As individuals seek success, destructive interpersonal clashes can emerge when they believe they can only succeed at the expense of others. Prior work suggests this zero-sum construal of success is more likely occur when people receive negative feedback regarding their achievement. In the present research, we identify another element in the workplace that can strengthen zero-sum beliefs, and not just for those who receive negative feedback, but even for those who receive positive feedback.

Detaching from work is beneficial because it helps employees recover from work demands. However, we argue that detachment may be a trade-off for employees in organizations with higher (vs. lower) levels of performance pressure. Drawing on social self-preservation theory, we hypothesize that evening detachment leads employees working in higher (vs. lower) performance pressure work contexts to experience increased shame at work the next morning.

Given that mask-wearing proved to be an important tool to slow the spread of infection during the COVID-19 pandemic, investigating the psychological and cultural factors that influence norms for mask wearing across cultures is exceptionally important. One factor that may influence mask wearing behavior is the degree to which people believe masks potentially impair emotion recognition.

Leaders play a critical role in creating the ethics agenda in organizations. Their communications, decisions, and behaviors influence employees to act ethically or unethically to accomplish organizational goals. To be sure, various reviews within the behavioral ethics literature have highlighted the crucial role that ethical leadership plays in gearing organizations and employees ethically. Yet, numerous documented ethical failings in organizations have evidenced the impact of unethical leadership—where leaders’ unethical conduct or influence on employees promotes unethicality within organizations and generates harmful consequences.

Teams often need to adapt to planned discontinuous task change or fundamental alteration of tasks, tools, and work systems. Although team adaptation theories have made substantive progress in explaining how teams can respond to change, they have not adequately considered the unique impact that discontinuous task change can have on teams. Such change can render not only collective but also individual task capabilities obsolete and necessitate a multilevel task relearning process. Drawing on the team compilation model, we suggest that adaptation to discontinuous task change is akin to team (re)development.

We examine the effects of leader prevention focus on the leader’s own behavior, in the form of the harmful overruling of good ideas by their follower team, and on the team’s collective behaviors, processes, and performance. We argue that when leaders adopt a prevention mindset, it can have costly effects on team outcomes.

Employees often engage in collective grassroot efforts to bring about gender equity in the workplace. Such coalition-based advocacy is largely driven by women, which has led to debate about whether men’s involvement as allies can help. Integrating literatures on signaling and legitimacy, we propose that the demographic composition of a gender equity advocacy coalition matters: Men-only groups lack coalition legitimacy, or the perception that they are the “right” spokespersons for gender equity issues, whereas women-only groups struggle to convey issue legitimacy, or the perception that gender equity is of strategic importance within business organizations.