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Theoretical perspectives from accountability, impression management, goal setting, and performance evaluation suggest that accountability conditions may influence whether goals are used for impression management or performance-directed purposes. Goal theory and research suggest that goals typically are performance-directed, resulting in elevated performance under certain conditions. Alternatively, impression management theory might imply that goals may not always be performance-directed, and the goal-performance relationship may be decoupled in such cases. Accountability is proposed as influencing this relationship in addition to main effects on how people approach tasks. Two studies tested notions of how accountability influences task approaches and goal uses: a laboratory experiment with university students, and a field study of telemarketers. Convergence of results indicates that participants approached tasks and set goals differently according to accountability conditions. Furthermore, the goal-performance relationship differences reflect the use of goals for performance-directed purposes under low accountability, and for impression-management purposes under high accountability (with no goal-performance relationship), as predicted.

In an effort to better understand the multidimensional nature of satisfaction, it is examined in the context of organizational restructuring. This context allows the test of a conceptual model that includes antecedents, components of work-related satisfaction, overall satisfaction, and satisfaction with life. The findings support the notions that (1) organizational restructuring has demonstrable implications for employee satisfaction and (2) work-related satisfaction is a major component of satisfaction with life. Contributions, limitations, and potential directions for future research are discussed.

Business school courses often require team projects, both for pedagogical reasons as well as to prepare students for the kinds of team-based activities that are common in organizations these days. However, social loafing is a common problem in teams, and peer evaluations by team members are sometimes used in such team settings to assess individuals' contributions. We propose that high and low team performers differ in terms of their ability and motivation to make distinctions in their teammates' performance, and consequently they differ in how they evaluate their teammates' performances. Specifically, we predict that high performers will provide evaluations of teammates that distinguish between those who did well and those who performed poorly, and thus high performers' ratings will exhibit greater variability. In contrast, we predict that low performers will fail to distinguish among teammates' levels of performance, and thus will provide evaluations that are lower in variability. Using latent growth modeling, we demonstrate that high and low performers do indeed differ as predicted in the variability of the points they allocate to teammates. The pedagogical implications of this positive relationship between team members' performance and variability in points allocated are discussed.

The perceptions of organizational politics model proposed by Ferris, Russ, and Fandt (1989) was tested in this study, and reasonably strong support was found for most of the linkages in the model, including the moderating effects of control and understanding, and the mediating effects of politics between predictors and outcomes. Furthermore, politics was characterized as a potential source of stress in the work environment, contributing to our understanding of the dynamics of politics in organizations. The results of the present study are discussed in light of the implications and directions for future research.

Considerable theoretical work has been published to date concerning the relationship between demographic composition of organizations and the performance of those firms. Indeed, under the topics of organization demography, substantial thought has been given to how demographic composition influences organization performance. Unfortunately, little empirical research has been conducted. The present research reports the results of two organization-level studies that investigated the relationship between gender diversity of organizations and their performance and hypothesized a nonlinear association. Study 1 results demonstrated support for an inverted U-shaped relationship between gender composition and organization performance, as hypothesized, and these results were constructively replicated in Study 2, thus increasing confidence in the validity of the findings. The results of Study 2 suggest that some industries might not be able to take advantage of this gender composition–firm performance relationship. Implications of these results for theory and research are discussed.