We assess the perceived impact of leaders’ humility on team effectiveness, and how this relationship is mediated by balanced processing of information. Ninety-six leaders participate in the study. The findings suggest that humility in leaders is indirectly related to leaders’ perceived impact on team effectiveness. The study also corroborates literature pointing out the benefits of using other-reports to measure humility, and suggests adding humility to the authentic leadership research agenda.

Moral and financial scandals emerging in recent years around the world have created the momentum for reconsidering the role of virtuousness in organizational settings. This empirical study seeks to contribute toward maintaining this momentum. We answer to researchers’ suggestions that the exploratory study carried out by Cameron et al. :766–790, 2004 ), which related organizational virtuousness and performance, must be pursued employing their measure of OV in other contexts and in relation to other outcomes :928–958, 2007 ). Two hundred and (...) sixteen employees reported their perceptions of OV and their affective well-being at work, their supervisors reporting their organizational citizenship behaviors. The main finding is that the perceptions of OV predict some OCB both directly and through the mediating role of AWB. The evidence suggests that OV is worthy of a higher status in the business and organizational psychology literatures. (shrink)

Through a convenience sample of 260 employees, the study shows how employees’ perceptions about corporate citizenship (CC) predict their affective commitment. The study was carried out in Portugal, a high in-group and low societal collectivistic culture. Maignan et al.’s (1999, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science27(4), 455–469) construct, including economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary responsibilities was used. The main findings are: (a) contrary to what has been presumed in the literature, the discretionary dimension includes two factors: CC toward employees (...) and toward community; (b) perceptions of CC explain 35% of unique variance of affective commitment; (c) the best predictors are perceptions of economic and legal CC and, mainly, perceptions of discretionary CC toward employees; (d) the perceptions of discretionary CC toward employees are significantly better predictors of affective commitment than are perceptions of economic, ethical, and discretionary CC toward the community; (e) perceived inconsistency of the several CC dimensions is detrimental to employees’ affective commitment. The study questions the four-dimensional model of the CC construct as operationalized by Maignan et al., suggests that culture should be included as a moderating variable in future research, and stresses that affective commitment may decrease when employees perceive that their organizations act upon the several areas of CC inconsistently. (shrink)

Sixty-eight stores of a retail chain were used for testing a model in which perceived authentic leadership predicts stores’ sales achievement through the mediating role of perceived store virtuousness and perceived store potency. Employees reported AL, store virtuousness, and store potency. Sales achievement over a period of four consecutive months subsequent to data collection was considered as dependent variable . The main findings are the following: AL predicts store potency through the mediating role of store virtuousness; store virtuousness predicts sales (...) achievement through the mediating role of store potency; AL predicts sales achievement via the mediating role of both store virtuousness and store potency. By focusing on three positive constructs, whose interrelations have scarcely been explored, and relating them to store performance, the study enriches the Positive Organizational Scholarship movement, and suggests that AL and virtuousness are good in themselves and also potential facilitators of group success. (shrink)

Through a qualitative approach, we explore the perspective of 72 CEOs of companies operating in Portugal about the definition of corporate sustainability and its facilitators, and obtain four main findings. First, most CEOs equate CS with the company’s continuity/viability. Second, the relevance ascribed to different stakeholders differs considerably: while more than 50 % of CEOs cited shareholders/profits, and more than 40 % mentioned the natural environment and employees, very few mentioned customers, society, suppliers, the State, or competitors. Third, the management (...) practices considered as most important to develop CS are the organization’s strategic alignment with a long-term orientation, and developing and energizing people within a positive organizational climate characterized by trust and ethics. Fourth, the leadership characteristics and behaviors considered as most important to foster CS are scrutinizing the future and leading people through a mobilizing vision; energizing and developing employees; and leading by example. While the whole picture is largely consistent with the “sustainable strategic management” approach suggested by Stead and Stead and with recent CS integrative approaches, the great majority of CEOs who participate in the study have not embraced such integrative and coevolutive perspectives. (shrink)

We uncover fundamental dimensions of the process through which organizations embed the practice of fraternity through embarking on an organizational journey in the direction of the common good. Building on the latest encyclical of Pope Francis, _Fratelli Tutti_, about fraternal and social friendship, we offer insight into the understanding of what it means to become a fraternal organization and reflect on the key ethical and paradoxical challenges for organizations aiming at collectively contributing to the common good. We add to previous (...) work by characterizing this journey as a process involving unique ethical challenges that emerge from the paradoxes associated with this process and how this might change the nature of the relationships between organizations and others within the organizational landscape. (shrink)

Business firms have been explained as internal markets or as communities. To be sustainable, however, they need to reconcile these two constituting elements that have mainly been touted as opposite and part of a dualistic relationship. We suggest that organizations may, in alternative, view market and community as part of a duality, interdependent and mutually constituting processes that may not only contradict each other but also enable one another. The implications of a duality view for business ethics, which articulates market (...) and community elements in a fruitful, mutually enabling relationship, are considered, and duality is presented as a way of transcending what is commonly viewed as opposition, moving organizations both in the direction of humane and competitive finalities. (shrink)

Despite common assumptions that capitalism and compassion are contradictory, we theorize that compassion can be compatible with capitalism, and may either manifest or be inhibited within capitalistic society through a range of organizational approaches. These, in turn, result in varying consequences for employees’ experiences, feelings, and behaviors. In this article, we examine the perceived support provided to employees by their organizations during the 2011 Brisbane flood. Analysis of interview data identifies a continuum of organizational responses: from neglect to ambiguity to (...) compassionate care, each of which engendered various employee experiences, feelings, and behaviors toward themselves, their organizations, and the community at large. The empirical findings lead to theorizing that the perceived organizational responses are consonant with a range of capitalistic tendencies. Perceived organizational neglect is most consonant with neoclassical capitalism, understood as having a primary focus on self-interest and profit maximization. Perceived ambiguity tends to fit with a supplemental capitalism that adds social responsibility to the baseline of classical capitalism. Organizational compassionate care fits with a transformed or conscious capitalism that considers value creation in society to be an organization’s primary purpose. (shrink)

We propose a liminality-based analysis of the process of ethical leadership/followership in organizations. A liminal view presents ethical leadership as a process taking place in organizational contexts that are often characterized by high levels of ambiguity, which render the usual rules and preferences dubious or inadequate. In these relational spaces, involving leaders, followers, and their context, old frames may be questioned and new ones introduced in an emergent way, through subtle processes whose evolution and implications may not be easy to (...) grasp even by those participating in them. (shrink)

We propose a liminality-based analysis of the process of ethical leadership/followership in organizations. A liminal view presents ethical leadership as a process taking place in organizational contexts that are often characterized by high levels of ambiguity, which render the usual rules and preferences dubious or inadequate. In these relational spaces, involving leaders, followers, and their context, old frames may be questioned and new ones introduced in an emergent way, through subtle processes whose evolution and implications may not be easy to (...) grasp even by those participating in them. (shrink)

Obedience: a simple term. Stanley Milgram, the famous experimental social psychologist, shocked the world with theory about it. Another man, Pol Pot, the infamous leader of the Khmer Rouge, showed how far the desire for obedience could go in human societies. Milgram conducted his experiments in the controlled environment of the US psychology laboratory of the 1960s. Pol Pot experimented with Utopia in the totalitarian Kampuchea of the 1970s. In this article, we discuss the process through which the Khmer Rouge (...) regime created an army of unquestioningly obedient soldiers — including child soldiers. Based on these two cases, we advance a framework on how obedience can be grown or countered. (shrink)

Obedience: a simple term. Stanley Milgram, the famous experimental social psychologist, shocked the world with theory about it. Another man, Pol Pot, the infamous leader of the Khmer Rouge, showed how far the desire for obedience could go in human societies. Milgram conducted his experiments in the controlled environment of the US psychology laboratory of the 1960s. Pol Pot experimented with Utopia in the totalitarian Kampuchea of the 1970s. In this article, we discuss the process through which the Khmer Rouge (...) regime created an army of unquestioningly obedient soldiers – including child soldiers. Based on these two cases, we advance a framework on how obedience can be grown or countered. (shrink)

Drawing on Durkheim's concept of anomie, we address the under‐explored phenomenon of anomic suicide in contemporary organizations and discuss the consequences of solidarity for organizations and society. The relations of social solidarity to issues of identity and insecurity are explored through the cases of France Telecom Orange and Foxconn. Remedial implications for organizing, considered as community building, are discussed. Durkheim wrote not only about anomic but also altruistic suicide. We will also analyze examples of this type of suicide. Some tentative (...) suggestions are made for how to organize to minimize the incidence of suicidal violence in organizations. (shrink)

In the management and organization studies literature, a key question to explore and explain is that of the family as an organizational stakeholder, particularly when working-from-home became the “new normal”. Departing from meta-analytic studies on the work-family relation and connecting with scholarly conversation on work-family boundary dynamics, we identify three main narratives. In the _separation narrative,_ work and family belong to different realms, and including the family in the domain of organizational responsibility is seen as pointless. The _interdependence narrative_ stresses (...) that organizations and families are overlapping domains in which it is important to acknowledge that the policies and practices of the former might have an impact on family life, and vice-versa. The _embeddedness narrative_, brought to the fore by the COVID-19 pandemic, sees employment and family as progressively convergent and hybrid work domains. The evolution of employment relations towards increased hybridity of the work situation being embedded in the familial/household context increasingly calls for consideration of the family/household as an integral rather than a peripheral stakeholder. (shrink)

The topic of spirituality is gaining an increasing visibility in organizational studies. It is the authors contention that every theory of organization has explicit or implicit views of spirituality in the workplace. To analyze the presence of spiritual ideologies in management theories, they depart from Barley and Kunda's Administrative Science Quarterly article and analyze management theories as spirituality theories with regard to representations of people and the organization. From this analysis, we extract two major dimensions of people (as dependent or (...) independent workers) and the organization (as spiritually informed or spiritually uninformed) that, in combination, result in a typology that advances four organizational types of spirituality: the soulful organization, the holistic organization, the ascetic organization, and the professional organization. The expression of spirituality in each of these forms is discussed with the aim of contributing to a critically informed analysis of organizational spirituality. (shrink)

Using a sample of 114 leaders (described by 516 team members), we show empirically that the association between leader relational transparency and leader receptiveness to relational transparency of team members is indirect (through leader respect) and conditional on leader humility. When a transparent leader expresses humility, he/she conveys respect to team members and is perceived as more receptive to the relational transparency of employees toward him/her. The indirect association between leader relational transparency and leader receptiveness to the relational transparency of (...) team members is negative, however, when the leader is perceived as non-humble. Our paper contributes to discussion about the limits of relational transparency as an indicator of authentic leadership. We suggest that what is often described as relational transparency is no more than unidirectional transparency—from leaders to followers. We conclude that transparency (and authenticity) in leaders is relational only when it is bidirectional. (shrink)

In an application of the personality dynamics framework, we advance understanding on the relationship between baseline leader humility and team psychological safety by exploring the roles of humility variability and attractor strength. Specifically, we examine how the consistency of leader-expressed humility across team members operates as a boundary condition in the relationship between leader-expressed humility and team psychological safety. We also explore how the agreement between leader self-reported humility and leader-expressed humility operates as an attractor to predict such a consistency. (...) We test the hypothesized model through a sample of 85 teams, rated by 354 team members. The findings suggest that consistency reinforces, while inconsistency weakens, the effect of leader-expressed humility on team psychological safety. The findings also reveal that SOA relates to the consistency of leader-expressed humility, depending on the level at which the agreement occurs. We conclude that to better understand the outcomes of humble leadership, it is necessary to take into account not only the baseline of humility expressed by the leader, but also his/her humility variability and the strength of the attractor. (shrink)

The article suggests that the four-factor model of corporate citizenship (CC: economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary responsibilities) does not fairly represent all pertinent dimensions of employees’ CC perceptions. Based on an empirical study with a sample of 316 employees, we show that, at least in some contexts, individuals distinguish seven CC dimensions: (1) economic responsibilities toward customers; (2) economic responsibilities toward owners; (3) legal responsibilities; (4) ethical responsibilities; (5) discretionary responsibilities toward employees; (6) discretionary responsibilities toward the community; and (7) (...) discretionary responsibilities toward the natural environment. We do not suggest that this seven-factor model represents all of the (more) relevant CC dimensions in the employees’ minds. We aim to share evidence showing that the four-factor model proposed by Maignan et al. (Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 27(4):455–469, 1999 ) may be refined, at least when the employees are the stakeholders in question. (shrink)

Obedience: a simple term. Stanley Milgram, the famous experimental social psychologist, shocked the world with theory about it. Another man, Pol Pot, the infamous leader of the Khmer Rouge, showed how far the desire for obedience could go in human societies. Milgram conducted his experiments in the controlled environment of the US psychology laboratory of the 1960s. Pol Pot experimented with Utopia in the totalitarian Kampuchea of the 1970s. In this article, we discuss the process through which the Khmer Rouge (...) regime created an army of unquestioningly obedient soldiers – including child soldiers. Based on these two cases, we advance a framework on how obedience can be grown or countered. (shrink)