Leadership & Organizational Behavior

The research in this article examined the consequences of a failed attempt to reduce dissonance through a self-affirmation strategy. It was hypothesized that disconfirming participants' affirmations would reinstate psychological discomfort and dissonance motivation. In Experiment 1, high-dissonance participants who affirmed on a self-relevant value scale and received disconforming feedback about their affirmations expressed greater psychological discomfort (Elliot & Devine, 1994) than either affirmation-only participants or low-dissonance/affirmation disconformed participants.

Behavioral research on negotiation in recent years has been dominated by the decision-making research paradigm, which accords a relatively narrow role to emotions. Decision-making researchers have considered emotions primarily in terms of how an individual’s positive or negative affect impacts, and usually impedes, his or her information processing. Drawing on recent advances in psychology and other fields, we propose an alternative perspective that highlights more social and more functional aspects of emotion in negotiation.

We investigate how individuals learn from imagined might-have-been scenarios. We hypothesize that individuals are more likely to learn when they have responded to an event with upward-directed, self-focused counterfactual thoughts, and, additionally, that this learning process is inhibited by accountability to organizational superiors. Support for these hypotheses was obtained in two studies that assessed learning by aviation pilots from the experience of near accidents.

This paper studies implementation in a principal-agent model of adverse selection. We explore ways in which the additional structure of principal-agent models (compared to general implementation models) simplifies the implementation problem. We develop a connection between the single crossing property and monotonicity conditions which are necessary for Nash and Bayesian Nash implementation. We also construct simple implementing mechanisms that rely on the single crossing property and on assumptions about the outcome set frequently made in the principal-agent literature.

Sociologists contend that industries can be importantly characterized as sets of interlocking producer positions. This paper argues that this distinctively relational conception of a market represents a powerful framework for depicting and analyzing the process of technical change.

Prior evaluations are frequently challenged and need to be revised. We propose that an important determinant of such revisions is the degree to which the challenge provides an opportunity to compare the target against a competitor. Whenever a challenge offers an opportunity, the information contained in the challene will carry a disproportionate weight in the revised judgments. We call this proposition the comparison-revision hypothesis.

Low inventory, a crucial part of just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing systems, enjoys increasing application worldwide, yet the behavioral effects of such systems remain largely unexplored. Operations research (OR) models of low-inventory systems typically use a simplifying assumption that processing times of individual workers are independent random variables. This leads to predictions that low-inventory systems will exhibit production interruptions leading to lower productivity. Yet empirical results suggest that low-inventory systems do not exhibit the predicted productivity losses.

The present research is motivated by an interest in why organizational decision makers so often respond to accidents with remedy plans that focus narrowly on correcting human error rather than more environment-focused plans or more encompassing plans. We investigated the role of counterfactual thinking in the decision-making tendency toward human-focused plans. Our experiments indicated that even in a domain where human-focused remedies were not otherwise appealing, many participants decided on human-focused remedies after they had generated an “if only” conjecture about the accident.