Jin Nam Choi

Links in the chain of adversity following job loss: how financial strain and loss of personal control lead to depression, impaired functioning, and poor health.

The authors tested hypotheses concerning risk mechanisms that follow involuntary job loss resulting in depression and the link between depression and poor health and functioning. A 2-year longitudinal study of 756 people experiencing job loss indicates that the critical mediating mechanisms in the chain of adversity from job loss to poor health and functioning are financial strain (FS) and a reduction in personal control (PC). FS mediates the relationship of job loss with depression and PC, whereas reduced PC mediates the adverse impacts of FS and depression on poor functioning and self-reports of poor health. Results suggest that loss of PC is a pathway through which economic adversity is transformed into chronic problems of poor health and impaired role and emotional functioning.

How Does Corporate Ethics Contribute to Firm Financial Performance? The Mediating Role of Collective Organizational Commitment and Organizational Citizenship Behavior

Despite the increasing significance of corporate ethics, few studies have explored the intermediate mechanisms that explain the relationship between corporate ethics and firm financial performance. Drawing on institutional theory and strategic human resource management literature, the authors hypothesize that the internal collective processes based on employees’ collective organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) mediate the ethics–performance relationship at the organizational level. The authors’ hypotheses are tested using data collected from 3,821 employees from 130 Korean companies and the respective companies’ financial performance data. The results indicate that collective organizational commitment and interpersonal OCB are meaningful intervening processes that connect corporate ethics to firm financial performance. To complement prior studies that identify a firm’s reputation and external relations as mediators between corporate ethics and performance, the present study highlights the need to examine microprocesses occurring within the organization to account for the ethics–firm performance relationship. Moreover, the present demonstration of collective organizational commitment and OCB as meaningful predictors of a firm’s objective performance indicates the significance of these employee processes in explaining organizational-level outcomes.

External Activities and Team Effectiveness: Review and Theoretical Development

With the emergence of new organizational forms such as team-based organizations, external activities have become a critical function for organizational teams. This article offers a theoretical framework that indicates when external activities enhance team effectiveness and explains how team-design features influence external activities. Drawing on structural contingency theory, this article proposes that the relationship between external activities and team effectiveness is moderated by a set of structural contingency factors, including environmental characteristics, external interdependence, temporal fluctuations in external demands, and task complexity. The framework also identifies a set of team characteristics, including team composition, group development, and leadership, that influences the level of external activities. The present model contributes to the group literature by identifying moderators and antecedents of external activities with respect to their effects on team effectiveness. It also suggests further issues and challenges that should guide future studies of external activities of organizational teams.

Contextual Inhibitors of Employee Creativity in Organizations The Insulating Role of Creative Ability

This study highlights the importance of negative predictors of employee creativity. The authors identified a set of work environment characteristics that may inhibit employee creativity. Using data collected from 123 Canadian employees in various industries, the authors empirically tested the relationships between these inhibiting factors and peer-rated creative performance. Aversive leadership and unsupportive organizational climate were negatively related to creativity, whereas close monitoring was positively associated with creativity. Interaction analyses indicate that creative ability of employees may either enhance or attenuate the detrimental effects of inhibitory contextual factors. Complementing the existing studies that have largely focused on facilitators of creativity, the present study introduces a more balanced perspective to the organizational creativity literature by examining inhibitory contextual factors.

Coauthorship Dynamics and Knowledge Capital: The Patterns of Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration in Information Systems Research

From the social network perspective, this study explores the ontological structure of knowledge sharing activities engaged in by researchers in the field of information systems (IS) over the past three decades. We construct a knowledge network based on coauthorship patterns extracted from four major journals in the IS field in order to analyze the distinctive characteristics of each subfield and to assess the amount of internal and external knowledge exchange that has taken place among IS researchers. This study also tests the role of different types of social capital that influence the academic impact of researchers. Our results indicate that the proportion of coauthored IS articles in the four journals has doubled over the past 25 years, from merely 40 percent in 1978 to over 80 percent in 2002. However, a significant variation exists in terms of the shape, density, and centralization of knowledge exchange networks across the four subfields of IS--namely, behavioral science, organizational science, computer science, and economic science. For example, the behavioral science subgroup, in terms of internal cohesion among researchers, tends to develop the most dense collaborative relationships, whereas the computer science subgroup is the most fragmented. Moreover, external collaboration across these subfields appears to be limited and severely unbalanced. Across the four subfields, on average, less than 20 percent of the research collaboration ties involved researchers from different subdisciplines. Finally, the regression analysis reveals that knowledge capital derived from a network rich in structural holes has a positive influence on an individual researchers academic performance.

Do organizations spend wisely on employees? Effects of training and development investments on learning and innovation in organizations

The present study examines the effects of training and development on organizational innovation. We specifically suggest that the training and development investments of an organization affect its innovative performance by promoting various learning practices. We empirically tested our hypothesis by using time-lagged, multi-source data collected from 260 Korean companies that represent diverse industries. Our analysis showed that corporate expenditure for internal training predicts interpersonal and organizational learning practices, which, in turn, increase innovative performance. The data also revealed that the positive relationship between interpersonal and organizational learning practices and innovative performance is stronger within organizations that have stronger innovative climates. By contrast, investment in employee development through financial support for education outside an organization poses a significant negative effect on its innovative performance and no significant effect on learning practices. The present study provides a plausible explanation for a mechanism through which the investment of an organization in employees enhances its innovative performance. Copyright

Why not procrastinate? Development and validation of a new active procrastination scale.

Procrastination has been studied as a dysfunctional, self-effacing behavior that ultimately results in undesirable outcomes. However, A. H. C. Chu and J. N. Choi (2005) found a different form of procrastination (i.e., active procrastination) that leads to desirable outcomes. The construct of active procrastination has a high potential to expand the time management literature and is likely to be adopted by researchers in multiple areas of psychology. To facilitate the research on this new construct and its further integration into the literature, the authors developed and validated a new, expanded measure of active procrastination that reliably assesses its four dimensions. Using this new measure of active procrastination, they further examined its nomological network. The new 16-item measure is a critical step toward further empirical investigation of active procrastination.

Multilevel and Cross-Level Effects of Workplace Attitudes and Group Member Relations on Interpersonal Helping Behavior.

Scholars have consistently identified contextual performance or organizational citizenship behavior as a core component of job performance. The current literature on this issue has been dominated by a single-level approach, typically conducted at the individual level of analysis. This study adopts a multilevel approach to simultaneously examine main effects of and cross-level interactions among individual- and group-level predictors of interpersonal helping behavior. Results from a large-scale longitudinal data set show that at the individual level, helping behavior was predicted by perceived organizational support (POS), fairness, and affective commitment. At the group level, helping behavior was predicted by trust among group members. Trust among members also significantly moderated the individual-level relationships between POS and helping behavior and between fairness and helping. These crosslevel moderations indicated that the group- and individual-level predictors were complementary (instead of mutually reinforcing) in predicting interpersonal helping behavior. This finding indicates that various antecedents of interpersonal helping are characterized by distinct dynamics at the individual and group levels of analysis.

Person–Environment Fit and Creative Behavior: Differential Impacts of Supplies–Values and Demands–Abilities Versions of Fit

Numerous studies that have demonstrated interaction effects between individual and contextual factors suggest the potential positive effect of congruent personal and environmental characteristics on creativity. None of the prior studies, however, has explicitly and systematically tested the formal theory of person–environment fit in the context of creativity. This study examined the effects of two versions of person–environment fit (supplies–values and demands–abilities fit) on creative behavior and context satisfaction. The results, based on longitudinal data collected from management students and their instructors, showed that creative behavior was almost exclusively predicted by personal characteristics (desire for creative climate, actual creative abilities), whereas context satisfaction was strongly influenced by environmental characteristics (current creative climate, required creative abilities). The present results indicate a potential division of roles between personal and environmental characteristics with respect to affective and behavioral outcomes. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

The Organizational Application of Groupthink and Its Limitations in Organizations

This study examined groupthink and team activities in 30 organizational teams faced with impending crises. The results show that the groupthink symptoms consisted of 2 factors. Surprisingly, 1 factor of groupthink was significantly and positively related to team performance, whereas the other showed an insignificant negative correlation to performance. Moreover, the symptoms of detective decision making were not significant predictors of team performance. Overall, team activities had a stronger impact on performance than groupthink. The results imply that groupthink may have an indirect effect on performance mediated by team activities. This study demonstrates the potential positive implications of groupthink in organizational teams and raises a question about the empirical coherence of groupthink as a phenomenon.