Nikolaos Dimotakis

Are health and happiness the product of wisdom? The relationship of general mental ability to educational and occupational attainment, health, and well-being.

This study tested a structural model explaining the effects of general mental ability on economic, physical, and subjective well-being. A model was proposed that linked general mental ability to well-being using education, unhealthy behaviors (smoking and excessive drinking), occupational prestige, and health as mediating variables. The sample consisted of 398 individuals, from whom measures were collected across 4 periods. The results supported a model that includes direct and indirect (through unhealthy behaviors and occupational prestige) links from mental ability to physical well-being (i.e., health) and economic well-being. Furthermore, the results supported the relationships of economic well-being and physical well-being to subjective well-being. Overall, the study underscores the importance of general mental ability to work and nonwork outcomes, including physical, economic, and psychological well-being.

Team structure and regulatory focus: the impact of regulatory fit on team dynamic.

We report a within-teams experiment testing the effects of fit between team structure and regulatory task demands on task performance and satisfaction through average team member positive affect and helping behaviors. We used a completely crossed repeated-observations design in which 21 teams enacted 2 tasks with different regulatory focus characteristics (prevention and promotion) in 2 organizational structures (functional and divisional), resulting in 84 observations. Results suggested that salient regulatory demands inherent in the task interacted with structure to determine objective and subjective team-level outcomes, such that functional structures were best suited to (i.e., had best fit with) tasks with a prevention regulatory focus and divisional structures were best suited to tasks with a promotion regulatory focus. This contingency finding integrates regulatory focus and structural contingency theories, and extends them to the team level with implications for models of performance, satisfaction, and team dynamics.

Positive and negative assessment center feedback in relation to development self-efficacy, feedback seeking, and promotion.

In this field study we examined both positive and negative developmental feedback given in managerial assessment centers in relation to employees’ self-efficacy for their ability to improve their relevant skills assessed in the centers, the extent to which they sought subsequent feedback from others at work, and the career outcome of being promoted to a higher level position within the organization. We found that feedback was related to self-efficacy for improvement which was in turn positively related to feedback seeking, which was positively linked to the career outcome of promotion (e.g., feedback leads to self-efficacy for improvement leads to feedback seeking leads to promotion). In addition, we tested boundary variables for the effects of feedback in this model. Both social support for development and implicit theory of ability moderated the effects of negative feedback on self-efficacy. Having more support and believing that abilities can be improved buffered the detrimental impact of negative feedback on self-efficacy. We discuss implications for theory, future research and practical implications drawing upon literature on assessment centers, feedback and feedback seeking, employee development and career success.

Intentional negative behaviors at work

Intentional negative behaviors, under their various conceptualizations, have developed into a major area of study in the literature. Previous research has provided many interesting and valuable examinations of this phenomenon, examining a variety of factors such as individual differences, exogenous influences and affective and cognitive reactions to experienced events. Most of these approaches, however, have been limited by relatively static conceptualizations of intentional negative behaviors and their antecedents. After reviewing the previous literature, we offer an alternative, dynamic view of discrete episodes of said behaviors, and outline the ways in which this approach could help advance the field and address some of the limitations of previous research.