Timothy P. Munyon

Coexisting Agency and Stewardship Governance in Family Firms: An Empirical Investigation of Individual-Level and Firm-Level Effects:

This article theoretically and empirically intertwines agency and stewardship theories to examine their distinct and combined influences on family firms. Primary matched triadic data from CEOs, family employees, and nonfamily employees in 77 family firms suggest that agency and stewardship governance affects individual-level behavior and firm-level performance. Specifically, agent behavior is highest under conditions of coexisting low agency governance and high stewardship governance and is lowest when agency and stewardship governance coexist at high levels. Furthermore, when high levels of agency and stewardship governance coexist, family firm performance is the highest. Theoretical implications and future research directions are discussed.

More Than Meets the Eye: A Review and Future Directions for the Social Psychology of Socioemotional Wealth:

Socioemotional wealth (SEW) research has been criticized for not directly assessing the locus and drivers of family members’ SEW. We propose that a social psychological approach to SEW can help address these concerns, conducting analyses on 421 articles published across 25 journals during the first decade of SEW research. We therefore assess how SEW has been used and identify various inherent complexities that SEW poses for researchers. Altogether, our analyses afford us opportunities to better understand SEW scholarship’s social psychological roots and to propose an agenda that can help further build and extend the psychological microfoundations of family firms.

Overcoming the Help-Seeker’s Dilemma: How Computer-Mediated Systems Encourage Employee Help-Seeking Initiation

Helping processes are critical for organizations. Yet, research suggests that there are strong disincentives for employees to seek help from others. Drawing on self-presentation theory, this paper tested how computer-mediated communication may be used to stimulate a help-seeking response from workers. Subjects were placed in an induced-failure work scenario and provided with a computer-mediated channel with which to request help. By experimentally manipulating feedback, anonymity, and interdependence features of the work context, we then measured the length of time before subjects requested help. Eighty three percent of subjects initiated a request for help within the work period, and these help-seeking requests were made more quickly under strong helping norms, high goal interdependence, and high anonymity conditions rather than weak helping norms, low goal interdependence, and low anonymity conditions. The results provide new insights into the design of official communication channels intended to encourage employee help-seeking.

When Territoriality Meets Agency: An Examination of Employee Guarding as a Territorial Strategy

Do managers behave territorially toward their employees? Despite accumulating evidence demonstrating the prevalence of territoriality over nonagentic organizational resources, key questions remain regarding the extent to which psychological ownership and territorial behavior occur within supervisor-subordinate relationships. To explore this question, we drew on territoriality and mate-guarding theory to ascertain how and why managers might utilize one form of territoriality, anticipatory defenses, toward their employees. In a four-study investigation, we find that managers consistently engage in two forms of anticipatory defense tactics, persuasion and nurturing, that are intended to defend ownership claims over their employees and limit employee defection. Our results demonstrate a positive relationship between psychological ownership of subordinates and employee guarding directed toward those subordinates. We also find that managers engage in employee guarding more when they anticipate an employee is likely to defect, and they adapt guarding tactics in response to the subordinate’s general mental ability. Collectively, our results identify the motivations and conditions under which supervisors act territorially toward agentic subordinates, contributing to theory in territoriality and downward social influence.

The Effects of Politics on Job Satisfaction in Crime Lab Employees

Abstract This study examined the effects of crime lab workers’ perceptions of intra-lab politics on job satisfaction. In addition to finding that political behavior reduces employee job satisfaction, the study also identified ways in which crime lab managers can mitigate the negative effects of political behavior, increasing employee job satisfaction when political behavior is high within a given unit. Data collected from 874 employees at twelve FORESIGHT laboratories suggest that increasing crime lab worker job autonomy, job efficiency, strategic vision, and task significance are especially effective interventions that increase job satisfaction when political behavior is high. We discuss practical implications of these findings for crime lab managers. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how perceived political behavior affects the job satisfaction, or morale, of crime lab workers. The study was motivated by several interactions we had with forensic crime lab managers at the 2013 American Society of Crime Lab Directors (ASCLD) meeting. In ASCLD human resources and FORESIGHT meetings, we received consistent inquiries concerning the potential role of organizational politics as a detrimental factor on employee attitudes. These conversations highlight the unfortunate ubiquity of political behavior at work, including work in crime labs. Organizational politics often create disharmony among employees and can negatively affect employee job satisfaction and other attitudes (Breaux et al. 2009; Ferris et al. 1996). Thus, we sought to explore how political behavior affects the job satisfaction of crime lab employees, and potential managerial strategies that could be useful in mitigating for this potential negative effect.

Workers’ Perspective About Organizational Climate in Knowledge Management: Automotive Assembly-Line Case

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relation between Organizational Climate and Knowledge Management in the shop floor. The study is conducted in an auto part plant inserted in a Truck Factory with 7 partners. 44 blue collar workers were interviewed. The results show a relationship between Organizational Climate and Knowledge Management in the automotive sector, evidenced by the significant correlations between the variables analyzed. The unemployment situation can negatively influence the climate of organizations. The positive social interaction can preserve knowledge sharing even when there are weaknesses in the organizational climate. Future research can compare the results of this study with another sample in the same environment in stable employment situation. Other research may replicate this study with a larger number of participants.

The Family Ties That Bind: How Emotion and Family Dynamics Preserve Socioemotional Wealth

Family business researchers contend that family firms differ from nonfamily firms because they make unique strategic decisions that preserve socioemotional wealth (SEW). However, extant family firm...