Summary in BulletPoints of Social Psychology and Organizations by de Cremer et al.

Chapter 1: Seeing organisations through the eye of a social psychologist

• Social psychology can be defined as a 'scientific attempt to understand and explain how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of other human beings' (Allport, 1954).

• Seeing the workplace through the eye of a social psychologist can lead to substantial improvements, both for employee and company behaviour.

Chapter 2: Power

• Human relationships are build on who has the power, who is affected by it and how the power is gained.

• The Power-Approach-Theory says that power sets the behaviourvioural approach system into motion. The sensitivity to rewards, achievement, sex, and social bonding gets a boost. When there's a lack of power, the behavioural inhibition system is activated. This system increases behaviour related to anxiety, avoidance, and response inhibition.

• People with high levels of power are less interdependent and are better in satisfying their needs without help. This causes powerful people to be less attentive to the internal experiences of others. To achieve their own goals, powerful people tend to see others more in an instrumental manner.

• Research shows individuals change because of power. Power has foreseen effects on their behaviour and thoughts. People with power seem to be optimistic and action-oriented. Also, they have a clean view of the future. Unfortunately, people with power also tend to take to much risk and have the illusion of control.

• Studies show that having power increases the likelihood to take assertive action.

• People with power tend to think their future holds more positive and less negative experiences. This does not only apply to things in their control, but also to things outside of their control, like getting ill. Also, powerful people perceive the world as less dangerous and less risky.

• Power seems to boost the interaction between individual traits and behaviour. Because of power, normative behaviour tends to fade so the true nature of the person emerges. It can be said that the behaviour of powerful people can be better predicted by their personalities, compared to powerless people.

• The consequences of being powerful vary with cultures. In Western cultures, having power means you're free from the control of others and you can fulfill your wishes at any time. Having power, means you're reward-directed. In Eastern cultures, powerful people are the responsible people. Having power, means you're responsible-directed.

• Having power does not make a person a leader, and leaders do not always have or need power.

• The combination of being a leader and having power can motivate others to achieve a team goal. Also, others could get inspired to show more goal-directed behaviour.

• Perspective taking (being able to see things from the other persons view) is a key concept to convert power into successful leadership.

Chapter 3: Leadership and procedural fairness

• Procedural fairness is 'the justice of the procedure used when making allocation decisions' (de Cremer, van Dick, & Murnighan, 2011, pp. 39).

• The relational model of leadership states that the behaviour of the leader intends to send some sort of social message to others. The others used this to determine their group status. This social message was constructed following three principles: (1) The extent to which the decision making process was neutral; (2) How much faith other people had in the motives of the leader; (3) The degree of politeness and kindness the leader showed to other people. Those three principles are all part of procedural fairness.

• Research states people see their relationship with a leader in a relational manner. Other studies show people prefer to use relational norms (e.g. trust and neutrality) to define the justice of procedures, instead of chances of participation.

• The authors of this book state leadership as a process of influence. As social psychologist, leadership can be defined as a psychological influence a certain person has on others which shapes the way feel, perceive themselves, make decisions and behave.

• Organisations often want to rely on leaders with self-confidence. This quality seems to be essential for effective leadership. Self-confidence has a motivational effect because the confidence the leader has in success has an effect on the feeling of control and self-efficacy of others. When others experience this, they are more prone to pitch their ideas and thoughts.

• Empowerment is a popular research topic in recent studies. Empowerment seems to create a better work satisfaction, effectiveness, and innovation at work. Empowerment seems to belong to some specific leadership behaviours in which the leader builds conditions in which others can develop themselves. This enhances their impression of of being competent. This leads to a higher self-esteem.

• The rewarding leadership style states the leader gives others compliments about their accomplishments. Also, they motivate others to self-reward after a job is completed. Other research used this information and found a rewarding leadership style made others value having a say more than a non-rewarding leadership style.

• When leaders give group members a say in the matter, this is often perceived as valuable. When not getting a voice, group members can experience negative emotions.

• A group leader can be either assigned or chosen. When chosen by the majority of the group, people in the minority group could feel left out and care less about the actions of the leader.

• Leadership can encourage others to show their self and to focus on their own values, goals, and motives.

• The Self-Determination Theory (SDT) states autonomy, competence, and social relations are universal necessities for every person to have the best developmental possibilities and integrity. Ultimately, this results in a positive emotional well-being, more intrinsic motivation, and positive self-views and self-evaluations.

• Not only the effect between the universal necessities and procedural fairness seem alike, also the universal necessities themselves look like the motives which can explain procedural fairness.

• Procedural fairness cannot only be explained by cognitive procedures, but also by motivational models.

Chapter 4: Normative influences in organisations

• According to the Focus Theory of Normative Conduct, social norms can be explained in two different ways:

1. 1. There are two types of norms: descriptive and injunctive norms. Both guide behaviour differently.

   2. Behaviour is directly influenced by every norm to the extent that it is focal.

• The effect of descriptive norms is less likely to generalise to other situations, as it is situation specific, compared to the effect of injunctive norms

• Whatever a participant regards as common behaviour, in a particular situation or in a particular environment, influences his behaviour

• Two main concepts considering the Focus Theory are norms only direct behaviour when salient and the activation of the descriptive or injunctive norm can create different behavioural outcomes.

• Descriptive norms can be seen as a standard. Employees measure their behaviour to see if it is in line with the descriptive norm.

• The social identity can be seen as an extension of the self-concept.

• To the degree of which people identify themselves with a particular group is a good predictor of the norms those people use

Chapter 5: Action Theory Approach

• Entrepreneurship can be defined as the things an entrepreneur does. It involves discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities, which only exist in a certain context.

• Being active requires three aspects:

1. Self-starting: one does something without someone else telling him to.

2. Long-term proactivity: the focus lies on the long term and there are no explicit demands needed.

3. Persistence when there are obstacles: protecting and overcoming

• Action can be explained as goal-oriented behaviour. There are three important parts: sequence, action structure, and focus

• There are several regulation levels: skill level, the level of flexible action patterns, the conscious level, and the level of meta-cognitive heuristics.

• The majority of tasks take place in a social setting, especially for entrepreneurs. The social setting is both a beneficial and unfavorable for the task. When the social component becomes to big, the task will never get finished, but when the social focus misses, people will be ineffective in their social surroundings.

• Plans could be described as the bridge between goals and actions, according to the action theory.

• One interesting part of feedback is errors. Errors arise from unintentional behaviour which does not contribute in reaching the goal. When an environment is complex, more errors will emerge.

Chapter 6: Responsive leaders

• Psychological identity can be explained as the characteristics people use to define themselves.

• The core identity of a leader consists of those characteristics and categories about themselves they value most in describing their concept of self.

• A leader wants to show its identity by behaviour, but the interpretation of this behaviour may differ among other people. To hold their identity, leader are socially challenged. The response of others determines if the identity a leader wants to show will be kept.

• In this way, an identity threat in one area can have an influence on the identity as a whole.

• Strategic recategorisation: in this identity repair method the leaders pointed out the positive aspects of their school which were not taken into account in the ranking. This was done to explain the disappointing ranking.

• Favorable social comparisons: in this repair method leaders differentiated their school from other schools while emphasising the positive aspects of their school and pointing out the negative aspects of the other schools, so their school looked more positive compared to the other schools. Also, the school leaders mentioned their school to be the same as top ranked schools, so they compared their school in a positive way to a school like Stanford University.

• Selective self-categorisation: in this repair method, one focuses on the positive aspects of ones identity and minimised the negative aspects.

• The decisions leaders make can be threating their identity in two ways: (1) credibility and (2) public claims about core identities.

• Identity dissonance can be explained as a certain psychological state, created by leadership identity threats.

• The strategic dissonance model (Burgelman, & Grove, 1996) states that leaders benefit from the difference between the identity of the organisation and the identity of the leader himself.

Chapter 7: Overconfidence and procedural fairness

• Overconfidence can be divided in three types: overestimation, overplacement, and overprecision.

• Studies about overconfidence have to deal with three different problems: confounding (most studies measure both overestimation and overprecision), underconfidence (underestimation, illusion of controll, planning fallacy, future pessimism, underplacement, comparative pessimism, and underprecision), and apparent inconsistency (overestimation and overplacement seem to be inconsistent).

• The differential information theory states that the information people have about themselves is far from perfect, but the information people have about others is worse. This means the estimates people make will regress towards a baseline.

• The precision of the prediction of the participants' score is associated with less underestimation on easy, and less overestimation on hard quizzes.

• When the precision of the prediction of the scores of the randomly selected other participant is better, this is associated with less overplacement on easy and less underplacement on hard quizzes.

• The studies spoken of in this chapter indicate there are no individual differences which explain overconfidence significantly.

• There are some moderators for overconfidence: controllability, observability, personal experience, and absent/exempt.

Chapter 8: Conflicts in groups

• The concept of conflict could be explained as perceived adverse interests between persons or groups. Task conflicts can be defined as conflicts about ideas and opinions about the task. Relationship conflicts could be defined as conflicts about things unrelated to the task at hand.

• Conflict asymmetry arises when some people perceive more conflict than others. There could be group conflict asymmetry (the difference of opinion between group members) and individual conflict asymmetry (the direction of the difference – does the individual perceive high or low conflict compared to the other group members?).

• Shared mental models are cognitive structures which represent the characteristics, tasks and needs of team members. Also the team members interactions and processes are represented in the shared mental models. When the shared mental models are the same for all group members, the interaction between group members is better.

• Mediation processes were less successful when the team members perceived different levels of conflict. When team members on the other hand experience conflict symmetry, they are more likely to work together in solving the conflict.

• Team members who perceive high conflict feel less satisfied, have the idea their performance lacks, and do not have a tendency to work with the group later. Also, when trying to resolve the conflict other team members do not think exists, can cause frustration and withdrawal.

• There are different mediators between asymmetric conflicts and group performance: (1) group atmosphere or group state, (2) social processes, (3) intraindividual cognitions, and (4) affective states.

• Research indicates a conflict which is perceived and psychologically experienced as a challenge, could have positive effects on the performance of the group. Motivation plays an important part. There are negative effects on the performance outcomes when the conflict is experienced as a threat.

Chapter 9: Trust

• When trust is broken, those benefits disappear. In the world of organisations, it is not uncommon for trust to be broken.

• In general, the three viewpoints on repairing trust are attributions, social equilibrium, and negotiation.

• The effects of an apology are dependent on the type of offense: when the offense is about competence, it is better to apologise, because people tend to see this as an act of willingness to perform better in the future. When the offense is about integrity, an apology does not outweigh the thought you're of low integrity. In this case, being reserved also is not a good response, as it does not provide proof you do not do it again.

• After an offense, interpersonal relations are damaged. Not only the employer will be considered questionable, but also the relationship with the employer. This can result in a social disequilibrium. To restore this, some social rituals should be performed, including apologies, penance, and punishment.

• Not only the employer at fault, but also the employee play a role in the process of repairing trust between the two.

  The bilateral model of trust repair (BTR, Kim et al., 2009) shows three stadias:

1. Was the employer at fault?

2. Should the fault be administered to the person or to the situation?

3. When (partly) administered to the person, could this be repaired or is it a sign of character?

• Future research should focus on (1) what happens when an organisation in it is whole is at fault, and trust in the organisation must be repaired, (2) the relation between power and repairing trust, and (3) whether or not trust could be fully repaired.

Chapter 10: The psychology of conflict

• Most people feel uneasy with asking for help from others. When there's a chance our request might be rejected, we rather seek other possibilities than seek for help. It is important for us to correctly predict if our request will be met or not, because of the (social) consequences. Unfortunately, we are not that good in predicting the willingness to help.

• Research shows the people who are asked for help are much more willing so when asked directly (because it is socially awkward to say no) and do not calculate the effort when they decide to help or not, which is the opposite of the thought process of help seekers.

• People who give gifts take the price in consideration: the more expensive, the more the feeling of appreciation will be transferred to the gift receiver. However, the gift receivers do not feel it this way; they do not feel the degree of appreciation depends on the gift price.

• Gift receivers feel more appreciated when they get a thoughtful gift. However, 'thoughtful' has a different meaning for the giver then for the receiver. The giver considers thoughtful as expensive, while the receiver thoughtful as carefully selected.

• The social norms for the giver and receiver differ: the receiver must be thankful the giver is not offended by the request, while the giver has to devalue their generosity. When a certain act is valued more by the receiver then by the giver, givers expect less in return from the receiver, while the receiver wanted to return more.

• When first asking a large demand, and getting 'no' as an answer, people are more inclined to answer 'yes' to a smaller demand. Also, we assume people are more willing to help when asked for a second time, when refusing the first time. However, people who are in the receiving role think this is the exact opposite: when asked to help the first time, and refused, the person will also refuse the second time.

• When someone makes a decision to help based on affect, the receiver was more willing to accept the help then when the help was based on a cost-benefit analysis. However, when the favor was big, the receiver expected the favor to be based on a cost-benefit analysis. When this is not the case, the receiver likes the giver a lot, but also thinks the giver is a bit dumb.

• In a team, people who are seen as givers get more respect and appreciation. Also, people who didn't ask for help, were granted with more appreciation and respect from their group members. People who were seen more as receivers, usually get less appreciation and respect.

Chapter 11: Diversity in organisations

• Diversity can be explained as the result of every aspect individuals adopt into differencing another individual from them. This includes far more than aspects like race and gender. Another definition of diversity is the following: diversity can be seen as a characteristic of social grouping, which shows the objective and subjective discrepancies between individuals in the group.

• Social category diversity represent characteristics which people use to categorise others to the in-group or the out-group. Individuals in the in-group are people who have the same characteristics, while individuals in the out-group have different characteristics.

• Informational diversity categoriseises people by their information, opinions , thoughts, and behaviour to bring people together in performing a task. To solve problems, people with different kinds of information often are brought together.

• Social category diversity has an influence on the affective and cognitive functions of individuals and therefore influence their performances. There are three mechanisms: (1) expectation, (2) preference, and (3) balance in social relationships.

• When the team has social category diversity and there are different opinions about how to solve the task, this team performs better then when there's no social category diversity in the team.

• When people have the idea task performance benefits from group diversity, they could identify themselves more with a diverse group. On the other hand, when people thought group diversity causes disadvantages for the task performance, their identification with the diverse group was lessened.

Chapter 12: Antisocial behaviour in organisations

• A workplace victim can be described as someone who encounters a negative outcome because of the treatment of another person within the organisation.

• The explanation of workplace victimisation is the following: aggressive behaviour by at least one employee has damaging effects on the wellbeing of another employee. The wellbeing is harmed when important psychological needs, like the need to belong, are not met.

• A study about bullying on the schoolyard found two sets of victims: submissive victims (they are more anxious, quiet, and insecure, and they have a damaged self-image), and proactive victims (they have different characteristics: hostility, uncompromising, and aggressive).

• The victim precipitation theory states that victims contribute to being a victim (either aware or unaware).

• Another way to divide victims into groups is by using the terms passive and active. When classified in the passive group, an individual fails to protect himself against bullying. When victims are categorised as active, they provoke direct reactions from other people with their behaviour. People feel like active victims deserve to be bullied, because of this behaviour.

• The symbolic interactionist model of aggression states that aggressive behaviour is often intended as social control, to increase the social identity, or pay back.

• Both status and background characteristics could contribute in becoming victim or not.

• Eventually, people who are workplace victims reach a threshold. One of the reactions which could origin from this, is revenge. Revenge could be explained as reacting behaviour on perceived wrongdoing which is doing harm to the perceived bully. Eventually, revenge results in escalating conflicts and less productivity.

• People with an absolute and high status do not have a tendency towards revenge so much. There are two main explanations. First of all, people in such a position get so much confirmation (both socially and materially) so it is hard to experience identity threats. Second, people with absolute and high power experience strong normative pressure to behave in a good manner.

• Relative power could be described as a difference in status between the person that commits wrongful behaviour, and the person who wants to take revenge. Another explanation of relative power is a situation in which different people experience contrasting abilities to act on desired goals, to apply punishment, and/or to deny rewards.  

Chapter 13: Creativity

• Whether something is creative or innovative, could be determined in two different ways: (1) the process perspective (focus on the processes which are needed to develop or implement new ideas), and (2) the end-state (the end product will be assessed, is it novel and appropriate, or useful?).

• To evaluate whether something could be regarded creative, three dimensions are taken into account: (1) fluency, (2) originality, and (3) flexibility.

• The Dual Pathway to Creativity Model (DPCM) gives a better look at creative performance. The dimensions fluency and originality can, according to this model, be accomplished by flexible thinking and processing information in a divergent manner, by systematically linking possibilities, or by the combination of cognitive flexibility and persistence.

• To achieve both cognitive flexibility and persistence, one needs to be cognitively activated. When this activation is moderate and the individual is also moderately aroused, the cognitive flexibility and persistence are at their best (compared to high or low activation and arousal).

• The value-from-fit theory states that people are more task-engaged when the requirements for this task match their characteristics, or when task activity brings them closer towards their goals.

• The concept of flow can be defined as a highly focused state of consciousness, which almost has no costs for the individual.

• The Motivated Information Processing in Groups Model (MIP-G) is based on the idea of groups as information processors. There is a cycle between individuals and the group: group members individually search information, share this with the group members, who will be affected by this information. This makes them search other information, which will be shared... and so on until a decision is made.

• The epistemic motivation can be defined by how much effort one is willing to put into a correct understanding of the group problem or task.

• Social motivation can either be pro-self or prosocial. In the former, people want to individually benefit from the outcomes, while in the latter, people want the group to benefit from the outcomes.

• Both social and epistemic motivation play an important role in information processing, judgments, and decisions at group level. The chance on a joint positive outcome is greatest when groups are both highly epistemic and prosocially motivated.

• Insecurity about ones own thoughts (because of heterogeneous thoughts among group members) could raise epistemic motivation. A special manner in which this is accomplished, is when the group majority and the group minority have opposing thoughts. This causes the minority to come up with the most creative ideas, especially when the group climate is prosocial and psychologically safe. Studies show groups like this score higher on innovation tasks.

Chapter 14: Workplace stress: a social identity approach

• A lot of factors which lead to positive workplace outcomes, like leadership, negotiation, and productivity, bring stress along as a negative consequence. This influences the wellbeing of the employee. Besides, workplace stress has increased over the years, since there are more productivity demands.

• The social identity perspective states that team memberships are contributing to the perceived social and environmental stressors. This can be explained by the influence group membership has on us as a person, on our sense of self. Mostly, social identity plays a key role in this.

• The psychological approach states that stress is a reaction to too high requirements.

• The general adaptation syndrome (GAS) has three different stages: (1) shock, (2) countershock, and (3) resistance. When the third stage results in exhaustion, this can even result in burnout.

• The individual difference approach states that the psychological profile of the individual plays an important role. One could make a distinction between Type A and Type B personalities. This distinction divides people into two groups: one group which is sensitive to stress-related problems and one group which is not so much.

• The stimulus based approach states that stress is caused by characteristics of the organisational context. Stress could be caused by both life events and special professions.

• The transactional approach states that one has to perceive stress as something which is psychologically mediated. Stress is caused by environmental stressors which the individual perceives as threatening to his wellbeing: thus the cognitions of the individual determines whether a stressor will cause problems.

• There are two types of appraisal: (1) Primary appraisal: how important is the particular happening for the wellbeing of the individual? (2) Secondary appraisal: on what level the individual estimates he could cope with the given stressor?

• An important coping mechanism when stress causes problems, is social support.

• The social identity theory (SIT) states that the individuals sense of self is construed by their group membership. The identity people shape for themselves is thus both personal and social.

• The self categorisation theory (SGT) follows up on the SIT and unravels the psychological dynamics of the self.

• A shared social identity has positive effects on stress since it forms the basis for social support. Also, when asking people if they can cope with a certain stressor, they use their group membership as a reference point. Both the nature and firmness of identification with a group and the definition of the stressor, related to this identity, determine the impact the stressor has on a certain individual.

• Higher levels of social identification are connected to positive stress outcomes. When feeling identified with the group, the group lower on hierarchy could use this as an advantage. Also, when there's low social identification in a high hierarchy group, this is a disadvantage.

Chapter 15: Morality, social identity, and ethics

• The process of ethical decision making exists of the following steps: (1) moral awareness, (2) making a moral judgment, (3) moral decision making, and (4) the behaviour.

• Models of progressive moral development state there are two factors which influence the judgments of people: (1) the cognitive moral development and (2) the moral intensity. When people think the moral intensity of their behaviour is high, the will behave morally. However, when the moral intensity is not high, the cognitive moral development of the individual plays an important role. When this person is high on Kohlberg's hierarchy of cognitive moral development, the ethical behaviour does not depend on the moral intensity.

• When people have good self-justification abilities, they act more unethically. When they are not that good in self-justification, unethical behaviour damage ones self image.

• Some people see morality as a most important factor to live by. These people have one thing in common: a strong cohesion between morality and perceptions of the self. This is called the moral identity.

• The social identity theory states that social identity is an expansion of the concept of self. This concept of self will become a more collective self. The social identity arises from the membership someone has in certain groups. The personal identity does not depend on social aspects, but only on personal attributes.

• Another explanation for the self are (1) everyone has multiple social identities, based on their different group memberships. The social identity which plays the main role, is dependent on the situation at hand. (2) This explanation assumes role identities. Everyone has different roles which are in a hierarchy based on which role is most noticeable. For an example, see figure 15.1 (pp. 360). This most noticeable role is the most dominant one.

• The moral identity could be explained by how important morality is for the concept of self. When someone has a stronger moral identity, this person will act on this.

• People have trouble to behave unethical when they care about something, but only when morality is an important aspect of their self. If this is not the case, the behaviour in situations someone cares about could be even more unethical.

• Sometimes, the different role demands could conflict with each other. Moral principles in one domain could be in conflict with the moral principles in the other domain. When the conflicts get so far people have to choose to act unethical in one domain while acting ethical in the other domain, they most likely act unethical in the domain which influences their self concept the least.

• Both the moral licensing and the moral equilibrium models state people think they can earn credits when acting morally, which they can spend by acting less morally in another situation. The moral compensation model states that people try to make up for less moral behaviour by behaving more moral in the future.

Chapter 16: Culture and creativity

• Creativity can be explained as generating new ideas.

• Innovation can be defined as creating creative outcomes.

• When defining creativity as creating new things, this idea is way more important and accepted in the Western cultures compared to the South-Asian cultures. This could be explained by the characteristics of the cultures: the Western cultures could be more typified as individualistic, while the South-Asian cultures are more collectivistic.

• It is widely accepted to see creativity as some sort of social process. This may contain a bias in favor of Western cultures. It is definitely possible Western creativity tests contain items which are not regarded creative in non-Western communities. Also, Western creativity tests may lack items which are regarded creative in non-Western communities.

• Collectivism is seen as a suppressive factor when regarding creativity, because conformity is more important for this cultural style. Low uncertainty avoidance can be seen as a promotive factor when regarding creativity.

• According to the Western ideas, innovative behaviour is promoted by a learning-goal orientation, while it is negatively affected by a performance-goal orientation. Studies show knowledge sharing is a mediator for the connection between innovative behaviour and a learning-goal orientation, while the effect of a performance-goal orientation only existed through perceived autonomy.

• There are two Chinese theories about creativity: (1) face: the desire to maintain a positive self- and public image, and (2) renqing; the desire to be sympathetic towards others and to help them at all times. According to the Chinese theories, face and renqing are positively connected and are part of the relational orientation. The connection between face and renqing seems to have a negative connection with fear of failure and innovative behaviour.

• Creative versatility: the creative powers of an individual. Individuals who experience two cultures in their lives, feel like they have two different cultural identities.

• Creative virtuosity: the quality of the creative act. This could be influences by (1) more access to ideas, (2) unconventional associations, and (3) novel conceptual combinations. The first two concepts (idea access and unconventional ideas) need the individual to be close to the other culture. For novel conceptual combinations, it is required one experiences both cultures at the same time.