Graduate School of Business

Focusing on “what people want in their group” as a critical antecedent of intragroup conflict, the present study theorizes and empirically investigates the relationships among the psychological needs of group members, intragroup conflict, and group performance. It attends to the within-group average and dispersion of members’ psychological needs and examines the effects stemming from group composition
of needs on multiple types of conflict. The analyses based on multisource data from 145 organizational teams revealed significant relationships between the groups’ composition with respect to the members’ need for achievement and task conflict, need for affiliation and relationship conflict, and need for power and status conflict. Some of these relationships were moderated by open communication among members. The analyses also demonstrated that when the 3 types of conflict were considered together, task conflict was a positive predictor of group performance, whereas relationship conflict was a negative predictor. The findings highlight the motivational aspects of intragroup conflict, revealing the multilevel dynamics of the psychological needs in social settings.

Despite the increasing significance of corporate ethics, few studies have explored the intermediate mechanisms that explain the relationship between corporate ethics and firm financial performance. Drawing on institutional theory and strategic human resource management literature, the authors hypothesize that the internal collective processes based on employees’ collective organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) mediate
the ethics–performance relationship at the organizational level. The authors’ hypotheses are tested using data collected from 3,821 employees from 130 Korean companies and the respective companies’ financial performance data. The results indicate that collective organizational commitment and interpersonal OCB are meaningful intervening processes that connect corporate ethics to firm financial performance. To complement prior studies that identify a
firm’s reputation and external relations as mediators between corporate ethics and performance, the present study highlights the need to examine microprocesses occurring within the organization to account for the ethics–firm performance relationship. Moreover, the present demonstration of collective organizational commitment and OCB as meaningful predictors of a firm’s objective performance indicates the significance of these employee processes in explaining organizational-level outcomes.

The effects of extrinsic rewards on creative performance have been controversial, and scholars have called for the examination of the boundary conditions of such effects. Drawing upon expectancy theory, we attend to both reinforcement and self-determination pathways that reveal the informational and controlling functions of creativity-related extrinsic rewards. We further identify the individual dispositions that moderate
these two pathways. Specifically, we propose that extrinsic rewards for creativity positively predict creative performance only when employees have high creative self-efficacy and regard such rewards as important. We likewise propose that extrinsic rewards positively affect the intrinsic motivation of employees with an internal locus of control, thus enhancing their creative performance. Results based on a sample of 181 employee– supervisor dyads largely supported these expectations. The current analysis enriches the creativity literature by combining different perspectives in a coherent framework, by demonstrating the positive
effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation, and by demonstrating that the rewards–creativity relationship varies across employees depending on their individual differences.