Troy A. Smith

It's all in the attitude: The role of job attitude strength in job attitude-outcome relationships.

Integrating attitude theory with the job attitudes literature, we position job attitude strength (JAS) as a missing yet important theoretical concept in the study of job attitudes. We examine JAS as a moderator of the relationship between job satisfaction and several criteria of interest to organizational scholars (job performance, organizational citizenship behavior, withdrawal). We also examine multiple relevant indicators of JAS (i.e., attitude certainty, attitude extremity, latitude of rejection, and structural consistency), both to shed light on its conceptual nature and to provide meaningful practical direction to researchers interested in incorporating JAS into job attitude research. Data were collected in five field samples (total N = 816). Results support our hypotheses: JAS moderates the relationships between job satisfaction and performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and turnover intentions; in each case, these relationships are significantly stronger for employees with stronger job satisfaction attitudes. However, as expected, not all JAS indicators are equally effective as moderators. We discuss our findings in terms of their theoretical, empirical, and practical implications for the future study of job attitudes.

Ideology and Gender: Observers’ System Justification and Targets’ Gender as Interactive Predictors of Citizenship Expectations

ABSTRACT We integrate system justification and social role theory to explain how observers’ system justification and target employees’ gender interact to predict observers’ expectations of targets’ sportsmanship citizenship behaviors. In contrast with social role theory predictions, observers did not expect greater levels of sportsmanship from women compared to men. Yet observers expected more sportsmanship from women (a) when observers were ideologically motivated by gender-specific beliefs (gender-specific system justification; Study 1) and (b) when system justification was cued experimentally (Study 2). A heretofore-unexamined aspect, observers’ ideology, modifies their expectations of sportsmanship citizenship across target genders. This has implications for system justification, social role, and organizational citizenship theoretical perspectives.

Multiple team membership and empowerment spillover effects: Can empowerment processes cross team boundaries?

In today’s organizations, employees are often assigned as members of multiple teams simultaneously (i.e., multiple team membership), and yet we know little about important leadership and employee phenomena in such settings. Using a scenario-based experiment and 2 field studies of leaders and their employees in the People’s Republic of China and the United States, we examined how empowering leadership exhibited by 2 different team leaders toward a single employee working on 2 different teams can spillover to affect that employee’s psychological empowerment and subsequent proactivity across teams. Consistent across all 3 studies, we found that each of the team leaders’ empowering leadership uniquely and positively influenced an employee’s psychological empowerment and subsequent proactive behaviors. In the field studies, we further found that empowering leadership exhibited by one team leader influenced the psychological empowerment and proactive behaviors of their team member not only in that leader’s team but also in the other team outside of that leader’s stewardship. Finally, across studies, we found that empowering leadership exhibited on one team can substitute for lower levels of empowering leadership experienced in a different team led by a distinct leader. We discuss our contributions to the motivation, teams, and leadership literatures and provide practical guidance for leaders charged with managing employees that have multiple team memberships.