Browsing by Author "Larrick, Richard P"

Although subgroups are a central component of work teams, they have remained largely unexamined by organizational scholars. In three chapters, a theory and measure of subgroups are developed and then tested. The theory introduces a typology of subgroups and a depiction of the antecedents and consequences of subgroups. The measure, called the subgroup algorithm, determines the most dominant configurations of subgroups in real work teams--those that are most likely to influence team processes and outcomes. It contrasts the characteristics within a subgroup or set of subgroups versus the characteristics between subgroups or a set of subgroups for every potential configuration of subgroups on every work team in a given sample. The algorithm is tested with a simulation, with results suggesting that it adds value to the methodological literature on subgroups. The empirical test uses the subgroup algorithm to test key propositions put forth in the theory of subgroups. First, it is predicted that teams will perform better when identity-based subgroups are unequal in size and knowledge-based subgroups are equal in size. Second, it is predicted that, although teams will perform better with an increasing number of both identity-based and knowledge-based subgroups, there will be a discontinuity in this linear function for identity-based subgroups: teams with two identity-based subgroups will perform more poorly than teams with any other number of identity-based subgroups. The subgroup algorithm is used to test these predictions in a sample of 326 work teams. Results generally support the predictions.

The value of task-related conflict to team effectiveness continues to generate controversy in organizational studies. I argue that this debate reflects as much differences in the conceptualization of conflict by scholars from separate traditions as it does variation in empirical settings and methods. The model proposed in this research is a more general framework for the study of team conflict that clarifies, accommodates, and reconciles to a large degree the divergent findings of prior research. It suggests that recent pessimism about the value of team conflict is overstated, and it offers a number of promising paths through which task-related conflict may improve team performance and satisfaction. Chapter 1 reviews the history of this debate and introduces the model of team conflict. Chapter 2 documents a test of the model's propositions in a correlational study of 223 MBA teams conducting a decision-making exercise. Chapter 3 features an experimental test of the model with a forecasting task completed by 60 3-person groups. And Chapter 4 revisits the conflict over conflict in light of the studies presented herein.

One important aspect of enhancing creativity in organizations is to measure and reward creativity. However, not every creative process can be immediately tied to and measured by numerical standards. In such cases, the manager's subjective impression of employee creativity may replace objective measures as the basis for decision-making. In an organizational context, the social context in which the work occurs must be thoroughly considered as employees often work in groups on major products. As such, this paper examines two questions on how the social setting affects the observer's creativity assessment. Firstly, I demonstrate that observers use surface features of groups to infer the creativity of group output: they expect demographically diverse groups to be more creative than homogeneous groups and this difference in expectation biases the evaluation. Secondly, when observers form impressions of individual creativity based on group output, I demonstrate that they commit the fundamental attribution error in partitioning credit between others in the group and the target individual. In turn this either benefits or costs the perceived creativity of the target, depending on the objective quality of group output. Taken together, the two questions addressed in this paper emphasize the need for further research on factors that influence the observer's perception of creativity in an organizational context.

I investigate people's degree of preference for "blinding" in decision-making: purposefully restricting the information one sees in order to try to form a more accurate evaluation. For example, when grading her students’ papers, a professor might choose to "blind" herself to students’ names by anonymizing them, and thus evaluate the papers on content alone. I propose a theoretical framework of individual-level blinding preferences, outlining various factors that may drive evaluators’ choices to see or blind themselves to potentially biasing information in an impending evaluation. Next, I discuss 8 studies (N = 5,350) and associated replications (N = 3,720) that (a) explore individuals’ preferences for blinding and outline consequences for bias, (b) test the mechanisms driving blinding decisions proposed in my theoretical framework, and (c) explore the efficacy of multiple interventions to encourage a choice to blind one’s judgment. I find that people often choose to see potentially biasing information rather than be blind to it, even though they acknowledge they should be blind and that seeing such information will likely bias their evaluations. I also find that interventions that facilitate deliberative reflection before a blinding choice is made can encourage a choice to be blind. I discuss contributions of these studies to research on mental contamination, inequality reduction in organizations, and social perception, as well as implications of these studies for groups concerned with members’ decision bias.

Individuals have the tendency to believe that they have complete information when making decisions. In many contexts this propensity allows for swift, efficient, and generally effective decision making. However, individuals cannot always see a representative picture of the world in which they operate. This paper examines judgment in censored environments where a constraint, the censorship point, systematically distorts the sample observed by a decision maker. Random instances beyond the censorship point are observed at the censorship point, while instances below the censorship point are observed at their true value. Many important managerial decisions occur in censored environments, such as inventory, risk-taking, and employee evaluation decisions. This empirical work demonstrates a censorship bias - individuals tend to rely too heavily on the observed censored sample, biasing their beliefs about the underlying population. Further, the censorship bias is exacerbated for higher rates of censorship, higher variance in the population, and higher variability in the censorship points. Evidence from four studies demonstrates how the censorship bias can cause managers to underestimate demand for their goods, over-estimate risk in their environments, and underappreciate the capabilities of their employees, which can lead to undesirable outcomes for organizations.

People give each other advice on a variety of topics throughout their lifetimes. In this dissertation, I ask: Do advisors accurately perceive the impact of their advice? Or, do they possess blind spots that prevent them from doing so? I focus on whether advisors recognize the information they need in order to form judgments of the impact of their advice, which I call "impact judgments". Four studies demonstrate that advisors have blind spots in their perceptions of their influence and that these blind spots have consequences for advisors' accuracy and subsequent behavioral intentions. First, a free-recall task (Study 1) and a manipulated scenario task (Study 2) showed that advisors failed to recognize when they were missing information needed to form accurate impact judgments, namely, information on the advisee's initial, pre-advice opinion, unless they were prompted to think about why they need that information. Second, an experiment where participants were assigned the role of advisor or advisee (Study 3) demonstrated that advisors' impact judgments were less accurate when advisors did not know the advisee's initial, pre-advice opinion. Third, participants' recollections of a time they gave advice (Study 4) showed that advisors relied on their impact judgments for forming downstream behavioral intentions such as willingness to give advice again, even when they recognized that they were lacking needed information. I conclude with a discussion of the implications for advice giving by individuals and members of organizations, a general framework for impact judgments, and areas for future research.

Overconfidence has primarily been studied in one of three forms; overestimation, overplacement, or overprecision. These forms differ in their definitions, the levels of overconfidence they exhibit, and their responses to changes to task difficulty. This has led some to conclude that the different measurements of overconfidence do not share a common, dispositional component, but rather are empirically distinct. In two time-lagged studies, we show that at an individual-level, i) different elicitations of overconfidence are positively correlated, and ii) measures of overconfidence are stable over short and long time periods. We conclude from this evidence that there is a dispositional component to overconfident beliefs and that the three forms are empirically related. We also introduce a new measure of overconfidence that is less dependent on the idiosyncrasies of individual elicitations: core overconfidence. We find that core overconfidence is significantly associated with a range of individual difference measures (e.g., narcissism), and can be measured efficiently using a short three-item scale. Overall, by studying the same respondents’ behaviors across elicitations, domains, and time periods, we find strong evidence for stable, individual differences in overconfidence.

As the role of thinking about one’s future in terms of decision-making and goal pursuit gains momentum, it becomes increasingly important to ensure the balance between optimistic future thinking and rational self-concepts. This question especially gains significance in light of the fact that thinking about the future itself may not always instigate behavioral changes. The present research, drawing on subjective time perceptions, self-cognition, and self-regulation, proposes that people adjust their self-views depending on the extent to which they exclude their future selves from their current self-representation. Evidence from six studies demonstrates that when the future is perceived to be excluded from one’s current identity or self-construal, a greater perceived gap between the present and the future is likely to yield a comparison process by which people draw a contrast with their superior future selves and subsequently express critical self-evaluation. Such comparative thinking will increase one’s motivation to improve. The findings complement and extend previous research on the role of thinking about the future while demonstrating that different narratives of one’s future are a valuable source for understanding and predicting people’s view of themselves and current behavior.

In recent years, leadership research has focused on the concept of “authentic leaders” who act consistently with their values, make balanced decisions, are self-aware, and are transparent in their relationships (Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing and Peterson, 2008). Authentic leaders have the dual tasks of remaining true to their own values and beliefs (in order to be perceived as authentic) and simultaneously projecting an expressive persona (in order to be perceived as a leader). In this research, personality (extraversion and conscientiousness) and impression management (self-monitoring) constructs are used to capture the aspects of authentic leadership that reflect authenticity (expressiveness and other-directedness) and are shown to predict authentic leadership using ratings of followers. The analysis also includes the different dimensions of the self-monitoring scale, using mini-scales that reflect expressiveness (public-performing) and consistency (other-directedness or self-directedness), and show that they predict authenticity in leaders using self-ratings of leaders. The studies help to explain which leaders meet the challenge of being themselves and projecting their persona. Finally, there is evidence that authentic leadership is a mediator of the relationship between previously studied personality variables (extraversion and conscientiousness) and job satisfaction.

Motivated by recent academic inquiry into the distinction between relational collectivism and group collectivism that characterize different cultures, I empirically investigate the differential effects of relational and group collectivism on social motivation across cultures. The present research contextualizes motivation in social interactions and illustrates the influences of different types of interaction partners on social motivation through self-construal. To unpackage the psychological process in which social motivation is elicited, I develop a two-step theoretical model: In the first step, I examine how different types of interaction partners activate the individual, relational and collective aspects of the self construal. The second step of my model investigates how the activated self-construal shapes individuals' social motivations toward their interaction partners.

Empirical studies were conducted in an individualist culture (US) and a collective culture (Singapore). Results from the studies identified both culturally specific and culturally universal patterns in self-construal activation. Interacting with a friend elicits relational self across both cultures. When interacting with a stranger, members of individualist cultures activated their collective and relational selves whereas members of collectivist cultures activated their individual self. Another interesting finding is that interacting with an ingroup member evokes the relational aspect of the self-construal in collectivist cultures, but it elicits the collective aspect of the self-construal in individualist cultures. An outgroup member evokes the collective aspect of the self-construal across both cultures. The studies also examined the link between the activated self-construal and its motivational consequence, and established the mediating effect of self-construal between interaction partner and social motivation. Applying the two-step model to both individualist and collectivist cultures, I demonstrate that individualist and collectivist cultures vary in the self-construal activation process in response to different types of interaction partners, but once certain aspect of the self is activated, it is likely to lead to the same social motivations across the two cultures.

This dissertation examines how people’s loyalty to their groups influences their perception of harm. Specifically, people who are loyal (vs. not loyal) to their ingroup perceive negative actions by an outgroup against their group as more harmful. Three studies provided support for this hypothesis. Students loyal to their university’s basketball team perceived greater harm from its rival basketball team than those who were not (Studies 1 and 2). The effect held controlling for related group constructs, such as group identification (Studies 1 and 2), and related moral constructs, such as belief in a just world (Study 1). The association between loyalty and harm perception generalized to a country context by showing that Americans more loyal to the United States were more likely to perceive foreign tariffs as harmful (Study 3). Rather than differences in memory recall or general negative perceptions of the outgroup, this effect appeared to be due to loyalists exaggerating the perceived harm inflicted (Studies 2 and 3). Furthermore, as perceptions of harm increased, desire for punitive actions also increased (Study 3).