Celebrating Success: Dr Benjamin Bader
Congratulations to Dr Benjamin Bader who has received Faculty Impact Fund (FIF) Rolling Call 2022 award of £4,494 for a project on “Health-focused hybrid leadership training” with a project partner SYNK Group, Frankfurt (owners of the Leada app).
Overview
This project develops a leadership training program to improve leaders’ approach to health-focused hybrid leadership, i.e., leading teams both in-person and virtual. It is developed based on my research and will be rolled out using an existing smartphone/tablet application called Leada. Leaders participate in this self-paced training program, receiving two daily push-messages with micro-impulses over the course of eight weeks. An immediate and direct effect is expected on their daily leadership behavior, improving job satisfaction and subjectively rated health in the short term and decreased sickness-related absence, stress, and burnout in the long run.
Benjamin with co-authors Tassilo Schuster (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg), Anna Katharina Bader (Northumbria University), and Denise Rousseau (Carnegie Mellon) have also had a paper entitled “Does What Happens Abroad Stay Abroad? Displaced Aggression and Emotional Regulation in Expatriate Psychological Contracts” accepted in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.
Abstract
Despite considerable research on psychological contracts, their dynamics in work arrangements with more than two parties are largely unknown. Multi-party work arrangements differ from traditional ones because individuals are vulnerable to unfulfilled psychological contracts by more than one party, potentially directing negative emotional responses not only toward the responsible party but also displacing it to the other (innocent) party. Primary data from a two-wave survey of 221 current expatriates are used to test the effects of displaced aggression and emotion regulation in multi-party psychological contracts. We find that feelings of violation following unfulfilled psychological contracts predict reduced commitment both to the perpetrating organization and the innocent party. However, this spillover effect is asymmetric and follows displaced aggression theory: Expatriates displace their aggression on to the host in response to feelings of violation towards the home organization, but not the reverse. This mechanism is buffered by the individual characteristic of high emotion regulation self-efficacy.