Matthias Spitzmuller

Personality and citizenship behavior: the mediating role of job satisfaction.

Using meta-analytic path analysis, the authors tested several structural models linking agreeableness and conscientiousness to organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Results showed that the 2 personality traits had both direct effects and indirect effects-through job satisfaction-on overall OCB. Meta-analytic moderator analyses that distinguished between individual- and organization-targeted citizenship behaviors (OCB-I and OCB-O) showed that agreeableness was more closely related with OCB-I and conscientiousness with OCB-O. Finally, the path analyses predicting OCB-I and OCB-O offered further support for the general hypothesis that these 2 constructs are distinct. That is, the results of these analyses revealed that agreeableness had both direct and indirect effects on OCB-I but only indirect effects on OCB-O, and that for conscientiousness the pattern of direct and indirect effects was exactly opposite (direct and indirect effects on OCB-O but only indirect effects on OCB-I).

Advancing Our Understanding of Team Motivation Integrating Conceptual Approaches and Content Areas

Although research on team motivation has been one of the fastest growing research domains in organizational science, progress in this domain has been hampered by a lack of integrative reviews. Thus, we develop a theoretical framework in this article to summarize and discuss different conceptual approaches to team motivation for the following six content areas: team design, team needs, team goals, team self-regulation, team efficacy, and team affect. Our framework organizes previous research according to two dimensions. First, we assess the degree of interdependence between team members’ motivational states, differentiating between models that conceptualize team motivation as functionally equivalent to individual level motivation and models that conceptualize team motivation as a truly collective phenomenon. Second, we assess the extent to which research conceptualizes team motivation as a dynamic phenomenon that evolves over time, with static models of team motivation and dynamic models of team motivation demarcating the opposite ends of this continuum. With this framework, we show that previous research on team motivation has overemphasized conceptual similarities between motivation constructs at the individual and team levels of analysis. We address this shortcoming by developing a theory of interdependent regulatory dynamics. This theory emphasizes the interdependent and dynamic nature of team motivation. It depicts the processes in which team members decide how to allocate their efforts and resources between individual goals and team goals, and it identifies the multiple pathways through which teams coordinate and regulate their collective efforts over time.

Investigating the Uniqueness and Usefulness of Proactive Personality in Organizational Research: A Meta-Analytic Review

Using meta-analysis (283 effect sizes from 122 studies), we extend prior qualitative and quantitative reviews of research on proactive personality in a number of meaningful ways. First, we examine the discriminant and incremental validity of proactive personality using meta-analytic regression analyses. Our results reveal that more than 50% of variance in proactive personality is unrelated to the Big Five personality traits collectively. Also, proactive personality accounts for unique variance in overall job performance, task performance, and organizational citizenship behaviors, even after controlling for the Big Five personality traits and general mental ability (for overall job performance and task performance). Moreover, we find no subgroup differences in proactive personality, highlighting its potential use in selection contexts. In conclusion, we discuss implications of our findings for research and practice.

Pay Attention! The Liabilities of Respondent Experience and Carelessness When Making Job Analysis Judgments

Job analysis has a central role in virtually every aspect of HR and is one of several high performance work practices thought to underlie firm performance. Given its ubiquity and importance, it is not surprising that considerable effort has been devoted to developing comprehensive job analysis systems and methodologies. Yet, the complexity inherent in collecting detailed and specific “decomposed” information has led some to pursue “holistic” strategies designed to focus on more general and abstract job analysis information. It is not clear, however, if these two different strategies yield comparable information, nor if respondents are equally capable of generating equivalent information. Drawing from cognitive psychology research, we suggest that experienced and careless job analysis respondents are less likely to evidence convergence in their decomposed and holistic job analysis judgments. In a field sample of professional managers, we found that three different types of task-related work experience moderated the relationship between decomposed and holistic ratings, accounting for an average ΔR2 of 4.7%. Three other more general types of work experience, however, did not moderate this relationship, supporting predictions that only experience directly related to work tasks would prove to be a liability when making judgments. We also found that respondent carelessness moderated the relationship between decomposed and holistic ratings, accounting for an average ΔR2 of 6.2%. These results link cognitive limitations to important job analysis respondent differences and suggest a number of theoretical and practical implications when collecting holistic job analysis data.

Initial Expectations of Team Performance: Specious Speculation or Framing the Future?

This study demonstrates that the initial performance expectations of teams, formed even before members are very familiar with each other or the team’s task, are a key determinant of the team’s ultimate success. Specifically, we argue that such early formed beliefs determine the extent to which teams frame their task as a gain or loss context, which affects their orientation toward risk-taking. Our results suggest a self-fulfilling prophecy effect: Initial team performance expectations lead to the fulfillment of such expectations via risk-taking behavior. We also show that teams are less susceptible to this “risk-taking trap” to the extent that members have low avoidant or high dependent decision-making styles. We tested and found support for our predictions in a study of 540 individuals comprising 108 five-member teams working in a controlled environment. Our study contributes to theory on emergent states and decision biases in teams, and we offer a number of practical implications.

Terrorist teams as loosely coupled systems.

Acts of terrorism can be harrowing and cause extensive damage, yet they occur far too frequently. How do terrorist groups organize and coordinate their attacks? What makes those groups simultaneously cohesive and flexible in a hostile environment? Different academic disciplines have contributed to a better understanding of the proliferation of terrorist acts in recent years. With very few exceptions, however, extant psychological research on terrorism has almost exclusively focused on the individual terrorist. We leverage the team literature to better understand how a team of terrorists radicalizes, organizes, and makes decisions. Drawing from the work of Weick (1976), we characterize terrorist teams as loosely coupled systems. Examples of different terrorist attacks from the last 15 years illustrate how loose coupling in terrorist teams is especially powerful because of the high familiarity and intimacy among members of terrorist teams. Loosely coupled structures have led to highly adaptive and resilient teams whose actions are fluid, unpredictable, and often lethal. We conclude by discussing implications for counterterrorism and for future research.