Introduction: The Import of Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Dynamics in Work Performance
介绍了一个特刊，汇集15篇论文，强调心理过程（如人格、人际关系、感知）对个体、团队和公司绩效的影响，适合管理者和研究者了解如何将人的因素纳入工作设计。
Managers have often heard it said that ‘people are your most important resource’. Despite the ubiquity of this truism, examining recent issues of many of the key management journals reveals that a great deal of researcher and practitioner attention currently focuses on subjects such as firm-level innovation, strategy, knowledge management, corporate reputation and organizational learning, without necessarily bringing in the ‘human factor’ stressed by organizational psychology. The aim in putting together this thematic issue, ‘Individual, group, leader and company performance: responses to intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics’, was to present a collection of papers that underscore the importance of psychological processes in determining human and ultimately organizational performance. These 15 papers do just that. Collectively, they address the role of personality, interpersonal relationships, and perceptions and attributions in contributing to work performance in a variety of guises. Some show positive effects of characteristics heretofore considered dysfunctional, as in Kooij-de Bode, van Knippenberg, and van Ginkel's (2010) examination of the effects of negative affectivity and group decision-making. Some demonstrate damaging effects of common perceptual processes such as stereotyping, as in Haslam et al.'s (2010) investigation into the links between women's presence on company boards and firm performance. All reinforce the need for managers to attend to intrapersonal and interpersonal forces when planning work, creating work teams, assigning tasks, and formulating work processes and policies. This collection features both conceptual (Pillai, 2010) and empirical papers; the latter draw upon a wide range of research designs and methodologies. There is qualitative work (e.g. Harris and Ogbonna, 2010), quantitative research that employs experimental (e.g. De Cremer and Van Hiel, 2010; Kooij-de Bode, van Knippenberg and van Ginkel, 2010), cross-sectional (e.g. Aasland et al., 2010; Felfe and Schyns, 2010) and longitudinal designs (e.g. Restubog et al., 2010), and studies drawing upon multiple sources of data for their analyses (e.g. Millward and Postmes, 2010; Restubog et al., 2010). Performance is addressed at all levels: micro (e.g. Cicero, Pierro and van Knippenberg, 2010), meso (e.g. Tanghe, Wisse and van der Flier, 2010a, 2010b) and macro (e.g. Delgado-García, de la Fuente-Sabaté and de Quevedo-Puente, 2010; Fink and Kessler, 2010; Haslam et al., 2010). Both task performance (e.g. Millward and Postmes, 2010) and contextual performance (e.g. Hoel et al., 2010) are considered. This impressive diversity in research design and means of operationalizing performance lends itself to a compilation of papers that sheds light into a multiplicity of different crevices of organizational functioning. The thematic issue leads with papers that focus on the individual employee, and how his or her emotional traits, perceptual processes and personal motivations contribute to both individual and organizational performance. The issue goes on to feature research illuminating the functioning of work teams, an increasingly important topic given their escalating popularity in the workplace (Kozlowski and Ilgen, 2006). This is followed by papers featuring research on leadership behaviour, with an emphasis on its bidirectional relationship with follower characteristics – a necessary emphasis, given that all too often leadership is considered in isolation or in conjunction with the external business environment and the importance of its interplay with subordinate characteristics is neglected (Baker, 2007; Hollander, 1992). Throughout the issue, a number of lower-order themes establish themselves across the micro–meso–macro levels. Some of these will be briefly discussed over the next pages in order to introduce readers to the issue and provide a small taste of what lies in store for them. Employee personality is one example of a lower-order theme that cuts across the various levels of analysis employed in the papers in this issue, with negative affectivity playing a vital role in two papers. This disposition to experience subjective distress (Watson and Clark, 1984) functions as a signal that one's current situation is problematical and requires vigilant monitoring and possibly action (Forgas and Gorge, 2001). In ‘Too negative to take risks? The effect of the CEO's emotional traits on firm risk’, Delgado-García, de la Fuente-Sabaté and de Quevedo-Puente (2010) evaluate how the stable emotional traits of Spanish bank CEOs influence the banks' propensity for risk taking. The authors find that the negative affectivity of CEOs related to lower risk taking on the part of their banks, as evidenced by less variability in performance, less credit risk, and less risky composition of loan portfolios. Affect and the impact of negative emotional traits appear again in Kooij-de Bode, van Knippenberg and van Ginkel's (2010) paper, ‘Good effects of bad feelings: negative affectivity and group decision-making’. The authors' research on negative affectivity finds that, when work group members are high in this characteristic, they make better use of information distributed unequally among them, by thoroughly discussing and sharing information. As a consequence, the work group makes higher quality decisions. Kooij-de Bode, van Knippenberg and van Ginkel's (2010) is a fascinatingly counterintuitive result, which demonstrates that what is frequently considered a dysfunctional trait can have clearly positive effects on work group performance. The authors suggest that for group tasks necessitating thorough elaboration of new information, managers may wish to create teams composed of members with moderately high levels of negative affectivity. The findings of Delgado-García, de la Fuente-Sabaté and de Quevedo-Puente (2010) are no less significant in terms of their implications for managers, however. In the current economic climate, created by banks and financial institutions that were the opposite of risk-averse, CEOs who are higher in negative affectivity, who thus engage in greater information processing and are more open and attentive to new information, and who consequently take on lower levels of risk, are likely to be recognized and valued to a much greater degree than may have been the case several years ago. Both papers are evidence of the importance of taking account of emotions due to their specific consequences for performance, despite the fact that managers often consider them irrational and researchers often consider them difficult to study. The importance of dispositional characteristics is reinforced by ‘Followers' personality and the perception of transformational leadership: further evidence for the similarity hypothesis’. In it, Felfe and Schyns (2010) find that subordinates' personality traits – specifically, extraversion, agreeableness and openness to experience – influence commitment to the leader, as well as the perception of transformational leadership. In addition, subordinates' perception of leaders' personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, and neuroticism) are also related to commitment to the leader and to the perception of transformational leadership. Felfe and Schyns (2010) also find evidence of a mediated relationship, with subordinates' personality traits predicting their perception of leaders' personality traits, which then influence subordinates' perception of transformational leadership and commitment to the leader. This has obvious ramifications for subordinates' evaluation of a leader's performance, as the authors point out; assessment of performance may be strongly influenced by subordinates' personality, with, for example, subordinates high in extraversion and agreeableness being positively biased and subordinates high in neuroticism being negatively biased. The topic of biases, and of perception more generally, crops up in several papers featured in this issue. In ‘Managers' perceptual errors revisited: the role of knowledge calibration’, Pillai (2010) discusses calibration – when one's confidence in one's knowledge matches the accuracy of that knowledge. What happens when managers are miscalibrated? The author postulates that managers who overestimate external factors (such as industry growth rates and favourable macroeconomic factors) and who are overconfident are more likely to form strategies that are more incremental and evolutionary. On the other hand, managers who overestimate internal factors (such as firm knowledge and resources) and are overconfident are likely to generate strategies that are more disruptive and discontinuous. The arguments in Pillai's paper show that managers' perceptual inaccuracies can have very different consequences, and that negative consequences can be avoided if managers seek further information or advice before engaging in strategic decision-making. Moving from the effects of perceptual processes at the individual level to those at the organizational level, Haslam et al.'s (2010)‘Investing with prejudice: the relationship between women's presence on company boards and objective and subjective measures of company performance’ looks at FTSE 100 firms from 2001 to 2005 to determine the nature of the relationship between the presence of women on company boards and organizational performance. No link is found between the presence of women on boards and objective measures of performance, such as return on assets and return on equity. However, a negative relationship is identified between the presence of women on boards and more subjective measures of performance, based on stocks. Firms whose boards were composed solely of men had a 37% valuation premium on the book value of their assets over otherwise similar companies with one or more women on their boards. This is a seminal piece of research that demonstrates very clearly that there is no evidence that women are appointed to leadership positions in firms that are failing, or that women in leadership positions contribute to a decline in company performance. What the results do show is that, among investors, perceptions of performance and objective reality are not aligned. Haslam et al. (2010) discuss the role of gender-based stereotypes with regard to leadership, as well as investor perceptions that the presence of women in leadership roles signals organizational crisis. Employee perceptions of breach in the psychological contract are explored in Restubog et al.'s (2010)‘Investigating the moderating effects of leader–member exchange in the psychological contract breach–employee performance relationship: a test of two competing perspectives’. This study tests both the social support perspective and the betrayal perspective with regard to high leader–member exchange employees' reactions when their psychological contracts are breached. Essentially, what the authors find is that employees who enjoy high quality relationships with leaders appear to react more negatively to breach, by performing fewer organizational citizenship behaviours and by engaging in reduced task performance. These are robust results, across three samples, using multiple sources of data, and employing both cross-sectional and longitudinal research designs. The findings do not support the social support perspective; under circumstances of psychological contract breach, leader–member exchange does not function as a stress-buffering source of social support mitigating the negative impact of breach on performance. Instead, employees perceive breach as violating their expectations of trust, obligation and support, which accompany high quality relationships. Cognitive dissonance also comes into play: breach in the context of a supportive relationship may be more salient because it is unexpected and contains contradictory cognitions. Restubog et al. (2010) observe that while organizations will continue to want to encourage high quality leader–member exchange relationships, they need to realize that this will probably create higher expectations from employees that have the potential to generate damaging outcomes if not met. Social identity is another common thread among several of the papers in this issue. In ‘The formation of group affect and team effectiveness: the moderating role of identification’, Tanghe, Wisse and van der Flier (2010a) use a mixed-methods approach to examine the influence of social identification in predicting work team performance. Their study finds that identification with the work group predicts affective convergence amongst group members, meaning that group members are influenced by one another and become more similar in terms of their affective (emotional) states. This affective convergence predicts, in turn, greater willingness to engage in organizational citizenship behaviours. Groups with high levels of identification are more likely to report high perceived work team performance and willingness to engage in organizational citizenship behaviours when the converged group affective state is positive, rather than negative. This is an important qualifier; high levels of identification with the group and greater emotional convergence will not necessarily contribute to better team performance, both task and contextual. The group affective state must be positive in order for these rewards to be reaped. A different take on the impact of social identity is found in ‘Leadership and uncertainty: how role ambiguity affects the relationship between leader group prototypicality and leadership effectiveness’. Cicero, Pierro and van Knippenberg (2010) find that, for employees experiencing greater role ambiguity, the extent to which the leader is representative of the group identity is more strongly related to higher perceived leadership effectiveness, higher job satisfaction and lower turnover intentions. To explain this effect, the authors posit that role ambiguity propels people to rely on their group memberships for information about social reality in an effort to reduce uncertainty. Evidence for the contribution of social identification to work performance also appears in ‘Who we are affects how we do: the financial benefits of organizational identification’, Millward and Postmes's (2010) examination of different foci for organizational identification. Surveying individual employees, the authors find that identifying with the superordinate business unit, rather than one's particular team or operating company, is associated with higher sales at the team level. Across both individual-level and group-level analyses, organizational identification predicts sales achievement, despite the fact that team identification and operating company identification are found to be stronger. This is a meaningful result; previous work on social identification in organizations has supported a link between identification and motivation (see van Knippenberg and Ellemers, 2003), but this study is one of the first to demonstrate quantifiable material benefits for organizations whose members are psychologically entwined with the larger group. Taken together, these three papers point to the considerable role played by social identification in determining work group performance, individual attitudes and perceptions of leadership efficacy, whether alone (as in Millward and Postmes, 2010), or in conjunction with role ambiguity (Cicero, Pierro and van Knippenberg, 2010) or group affective tone (Tanghe, Wisse and van der Flier, 2010a). Two papers explore the role of trust and cooperation at two different levels – individual and organizational. Tanghe, Wisse and van der Flier's (2010b) second paper in this issue, ‘The role of group member affect in the relationship between trust and cooperation’, details the results of two experimental manipulations. The findings are based on the argument that individuals low in dispositional trust are more likely to scan their environment for cues that help them to predict others' behaviour. Low trusting individuals are thus more willing to cooperate when they encounter group members displaying high activation affective states – readiness for action – because these group members are expected to be more cooperative. For managers attempting to promote cooperation in work groups to achieve maximum performance, this has important implications. Faced with employees characteristically low in trust, managers do not necessarily need to put forth effort in changing that baseline level of trust. Instead, they can attempt to ensure that other people in the team physically demonstrate their readiness for action, through means such as facial expression and/or body language. At the organizational level, Fink and Kessler's (2010) paper ‘Cooperation, trust and performance – empirical results from three countries’ reports on a survey of owners and/or managers of small and medium-sized enterprises in Austria, Slovenia and the Czech Republic and links organizational performance to individual capabilities for engaging in trust processes. The authors find that the quality, rather than the quantity, of cooperation relationships creates value for companies. Firms with more cooperation experience are more successful, and the longer they manage to maintain their cooperative relationships the better they perform. 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