Deze samenvatting is gebaseerd op het studiejaar 2013-2014.

Lecture 1: Job Performance in Context

Job performance is the behavior under the control of the individual that contribute to or diminish organizational goals. Evaluating job performance is difficult, as taking risks in a job is sometimes paired with making mistakes, but are you therefore a worse employee?

Job performance is influenced by three dimensions:

• Task performance: behaviors that contribute to the organization’s technical core. This behavior is very specific for a position and contributes to the execution of a job (teacher: conveying class content). It is desired by an organization and therefore often part of the job description. The key drivers are ability and expertise and the job specificity is high.
• Contextual Performance: behaviors that advance the organization’s goal by contributing to its social and psychological environment, which is not directly related to your specific job (helping others, supporting organizational goals). The contextual performance has become more importance since there is an increasing global competition, which asks more than executing a task. The team-based organizational structures are becoming more popular and the focus on customer service increases. Contextual performance is desired by an organization, but no part of the job description. Furthermore, the job specificity is low. Key drivers for showing this behavior are personality, attitudes and feelings.
• Counterproductive Performance: voluntary behavior that harms the well-being of the organization, team or other employees. Examples of this negative influence on an organization are wasting resources, sabotage or violence among employees. This dimension of performance is not desired by an organization and has low job specificity. The key drivers are also personality, attitudes and feelings.

Job Performance is dynamic, which is caused by the fact that people differ in potential maximum performance by skills and expertise and by personal or situational characteristics. Also the individual performance of employees fluctuates over time, which is caused by moods, emotions and attitudes or distractions from current tasks.

A framework which is used to describe job performance, can be designed in two ways. First, Context factors moderate the relationship between human factors and job performance. Second, human factors moderate the relationship between context factors and job performance. 

Lecture 2: Job Design

Job Design is the way the elements in a job are organized and gives an arrangement of the specific tasks a job contains. Job Design has emerged from the classis approach of Scientific Management (Taylor). This approach focus on efficiency and mass production, has horizontal division of labor and a vertical separation of planning and doing. The key consequences are Job simplification and division of labor.

Strengths of classic approach:

• It enables mass production
• It increases the efficiency and delivers a constant output.
• It is cheaper because you need less skilled labor.

Weaknesses of classic approach:

• Tiring and boring jobs
• Negative work attitudes from the employees, which result in less motivated behavior.
• Few opportunities for creativity and innovation.

The Job Characteristics Model shows five core job characteristics (skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback from the job), which are influenced by three critical psychological states (experienced meaningfulness of work, experienced responsibility for the outcomes and knowledge of actual results of work activities) to create one of the three work-related outcomes (high internal work motivation, high quality work performance and high satisfaction with work). In this model, the Employee’s Growth Need Strength is considered as a moderator for the relation between both job characteristics and psychological states and psychological states and outcomes.

Strengths of the Job Characteristics Model:

• Core ideas have been empirically confirmed. 
• It takes motivation and job attitudes into account.
• There is integration of personality as a boundary condition.

Weaknesses of the Job Characteristics Model:

• Limited empirical support for details
• Some important variables are neglected (other job characteristics, personality traits and contextual or counterproductive performance).

The Demands-Control Model is categorizing four types of jobs based on Job Control and Job Demands, in which Demand is based on the required experience and Control on the regulations and measurability of the job:

• Passive Job: boring, monotonous and unsatisfying. (Job Demand and Control both low)
• High Strain Job: stressful, overwhelming, risk of burnout. (High Job Demand, low control)
• Active Job: challenging but manageable, energizing and motivating with little strain and high performance. (High Job Control, high Demand)
• Low Strain Job: not stressful, boring, no challenge. (High Control, low demand)   

In most situations, the Active job is most ideal, but every job has to be adjusted to the specific situation. High strain job is the worst situation, because maximum skills are needed and employees feel the pressure, but can’t adjust the job to their own design.

Strengths of Demands-Control Model:

• Joint effects of demands and control are well documented
• It shifts attention to job strain, which can be considered as a key problem in recent jobs.

Weaknesses of Demands-Control Model:

• Limited performance focus
• Restricted Range of variables included

A job can be made more challenging by the following three applications:

1. Job Rotation: periodic shift from one task to another, employees have several types of jobs.
2. Job Enlargement: horizontal task expansion, an employee is responsible for multiple jobs. Benefits: greater skill variety and higher task identity among employees and decreasing of boredom. Limitations: The different jobs have the same responsibility and therefore motivational effects are limited, as long as employees are still responsible for two ‘easy’ tasks.
3. Job Enrichment/Empowerment: vertical extension of jobs, also different types of responsibility and autonomy. Benefits: greater skill variety, enhances motivation and satisfaction and reduces stress and turnover. Limitation: Job enrichment is not applicable to all contexts.

Organizational structure is the way jobs in an organization are divided, grouped and coordinated. Six key dimensions of an organizational structure:

• Work specialization: division of labor.
• Departmentalization: basis for forming groups
• Chain of Command: reporting structure
• Span of control: How many subordinates per supervisor
• Formalization: Presence of rules and regulations
• Centralization: Location of decision-making authority. The degree to which decision-making rights are concentrated at the top of the organization.

Key advantages of a centralized structure are the high degree of control because of the standardized process, faster decision making and higher efficiency. Key advantages of a decentralized structure: close to the employees and their problems, motivated and committed employees.

There is no optimal structure, but this is depending on the degree of individual creativity and flexibility, required proximity to customers and the relevance of standardized control.

Organizational Strategy is describing the broad goals and decisions that constitute the key to a company’s competitive advantage. What is the main organizational performance indicator?

• Price: low costs, division of labor, low autonomy and low task variety.
• Quality : Constant output, specific control tasks may be delegated
• Flexibility: adaptability and deal with complexity; high autonomy and task variety, low routinization. Job enrichment can be useful.
• Innovation: Fluid structures.

Lecture 3: Personality

Personality consists of the enduring characteristics that describe an individual’s behavior. The Big Five Model gives five basic dimensions of personality:

• Extroversion: sociable, active, ambitions and assertive.

Beneficial in interactive jobs, leadership positions or jobs that require persuasion.

• Agreeableness: warm, helpful, trusting and cooperative.

Beneficial in jobs that require cooperation or empathy or in teamwork situations.

• Openness to experience: cultures, intellectual and imaginative.

Beneficial in creative jobs or in jobs with ambiguous environments.

• Conscientiousness: shows self-discipline and aim for achievement; dependable, industrious and efficient. Conscientiousness is the most important and consistent performance predictor among Big 5.
• Emotional stability: tendency to experience unpleasant emotions; calm, steady and secure. People have greater self-confidence and more positive job attitudes. Emotional stability is almost as important as conscientiousness.

Personality is namely influencing the motivation components of Job Performance, and not so much the skills component.

The influence of personality in a strong situation is limited because of the clear social rules, prescribed individual behavior and little discretion. (call-center)

Cognitive intelligence is the ability to grasp and reason correctly with abstractions and solve mental problems. Cognitive ability leads to greater and more rapid learning, particularly for complex materials. Cognitive intelligence is a combination of the following abilities:

• Numerical ability: ability to do speedy, accurate arithmetic
• Verbal ability: ability to understand what is read or heard
• Spatial ability: ability to imagine how an object would look like if its position in space changed.

Cognitive intelligence is positively related to performance in almost any area of life and is one of the most important predictors of job performance across any type of job. Cognitive intelligence is a predictor of the acquiring job knowledge and the problem solving capacity, which are related to Job Performance. Managers, sales and engineering have a high relevance of cognitive intelligence. In general: the greater the information processing demands in a given job, the more cognitive intelligence drives performance.

Cognitive intelligence does not predict all performance dimensions; it is particularly focusing on critical dimensions for task performance and addresses the ability aspect rather than the motivational performance aspects. Therefore, cognitive intelligence should be used to assess performance potentials, for example by selection, but the non-cognitive drivers of performance should also be considered, because they increase the prediction of task performance and are a better prediction of contextual or counterproductive performance.

Lecture 4: Emotions

An Emotion is an intense reaction to a specific event, which is directed towards a specific object. An emotion always has a direction. Examples are enthusiasm, frustrations, fear. A mood is a low-intensity, undirected and enduring affective experience. The difference with an emotion is that a mood often appears without a specific reason. You can have a positive mood or a negative mood. Affect is the term to collect emotions and moods. There is a difference between a positive and a negative mood, but these are not opposites of each other, which means that they are independent. There is a negative relationship between these two moods: the more positive, the less negative. 

Arousal is the level of energy in an emotion. In the Affect Circumplex the positive and the negative affect are plotted against each other. Furthermore there is made a distinction between high affect and low affect, where low negative affect is difficult to differentiate from low positive affect. For example, the difference between Calm and Sleepy. The High affects are easy to differentiate.

As mentioned before, Job performance can be measured with the help of three performance measurements: Task performance, contextual performance and counterproductive performance. These performances do all have a different strength of relationship. Positive affect is positive correlated with task performance and contextual performance, where negative affect is negative correlated with task performance and contextual performance and positive correlated with counterproductive performance. Especially the relationship between negative and counterproductive is very strong, and you definitely don’t want that in your organization.

Moods and emotions are not fixed, they change over time. A mood changes throughout the week or during the day, it takes time to change it. An emotion changes quickly as a response on an affective event. These changing moods and emotions may explain why the job performance fluctuates over time.

A positive affect has positive consequences for the job performance. There is an increased task activity, greater creativity, more favorable social interactions which result in more helping and there are more positive judgments and job attitudes. Although, these positive consequences increase the job performance, a positive affect has also negative consequences, like a superficial style of thinking, little attention to details and an exaggerated and unrealistic optimism.

A negative affect has also both positive and negative consequences. Positive consequences are the systematic and analytic style of thinking and the greater attention to details. The negative consequences are personal costs (employees are feeling down), negative attitudes and low motivation, risk of cognitive and behavioral inflexibility and negative social interactions.

Which consequences will occur is dependent on the type of job. Positive affect may be beneficial in leadership positions, customer-service situations, teamwork situations and creative jobs. Negative affect may be less harmful in jobs with little margin for error, situations rewarding negative expressions and in some negotiation context. In these situations a negative affect may even be beneficial and therefore can be used.

Emotional demands is the degree in which your job asks you to express certain emotions. Emotional labor is the behavior you have to show to meet your emotional demands, the expression of organizationally desired emotions at work by the employee. The expression of these emotions can be done by deep acting and surface acting. Surface acting is stimulation emotions, which you don’t actually feel. For the employee this feels weird, and showing surface acting creates emotional dissonance, stress or burnouts. It can be helpful as a quick solution or response on something that happened. By deep acting are you trying to feel something than you would normally feel, you are modifying your inner feelings. This is less stressful and may require a greater motivation or effort. By showing deep acting behavior, others would judge you as more authentic and you would get more positive reactions then by surface acting.

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to carry out accurate reasoning about emotions and solve emotional problems. This is a clearly defined set of competencies, personality traits and self-perceptions related to the effective handling of emotions, categorized in four Key Abilities:

• Perceiving emotions: the ability to correctly identify own and others’ feelings
• Using emotions: the ability to use emotions to facilitate thinking. An example is matching emotions and tasks.
• Understanding emotions: the ability to grasp causes and consequences of emotions.
• Managing emotions: the ability to regulate own and others’ emotions.

Individuals with a high Emotional Intelligence, are considered as more pleasant, achieve a higher task performance and have an advantage in leadership situations. Although there are much popular claims about the consequences of Emotional Intelligence, research is still in an early stage and therefore there is not much evidence. Emotional Intelligence can be very useful in jobs with high emotional demands, because it facilitates effective emotional labor.

Measuring Emotional Intelligence can be done by three different approaches, self-report measures of EI, where people describe their own Emotional Intelligence on various items, other-report measurements of EI, where people describe others’ EI, and Performance Measures of EI, where actual test questions are measured and linked to an EI score. Advantages of these measures are the objective evaluation of the EI abilities, that it is not based on self- or other-perceptions and that there is no bias or lying. The main problem with this system is how to determine correct and false answers. 

Lecture 5: Leadership

Leadership is always about influencing others towards the achievement of a goal. The difference between leaders and managers: leaders create and develop new things, try to do things different. Doing the right things. Managers are about implementing and controlling, thinking in short terms. Making things better and thinking in boxes. Doing things right. Managers and leaders are both necessary, this can be in one person.

The three key leadership criteria:

1. Leadership mergence: who do others perceive as leader? Who is motivating and influencing others?
2. Leadership behavior: How does a person act in a leadership role?
3. Leadership effectiveness: does a leader achieve effective outcomes? Where effective outcomes can mean different things.

Classic leadership approaches

According to the trait theories, leaders differ from non-leaders in personal qualities and characteristics. With the help of quantitative research, trait theories have become more important and popular during the last ten years. Recent findings show that the personality traits are influencing leadership emergence and effectiveness. General cognitive ability promotes leadership emergence and effectiveness also, even as emotional intelligence. By executing trait research, there is always a disregard of context: are the required traits necessary in all situations? Furthermore trait theories are not clear about the reason why something is difficult, they use the Blackbox Approach.

Behavioral theories state that leaders’ effectiveness depends on their behavior and not on their traits. They distinguish two types of leadership behavior: Initiation structure, which is focused on production and tasks, and consideration behavior, which is focused on the employee and relationships. Both styles are positive correlated to leadership effectiveness. Criticism for this model state that there should be a link with the trait approach and also the behavioral theory does not use the context.

Contingency theories assume that leaders are effective if their behavior matches the situation. So there is no perfect behavior, everything is depending on the situation you are dealing with. The fieldler model makes a distinction between task-oriented leadership and relationship-oriented leadership and it scales these styles in three situational factors, in favorable, moderate and unfavorable situations. Advantage of the contingency theory is the use of context: situational factors are required to understand leadership effectiveness. Disadvantage of this model is the distinction between task and relation oriented, because according to this model, a leader can’t be both. Furthermore the contingency theory is very complex, but has limited practical usefulness.

Leaders are born and made: you are born with a fundament for a good leader, but a person can learn to behave like a leader (trait and behavioral theory).

Charismatic leadership

The Full Range of Leadership model schedules leadership styles on a scale from effective to ineffective and passive to active.

Transactional leadership consists of two parts: contingent reward; the reward or punishments in exchange for goal achievement, and management by exception; hands off as long as things go well. The transactional leadership is a very rational approach and similar to production-oriented leadership.

Transformational Leadership is a new style of leadership, which is a style in which leaders are engaged with the group and moving followers to strive towards higher goals or ideas. Followers should undergrad their self-interest for the common organizations goals. A transformational leader leads his followers by inspiration, vision and charisma.

Transformational Leadership is high correlated with follower satisfaction (0.52) and with leader effectiveness (0.37), much more compared to transactional leadership (0.04-0.15) and laissez-faire leadership, which has a negative coefficient of -.13 and -.14.

Four different dimensions of Transformational leadership:

• Idealized influence: leading by doing instead of only saying. Behavior with which others identify. These leaders are often role models.
• Inspirational motivation: have a communicating mission. Vision is important, an idealized picture people want to strive for. There are high performance expectations.
• Intellectual stimulation: participative leadership. Encourage employees to have creative ideas and to think out of the box. Communicate the new insights.
• Individualized consideration: consider each employee as an individual and support each employee individually.

Transformational leadership is a much broader approach than only charismatic leadership, but charisma is a part of transformational leadership. Transformational Leadership has an effect on bot follower satisfaction and leader effectiveness, which are much higher than the transactional leadership.

The Augmentation effect suggests that transactional leadership is also an important leadership style, because people do what their leader expects them to do. Transformational leadership is not about setting a goal, but about making a vision, which goes beyond expectations. Transactional leadership is the fundament for transformational leadership.

Being a transformational leadership is not easy. Extraversion is one of the most important type of behavior to be a charismatic and transformational leadership. Also emotional intelligent is one of the key drivers of transformational leadership. 

In centralized companies, you find less transformational leadership and if so, it is less effective. If employees have to follow strict rules, the effect of encourage employees in being creative is small.

The dark side of leadership

Abusive supervision is a construct as subordinates’ perceptions of the extent to which supervisors engage in the sustained display of hostile behaviors, excluding physical contact. So hospitality from a leader to follower. Kind of abusive behavior include yelling, lying, breaking promises, publicly denigration or blaming subordinates for own mistakes. Three factors which explain why leaders behave abusive supervision:

• Abusive supervision as displaced aggression: it is easier to react your aggression on your subordinates then on your boss.
• Supervisor characteristics: depression, lack of self-control, stress. Anger.
• Subordinate characteristics: negative affectivity, aggressiveness, low performance.

The consequences of abusive supervision are more negative than other forms of aggression, like consumer aggression, because the supervisor has control over you and therefore is more influencing you. Abusive supervision leads to numerous negative consequences: stress, burnouts, counterproductive work behavior, family undermining and reduced task performance. Factors that would eliminate abusive supervision are educating supervisors about the negative consequences of their behavior, clear-cut policies and sanctions and zero tolerance against abusive behavior.

Charismatic leadership can also be very dangerous. It creates expectations by people, for example Adolf Hilter.

Lecture 6: Teams

Team-based structures are today’s basic organizational units. They form the basic blocs of organizations. There is a difference between teams and groups. A team consists of two or more individuals.

• There is a form of socially interaction. Face to face  not necessary
• Process one or more common goals. Try to reach collective goal together.
• Perform organizationally relevant tasks
• Are interdependent. (most important!) what one person in the team does, effect what the other persons in the team do. Interdependent is always necessary and is de difference between work team and group.
• Have different roles/responsibilities.
• Are together embedded in an organizational system.

Organizations hope that teams are more creative, they make better decisions, greater consensus, higher productivity and efficiency. The question is if work teams can live up to these expectations.

Decision making are an important part of teams. There is evidence that teams make better decisions than individuals. There is a greater diversity of views and perspectives among the members of a group. They also have more complete information and knowledge. Furthermore teams are more creative in their solutions and there is a greater acceptance of decisions. But besides these positive effects, there are also disadvantages. Making decisions in teams is less efficient, you have to convince people and have to talk about your ideas.

More relevant problems are group shifts, which means that groups are making more extreme decisions than they would have done on their own, because of influencing each other and remove of the norm. The second phenomenon is groupthink, which can be described as diminishing the diversity. People who don’t fit the norm of the team, are removed from the team. These teams create a common identity, an illusion of unanimity, which is more radical than the individuals would have.

Teamwork is almost identic with contextual performance. The consequence of contextual performance is that team members’ average contextual performance increases overall team performance ratings and objective team performance.

Teams shape counterproductive performance. Group membership can create a sense of anonymity, which makes it possible to lie, cheat or steal. Nobody knows that it was you.

Monkey see, monkey do – effect: mean counterproductive behavior in the team enhances individuals’ respective behavior. Counterproductive behavior in teams is a really problem; it creates a negative atmosphere in the team and diminishes team performance.

Teams’ composition may shape team processes and performance. There are different possible composition models, like mean-level, heterogeneity(difficult to cooperate), minimum or maximum. Average, Minimum and Maximum are positive correlated to team performance. If you have a star-performer, your team performance increases as a whole. According to the Big Five, the agreeableness of the less cognitive person, is correlated with the team performance. Although, these relations are dependent on the context and type of task.

Team Affective Tone: team members shared affective experiences. Team members develop overtime very similar emotions; there is a homogeneous level of affect among members. This can be a positive or negative affective tone. This occurs because teams share a common contextual influence and this matters to everyone collectively. Furthermore, what our body does remind in our brains, and influences how we feel. Affective sharing makes use of this phenomenon.

Positive affective tone increases team cohesion, reduces member absence, enhances member contextual performance, more creativity and enhances team performance. The negative affective tone has the following consequences: it diminishes members’ contextual performance, it distracts team members from their tasks and it diminishes team performance.

It is not only the experience of negative affective tones, but also the behavior after it. Some teams can deal with negative emotions, and are more effective than positive teams.

Emotional intelligence enables the effective use of team affective tone and facilitates team member cooperation. There is small evidence that the average team Emotional Intelligence enhances team performance.

Leadership in work teams

In many cases transformational leadership strengthens the goal congruence (get the same direction among all employees), positive affective tone, team innovativeness and team performance. Both task-focused and person-focused are positive related to the perceived team effectiveness and the team productivity, whit a higher correlation for the person-focused team leadership. Leadership can crucially influence team performance and therefore it should be investigated and matched to the type of task.  

Task Performance and Contextual Performance: The Meaning for Personnel Selection Reserach by Borman and Motowidlo(1997)

Task performance is related to the activities which are a contribution to the organization’s technical core business. Contextual performance contributes to the organizational shape, social and psychological context and therefore affects the organizational effectiveness (helping others, cooperating). Contextual performances have been studied often over the last years. Several interpretations of this performance are described, where Soldier Effectiveness is the last model to identify this performance. The model shows all the factors that are relevant for unit effectiveness, but fall out the technical core business. Commitment, Allegiance (orders/regulations), Socialization, Teamwork, Morale and Determination are all influencing the soldier effectiveness.

Borman and Motowidlo have made a five-category system to categorize the contextual performance:

1. Persisting with enthusiasm and extra effort as necessary to complete own task activities successfully
2. Volunteering to carry out task activities that are not formally part of own job
3. Helping and cooperating with others
4. Following organizational rules and procedures
5. Endorsing, supporting and defending organizational objectives

According to them, there are three main differences between contextual performance and task performance. The first difference is the fact that task activities vary across jobs, whereas contextual activities are almost the same across jobs in an organization. Second, task activities are more role-prescribed than contextual activities. Finally, task performance often requires more cognitive ability, whereas contextual performance is involved with more personality variables.

The article provides evidence to the assertion that overall job performance ratings are influences by contextual performance, which is important for the use of personality predicting job performance because personality does have significant links to contextual performance. Studies have found that correlations between personality scales and contextual performance are higher than the correlations between personality and task performance.

Three major conclusions:

• Contextual performance is different than task performance and important in the effectiveness of an organization.
• Contextual performance is part of the subordinates when making overall performance ratings and these factor weights as high as task performance.
• When contextual performances are included as criteria by personnel selection, personality predictors are more likely to be successful correlates.

Future work design research and practice: Towards an elaborated model of work design by Parker, Wall and Cordery

Greater global competition, new forms of information and communication technology, increased service sector and more individualized career paths are changes in the organizational landscape which occur in these current times. By dealing with these changes contemporary and future jobs are designed to be flexible. In this article the key issues for these jobs are identified by designing an elaborated model of work design. This model distinguishes five categories of variables:

1. Antecedents: describe the factors that influence the choice of work design. These can be internal (management style, technology) or external to the organization (environment, political and labor institutions). Furthermore individual antecedents like personality, believes and trust are also influencing the choice of work design. Identifying these antecedents can be useful by predicting the types of work designs in various settings.      
2. Work characteristics: identifying what type of work has to be done. This is dependent on individual-level(job control, skill variety, feedback, emotional demands), group-level(team autonomy, team feedback, team skill variety) and interactions between work characteristics, which means that in some situations individual behavior or group process can be very different than you have predict.
3. Outcomes: There is made a distinction between individual/group outcomes and organizational outcomes. Individual and group outcomes include job performance, affective reactions, safe working, outside-work activities and creativity. Organizational outcomes are related to productivity, customer satisfaction, absence, accidents and innovation.
4. Mechanisms linking work characteristics to outcomes: Gives the mechanisms which are influencing the relationship between work characteristics and outcomes. The work design can affect the outcomes. Mechanisms as motivation, quick response, learning and development and interaction processes are all related to the final outcomes.
5. Contingencies affecting the link between work characteristics and outcomes: there are some contingencies that affect the appropriateness and effectiveness of particular work designs. There are three types of contingencies; organizational contingencies, which stand for interdependence, uncertainty, implementation process, alignment or HR and technological systems. Second, the group contingencies are norms, knowledge, structure, size, skill composition, goal clarity. The last contingencies are the individual, which are growth need strength, ability, context satisfaction, interpersonal trust. 

Sociotechnical systems: towards an organizational learning approach by Molleman and Broekhuis

The Sociotechnical system theory is a theory of work design and quality of working life by means of three design principles:

1. Sociotechnical criterion: the control of variance and the statement that variances should be treated as close to their point of origin as possible. An organization should have enough means to respond to variety by using variety in their production process.
2. Minimal critical specification: work descriptions should be minimalized, which enables employees to bring in their own personal contribution. There should only be enough directives to ensure that the employee is executing his own task. (local autonomy and decentralized control is desirable)
3. Joint optimization principle: both social and technical system should be optimized, whereas social system refers to human resources, job design and control structure, and technical systems refer to production structure, technical equipment and information and communication technology.

STS is related to four organizational performance indicators:

• Price
• Quality
• Flexibility
• Innovation

Firms in which prices are very important, are often mass-producing firms. These companies have a high need to standardize their production process because of the easiness to implement and of the strong competitive value. There is almost no need for local autonomy and the decentralized decision-making is minimal, which makes work specifications more needed in these kinds of companies. The joint optimization is ignored, because the technical system gets all the attention and therefore dominates the social system. Examples for practices have shown that there are some mass-producing firms which have focused on the social factors and they found out that the motivation and satisfaction of the employees plays an important role in the effectiveness of the company. Principles as Lean can be more useful by implementing this joint optimization.

Over the last years, quality has become more important and therefore it is important to control undesired variations in quality. When quality and price are the mainly performance indicators, it is important to implement specification and standardization. With routinized work and standardize tasks, a company achieves the most effective and completed products. Technical systems to fulfill these goals are dominated and therefore you can conclude that quality is often a second performance indicator, and efficiency (costs) the only important one.

Flexibility is caused by the consumers’ demand to more diversity and shorter delivery times. Organizations have to produce a lot different products in many variants. Referred to the sociotechnical criterion, flexibility means that an organization should be able to deal with a quick changing environmental demand and therefore should need variety in products, skills and tasks. There should be enough space for local decision-making to respond effectively to changes in customer demand. In a variable environment both technical and social systems are important.

Innovation is a major determinant for long-term success in dynamic and changing markets. Processes are based on non-routines and non-repetitive actions, which makes it important to have a flexible structure. There should be a moderate level of diversity at the team level (preventing too much differences among members), but there should be a high level of diversity at organizational level, in order to be able to achieve different markets and their customer needs. The selection of workers in these kinds of businesses is very important, because central themes are trust and power in the team. Optimization is mainly focused on the social aspect of the system.

The learning approach to STS identifies several characteristics which influence the team learning. First, worker characteristics like high self-efficacy, high tolerance for ambiguity and a moderate level of group loyalty are given. The other characteristics are focused on team and design characteristics, which include flexible structures, moderate level of diversity at team level, high level of mutual trust and low variety in power. Al these characteristics are influencing the team learning and this relationship is moderated by the support of technical systems. On step further to organizational learning, aspects as flexible structures, technical support systems and a high diversity at organizational level are required characteristics.   

Yes, Personality Matters: Moving on to More Important Matters by Barrick and Mount (2005)

In contrast to what researchers in the past have said, Personality matters because it predicts how we behave at work and the Big Five traits are predictors or job performance across a wide variety of outcomes that organizations value. Personality characteristics are always taken into consideration, even unnoticed. By selection, a manager would always prefer a dependable, confident and persistent person over a lazy and impulsive person.  

But also research has shown the importance of personality. Personality is important as an enduring predictor of behaviors at work, which cannot be predicted by general mental ability, job knowledge of the situation itself. Often, Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability are the best predictors for job performance. In this article, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Openness to Experience are used as predictors of performance, but only effective in specific niches:

• Extraversion: only significant when a job involves interacting with others and focused on influencing, status and power.
• Agreeableness: only matters when interaction involves helping, cooperating and nurturing others.
• Openness to experience: is only significant when creativity is needed and when influencing the ability to adapt to change.

Human behavior at work is complex, and therefore the relationship between personality traits and job performance is difficult to understand. The article gives three future areas for research. The first area the investigation of the interaction between personality and context. Barrick and Mount state that personality has the biggest effect on behavior when the situation is relevant to the trait’s expression, but weak enough to give employees the opportunity to choose how they behave in a particular situation. The second area is investigating the motivation a person has, which influences job performance. Motivational variables could be used as mediators by the relationship between personality traits and specific performance dimensions. The last area includes finding critical measurement issues to measure personality and its influence.

The Role of General Cognitive Ability and Job Performance: Why There Cannot Be a Debate by Schmidt (2002) 

General cognitive ability is the degree to which a person is able to learn. The difference between cognitive ability and intelligence is the genetic potential and the concept of developing. Even though cognitive ability is influenced by genes, it is influenced by much more than only the genetic potential. Cognitive abilities that are narrower than general cognitive abilities are called specific aptitudes, and they used to use these aptitude measures as better predictors of job performance rather than General Cognitive Ability. But recent research has shown that General Cognitive Ability is the best prediction of job performance, whereas aptitudes have no contributions to that prediction, because of the higher degree of validation.

Empirical research have shown that there is a strong link between General Cognitive Ability and job performance, which is so strong, that General Cognitive Ability can be considered as a valid predictor of job performance. It would be curious if General Cognitive Ability would not be a valid predictor of job performance, since General Cognitive Ability is used as a predictor for many aspects of human lives, such as income, education and criminal behavior.

The reason why General Cognitive Ability is so important by predicting job performance is because people higher in General Cognitive Ability acquire more job knowledge and they acquire it faster. When knowledge of a job is higher, this automatically leads to a higher level of job performance. According to Schmidt, it would be better if General Cognitive Ability was less important, and when specific aptitudes would be better argued and used by selecting and prediction job performance. But because of the large amount of evidence, Schmidt has to admit that General Cognitive Ability is too important to neglect.

Social Policies are striving for equal representation of all groups in all jobs at all different levels of job complexity. But every group differs in General Cognitive Ability and therefore in job-relevant skills and abilities. And because Social Policies should encourage managers to hire employees on basis of performance predictors such as General Cognitive Ability, it is not realistic to strive for this equal representation.

Organizational Behavior: Affect in the Workplace by Brief and Weiss (2002)

Organizational behavior is composed of influences of work organizations on people and people on work organizations. This article gives an overview about affective experiences in organizational settings.   

Historical Context

Since 1930 it was possible to do scientific research to a social phenomenon, and therefore the understanding of workers’ feelings could increase. Studies were innovative, full discoveries and very diverse. That scientific point of view soon became narrower by neglecting extra-work factors and ignoring qualitative research methods. Between 1985-1990 researches found the principles of moods and emotions. Moods are generalized feeling states that are not typically identified with a particular stimulus, where emotions are associated with specific events and are intense enough to disrupt thought processes.   

Affective status of the job satisfaction construct

Job Satisfaction is an affective reaction to one’s job or job experiences and it should have a cognitive and affective content, whereas the cognitive content is more used in measurements, although the affective content influences the job satisfaction more. Job Satisfaction can also be considered as an evaluative judgment. 

The production of moods and emotions in the workplace

The article identifies and categories several factors which are influencing the production of moods or emotions in the workplace:

• Exogenous factors: the factors in the workplace that influence the feelings experienced there. Cycles in feelings do occur related to lifestyle and sociocultural factors. Also the group affective tone is an exogenous factor, which can be described as the consistent or homogenous affective reactions within a group.
• Stressful Events or Conditions at Work
• Leaders: leaders can influence the feelings of their followers, especially among transformational leaders, who use strong emotions.
• Work Group Characteristics: The group affective tone is influence by the characteristics and personality traits within groups. People’s moods are influenced by the collective mood of their co-workers over time.
• Physical settings: Physical settings play an important role in the emotions and moods of employees. Although there is small research done, research recognizes customers or clients as mood or emotion generators.
• Organizational rewards

Consequences of moods and emotions in the workplace

Affect-driven behaviors are straight behavioral and cognitive outcomes, often bound in time and the overall judgment of job experience. Judgment-driven behaviors are influenced by evaluative judgments.

The main consequences of moods and emotions:

• Positive mood enables creative problem solving
• Positive mood generally encourage to behave helpfully and cooperative.
• General performance is either increased by positive emotions or negative emotions. This is dependent on the context, since negative emotions can lead to more effective problem solutions and more accurate judgments.
• Negative emotions can also help to achieve more in negotiation context.
• Positive emotions predict absenteeism and both positive and negative emotions are predicting turnover intentions, mediated by commitment.

Human abilities: Emotional Intelligence by Mayer, Robers and Barsade (2008)

Mayer et al., view intelligence as a general descriptive term referring to a hierarchy of mental abilities. This model consists of several hierarchical levels: basic mental abilities, broader cohesive groups of abilities and on the highest level general intelligence (of all domains).

Emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to carry out accurate reasoning about emotions and the ability to use emotions and emotional knowledge to enhance thoughts. Almost all mental activities involve emotion and intelligence, but the difference with Emotional Intelligence is the involvement of a primary focus on a specific area of problem solving.  

Different approaches to emotional intelligence in the literature:

• Theoretical Approaches to Emotional Intelligence
• Specific-Ability Approaches to Emotional Intelligence: consider individual mental capacities important to EI. Some of these abilities are emotional perception (nonverbal perception is recognizing the social information about power and emotional expressions), use of emotional information in thinking (people with higher EI can be more objective when something is related to emotions), reasoning about emotions and emotion management.
• Integrative-Model Approaches to Emotional Intelligence: regard EI as a cohesive, global ability, in which several specific abilities are related to the overall sense of EI. An example of an integrative model is the Four-Branch Model of EI, in which EI is considered as the joining abilities of four areas: accurately perceiving emotion, using emotions to facilitate thoughts, understanding emotions and managing emotions.
• Mixed-Model Approaches to Emotional Intelligence: mixes noncognitive, capabilities, competences or skills, emotionally and socially intelligent behavior and dispositions from the personality domain.

Measuring Emotional Intelligence is possible in very many ways. The key question by choosing for a specific test is: do these tests measure what they claim to? An adequate test design has a content evidence of validity (do I measure what I want to know?), response-process evidence of validity (linking individual answers to criterion of correctness), reliability of emotional intelligence measures (consistency) and validity evidence from factor structure.

Topics, which can be predicted by emotional intelligence:

• Social Relations in Childhood and Adolescence: EI is positive correlated with good social relations and negative correlated with social deviance.
• Social Relations in Adulthood: Higher EI leads to greater self-perception of social competence and a decreased use of destructive interpersonal strategies.
• Scholastic Outcomes from Grade school to College: Higher EI leads to higher academic achievements, but not always to higher grades because that is influenced by IQ.
• Emotional Intelligence at Work: High EI gives better social relations during work performance and in negotiations.
• Psychological and Physical Well-Being: EI is correlated with greater life satisfaction and self-esteem and lower ratings of depression.
• Better family and intimate relationships.
• High EI individuals are perceived more positively by others.

Abusive Supervision in Work Organizations: Review, Synthesis and Research Agenda by Tepper (2007)

In this article, several constructs of supervisors are evaluated on four dimensions: is the hostility of supervisors only against specific subordinate targets, are there other forms of hostility, are the construct’s content domain capturing nonhostile behavior and the role of intentions. They evaluated the following constructs:

• Abusive Supervision: subordinates’ perceptions of the extent to which their supervisors behave hostile, verbal or non-verbal

Directed downward, excludes physical hostility

• Generalized hierarchical abuse: exposure to hostility committed by hierarchically superior coworkers.

Directed downward

• Pretty tyranny: managers’ use of power and authority oppressively, capriciously and vindictively.

Directed downward, excludes physical hostility, Encompasses content other than hostility.

• Victimization: self-perception of an individual of being exposed to aggressive actions

Includes references to intended outcomes

• Workplace bullying

Physical hostility, Includes references to intended outcomes

• Supervisor aggression: physically or psychologically harm a worker

Directed downwards, Includes references to intended outcomes

• Supervisor undermining: supervisor hinders interpersonal relations, work-related success and favorable reputation.

Directed downward, excludes physical hostility, Includes references to intended outcomes

• Negative mentoring experiences: incidents that limit the ability to effectively provide guidance to protégés.

Directed downward, excludes physical hostility, Encompasses content other than hostility.

Model of Abusive Supervision

The supervisors’ perceptions of injustice or violation lead to abusive supervision and this relation is moderated by characteristics of subordinates. Thereafter, abuse supervision leads to several negative outcomes on attitudes, resistance, aggression and deviance, performance contributions, psychological distress and family well-being. This relationship is moderated by supervisors’ characteristics and behavior, subordinates’ work context and subordinate characteristics and behavior.

An Affective Events Model of Charismatic Leadership Behavior: A review, Theoretical Integration and Research Agenda by Walter en Bruch(2009)

This article integrates existing research and a more comprehensive perspective of leadership into a conceptual framework, in which factors such as type of leadership and contextual characteristics are taken into consideration.

Individual antecedents of Charismatic Leadership Behavior

From a demographic perspective, women are more likely to behave as a transformational leader and also age is related to the behavior as transformational leader. Furthermore the cognitive ability of a leader is positive related with transformational leadership even as the personality traits proactivity, risk-taking, self-confidence and social sensitivity. Positive moods and emotions are generally strengthening charismatic leadership. Last, much research has been done on Emotional Intelligence, which is really important for a charismatic leader.

Contextual antecedents of charismatic leadership

Contextual antecedents include position characteristics, which can be defined as the position of the leader within the organization. Besides that, social context characteristics, organizational characteristics, crisis situations and national culture are factors which belong to the contextual antecedents and therefore influencing charismatic leadership.

Affective Event Model

The Affective Event Model is based on the Affective Events Theory, which distinguishes affect-driven behavior from judgment-driven behavior. Affect-driven behavior is the behavior caused by individuals’ moods and emotions, where judgment-driven behavior is caused by individuals’’ work attitudes. This theory also integrates contextual aspects with individual determinants of employees’ behavior. To summarize the model:

• Charismatic leadership can influence either affect-driven elements or judgment-driven elements.
• Leader’s emotional intelligence is a moderator on two relations: the relation between leader positive affect to leader work attitudes (a leader can perform charismatic behavior, even if he doesn’t feel that way) and the relation of leader positive affect to charismatic leadership behavior (reduces the effects, high EI leaders can easier retain to positive work attitudes.
• The leaders’ context factors are categorized into two groups: context features, which shape the job characteristics, demands and constraints, and context features that influence leaders’ positive feelings through the work events. Context factors shape the work attitude of employees.
• The personality of leaders influences their affective reactions.

Bridging the Gap between I/O Research and HR Practice: Improving Team Composition, Team Training and Team Task Design by Hollenbeck, DeReu and Guzzo(2004)

Although the use of teams is become more important over the past years, almost no literature is paying attention to teams and their functioning. This article is discussing the current gaps and provides more information about team composition, training and job design.

Team Composition

Generic teamwork skills predict the team success above individual’s unique technical skills and abilities. By designing a team, there are some implications for selecting the right person. First, selection procedures should not only focus on individual-level Knowledge, Skills and Abilities, but also on teamwork KSAs. Second, recruiting for teams should emphasize the importance of teamwork requirements. Finally, team staffing decision should consider differences in employee preferences for working in groups. Measurements for the team characteristics go further than only measure the average of each team member’s responses, because team scores are dependent on circumstances and therefore you could use other score measurements.

• Mean score technique: when tasks are additive, each member contributes to team performance in proportion to her ability.
• Maximum Score: for disjunctive tasks (problem-solving tasks), because the group can perform as well as the best member.
• Minimum Score: for conjunctive tasks (mountain climbing), because the team performance is depending on the performance of the weakest member.

The mix of individual traits in team contexts is critical, and among these contexts, the appropriateness of a particular mix is dependent on personal traits, nature of a task and the desired team outcome. Diversity can positively influence the team performance, but this is dependent on the type of diversity. Demographic diversity can improve overall performance, but is ales important than other forms of diversity. The effects of diversity on other dimensions can neglect the effect of demographic diversity. Maximizing differences in individual KSAs and minimizing differences in psychological dimensions of diversity may result in effective teams.

Team Training

The relative value of team training is higher when it is executed in team context instead of individual context. The perfect training program should consist of an individual task-specific content, but also with a teamwork focus, team interaction training and a leader component. Furthermore, there should be a shared mental model, because tasks are often too complex to deal for one individual. Managers should focus on designing a trainings program, which enables the team to develop a shared mental model.

Recent research suggests that cross-functional training could have more positive effects than only task-based training. This is in composite with the thoughts that everyone should have an own task in a team, but cross-functional training generates more effective team processes (teamwork, interaction and communication. Within high workload and intense task-interdependence environments, a cross-functional team is necessary, but within other situations it a more task-based team can be appropriated.

Team Task Design

Team task design can be described as the structures and roles within a team context, which determine the allocation of tasks, responsibilities and authority. An essential element of teams is task interdependence, because without interdependence, a team should behave more like a group. But high interdependence is not the only critical element; the type of task and the level of internal and external fit are also critical elements of team task design. The type of work can change the required level of interdependence, because in behavioral tasks (production), a moderate level of interdependence is required, but in conceptual tasks (negotiating) the required interdependence has the shape of a U: very high or very low level of interdependence results in higher team performance. Organizations can use team structures to achieve a higher team performance by external fit (structure and task environment), but not by internal fit (structure and individual traits).

Judging a member’s input in the team performance can be difficult, but there are some factors that can help to measure accurately: the presence of feedback, leader experiences and the provision of information. A management perspective states that the development of feedback mechanisms that provide leaders with information on the quality of team members’ past judgments enhances overall team decision-making accuracy. But from a training perspective, managers should focus on how to use and distribute the decision influences in the best way.

Individual-based rewards can be useful in some contexts of team-based structures. Teams with high extroversion and agreeableness perform better when rewarded as a cooperative system and teams low on extroversion and agreeableness perform better when rewarded as a competitive system.