Happy New Year! As I've done in previous years, I present below the research articles I ran across in this area that I think were the most impactful and/or important of 2014. But first, let's catch up on two issues:
First, the Winter issue of Personnel Psychology:
- Situational judgment tests have been shown to be useful for measuring interpersonal skills, but beware: levels of "angry hostility" moderate that relationship. (Is there a happy hostility?)
- When hiring leaders, should you look for those that have a busy home life, or be wary of them? In this fascinating study, the authors found that leader family-to-work conflict negatively impacts followers in that it can increase their burnout. However, family-to-work enrichment increased follower engagement through leader engagement. So the answer is, as usual, not simple: home/family life can be a good thing for followers if it makes the leader more engaged; but if the home/family life is increasing burnout, the leader may pass that along to others. So it would seem it all depends on how the individual is handling their life outside of work!
Let's look at the November issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology:
- Are men or women perceived as better leaders? According to this meta-analysis, it depends on how you ask the question. If you limit the question to other-ratings, women are rated significantly higher. But if you look at self-ratings, men rate themselves significantly higher. Which leads to the next question: is it a biological perception or a gender perception, and if the latter, what traits are the most important?
- An intriguing study of how applicant confidence interacts with and can be altered by the recruitment experience, in this case among recruits for the U.S. military.
- Next, a study of employment and job search efficacy. Not surprisingly, within-person frequency of job search behavior correlated with job offers; interestingly, the relationship between perceived job search progress and efficacy beliefs were moderated by beliefs of internal attribution.
- Last but not least, more evidence of the importance of defining the criteria when predicting job performance. In this meta-analysis, the researchers found more support for personality traits out-predicting cognitive ability in predicting counterproductive work behavior, that the two predictors are approximately equal in predicting organizational citizenship behaviors, and that cognitive ability outperforms personality when predicting task and overall performance. So do you want high task performance, OCBs, or do you want to avoid CWB? :) (of course the situation is even more complicated depending on whether you're looking at individual, team, leader performance, over what period of time, etc.)
Okay, on to the awards! Without further ado, here are my nominations for Research of the Year for 2014:
1) Important advancements in our understanding of weight-based discrimination at work: Vanhove & Gordon.
2) A study of applicants posting faux pas on their social networking sites: Roulin.
3) Two important looks at assessments delivered remotely via mobile devices: Arthur, Doverspike, Munoz, Taylor, & Carr, and Morelli, Mahan, & Illingworth.
4) Two fascinating looks at personality at work: Judge, Simon, Hurst, & Kelley; and Wille & De Fruyt
5) An excellent study of how effective staffing and training practices impact firm-level flexibility and adaptability: Kim & Ployhart.
6) An important study of the movement of impactful I/O researchers to business schools: Aguinis, Bradley, & Brodersen.
7) The relationship between conscientiousness and job performance is more accurately described as curvilinear: Carter, Dalal, Boyce, O'Connell, Kung & Delgado
Finally, honorable mention to two great developments in 2014: the change of some publishers to making access to articles more affordable, and the announcement of an additional journal, the Journal of Personnel Assessment and Decisions.
I'm continually amazed at the quality of thought and research in our area and the passion and practicality you exhibit. Here's to an amazing 2014 and more in 2015!
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