The examination of Workplace Aggression as a global construct conceptualization has gained considerable attention over the past few years as organizations work to better understand and address the occurrence and consequences of this challenging construct. The purpose of this dissertation is to build on previous efforts to validate the appropriateness and usefulness of a global conceptualization of the workplace aggression construct. This dissertation has been broken up into two parts: Part 1 utilized a Confirmatory Factor Analysis approach in order to assess the existence of workplace aggression as a global construct; Part 2 utilized a series of correlational analyses to examine the relationship between a selection of commonly experienced individual strain based outcomes and the global construct conceptualization assessed in Part 1. Participants were a diverse sample of 219 working individuals from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk participant pool. Results of Part 1 did not show support for a one-factor global construct conceptualization of the workplace aggression construct. However, support was shown for a higher-order five-factor model of the construct, suggesting that it may be possible to conceptualize workplace aggression as an overarching construct that is made up of separate workplace aggression constructs. Results of Part 2 showed support for the relationships between an existing global construct workplace aggression conceptualization and a series of strain-based outcomes. Utilizing correlational analyses, additional post-hoc analyses showed that individual factors such as emotional intelligence and personality are related to the experience of workplace aggression. Further, utilizing moderated regression analysis, the results demonstrated that individuals experiencing high levels of workplace aggression reported higher job satisfaction when they felt strongly that the aggressive act was highly visible, and similarly, when they felt that there was a clear intent to cause harm. Overall, the findings of this dissertation do support the need for a simplification of its current state of measurement. Future research should continue to examine workplace aggression in an effort to shed additional light on the structure and usefulness of this complex construct.

The examination of Workplace Aggression as a global construct conceptualization has gained considerable attention over the past few years as organizations work to better understand and address the occurrence and consequences of this challenging construct. The purpose of this dissertation is to build on previous efforts to validate the appropriateness and usefulness of a global conceptualization of the workplace aggression construct. This dissertation has been broken up into two parts: Part 1 utilized a Confirmatory Factor Analysis approach in order to assess the existence of workplace aggression as a global construct; Part 2 utilized a series of correlational analyses to examine the relationship between a selection of commonly experienced individual strain based outcomes and the global construct conceptualization assessed in Part 1. Participants were a diverse sample of 219 working individuals from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk participant pool. Results of Part 1 did not show support for a one-factor global construct conceptualization of the workplace aggression construct. However, support was shown for a higher-order five-factor model of the construct, suggesting that it may be possible to conceptualize workplace aggression as an overarching construct that is made up of separate workplace aggression constructs. Results of Part 2 showed support for the relationships between an existing global construct workplace aggression conceptualization and a series of strain-based outcomes. Utilizing correlational analyses, additional post-hoc analyses showed that individual factors such as emotional intelligence and personality are related to the experience of workplace aggression. Further, utilizing moderated regression analysis, the results demonstrated that individuals experiencing high levels of workplace aggression reported higher job satisfaction when they felt strongly that the aggressive act was highly visible, and similarly, when they felt that there was a clear intent to cause harm. Overall, the findings of this dissertation do support the need for a simplification of its current state of measurement. Future research should continue to examine workplace aggression in an effort to shed additional light on the structure and usefulness of this complex construct.

My study investigated the effects of abusive supervision on work and family outcomes including supervisor-directed and organization-directed deviance and spousal undermining. Using a moderated-mediation model, the relationship of abusive supervision on outcome variables was proposed to be mediated by moral courage and moderated by leader-member exchange (a-path) and work and family role quality (b-path). Two separate studies were conducted using a sample (N=200) recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and through relatives of students at a large US public southeastern university (N=150 dyads). Results confirm the effects of abusive supervision on work and family outcomes while analyses of contextual and conditional factors are mixed. Confirmatory factor analyses, factor loadings, and model fit statistics are provided and implications for research and practice are discussed.

As research into the dynamic characteristics of job performance across time has continued to accumulate, associated implications for performance appraisal have become evident. At present, several studies have demonstrated that systematic trends in job performance across time influence how performance is ultimately judged. However, little research has considered the processes by which the performance trend-performance rating relationship occurs. In the present study, I addressed this gap. Specifically, drawing on attribution theory, I proposed and tested a model whereby the performance trend-performance rating relationship occurs through attributions to ability and effort. The results of this study indicated that attributions to ability, but not effort, mediate the relationship between performance trend and performance ratings and that this relationship depends on attribution-related cues. Implications for performance appraisal research and theory are discussed.

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This thesis examined factors related to employee (particularly new employee) stress. In particular it looked at stress caused by role ambiguity. It looked at the moderating effect of tolerance for ambiguity on the relationship between role ambiguity and stress. It also examined the indirect effect of feedback seeking behavior to gain desired role clarity as an intervening variable on stress level.

With the onset of globalization, the economic contexts and working conditions within many countries are changing, presenting new challenges' for governments, organizations, and workers. Amid these challenges, concerns about personal finances are prevalent among employees and detrimental to workers' health, well-being, and families. Research on how this financial stress affects employees at work is lacking. In this thesis, I propose an appraisal-based model of financial stress whereby actual income and expenses are related to perceptions of income adequacy to afford wants and needs. These adequacy perceptions are, in turn, related to financial strain, representing a heightened negative affective state regarding one's financial situation. I hypothesize that, through a drain in emotional resources, financial strain will negatively predict life satisfaction by potentially inhibiting participation in healthy, enjoyable behaviors. I argue that this drain in emotional resources will also inhibit successful task performance and restrict participation in discretionary citizenship behaviors. Data from two working samples provide support for the hypothesized financial stress model and establish preliminary evidence of construct validity for new financial stress scales. In a prospective investigation, financial strain fully mediated the effects of income adequacy on subsequent life satisfaction, but was not related to job performance. Instead, perceived income adequacy to afford wants had a direct negative relationship with both task performance and citizenship behaviors at work, while income adequacy to afford needs had a positive direct effect on organizational citizenship behaviors. This work resolves many conceptual inconsistencies about financial stress in the literature, and contributes to the understanding of how income perceptions and financial stress might influence psychological resources and work motivation. This work has important implications for how organizations manage employees who may be experiencing low income adequacy and high financial strain. Finally, there are several meaningful opportunities for future research that would substantially build upon existing theory and evidence in this new area of financial stress and work.

Although women have been progressing in the U.S labor force into supervisory and management positions, the number of Asian American women in leadership roles continues to be limited. There is support in the literature for research on factors associated with the leadership development of Asian American women. The purpose of this phenomenological qualitative study was to explore the racial and gender experiences and perspectives of 7 Asian American women in U.S. health care organizations and how they developed into leaders. Feminist and sociocultural theories were applied to gain insight. Interviews were carried out to comprehend the manner in which gender and racial characteristics informed the leadership styles of the 7 Asian American female participants selected using a purposive sampling method. Thematic analysis yielded 5 key themes (destined to accomplish, support from unexpected, disadvantages incurred from race and gender, according to the rules, and kind deeds). The findings offer an enhanced explanation of the lived experience of these Asian American women and how racial and gender characteristics influenced different parts of their intentionality and shaped their relations within organizations. In particular, the participants described encountering traditional gender biases, stereotypes and cultural assumptions that hindered their sense of belonging and perhaps influenced and impelled their success. In addition to contributing to the literature, the study may offer useful insight to Asian American women seeking leadership positions. Furthering Asian American women's prospects in organizational leadership positions may promote more diversity in the U.S workforce and address inequalities.

This study is one of four exploratory studies concerned with coalitions of organizations that are formed to plan and develop social welfare programs within the local community. Although each study was conducted independently, taken together their major purpose was to develop some insights and knowledge into the behavior of organizations and the ways in which they interact as they work together to develop community programs. They are, then, exploratory studies of inter-organizational behavior. Each of the studies had a different focus. One study attempted to identify the present areas of agreement and disagreement regarding inter-organization behavior by systematically reviewing the literature over the past ten years. Another focused on the stages of development of the coalition, attempting to determine if organizational coalitions seemed to follow similar developmental patterns as has been reported in the literature on small groups. Another focused on the decision-making patterns in the coalitions by first reviewing the literature and constructing a decision-making model and then "testing" the model against a set of case histories. This study, following a grounded theory approach, attempted to identify a set of common variables or analytical categories which seemed to be present in a number of coalitions. Although each of these exploratory studies was conducted independently with a different emphasis and analytical focus, they each utilized the same set of case histories of coalitions. Consequently, each of the studies utilized a common set of data but viewed the data from quite different analytical perspectives.

The study of interpersonal relationships continues to be a major focus of theory and research in a wide array of disciplines. The present research examined one of the most prevalent and significant interpersonal relationships in the workplace context—the dyadic relationship between a supervisor and a subordinate. This research examined the relationships between trust, quality of the leader-member exchange relationship (LMX; a measure of the quality of the dyadic relationship), perceived organizational justice, and several employee attitudes and behaviors that are important to individual workers and the organizations in which they work. Data were collected in both laboratory and field settings. The laboratory setting allowed for the manipulation of organizational justice, which permitted inferences regarding the causal effects of organizational justice on the relationships between trust and LMX and the outcome variables examined. The field setting allowed for the testing of the hypothesized relationships in a “real world” environment in which external contextual factors (e.g., industry and organizational differences) were naturally controlled. Two-hundred and twenty-three currently employed undergraduate students participated in the laboratory study. In the field study, data were collected in a Fortune 500 company from 113 subordinates and their supervisors. Results from both studies indicated that perceptions of trust in one's supervisor were strongly related to LMX. Importantly, in the field study, quality of the dyadic relationship was modeled as an emergent property of the perceptions of both subordinates and supervisors. Perceptions of LMX were related to a sense of overall fairness, which was jointly determined by procedural and distributive justice. Perceptions of overall fairness were related to job satisfaction, intention to quit, organizational commitment, in-role job performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and organizational retaliatory behaviors. Additionally, results of the laboratory study indicated that established perceptions of trust in one's supervisor and LMX were adversely affected by violations of either procedural or distributive justice. This adverse effect was greatest when both procedural and distributive justice were low. The theoretical and practical implications of the research are discussed.