Journal of Applied Psychology

The identity conflict process: Appraisal theory as an integrative framework for understanding identity conflict at work.
Identity conflict—the experience of perceiving incompatibilities between aspects of one’s identity content that call into question the individual’s ability to meet the identity standard of at least one of these identities—can significantly impact individuals’ work experiences. As individuals navigate experiences of identity conflict at work, managers and organizations also grapple with how to support employees’ multiple identities while mitigating the primarily negative outcomes of identity conflict. However, the scholarship on work-relevant identity conflict faces several challenges, including disciplinary fragmentation, conceptual imprecision, and diverse but deficient theoretical perspectives, which together have limited our ability to accumulate knowledge about this experience and to develop useful management tools. To overcome these, we conducted a thorough review of the cross-disciplinary literature, allowing us to offer a refined integrative definition of identity conflict and a reconceptualization of identity conflict as the result of an appraisal process. As we delineate what we know about the appraisal process of identity conflict, we provide a detailed theoretical explanation of its antecedents, outcomes, and responses and shed light on the mechanisms that drive the process. This approach not only enhances theoretical depth and guides new research directions but also equips managers to address and reduce identity conflict experienced by their employees. This research contributes to the literature by offering clarity and coherence to the identity conflict domain, providing theoretical and practical guidance, and outlining promising directions for future inquiry. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Out of sight, out of mind: How high-level construals can decrease the ethical framing of risk-mitigating behavior.
Organizational failures often cause significant harm to employees, the organization itself, and the environment. Investigations of failures consistently highlight how key employees behaved in (perhaps unintentionally) unethical ways that de-prioritized safety, such as investing fewer resources in safety (vs. other priorities) over time. Drawing on these investigations, we suggest a previously underexplored theme could explain why organizational failures persist and why employees did not “see” the potential for their behaviors to cause harm to others: Employees were distanced from where the harm eventually occurred, either in terms of space (e.g., being located miles away from the job site) or time (e.g., making decisions that would not have impacts for months or years). We use construal level theory to investigate how the way employees construe where work occurs—defined as work context construal—influences perceptions of harm and the ethical framing of risk-mitigating behaviors. We hypothesize that high-level (abstract) work context construals (vs. low-level, concrete ones) reduce perceptions of potential harm which, in turn, leads to framing risk-mitigating behaviors as less of an ethical obligation. Six studies—a correlational survey of aviation employees (Study 1), field experiments with offshore drilling employees (Study 2A) and health care workers (Study 2B), a preregistered experiment with nurses (Study 3), and two supplemental studies (Studies 4A/B)—support our hypotheses. We discuss implications of this research for understanding organizational failures, particularly in a world where technology increasingly enables employees to monitor complex and high-risk work occurring many miles away, or on the other side of the world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
They do not deserve your thanks! Witness reactions to leader-directed expressions of gratitude.
Gratitude expressions have received growing attention from scholars, with research emphasizing its many positive effects on expressers, recipients, and witnesses. Although our knowledge of gratitude expressions’ benefits is accumulating, our understanding of its limits is less developed. In this article, we ask when employees’ expressions of gratitude toward their leaders positively influence witnesses’ perceptions of them, and when they do not. Across three studies including two multiwave surveys and an experiment, we find that expressed gratitude strengthens witnesses’ perceptions of expressers’ prosocial identities, especially when the leader is believed to be deserving of gratitude. Study 1 examines leader competence as an indicator of deservingness in a sample of leaders and employees in a manufacturing context. Studies 2 and 3 use survey and experimental methods to directly establish leader deservingness as a mechanism of the competence moderator and explore warmth as an additional component of employees’ deservingness perceptions. All three studies show how gratitude expression ultimately shapes witnesses’ tendencies to help expressers and seek feedback from them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
How context shapes collective turnover over time: The relative impact of internal versus external factors.
Despite the prevalence of research on the consequences of collective turnover (TO), we lack an understanding of how, when, and why changes in the external environment influence collective turnover. The present study extends context emergent turnover and threat-rigidity theories to consider temporal changes in rates of collective turnover brought on by an external disruption. We also conduct variance decomposition to evaluate the relative influence of internal and external factors on collective turnover and examine how changes in the external environment impact relative influences. Finally, we examine the role of collective engagement in explaining patterns of collective turnover over time. Our study is based on a large, geographically dispersed U.S. firm. Findings from a two-phase longitudinal model reveal that rates of collective turnover change over time in ways that are predictable from threat-rigidity theory. Variance decomposition analysis finds that internal store-level factors explain substantially more variance than external factors, but the balance changes in response to an external disruption. We also show that collective engagement can mitigate increases in collective turnover. Results inform theory regarding the relative importance of internal versus external factors in influencing collective turnover and provide a framework for predicting how contextual change in the external environment impacts collective turnover over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
The influence of friends’ person-organization fit during recruitment.
Although recruitment and perceptions of fit are inherently social—as they reflect the interactions between applicants and recruiting firms—applicants’ social networks during recruitment can exert both positive and potentially negative consequences for subsequent applicant perceptions and behaviors. In this study, we examine the role of applicants’ friends’ perceptions of fit with the same recruiting organizations. Integrating ideas from social information processing theory and the person-organization (P-O) fit literature, we argue that friends’ P-O fit perceptions drive social learning and social influence processes for applicants, thus predicting applicant perceptions and behaviors toward recruiting firms. In addition, we posit that the direct and indirect relationships between friends’ P-O fit perceptions and applicants’ own fit perceptions and job choices with recruiting firms are further strengthened by how centrally connected applicants are within their friend networks. Using a sample of 576 applicant-firm observations from 178 job applicants, we found that friends’ P-O fit perceptions are positively related to applicant P-O fit perceptions and job choice decisions. Furthermore, applicants’ position in their network—assessed via applicants’ outdegree centrality within their friend group—strengthened the relationship between friends’ P-O fit and applicant P-O fit as well as with their job choice decisions. Our research provides important theoretical and empirical findings on the influence of applicants’ friends during recruitment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
When time theft promotes performance: Measure development and validation of time theft motives.
The prevailing viewpoint has long depicted employee time theft as inherently detrimental. However, this perspective may stem from a limited understanding of the underlying motives that drive such behavior. Time theft can paradoxically be motivated by neutral and even laudable intentions, such as promoting work efficiency, thus rendering it potentially beneficial and constructive. Across three mixed-methods studies, we explore the motives behind employee time theft, develop and validate an instrument to assess these motives, and examine how they differentially predict time theft behavior. Specifically, in Study 1, we use a qualitative method and identify 11 types of time theft motives. Study 2 embarks on the development of measures of these motives, subsequently validating their factor structure. Study 3 examines their incremental variance in predicting time theft behavior by controlling for personality and demographic variables. Overall, these studies reveal that employees’ engagement in time theft can be driven not solely by self-oriented motives but also by others- and work-oriented motives. Further, each of these motives provides incremental value in understanding time theft behavior. Implications for both research and practice emanating from these findings are also discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Enhancing team crafting through proactive motivation: An intervention study.
Although the literature on individual job crafting has proliferated over the past decade, research on the collaborative crafting efforts of organizational teams has lagged behind, which is surprising given the prominence of team-based arrangements in contemporary work and the importance of team proactivity in today’s business environment. Drawing on proactive motivation theory and the literature on proactive performance in teams, this article presents a large-scale intervention study aimed at increasing team proactive motivation, including a pretest/posttest control group with 96 teams and 1,077 employees. We study the extent to which a team proactive motivation intervention is associated with changes in three dimensions of team crafting (task team crafting, relational team crafting, and cognitive team crafting) at both 6 months and 1 year after the intervention. We also examine the mediating role of change in the three team-level crafting dimensions in explaining the association between the intervention and change in team performance over time. Our results show that the intervention is positively associated with change in all three forms of team crafting. Furthermore, change in team crafting positively associates with change in team performance 6 months and 1 year after the intervention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Journal of Applied Psychology - Vol 110, Iss 2