Scott E. Seibert

A Social Capital Theory of Career Success

A model integrating competing theories of social capital with research on career success was developed and tested in a sample of 448 employees with various occupations and organizations. Social capital was conceptualized in terms of network structure and social resources. Results of structural equation modeling showed that network structure was related to social resources and that the effects of social resources on career success were fully mediated by three network benefits: access to information, access to resources, and career sponsorship.

The Big Five Personality Dimensions and Entrepreneurial Status: A Meta-Analytical Review

In this study, the authors used meta-analytical techniques to examine the relationship between personality and entrepreneurial status. Personality variables used in previous studies were categorized according to the five-factor model of personality. Results indicate significant differences between entrepreneurs and managers on 4 personality dimensions such that entrepreneurs scored higher on Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience and lower on Neuroticism and Agreeableness. No difference was found for Extraversion. Effect sizes for each personality dimension were small, although the multivariate relationship for the full set of personality variables was moderate (R = .37). Considerable heterogeneity existed for all of the personality variables except Agreeableness, suggesting that future research should explore possible moderators of the personality-entrepreneurial status relationship.

Taking Empowerment to the Next Level: A Multiple-Level Model of Empowerment, Performance, and Satisfaction

Most research to date has approached employee empowerment as an individual-level phenomenon. In this study we proposed a work-unit-level construct, empowerment climate, and tested a multiple-level model integrating macro and micro approaches to empowerment. Empowerment climate was shown to be empirically distinct from psychological empowerment and positively related to manager ratings of work-unit performance. A cross-level mediation analysis using hierarchical linear modeling showed that psychological empowerment mediated the relationships between empowerment climate and individual performance and job satisfaction.

The Relationship of Personality to Entrepreneurial Intentions and Performance: A Meta-Analytic Review:

A set of meta-analyses were conducted to examine the relationship of personality to outcomes associated with two different stages of the entrepreneurial process: entrepreneurial intentions and entrepreneurial performance. A broad range of personality scales were categorized into a parsimonious set of constructs using the Five Factor model of personality. The results show that four of the Big Five personality dimensions were associated with both dependent variables, with agreeableness failing to be associated with either. Multivariate effect sizes were moderate for the full set of Big Five personality variables on entrepreneurial intentions (multiple R = .36) and entrepreneurial performance (multiple R = .31). Risk propensity, included as a separate dimension of personality, was positively associated with entrepreneurial intentions but was not related to entrepreneurial performance. These effects suggest that personality plays a role in the emergence and success of entrepreneurs.

Antecedents and consequences of psychological and team empowerment in organizations: a meta-analytic review.

This paper provides meta-analytic support for an integrated model specifying the antecedents and consequences of psychological and team empowerment. Results indicate that contextual antecedent constructs representing perceived high-performance managerial practices, socio-political support, leadership, and work characteristics are each strongly related to psychological empowerment. Positive self-evaluation traits are related to psychological empowerment and are as strongly related as the contextual factors. Psychological empowerment is in turn positively associated with a broad range of employee outcomes, including job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and task and contextual performance, and is negatively associated with employee strain and turnover intentions. Team empowerment is positively related to team performance. Further, the magnitude of parallel antecedent and outcome relationships at the individual and team levels is statistically indistinguishable, demonstrating the generalizability of empowerment theory across these 2 levels of analysis. A series of analyses also demonstrates the validity of psychological empowerment as a unitary second-order construct. Implications and future directions for empowerment research and theory are discussed.

Psychological Empowerment as a Multidimensional Construct: A Test of Construct Validity.

The construct validity of scores on Spreitzer’s Psychological Empowerment scale was examined. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of data from a sample of 160 nurses showed substantial support for Spreitzer’s four empowerment dimensions: meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact. In contrast to Spreitzer’s findings, the results of this study indicated that self-determination is a precursor of impact. This finding was cross-validated with data from a subset of the same sample 1 year later, after implementation of a job redesign program. In addition, results from structural equation modeling (SEM) demonstrated job characteristics to relate differentially to the empowerment dimensions, providing evidence for both convergent and discriminant validity of scores on the four empowerment dimensions. Finally, this study found that the four empowerment dimensions differentially related to organizational commitment and career intentions, providing evidence for the predictive validity of the Empowerment scale scores.

Chapter 1 Synthesizing What We Know and Looking Ahead: A Meta-Analytical Review of 30 Years of Emotional Labor Research

The purpose of the current chapter is to meta-analytically examine the nomological network around emotional labor. The results show that negative display rules, high level of job demand, frequent contacts with customers, and lack of autonomy and social support are significantly related to surface acting, whereas display rules, opportunities to display various emotions, and frequent, intensive, and long time contacts with customers are significantly related to deep acting. Further, people high on negative affectivity and neuroticism are more likely to surface act, whereas people high on positive affectivity and extraversion are more likely to deep act. In addition, surface acting is mainly associated with undesirable work outcomes, whereas deep acting is mainly related to desirable work outcomes.

The Role of Research Strategies and Professional Networks in Management Scholars’ Productivity

We propose a model of knowledge creation, transfer, and adoption based on theories of creativity and social networks. We test our hypotheses using a sample of 119 full professors in management departments at U.S. universities. We examine the effects that two research strategies, coauthoring and working in multiple research fields, have on the number of publications in each of three journal quality tiers during an 8-year period. In addition, we examined the influence that having strong ties and a dense network of professional colleagues each has on the total number of citations garnered by those publications. Results showed a heterogeneous pattern of coauthoring (distributing coauthoring activity evenly across a greater number of coauthors) is positively related to the number of publications in the highest-quality journals for the focal researcher. The heterogeneity of research fields in which a researcher works is also positively related to greater productivity, albeit in second- and third-tier publication outlets. In addition, we found that the number of strong ties in the focal author’s professional support network positively related to his or her total citation count, independent of the number and quality of publications. Implications for the social network theory of creativity, organizational knowledge theory, and models of management scholars’ productivity are explored.

Implementing and Sustaining Empowerment Lessons Learned from Comparison of a For-Profit and a Nonprofit Organization

This article explores the experiences of two organizations, one nonprofit and the other forprofit, seeking to create a culture of empowerment. Both organizations make a strong start and achieve significant change that is reflected in qualitative observations, quantitative measures of empowerment, and organizational performance results. The for-profit organization manages to sustain ongoing change in the direction of greater empowerment; however, the nonprofit loses focus and eventually drops the change effort. The article compares the two cases paying particular attention to contextual factors to better understand what may have lead to the different outcomes and then closes with ten lessons for sustaining empowerment efforts.

Measuring Career Orientations in the Era of the Boundaryless Career

Schein proposed his career anchor construct more than 40 years ago. The purpose of our research is to use current career theory perspectives to reconceptualize and develop a measure that is grounded in the career anchor framework but better reflects the boundaryless nature of careers today. We conducted two studies in which we develop and validate a measure of career orientation by examining its internal structure (Study 1) and external validity within a nomological network of conceptually related variables (Study 2). Results suggest that career orientation is best represented by a six-dimension factor structure: entrepreneurial creativity, security, managerial competence, lifestyle, technical competence, and service to a cause. Five of the six factors that emerged were correlated as expected with proactive personality, ambition, career self-management behaviors, mentoring relationships, and workplace attitudes, providing support for our conceptualization and measure of career orientation. The implications for both theory and practice are discussed.