. Trait PsyCap covaried more strongly with cognitive appraisals, and had stronger indirect effects through appraisal on health, among soldiers in units with higher levels of potentially traumatic exposures. We discuss implications for research on resilience to trauma in the workplace and for helping workers cope with potentially traumatic exposures.

Social face concerns and conflict avoidance of Chinese employees with their Western or Chinese managers

This study explores behavioral strategies in conflict avoidance and how they are related to social face concerns. One hundred and thirty-two Chinese employees recalled an incident where they avoided a conflict with their supervisors. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the categorization of yielding, outflanking, delay, and passive aggression as alternative approaches to avoiding conflict. Overall, other-face was positively associated with yielding and delay, whereas self-face was positively associated with passive aggression. The associations of social face concerns and avoidance were stronger among employees who interacted with Chinese managers compared with those working for Western managers. In conjunction with recent studies, findings challenge the traditional theorizing that the Chinese value of social face leads to passive avoidance.

Work-Family Balance, Role Integration and Employee Well-Being

Researchers have long been interested in understanding the antecedents of subjective well-being, which has been generally defined as “how people evaluate their lives” (Diener et al., 2003, p. 404). A number of studies have adopted a top-down approach to predicting subjective well-being, whereby a person’s dispositional characteristics influence the level of life satisfaction that the person experiences (see Heller et al., 2004). On the other hand, there is also evidence for a bottom-up process whereby a person’s levels of satisfaction with specific life domains (e.g., work, marriage, etc) are combined to form an overall level of satisfaction with one’s life in general (Heller et al., 2004).

Changing Experiences of Work Dirtiness, Occupational Disidentification, and Employee Withdrawal

Research and theory concerning “dirty work” has largely focused on how employees cope with stable features of their jobs. From a study of employees’ experiences across 6 weekly repeated measurements, we found that within-person increases in experienced dirtiness were positively related to their withdrawal behaviors and job change propensity indirectly through occupational disidentification. Assessed at the between-subjects level, team-oriented leadership moderated the indirect within-person effects of work dirtiness experiences on these outcomes. The relationships between elevations in experienced work dirtiness and occupational disidentification were more strongly positive at lower levels of team-oriented leadership. Analyses also showed that individuals’ perceptions of occupational stigma independently moderated the within-person relationship between experienced dirtiness and occupational disidentification. We discuss theoretical implications for the literature on dirty work and practical implications for mitigating the adverse outcomes associated with experienced work dirtiness.