Item response theory (IRT) is a modeling approach that links responses to test items with underlying latent constructs through formalized statistical models. This article focuses on how IRT can be used to advance science and practice in organizations. We describe established applications of IRT as a scale development tool and new applications of IRT as a research and theory testing tool that enables

Sexual harassment was once conceptualized solely as a sexual problem: coercive sexual advances that spring from natural feelings of sexual desire or romance. Research has since shown that by far the most common manifestation of sexual harassment is gender harassment, which has contempt at its core; this conduct aims to put people down and push them out, not pull them into sexual activity. With findings

Both perceived and objective measures of employee overqualification can impact job attitudes, various workplace behaviors, and work relationships. Utilizing motivation and capability-based theoretical approaches, this review summarizes research regarding the antecedents (demographic influences, personality traits, relational influences, job characteristics) and outcomes (individual health and well-being

Despite the centrality of technology to understanding how humans in organizations think, feel, and behave, researchers in organizational psychology and organizational behavior even now often avoid theorizing about it. In our review, we identify four major paradigmatic approaches in theoretical approaches to technology, which typically occur in sequence: technology-as-context, technology-as-causal,

Extending interactionist principles and targeting situational specificity of trait–performance linkages, trait activation theory (TAT) posits personality traits are expressed as valued work behavior in response to trait-relevant situational cues, subject to constraints and other factors, all operating at the task, social, and organizational levels. Review of 99 key sources citing TAT spanning 2011–2019

We conduct a comprehensive review of the chief executive officer (CEO) succession literature and update a CEO succession typology that incorporated manuscripts published through 2014. Our review illustrates that most of our understanding of succession and related processes stems from research based primarily in macro research traditions. We highlight ways that scholars can develop deeper understandings

Emotion work, the management of feelings and emotional displays in response to emotion work requirements, can have both positive and negative effects on well-being and performance. Adopting a work psychology perspective and drawing on work stress and work design literatures, we outline an expanded model of emotion work, regarding emotion work requirements as job characteristics and as part of broader

Self-report measures are characterized as being susceptible to threats associated with deliberate dissimulation or response distortion (i.e., social desirability responding) and careless responding. Careless responding typically arises in low-stakes settings (e.g., participating in a study for course credit) where some respondents are not motivated to respond in a conscientious manner to the items

Work-life balance is a topic eliciting much attention and scholarship. Yet what scholars mean by work-life balance is wide-ranging. This review focuses on work-life balance scholarship published primarily between 2000 and 2020. To understand what constitutes balance, we integrate this research with work on enrichment and depletion, two constructs that contribute to work-life balance. We identify four

Learning is the engagement in mental processes resulting in the acquisition and retention of knowledge, skills, and/or affect over time and applied when needed. Building on this definition, we integrate the science of training and the science of learning to propose a new science of workplace instruction, linking the design of instructional events to instructional outcomes such as transfer and job performance

In the past 20 years, there has been a growing interest in the phenomenon of workplace envy. This article provides an overarching review and analysis of the workplace envy literature. We first consider conceptual and measurement challenges facing envy researchers. We then review the current knowledge base in the research with a focus on synthesizing what we have learned regarding workplace envy's transmutations

I am quite gratified to be asked to provide this personal account of a career focusing on the role of individual differences in the workplace. I open with an account of my career journey and then offer a highly idiosyncratic perspective on substantive developments in the field over the past four decades, sneaking in observations about my own contributions. After surveying substantive developments,

Big data and artificial intelligence (AI) have become quite compelling—and relevant, ideally—to organizations and the consulting services that help manage them. Researchers and practitioners in industrial-organizational psychology (IOP) and human resource management (HRM) can add significant value to big data and AI by offering their substantive expertise in how workforce-relevant data are measured

In this review, we examine the burgeoning body of research on multiteam systems (MTSs) since the introduction of the concept in 2001. MTSs refer to networks of interdependent teams that coordinate at some level to achieve proximal and distal goals. We summarize MTS findings around three core processes and states: within- and between-team coordination processes/structures, leadership structures/processes

Positive organizational scholarship has led to a growing interest in the critical role of positive emotions for the lives of both workers and organizations. We review and integrate the different perspectives on positive emotions (i.e., positive valence, positive emotion regulation strategies, and positive adaptive function) and the four main mechanisms (i.e., cognition, affect, behavior, and physiology)

We begin by charting the evolution of the dominant perspective on job performance from one that viewed performance as static to one that viewed it as dynamic over long timeframes (e.g., months, years, decades) to one that views it as dynamic over not just long but also short timeframes (e.g., minutes, hours, days, weeks)—and that accordingly emphasizes the within-person level of analysis. The remainder

The phenomenon of posttraumatic growth—the transformative positive change that can occur as a result of a struggle with great adversity—has been a focus of interest for psychologists for more than two decades. Research on work-related posttraumatic growth has concentrated primarily on contexts that are inherently traumatic, either through direct exposure to trauma, such as in the military, or through

The emerging field of behavioral ethics has attracted much attention from scholars across a range of different disciplines, including social psychology, management, behavioral economics, and law. However, how behavioral ethics is situated in relation to more traditional work on business ethics within organizational behavior (OB) has not really been discussed yet. Our primary objective is to bridge

This review provides a comprehensive picture of the range of control influences in organizations. We begin by describing and labeling the various types of control mechanisms and control systems examined in the literature. We then identify several issues in the control literature that are currently compromising scholars’ capacities to develop a full, complete, and comprehensive knowledge base about

This review distills available empirical research about the process and experience of looking for a job. Job search varies according to several dimensions, including intensity, content, and temporality/persistence. Our review examines how these dimensions relate to job search success, which involves job finding as well as job quality. Because social networking and interviewing behavior have attracted

In this review, we conceptualize teamwork as the linchpin driving safety performance throughout an organization. Safety is promoted by teams through various mechanisms that interact in a complex and dynamic process. We press pause on this dynamic process to organize a discussion highlighting the critical role played by teamwork factors in the engagement of safe and unsafe behavior, identifying five

This review describes the history, current state, and future of modern discrimination in organizations. First, we review development of discrimination from the early 1900s to the present day, specifically discussing various stigmatized identities, including gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, disability, weight, and age. Next, we describe both individual-level (e.g., identity management, allyship)

By investigating broadly a contingency approach and implicit leadership theoretical perspectives with a multilevel lens as a starting point, this review highlights the potential for Asian conceptualizations of leadership. More specifically, by highlighting the important contingent role national culture plays in influencing leadership effectiveness, we review Asian conceptualizations of leadership that

Psychological measurement is at the heart of organizational research. I review recent practices in the area of measurement development and evaluation, detailing best practice recommendations in both of these areas. Throughout the article, I stress that theory and discovery should guide scale development and that statistical tools, although they play a crucial role, should be chosen to best evaluate

We contend that a variety of types of employee exits from the firm are presumed to be a net positive and are thus valued by management, resulting in a potentially important new way to think about these leavers. For each of three valued exit (VE) types (discharges, poor-performer quits, and layoffs) we examine incidence, construct similarities and differences, and antecedents. We also summarize and

Social networks involve ties (and their absence) between people in social settings such as organizations. Yet much social network research, given its roots in sociology, ignores the individuality of people in emphasizing the constraints of the structural positions that people occupy. A recent movement to bring people back into social network research draws on the rich history of social psychological

Secondary uses of meta-analytic data (SUMAD) represent advanced analyses and applications of first-order meta-analytic results for theoretical (e.g., theory testing) and practical (e.g., evidence-based practice) purposes to produce novel knowledge that cannot be directly obtained from the input meta-analytic results. First-order meta-analytic results in the form of bivariate effect sizes have been

According to organizational support theory (OST), employees develop a general perception concerning the extent to which their work organization values their contribution and cares about their well-being (perceived organizational support, or POS). We explain OST and review empirical POS findings relevant to OST's main propositions, including new findings that suggest changes to OST. Major antecedents

Workplace mentoring relationships have been advanced as critical to employee development. However, mentoring research has tended to find small to moderate effects of mentoring on protégé and mentor outcomes and considerable heterogeneity in effect sizes. These findings underscore the need to better understand the psychology of mentoring relationships in order to maximize the benefits of mentoring for

We offer a comprehensive review of the theoretical underpinnings and existing empirical evidence in the implicit leadership and implicit followership theories domain. After briefly touching on the historical roots of information-processing approaches to leadership and leader categorization theory, we focus on current contextualized and dynamic perspectives. We specifically present neural network approaches

Regulatory focus theory distinguishes between two different value concerns: promotion concerns with advancement and growth, and prevention concerns with safety and security. Since its publication more than 20 years ago, regulatory focus theory has generated a substantial amount of research and it has been applied to numerous organizational contexts. We identified four main domains: decision making

This article provides an overview of my career in industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology and organizational behavior (OB). I describe critical experiences shaping my development as a scholar, in particular, the contribution learning to think organizationally has made to my scholarship. I map my career experiences onto Boyer's scholarship framework, from an emphasis on basic and applied research

In this article I comment on areas where I agree/disagree with the five previous perspectives on organizational psychology/organizational behavior (OP/OB). This is followed by a dire prediction of the future for OP doctoral programs, criticisms of the journal editorial processes and the overemphasis on deductive theory building, the value of qualitative analyses and enumerative reviews, the importance

We conceptualize organizational teams as dynamic systems evolving in response to their environments. We then review the past 10 years of team effectiveness research and summarize its implications by categorizing studies under three main overlapping and coevolving dimensions: compositional features, structural features, and mediating mechanisms. We highlight prominent work that focused on variables

This review focuses on the paradoxical concept of self-leadership—defined as a comprehensive self-influence process capturing how individuals motivate themselves to complete work that is naturally motivating or work that must be done but is not naturally motivating—as a fundamental process that challenges many traditional assumptions in organizational psychology and organizational behavior. We first

Fueled by socioeconomic trends that changed the composition of organizational workforces, the term workforce diversity was coined in the 1990s. Since then, both researchers and practitioners have strived (and struggled) to understand the concept, its effects in and on organizations, and strategies for managing such effects. In this article, I provide an overview and interpretation of the current literature

Customer service is a central feature of the service context. As service research has evolved into a burgeoning multidisciplinary field, management scholars have developed an impressive body of research regarding the antecedents, processes, and outcomes of customer service. We provide an integrative review and synthesis of the literature with a focus on three important and interrelated aspects of customer

Goal orientation, a theory that originated primarily in the educational and social psychology fields, has emerged in the past two decades as a prominent theory in organizational psychology and organizational behavior. We review the state of affairs for goal orientation research with the following roadmap. First, we discuss the historical roots of goal orientation. Next, we summarize the nomological

We provide a review of psychological contract research, beginning with past conceptualizations and empirical evidence. We tailor this retrospective look by reviewing the antecedents and outcomes associated with psychological contract breach and discussing the dominant theoretical explanations for the breach-outcome relationship. This synthesis of past evidence provides the foundation for reviewing

We review person-organization fit theory and research on selection and recruitment, and also highlight practical recommendations. The article is framed around explaining how and why people who are well matched to their organization experience optimal psychological reactions and performance. We address five key challenges to person-organization fit research and provide a brief overview of the critical

This article reviews work and employment research, paying particular attention to theory and applications by scholars in organizational psychology and organizational behavior (OP/OB) and employment or industrial relations (ER), with the objective of better understanding employee and labor-management relationships. Our animating premise is that juxtaposing these two research traditions provides a stronger

There is solid evidence that proactivity, defined as self-initiated and future-focused action to change oneself or the situation, can positively benefit individuals and organizations. However, this way of behaving can sometimes be ineffective or have negative consequences. We seek to understand what factors shape the effect of proactivity on individual-level outcomes. On the basis of a review of 95

This article reviews the history of performance management (PM), beginning with performance evaluation. We discuss various strategies that have been used to enable accurate ratings as well as cognitive processes and contextual factors that have been shown to significantly impact ratings. We raise questions about the concept of true performance and whether raters can be enabled and motivated to make

Humans have consumed psychoactive substances for millennia, and these substances have played an important role in human culture and human labor. This article investigates our current understanding of the general association between the workplace and employee involvement with psychoactive substances. I begin by briefly exploring the broad evolutionary and historical intersection of psychoactive substances

Organizational politics has been an oft-studied phenomenon for nearly four decades. Prior reviews have described research in this stream as aligning with one of three categories: perceptions of organizational politics (POPs), political behavior, or political skill. We suggest that because these categories are at the construct level research on organizational politics has been artificially constrained

Studies of team-level constructs can produce new insights when researchers explicitly take into account several critical conceptual and methodological issues. This article explicates the conceptual bases for multilevel research on team constructs and discusses specific issues relating to conceptual frameworks, measurement, and data analysis. To advance programmatic research involving team-level constructs

Assessment centers (ACs) are employed for selecting and developing employees and leaders. They are interpersonal at their core because they consist of interactive exercises. Minding this perspective, this review focuses on the role of the assessee, the assessor, and the AC design, as well as their interplay in the interpersonal situation of the AC. Therefore, it addresses which conceptual perspectives

The concept of emotional energy generates increasing scholarly and popular interest. Research spans multiple disciplines (psychology, sociology, organization behavior, network science) and levels of analysis: micro (individual-level emotional energy), meso (dyadic or relational energy), and macro (group emotion, energy networks). I impose order on this sprawling and disparate literature by defining

The notion of occupation has long played a vital role in understanding the psychology of individual behavior, choice, perceptions, and attitudes in work contexts. However, the centrality of occupation to research found within the broader organizational psychology and behavior literature has been largely supplanted in favor of a more organization-centric lens. The primary goal of this review is to build

The concept of work as a calling has the potential to provide unique and powerful insights into how individuals relate to their work and organizations. However, although this concept may be one of the oldest in the study of work—harking back to the Protestant Reformation—its impact on mainstream OP and OB research has been limited. We review the research literature on work as a calling, and identify

Despite an extensive history of research on status (the prestige, respect, and esteem that a party has in the eyes of others), the time is ripe for a new review of the status literature given a fairly recent trend to study the dynamic nature of status, that is, not just how individuals acquire status, but also how they maintain or lose it over time. Greater understanding of dynamic status processes

The promise and perils of heterogeneity in team member characteristics has been and continues to be one of the central questions in research on management teams. We review the literature on member heterogeneity within management teams, with a focus on summarizing and integrating research on both horizontal member differences (i.e., diversity) and vertical member differences (i.e., inequality)—two streams

Transfer of training is one of the oldest topics of interest to industrial and organizational (I/O) psychologists. Drawing on several meta-analytic studies and recent empirical work, we first synthesize what is now reliably known with respect to the generalization and retention of learned knowledge and skills to work contexts. The second part of our review focuses on what is unknown—the significant

We review recent literature in the organizational sciences that uses some form of physiological measurement. We organize our review in terms of the underlying constructs that physiological measures were intended to assess. The majority of such constructs represents stress, health, or arousal, although these constructs are often studied in an attempt to understand a diverse set of other phenomena. The

How do self-direction and personal values influence career outcomes? Such questions have been central in research on the protean career—a career process characterized by the exercise of self-direction and an intrinsic values orientation in the pursuit of psychological success. This article provides an integrative review, with a focus on three empirically supported protean processes—identity awareness

Over the past 30 years, conservation of resources (COR) theory has become one of the most widely cited theories in organizational psychology and organizational behavior. COR theory has been adopted across the many areas of the stress spectrum, from burnout to traumatic stress. Further attesting to the theory's centrality, COR theory is largely the basis for the more work-specific leading theory of

Although scholars in the field of organizational behavior have raised concerns about a lack of contextual appreciation, there has been a recent embrace of contextual thinking in the organizational sciences. In this review, I discuss several recent theories and measures of context. The added value of a contextual approach is illustrated by how context can shape personality, how it affects the emergence

The study of diversity in work groups and organizations has become a significant domain of inquiry. However, the overall consensus in this literature seems to be that a direct relationship between diversity and performance-based outcomes is tenuous at best. To break this impasse, we propose a structural-emergence model that emphasizes how the embedding structural context has substantial implications

Over the last 15 years, there has been growing fascination among scholars in studying “dark behaviors” and “dark traits,” especially as they are expressed in organizational contexts. One taxonomy of dark traits that has garnered special interest is the dark triad (DT), which is comprised of three toxic and malevolent traits: psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. This chapter offers a review

This article updates our understanding of the field of job insecurity (JI) by incorporating studies across the globe since 2003, analyzes what we know, and offers ideas on how to move forward. We begin by reviewing the conceptualization and operationalization of job insecurity. We then review empirical studies of the antecedents, consequences, and moderators of JI effects, as well as the various theoretical