Reciprocal envy and gratitude are emotions that can be experienced at work when one perceives he/she is being paid less (or more) than fellow workers. Within organizational sciences, Adams’s Equity Theory explains how workers adjust their effort at work as a result of such comparisons. This study utilizes the original formula from Adams to answer a logical question at the collective level should this theory hold true at the dyadic level. We outline a series of agent-based simulations to explore the implications of Adams’s theory as applied to organizations with distinct rewards schemes: pay-for-performance (PFP) vs pay-for-time (PFT). The base model and four experiments show that just mere comparison and adjustment is sufficient to drive aggregate production upwards (productive gains) under PFP, but the same mechanism drives aggregate production downwards (productive loss) under PFT. The results are robust across several parameter combinations. However, when agents are designed to be able to recall past inequities and adjust based on historical information, there is a memory threshold where PFT results in productive gains to levels higher than PFP. This model provides computational evidence, built on a known psychological relationship, to show how fairness comparisons alone produce different systems dynamics under different reward schemes.

Media attention to Harvey Weinstein’s case in the later part of the last decade have highlighted the influence power differentials on workplace sexual harassment. The fact, though, is that researchers were well aware of the antecedents and consequences to a myriad of harassment behaviors since decades back (McDonald, 2012; Willness, Steel, & Lee, 2007). Yet in our knowledge of workplace sexual harassment, there seems to be a gap in terms of understanding third-party perception of observed workplace sexual harassment incidents. Outrage management theory (McDonald, Graham, & Martin, 2010) focuses on how harassers manage third party outrage after harassment had occurred, while theories linking social power to harassment specifies the enabling conditions that a harasser can exploit (Popovich & Warren, 2010).

Borrowing arguments from Popovich & Warren (2010), we designed a vignette-based experiment to test the influence of sources of social power (French & Raven, 1959) on third party’s perception of sexual harassment incident. Our experiment (N=181) with working adult females was carried out in the capital city of a Central Asian country, Kyrgyzstan. A repeated measures designed was used with a 5 x 12 factorial design. At the omnibus level, we showed that participant’s mean ratings of severity towards twelve different sexual harassment incidents differ significantly between the social power conditions (between harasser and the harassed) as depicted in our vignettes. Post-hoc analysis showed that, while lay theory would propose severity ratings to be highest in the conditions of coercive and reward power, as compared to legitimate and expert power, such differences were insignificant. Mean severity ratings of referent power were, however, significantly lower, when compared to coercive and legitimate power conditions.

This study examines how chief executive officers’ (CEOs’) moral foundations (MF) – fundamental intuitions about what is right and wrong – influence their firms’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. While some CEOs may view harm and injustice caused by their firms’ activities as personal moral violations (i.e. individualizing MF), other CEOs may perceive adhering to their firm-identified primary stakeholder groups’ expectations as their guiding moral principle instead (i.e. binding MF). Using a linguistic technique to assess MF from unscripted text spoken by 1,860 CEOs of S&P 1500 firms over five years, we show that CEOs with higher individualizing MF drive greater corporate ESG performance, while CEOs with higher binding MF negatively affect their firms’ ESG performance. Moreover, we find that pressures from consumer and employee stakeholder groups negatively moderate the relationship between individualizing MF and firms’ ESG performance. Our findings suggest that stronger stakeholder pressures can have unfavourable consequences, such as diminishing the expression of CEOs’ personal values around firms’ ESG outcomes. As a whole, our study highlights the significance of CEOs’ morality in understanding corporate ESG performance and adds nuance to existing research around the value of stakeholder pressures in driving greater ESG performance.

Opinion diffusion is often simulated in social influence agent-based models to understand the perpetuation of norms and beliefs. However theoretically realistic models are found to be few. This paper presents a dual attitude agent-based model of opinion diffusion where agents’ interaction, information search, and opinion formation incorporate specifications from the theory of need for cognitive closure (NFCC), mere exposure effect, bivariate evaluative space, and the law of just-noticeable difference. Two experiments simulated topic advocacy in artificial societies of agents with either high or low NFCC. Experiment one initiated societies with uniform (unbiased) distribution of NFCC levels between advocates of two competing topics, while experiment two initiated differential (biased) distribution of NFCC levels between the topics. Results in the unbiased context showed that popularity of the majority topic increases over time in high NFCC societies while popularity of the same majority topic decreases over time in low NFCC societies. These results are reversed and magnified in the biased context. High NFCC agents provide their advocated topic an NFCC-advantage. When high NFCC agents’ advocated topic is the majority or equal at initiation, there will be a significant increase in popularity over time. When their advocated topic is minority at initiation, the high NFCC agents reduces the assimilative pressures of the majority topic to protect the minority topic from popularity losses. The model and results here may shed light on the impact high versus low NFCC individuals have towards between-societies (experiment one) and within-society (experiment two) cultural shifts.

Upper Echelons Theory (Hambrick & Mason, 1984) proposed that firm outcomes can be explained and predicted by the personal attributes of the CEO. Large amounts of research have been coducted to support this theory, and personality such as hubris and narcissism have been shown to have an effect. However fun-damental Big 5 personality traits have not been widely studied in relation to firm outcomes and even more scarce are investigations into employee outcomes. This study uses advances in artificial intelligence on two publicly available data sources (earnings call transcripts, and employee ratings from Indeed.com) to es-timate the personality traits of CEOs of NYSE and NASDAQ listed companies in the US and relate them to employee satisfaction. Our study found that among all Big 5 traits, only Openness to Experience of CEO have a positive effect on em-ployee satisfaction, while others showed no significant effect. This finding is gen-erally consistent across all industries, and remain robust even when statistically controlled for firm variables.

A research thread within the managerial literature is to investigate the role of gender similarity, or gender match, between the supervisor and the subordinate on the subordinate’s job satisfaction. Grounded on the theories of relational demography (Tsui & O’Reilly, 1989) and leader-member exchange (Liden, Sparrowe, & Wayne, 1997), authors such as Tsui and O’Reilly (1989) and Green, Anderson and Shivers (1996), have found support gender matching to be positively related to positive employee outcomes, while others have found no effect (e.g., Epitropaki & Martin, 1999; Liden, Wayne, & Stilwell, 1993).

Using composite items from LiK 2013 data, we found an opposite effect for gender match dyads, where dissimilar supervisor gender is related to higher job satisfaction. This effect is unexpected and not found elsewhere. Investigation of the buffering hypothesis revealed no moderating effect. But consistent with other data we collected in Kyrgyzstan, work autonomy is seen to have less of an effect on job satisfaction than observed in other countries. Given the large power conferred by LiK’s data, the results suggests possible socio-institutional factors unique to Kyrgyzstan influencing workplace outcomes.

While the effect of positive emotions on creative performance is well-known to practitioners and management scholars (e.g., Ashby, Isen, & Turken, 1999), the effect of negative emotions on creativity has been equivocal (Davis, 2009). Several studies have applied the contextual account to explain the emotions—creativity link, such that negative emotions might benefit creativity in certain situations (e.g., Baas, De Dreu, & Nijstad, 2012; Martin & Stoner, 1996).  

In the current paper, we draw on the novel theoretical framework of instrumental emotion regulation (Tamir, 2005; 2009; 2011) to present an alternative account to the contextual perspective and examine its psychological ramifications on creativity and well-being.  This perspective examines the modulating effect of personality trait, with negative emotions benefitting individuals with certain personality dispositions only.  Specifically, we argue that individuals who experience negative emotions as being trait-consistent (e.g., people with high neuroticism experience the trait-consistent worrisome emotion) will harness more creative benefits than those who experience negative emotions as being trait-inconsistent (Leung, Liou, Qiu, Kwan, Chiu, & Yong, 2014). Extending these findings to advance theory and research that bridges emotion regulation, creativity, and well-being, we theorize that the experience of trait-consistent emotions could enhance well-being through (a) conserving cognitive resources and (b) enhancing intrinsic motivation.

Various elections worldwide have highlighted results where election outcomes were not what the electorate expected (e.g., Brexit, 2014 midterms). Here, we use an agent-based model to examine the possibilities and implications when voters, boundedly rational, vote not just for their preferred candidate/choice, but to also affect the winning margin of their preferred candidate.

Voting for the Ideal Percentage (IPV)

Based on one’s attitude towards candidates, one may develop a preference for a candidate to win by a big or small margin. One does not know what his/her peers will actually vote, but can reasonably guess their inclinations. At the polls, if one votes to achieve his/her ideal percentage, two scenarios can occur: (1) When one expects a large majority of peers to vote for one’s preferred candidate but wants the candidate to win by a small margin, one will vote for the alternative candidate to pull down the margin, and (2) when one expects a small majority of peers to vote for one’s preferred candidate, but wants the candidate to win by a big margin, one will vote for the preferred candidate to push up the margin.

The Model

The Majority-Vote cellular automata rule (Moore, 1997) is modified to a two-candidate plurality election. 3,721 voters are distributed on a square grid. Each voter holds independent scalar preference for both candidates. At each time point, each voter is influenced by those around them and makes an evaluation of who to vote.

Findings

Analyses revealed that approximately 80% - 90% of IPV runs have election outcome that is the opposite of what the majority of voters actually prefer. Subsequent analyses revealed that when the reversal occurs, the larger the true preference-margin (sincere voting) for one candidate, the larger the winning-margin for the alternative candidate. Model variations show results to be robust to neighborhood size, grid size, and relaxation of auxiliary assumptions.

We report work done to model work motivation mediated by process of fairness restoration. Design of a base model is reported alongside five experiments conducted to compare effects of workplace Pay for Performance (PFP) with fixed salary, Pay for Time (PFT). Agents adjust efforts on the job per Adams’s (1965) equity theory. Contrary to claims in literature, this local search for fairness, is sufficient to generate higher aggregate output over time for collectives when PFP is implemented. No  utility or wealth-maximizing goals is needed.
PFT generates lower aggregate output over time, but when memory and its variations are modeled, conditions are found where PFT generate higher aggregate output and to such levels far greater than that under PFP. Motivational dynamics between these reward schemes differ greatly. Additional work reveals tipping points, first-order phase transition reminiscent of abrupt labor walk-outs, and phased synchrony of motivational states occurring without central organization. For organizational science, a four decades old empirical paradox is given new explanation, pointing caution and guidelines
for future research. Managerial implications are discussed.

This presentation showcases the work done with a new ideal-type agent-based model of near zero intelligence agents. A well accepted social psychological theory, Equity Theory, is used as sole mechanism in a 2-layer cellular automata. We examined a basic but still largely unsolved question on the effects of different incentive methods (fixed payment vs. performance-based payment) on production when fairness considerations are present.

Our experiments explored effects of individual incentives on collective aggregate output. Results identified both generic conditions where performance-based incentives may be conducive for higher aggregate output, as well as specific conditions where fixed base pay may be better. Basic cognitive dimensions were sequentially added and at selected combinations, motivational phased synchrony and first-order phase transition akin to labor walk-outs were detected. The present work illustrates that a simple fairness mechanism is sufficient as a condition for individual incentives to generate higher aggregate output for a collective. Pursuit of wealth or ever greater income is not necessary for this and other ancillary results to emerge.

Using a sensemaking perspective and integrating concepts from organizational support theory, role theory, goal orientation theory and substitutes for leadership theory, we tested a moderated mediation model in which supervisor support, employees’ role clarity, and learning goal orientation are related to customer orientation. Participants were 354 employees of 4- and 5-star hotels in Singapore. Role clarity partially mediated between supervisor support and customer orientation. Learning goal orientation moderated the relationships between supervisor support and role clarity and between role clarity and customer orientation: Unlike employees with low learning goal orientation, employees with high learning goal orientation do not require a high degree of supervisor support to clarify their role, and should their role remain ambiguous, they are still able to show a high degree of customer orientation. The findings highlight the importance of supervisor support for employees with low learning goal orientation, and they highlight the importance of learning goal orientation as a selection and training criterion.

Incorporating Conservation of Resources (COR) and Job Demand-Resource (JDR) models of stress, this study examines emotional exhaustion of short-term business travelers, an understudied class of employees in burnout research. The frequency, intensity, and diversity of cross-cultural interactions of these personnel provide a relevant context to investigate cultural intelligence (CQ) alongside schedule autonomy and workfamily conflicts as resources and demands predicting emotional exhaustion. Through a three-country sample, we demonstrate CQ’s main and interaction effects on emotional exhaustion and its differing potential for intervention for short-term business travelers.

This exploratory research examines the combinative impact of an individual’s job, comparative perceptions, demographics, dispositional factors, and their preferred worklife benefits. Specifically we examined its impact on the popular work-life belief that greater job flexibility leads to better work-life balance. 261 employees from different companies participated in an online survey, and data obtained were analyzed using Profile Analysis via Multidimensional Scaling (PAMS). PAMS revealed two latent dimensions (profile patterns), from which we developed a nine box matrix for post-hoc analysis and discussion. Results revealed job flexibility does not positively affect all subgroups identified. We propose a new approach understand employees’ unique characteristics that may offer explanations to the numerous mixed and divergent findings in the work-life literature, and argue that an ecological approach, supported by statistical advances, can help enhance and expand current knowledge of work-life.