Leadership & Organizational Behavior

This paper examines agency as a mechanism that can predict cultural differences in human motivation. In elaborating on the theory of self-construal (Markus and Kitayama, 1991) and drawing on past research on culture, we propose that people from cultures stressing independence are more personally agentic, whereas people from cultures stressing interdependence are more collectively agentic?which results in culturally contrasting differences in cognition and human motivation.

The authors examined how gender stereotypes affect negotiation performance. Men outperformed women when the negotiation was perceived as diagnostic of ability (Experiment 1) or the negotiation was linked to gender-specific traits (Experiment 2), suggesting the threat of negative stereotype confirmation hurt women's performance relative to men.

Previous research suggests that attitudinal resistance to information that challenges a prior evaluation increases with the amount of information underlying the prior evaluation. We revisit this proposition in a context in which a set of important claims about a target brand are presented either alone—a lower amount of "isolated"? information—or along with other favorable, but less important claims— a higher amount of "embedded" information. Results from two experiments show that when the challenge occurs immediately after the initial evaluation, a greater amount of "embedded"?

The authors investigate two competing hypotheses about how chronic vividness of imagery interacts with the vividness and salience of information in decision making. Results from four studies, covering a variety of decision domains, indicate that chronic imagery vividness rarely amplifies the effects of vivid and salient information. Imagery vividness may, in fact, attenuate the effects of vivid and salient information. This is because, relative to nonvivid imagers, vivid imagers rely less on information that appears obvious and rely more on information that seems less obvious.

It has been recently suggested that sponsor identification may be biased in favor of prominent brands. All things equal, consumers are more likely to attribute sponsorship to brands that they perceive to be more prominent in the marketplace, such as large-share brands. This article offers additional empirical evidence for this phenomenon and examines the underlying processes. The results of a controlled laboratory experiment replicate the phenomenon and show that this bias arises only when consumers are unable to retrieve the name of the sponsor directly from memory.

A Sunday New York Times article on a potential development of new cancer-curing drugs caused EntreMed's stock price to rise from 12.063 at the Friday close, to open at 85 and close near 52 on Monday. It closed above 30 in the three following weeks. The enthusiasm spilled over to other biotechnology stocks. The potential breakthrough in cancer research already had been reported, however, in the journal Nature, and in various popular newspapers (including the Times) more than five months earlier.

In an empirical study using five real-world creative teams from an advertising agency, participants were given a strategic brief for a new beverage product and asked to design the layout for a print ad. Think-aloud concurrent protocols obtained from each teams copywriter, art director, and the two working together were analyzed to examine the creative process and its relationship to the created advertisement. Interpretive analyses of the protocols reveal that the teams access culturally available plot patterns but in different ways.

In view of the distressingly low rate of success in new product introduction, it is important to identify predictive guidelines early in the new product development process so that better choices can be made and unnecessary costs avoided. In this paper, a framework for early analysis based on the success potential embodied in the product-idea itself and the circumstances of its emergence. Based on two studies reporting actual introductions, several determinants are identified that significantly distinguish successful from unsuccessful new products in the marketplace.

The common image of a lone folk scientist laboring to make sense of a single agent's behavior is helpful but incomplete in its recognition of social context as it surrounds the perceiver and as it is reflected in the perceiver's folk theories. In this chapter, we review insights from social and cultural psychology that both confirm and expand the perceiver-as-scientist view. We proceed in three parts.