Three essays on resource inequality and its implications for organizational behavior

• Autores: Ruo Mo
• Directores de la Tesis: Sebastien Brion (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidad de Navarra ( España ) en 2020
• Idioma: español
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Sebastian Hafenbrädl (presid.), Elena Reutskaja (secret.), Matthias Seifert (voc.), Jennifer Jordan (voc.), Matteo Prato (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Ciencias de la Dirección por la Universidad de Navarra
• Materias:
  • Ciencias económicas
    • Organización y dirección de empresas
      • Organización de recursos humanos
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• Resumen

  • Resources of various forms abound in every sphere of people’s social life. Possession of resources influences people’s psychology and behavior. In organizations that feature allocation, utilization and production of resources, possession of resources in particular plays a significant role in shaping people’s behavior. This dissertation broadly revolves around the impact of differentiated possession of resources (i.e., resource inequality) on people’s behavior in organizational settings. Specifically, this dissertation consists of three chapters corresponding to resource inequality that plays out at three levels: dyadic, team, and societal.

    At the dyadic level, resource inequality manifests in supervisor-subordinate interaction. Chapter 1 focuses on how subordinates react to adverse leader behavior (i.e., abusive supervisor behavior). Integrating conservation of resource theory and regulatory focus theory, I offer a motivational account to examine the enabling and debilitating effects of abusive supervisor behavior on employees. With a scenario experiment with working professionals and in a field study in an organizational setting, I found that while abusive supervisor behavior is negatively related to subordinates’ prevention focus (i.e., debilitating effect), it is positively related to promotion focus (i.e., energizing effect). Moreover, via promotion focus, abusive supervior behavior also has a positive indirect effect on subordinates’ effort investment at work.

    At the team level, resource inequality manifests in the form of hierarchy. Based on this logic, Chapter 2 investigates the influence of two different types of hierarchy (i.e., power and status) on team dynamics (i.e. intrateam trust network). Whether hierarchy is functional or dysfunctional to team outcomes has been subjected to substantial debate, with mixed evidence supporting both the bright and dark sides of hierarchy. To address these issues, this research provides a refined examination of the basis of hierarchy by distinguishing between power and status hierarchy and employs a social network approach to delineate an important team dynamic, intrateam trust. I predict that power hierarchy is positively related to the intrateam trust network density and negatively related to trust network centralization, while status hierarchy is negatively related to intrateam trust network density and centralization.

    The results from two studies, using different measures of power and status, and using both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs, partially supported my hypotheses.

    At the societal level, resource inequality reflects socioeconomic status of a certain range within a community. Thus, Chapter 3 explores when socioeconomic status fosters unethical behavior. Past findings on the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and unethicality are inconclusive, with some previous studies demonstrating that high-SES people tend to engage in unethical behavior, while other research finds null effects of SES on unethical behavior. In this research, help reconcile these conflicting findings by adopting a multilevel perspective on the SES-unethicality relationship, whereby I incorporate the effects of macroeconomic conditions (i.e., whether the macroeconomy is doing well or poorly) on the SES-unethicality relationship. I predict that high-SES people do not constantly engage in unethical behavior; instead, they do so only in response to economic downturns (i.e., the macroeconomy is trending downward). Data from a large-scale survey (Study 1) and two experiments (Studies 2 and 3) support this prediction.

    Throughout the three chapters, I aim to contribute to a broader literature of resource inequality by investigating how resources, conceptualized across different levels (i.e., dyadic, team and societal), influence people’s psychology and behavior.