Biological implicit measures in HRM and OB: A question of how not if

Scholars in the disciplines of human resource management (HRM) and organizational behavior (OB) have primarily focused on explicit processes and measures in their research, but much of human feeling and behavior is triggered through implicit processing outside of conscious awareness. In this article, we discuss how explicit and implicit processes interact to shape work emotions, attitudes, and behaviors, and we suggest that scholars should incorporate biological measures for assessing implicit as well as explicit processes into their research designs. We provide guidance for such endeavors by describing how several biological implicit measures can be used in HRM and OB research. These measures include cortisol measurement, skin conductance, event related potential (ERP), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).     

Automatic associations and discrimination in hiring: Real world evidence

This is the first study providing empirical support for automatically activated associations inducing discriminatory behavior among recruiters in a real-life hiring situation. Two different field experiments on ethnic discrimination in hiring are combined with a measure of employers' automatic attitudes and performance stereotypes toward Arab-Muslim men relative to Swedish men using the Implicit Association Test.The results show that the probability to invite Arab-Muslim job applicants decreases by five percentage points when the recruiter has a one standard deviation stronger negative implicit association toward Arab-Muslim men. This suggests that automatic processes may exert a significant impact on employers' hiring decisions, offering new insights into labor market discrimination.     

Antecedents and consequences of host-country nationals' attitudes and behaviors toward expatriates: What we do and do not know

Host-country nationals' (HCNs') attitudes and behaviors toward expatriates are critical for expatriate success. Thus, this study systematically reviews the existing literature on the antecedents and consequences of HCNs' attitudes and behaviors toward expatriates. It is revealed that HCN personality, the perceived compensation gap between expatriates and HCNs, social categorization, HCNs' previous contact with expatriates, expatriate justice, task cohesiveness, interpersonal affect, and interpersonal relationships (guanxi) directly or indirectly predict HCNs' attitudes and behaviors toward expatriates. The attitudes and behaviors of HCNs toward expatriates are significantly related to expatriate adjustment and performance. This review indicates that the extant research on HCNs' attitudes and behaviors toward expatriates is limited, and the findings of past studies are often contradictory. Theoretical and practical implications as well as future research directions are discussed.     

Labor-market exposure as a determinant of attitudes toward immigration

This paper re-examines the role of labor-market competition as a determinant of attitudes toward immigration. We claim two main contributions. First, we use more sophisticated measures of the degree of exposure to competition from immigrants than previously done. In addition to education, we focus on the protection derived from (self-assessed) investments in job-specific human capital and from specialization in occupations that are (objectively) intensive in communication tasks. Second, we explicitly account for the potential endogeneity arising from job search. Methodologically, we estimate by instrumental variables, an econometric model that allows for heterogeneity at the individual, regional and country level. Drawing on the 2004–2005 European Social Survey, we obtain the following main results. First, natives that dislike immigrants tend to work in low-immigration jobs, biasing OLS estimates. Second, working in jobs that require high levels of specific human capital leads to relatively more pro-immigration attitudes, although this effect is only found for respondents with more than 12 years of schooling. Third, the degree of manual (communicational) intensity of workers' occupations has a negative (positive) effect on their pro-immigration views. This effect is the most significant, both in a statistical and in a quantitative sense, and is distinct from the protection from immigrant competition provided by formal education. Overall our results suggest a large role for skill-based labor market competition in determining individual attitudes toward immigration.     

Extending the link between entrepreneurial self-efficacy and intention: a moderated mediation model

This study extended the research on the relationship between entrepreneurial self-efficacy and intention by developing a moderated mediation model. This model posits that the link between entrepreneurial self-efficacy and intention is mediated by attitudes toward entrepreneurship and planned entrepreneurial control, and that these mediation processes are further moderated by subjective norms. Based on a sample of 308 valid responses, regression analysis yielded two noteworthy results. First, entrepreneurial self-efficacy positively affects intention through attitudes toward entrepreneurship and planned entrepreneurial control. Second, the direct effect of entrepreneurial self-efficacy on intention decreases as subjective norms increase. By contrast, the indirect intention effects of entrepreneurial self-efficacy through attitudes toward entrepreneurship and planned entrepreneurial control increase as subjective norms increase. In addition, the results indicated that subjective norms positively affect entrepreneurial intention. These findings indicated that the model advances the use of the theory of planned behavior and can be used to define a person as an entrepreneur.     

Holier than thou: Investigating the relationship between religiosity and charitable giving

One's religiosity (or lack thereof) is the touchstone from which people view and interact with the world. The presumed positive impact of religiosity on charitable giving, however, may be an oversimplification. The present study takes a more nuanced approach to the subject and investigates the impact of 2 potential mediators (attitudes toward helping others, AHO, and attitudes toward charitable organizations) and 1 moderator (materialism) on the religiosity–charitable giving relationship. Study results suggest that religiosity has a positive effect on attitudes toward charitable organizations, AHO, and donating to charity. Religiosity was also found to have an indirect impact on charitable giving via AHO. Materialism interacted with AHO, such that the indirect effect of religiosity on charitable giving through AHO is attenuated as materialism increases. Implications of the present research for better understanding charitable giving are discussed.     

No magic bullet: estimating anti-immigrant sentiment and social desirability bias with the item-count technique

Quality & Quantity - Extant scholarship on attitudes toward immigration and immigrants relies mostly on direct survey items. Thus, little is known about the scope of social desirability bias,...     

Digging deeper or piling it higher? Implicit measurement in organizational behavior and human resource management

Organizational researchers can dig deeper into peoples' thoughts, attitudes, and self-concepts to understand how automatic processes may impact judgment and social behavior in organizations. Measures of these automatic processes, including the Implicit Association Test (e.g., IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), Semantic Priming (e.g., SP; Wittenbrink, Judd, & Park, 1997), Affect Misattribution Procedure (e.g., AMP; Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005), Word Completion Tasks (e.g., WCT; Johnson & Saboe, 2011), among many others, deserve greater attention as alternatives or supplements to traditional self-report measures of variables important in organizations (e.g., job satisfaction, personality and trait measurement, diversity attitudes). In this paper, we first provide a primer on implicit social cognition and its relationship to automatic and controlled cognitive processes, discussing major types of implicit measures, how these might operate, criticisms of this approach, and how these implicit constructs may give rise to behavior in organizations. Second, we discuss models of automatic processes and explore their validity and how these may predict behavior. Third, we offer advice for selecting, constructing, and improving implicit measurements when used in organizational research to enhance human resources and organizational functioning.     

Explicit reforms,implicit theories and public service improvement

A framework for the explication of the theoretical basis of public management reforms is developed. The framework is applied to the Best Value regime in UK local government. The implicit assumptions of policy makers are that the Best Value regime will generate service improvements through changes in organizational structures, processes, culture and strategy content. Empirical evidence on the relationship between these variables and organizational performance is critically reviewed, and policy makers' implicit ‘theories in use’ are made explicit in the form of a simple additive model of public service improvement. In practice the actual pattern of change is likely to be mediative, reciprocal and contingent on local organizational circumstances. However, theorizing public management reforms in this way is valuable because it provides a basis for evaluating the logic of programme design, predicting effectiveness and generating testable models of the relationship between public policies, organizational changes and public service improvement.     

大学生锻炼动机和锻炼行为的关系:自我心智模式的调节效应

大学生参与锻炼活动备受关注,既有研究着重考察了锻炼动机和锻炼行为之间的关系。本研究进一步深入探讨了大学生的显性自我心智模式和隐性自我心智模式对锻炼动机和锻炼行为这一关系的调节作用。通过问卷调研和隐性联系测试方法,发现显性自我心智模式对锻炼动机和锻炼行为这一关系的影响有限;而隐性自我心智模式对这一关系的影响显著;并且锻炼动机、显性自我心智模式和隐性自我心智模式的三次交互项显著影响锻炼行为。结果说明,相对于显性自我心智模式,隐性自我心智模式对锻炼动机和锻炼行为关系的影响更为重要。     

Subjective performance of patent examiners,implicit contracts,and self‐funded patent offices

Self‐funded patent offices should be concerned with patent quality (patents should be granted to only deserving innovations) and quantity (as revenues come from fees paid by applicants). In this context, we investigate what is the impact of the self‐funded constraint on different bonus contracts and how these contracts affect the examiners' incentive to prosecute patent applications. We consider contracts in which a patent office offers bonuses on quantity quotas (explicit contract) and on quality outcome (either an implicit contract or an explicit contract based on a quality proxy). We find that a self‐funded constrained agency should make different organization choices of incentives. For a low quality proxy precision, an agency facing a tight budget operates well with implicit contracts. However, by only relaxing moderately the budget constraint, the agency might be worse off simply because this will preclude implicit contracts. Only very large patenting fees might allow the agency to compensate for the loss of implicit contracts.     

Operations change interactions in a service environment: Attitudes,behaviors, and profitability

An attitudinal and behavioral change program was developed and implemented in a service operations function. Changes were (1) stabilizing operations management (reducing turnover) and (2) improving attitudes and behaviors of employees with strong union affiliations in a common carrier trucking terminal when compared to similar employees in a control terminal undergoing no planned change. Management turnover was reduced. Other results from the eighteen-month longitudinal study indicated that employee attitudes in both groups remained negative toward work, management, and the company throughout the study period. Behaviors relating to attitudes — particularly turnover, absenteeism, and accident rates—improved at the experimental terminal, even though expressed attitudes remained negative. Operating efficiencies and profitability improved at the experimental terminal. It was found that these employees, pick-up and delivery drivers, retain positive attitudes toward customers and customers the same toward them, in spite of the drivers' negative attitudes toward the company. The operative service employee appeared to discriminate between attitudes toward the company and the customer; the drivers' negative attiudes toward most everything (except the customer) not affecting the customer's perceptions of the driver or the company.     

Reputation, Product Quality, and Warranties

This paper studies the firm's choice between implicit and explicit contracts as alternative methods of assuring product quality. The relationship between these two contractual forms is studied using a dynamic model with imperfect monitoring and team moral hazard where both the firm and the consumer take unobservable actions that affect product performance. The firm chooses the contractual arrangement that maximizes expected profit. Identified are conditions on the primitive attributes of the transactions and on the firm's environment that can help explain why firms might decide to use explicit contracting, implicit contracting, or a combination of the two. I also show that there are conditions under which the introduction of reputation causes explicit contracts to be more uniform and less sensitive to the details of the transaction than implied by static models.     

The relationship between employee knowledge,personal contact and attitudes towards chronically ill co-employees within the banking sector

As chronic illnesses continue to be a burden in today's organisations, it remains a very crucial call for management to find ways to eradicate the associated organisational problems. While people of all ages are affected by chronic illnesses, there is a higher risk of the elderly developing chronic diseases. However, as much as chronic illnesses are inevitable among employees, there should be ways at least to curb negative social and goal achievement impact which they bring in organisations. In this regard, a survey was conducted to examine the relationship between employees' knowledge about, contact with and attitudes towards their co-employees with chronic illnesses within the banking sector. This is not a well-researched area from an International Journal of Human Resource Management (IJHRM) view and this work could make a useful additive contribution. Results indicated that employees' knowledge about and contact with individuals diagnosed with chronic illnesses were significantly related to better attitudes towards this population. The findings also revealed that knowledge was related to positive attitudes among employees who had more personal contact with individuals with chronic illnesses and such findings indicate the importance of exposing employees to information about chronic illnesses and direct practice experience with individuals who have these illnesses. Managerial implications for employees with chronic illness are discussed.     

高管激励、非效率投资与公司业绩

从代理理论出发,以2001--2010年A股上市公司的数据为研究样本检验高管激励方式、非效率投资与公司业绩之间关系,研究结果表明：显性激励和隐性激励对于投资效率和公司业绩的影响是不同的,显性激励能够通过提升投资效率来改善公司业绩,而隐性激励则没有这样的作用;在不同所有制样本中,隐性激励对国有企业影响更大,而显性激励对非国有企业影响更大。     

Overestimating Oneself and Overlooking the Law: Psychological Supports for Employment at Will

This article studies the hypotheses that people tend to underrate other people's work motivation and skills relative to their own, and further tend to be unaware of the legal status of employment at will in contemporary U.S. law. The theoretical part of the article describes psychological bases for the hypothesized tendencies and explains how they can be expected to foster acquiescence to employment at will and high employment insecurity. The empirical portion of the article describes and discusses a survey of M.B.A. students that probed their knowledge of and attitudes toward U.S. employment law, along with their attitudes toward employment insecurity and work motivation. Consistent with the hypotheses, the study found widespread lack of knowledge about the legal status of employment at will, as well as a tendency toward overrating one's own work motivation relative to others and a tendency toward taking higher risks of termination when they were presented as controllable on an individual, though not a group, basis.     

“I'll donate money today and time tomorrow”: The moderating role of attitude toward nonprofit organizations on donation intention

Across two experiments, this study provides support for the concept that money and time are marked by psychologically distinct constructs. As temporal distance increases, preferences are more likely to be based on the value associated with a high‐level construal of options than the value associated with a low‐level construal of options. That is, as potential contributors are asked to donate later, high‐level featured resources (i.e., time) take focal precedent over low‐level ones (i.e., money) in judging preference for donation methods. This study also found that the match effect between temporal distance and construal level holds only when the level of attitude toward nonprofit organization (NPO) is relatively favorable. However, donation intention is enhanced under mismatch conditions when the level of attitude is less favorable. That is, when potential contributors hold relatively less favorable attitudes toward the NPO, those who are requested to make an expediting decision of donation are more likely to have higher intention to donate with a high‐level construal resource. This study attributed the finding to the shift of people's focal resource through their level of attitude toward the NPO.     

Demographics,personality, contact,and universal‐diverse orientation: An exploratory examination

This study explores relationships between race, gender, agreeableness, openness to experience, contact, and a measure of attitudes toward diversity—universal‐diverse orientation (UDO). UDO consists of three attitudinal components: realistic appreciation (a cognition), comfort with difference (a feeling), and diversity of contact (a behavior). Results suggest that race, agreeableness, and openness relate to UDO attitudes, primarily due to the relationships of these variables with the behavioral component—diversity of contact. Identifying characteristics of tolerant people (e.g., agreeableness) and training managers in skills related to those characteristics may improve contextual performance and make managers better role models within the organizational context. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

A framework for developing word fragment completion tasks

To broaden our understanding of the person-based phenomena that impact organizational behavior, researchers are increasingly making use of implicit measures. Explicit measures tap affect, attitudes, and self-concepts that are accessible to introspective awareness, which are sometimes unreliable or distorted by response biases. In contrast, implicit measures assess mental content and processes that operate outside awareness. Unfortunately, the ad hoc manner in which implicit measures are sometimes developed is problematic. As a way of improving research on implicit content and processes, we present a detailed and practical framework for developing one type of implicit measure: word fragment completion tasks. Such tasks have been successfully used to measure a variety of individual difference variables in previous organizational research. Our framework draws on previous research and well understood psychometric principles to describe a process for creating reliable and valid word fragment completion tasks.     

Are freelancers a breed apart? The role of protean and boundaryless career attitudes in employability and career success

Recent economic and organisational changes have fostered an increasing diversification of the workforce, among whom freelancers are an under‐represented population in the literature. This study aimed at examining the role of protean and boundaryless career, professional commitment, and employability activities in fostering freelancers' subjective career success. Data were collected via an online survey among a sample of 425 Italian freelancers and analysed through structural equation modelling. Results partially confirmed several hypotheses: higher self‐directed career management and boundaryless mindset predicted higher employability activities and professional commitment; moreover, employability and professional commitment acted as mediators between career attitudes and subjective career success. The study provides support for the importance of such variables to freelancers' career success, as well as for the significance of protean and boundaryless careers among nontraditional occupational groups. Interventions aimed at fostering such attitudes could support freelancers in improving their attainment of professional progress and perception of career success.