Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.

This paper advances novel theory and evidence on the emergence of informal leadership networks in groups that feature no formally designated leaders or authority hierarchies. We integrate insights from relational schema and network theory to develop and empirically test a three-step process model. The model's first hypothesis is that people use a "linear ordering schema" to process information about leadership relations. The second hypothesis argues that when an individual experiences a particular leadership attribution to be inconsistent with the linear ordering schema, that individual will tend to reduce the ensuing cognitive inconsistency by modifying that leadership attribution. Finally, the third hypothesis builds on this inconsistency-reduction mechanism to derive implications about a set of network structural features (asymmetry, acyclicity, transitivity, popularity, and inverse popularity) that are predicted to emerge endogenously as a group's informal leadership network evolves.We find broad support for our proposed theoretical model using a multi-method, multi-study approach combining experimental and observational data. Our study contributes to the organizational literature by illuminating a socio-cognitive dynamics underpinning the evolution of informal leadership structures in groups where formal authority plays a limited role.

We investigate forgiveness as a human service employee coping response to client-instigated victimizations and further explore the role of workgroup conflict in (a) facilitating this response, and (b) influencing the relationship between victimization and workplace outcomes. Using the theoretical lens of Conservation of Resources (Hobfoll, 1989), we propose that employees forgive clients- especially in the context of low workgroup conflict. From low to moderate levels of client-instigated victimization, we suggest that victimization and forgiveness are positively related; however, this positive relationship does not prevail when individuals confront egregious levels of victimization (i.e. an inverted-U shape). This curvilinear relationship holds under low but not under high workgroup conflict. Extending this model to workplace outcomes, findings also demonstrate that the indirect effects of victimization on job satisfaction, burnout, and turnover intentions are mediated by forgiveness when workgroup conflict is low. Experiment- and field-based studies provide evidence for the theoretical model.

This paper builds a theoretical framework to detect the conditions under which social influence enables persistence of a shared opinion among members of an organization over time, despite membership turnover. It develops agent-based simulations of opinion evolution in an advice network, whereby opinion is defined in the broad sense of shared understandings on a matter that is relevant for an organization's activities, and on which members have some degree of discretion. We combine a micro-level model of social influence that builds on the "relative agreement" approach of Deffuant et al. (J. Artif. Soc. Simul. 5:4, 2002), and a macro-level structure of interactions that includes a flow of joiners and leavers and allows for criteria of advice tie formation derived from, and grounded in, the empirical literature on intra-organizational networks.We provide computational evidence that persistence of opinions over time is possible in an organization with joiners and leavers, a result that depends on circumstances defined by mode of network tie formation (in particular, criteria for selection of advisors), individual attributes of agents (openness of newcomers to influence, as part of their socialization process), and time-related factors (turnover rate, which regulates the flow of entry and exit in the organization, and establishes a form of endogenous hierarchy based on length of stay). We explore the combined effects of these factors and discuss their implications. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York.

A longitudinal study was conducted on the social network of a leaderless group to explore how Big Five personality traits affect leadership emergence, in the form of receiver ties (being nominated as a leader), sender ties (nominating others as leaders), and similarity effects (nominating similar/different others as leaders). Forty one students on a 3-month study abroad program participated in intensive group work, and their perceptions of emergent task- and relationship-oriented leadership within these groups were assessed three times across the life cycle of the group. Results indicated that individuals scoring higher on extraversion, openness to experience, and conscientiousness were nominated more as task- and relationship-oriented leaders, whereas those who were more agreeable were more likely to emerge as relationship-oriented leaders. In terms of emergent followership, group members who were more agreeable and neurotic (and less open to experience) were less likely to follow relationship-oriented leaders, whereas more conscientious individuals were more likely to follow task-oriented leaders. With respect to the effects of complementarity and similarity, both task- and relationship-oriented leader nominations were based on dissimilar levels of agreeableness between leaders and followers, whereas nominated relationship-based leaders tended to have similar levels of openness to experience to followers. Implications of these results are discussed. © the Author(s) 2013.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how different emotional abilities affect the emergence of task and relationship leaders in a group of 41 students. To conduct this investigation, leadership is envisioned as a dynamic network of leadership perceptions. The emergence of leadership and the role played by emotional abilities in this process are analyzed using Stochastic Actor Oriented Models (SAOMs). The results suggest that emotional abilities play complementary roles in emergent leadership. Whereas the abilities to perceive and manage emotions facilitate the emergence of relationship leaders, the abilities to use and understand them facilitate the emergence of task leaders. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.

Smith (2001) notes that "much of the knowledge on which performance in real-world settings is based is tacit knowledge" and 90 percent of knowledge in any organisation is embedded in people's heads. It is through converting tacit knowledge to value that the organisation obtains the competitive advantages achievable through knowledge management (KM) (KPMG, 2000). Much research explores the management of explicit knowledge but limited progress is made on that of tacit knowledge (Insch et al. 2008; Perez & Mitra, 2007). Employees are the fundamental repositories of tacit knowledge and are the key players in knowledge management initiatives. Tacit knowledge is personal, hard to communicate and exists in individuals mental models (Cho, Li, Su, 2007). It is therefore the individual whom decides if they will share their knowledge (Constant et al. 1994). Thus, an understanding of individual factors and their influence on knowledge management processes is key to the success of any knowledge management initiative (Tohidinia & Mosakhani, 2010). Wang and Noe (2010) and Cho, Li and Su (2007) argue for further research on individual level variables. Additionally, the number of studies on these variables is limited and many define knowledge broadly to include explicit knowledge. This study aims to advance on this research gap and explore the influence of individual level factors on tacit knowledge management processes. The case study is based on an American multinational manufacturing site and the participants are engineers whom engage in routine and non-routine tasks which demand use of both explicit and tacit knowledge. A qualitative methodology is utilised. This paper presents the preliminary results of this investigation.

Although it is often assumed that an individual's self-view as a leader has an impact on that individual's emergence as a leader, there is currently no empirical evidence of this effect in the literature. Longitudinal social network analysis is used to study both the impact of an individual's self-view as a leader on leadership emergence and how the process of leadership emergence influences an individual's self-view as a leader over time. Results suggest a reciprocal process: an individual's self-view as a leader influences the number of leadership nominations an individual receives over time and the number of leadership nominations received over time influences an individual's self-view as a leader.© the Author(s) 2011.