How employees react to unsolicited and solicited advice in the workplace: Implications for using advice, learning, and performance.

Employees are often reluctant to ask for advice, despite its potential benefits. Giving employees unsolicited advice may be a way to realize the benefits of advice without relying on them to ask for it. However, for these benefits to surface, it is critical to understand how employees react to unsolicited and solicited advice. Here, we suggest that recipients are likely to attribute self-serving motives to those providing unsolicited advice and prosocial motives to those providing solicited advice. These motives shape the extent to which recipients use advice, learn from it, and perform better as a result of receiving it. In an organizational network study of unsolicited and solicited advice ties (Study 1), an experience-sampling study of daily episodes of receiving unsolicited and solicited advice across two workweeks (Study 2), and an experiment where we manipulated advice solicitation and whether the advisor was a friend or a coworker (Study 3), we found general support for our model. Moderation analyses revealed that recipient reactions were not affected by friendship with the advisor, the number of overlapping advice ties between the advisor and recipient, or the position of the advisor in the social network. By showing how perceptions of the advisor's motive can explain variability in the impact of unsolicited and solicited advice on recipients, this research clarifies the recipient reactions that advisors must navigate if their advice is to have impact at work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Predicting individual-level income from Facebook profiles.

Information about a person's income can be useful in several business-related contexts, such as personalized advertising or salary negotiations. However, many people consider this information private and are reluctant to share it. In this paper, we show that income is predictable from the digital footprints people leave on Facebook. Applying an established machine learning method to an income-representative sample of 2,623 U.S. Americans, we found that (i) Facebook Likes and Status Updates alone predicted a person's income with an accuracy of up to r = 0.43, and (ii) Facebook Likes and Status Updates added incremental predictive power above and beyond a range of socio-demographic variables (ΔR2 = 6-16%, with a correlation of up to r = 0.49). Our findings highlight both opportunities for businesses and legitimate privacy concerns that such prediction models pose to individuals and society when applied without individual consent.

The paradox of agency: Feeling powerful reduces brokerage opportunity recognition yet increases willingness to broker.

Research suggests positions of brokerage in organizational networks provide many benefits, but studies tend to assume everyone is equally able to perceive and willing to act on brokerage opportunities. Here we challenge these assumptions in a direct investigation of whether people can perceive brokerage opportunities and are willing to broker. We propose that the psychological experience of power diminishes individuals' ability to perceive opportunities to broker between people who are not directly connected in their networks, yet enhances their willingness to broker. In Study 1, we find that employees in a marketing and media agency who had a high sense of power were likely to see fewer brokerage opportunities in their advice networks. In Study 2, we provide causal evidence for this claim in an experiment where the psychological experience of power is manipulated. Those who felt powerful, relative to those who felt little power, tended to see fewer brokerage opportunities than actually existed, yet were more willing to broker, irrespective of whether there was a brokerage opportunity present. Collectively, these findings present a paradox of agency: Individuals who experience power are likely to underperceive the very brokerage opportunities for which their sense of agency is suited. (PsycINFO Database Record

Priming trait inferences through pictures and moving pictures: the impact of open and closed mindsets.

A newly developed paradigm for studying spontaneous trait inferences (STI) was applied in 3 experiments. The authors primed dyadic stimulus behaviors involving a subject (S) and an object (O) person through degraded pictures or movies. An encoding task called for the verification of either a graphical feature or a semantic interpretation, which either fit or did not fit the primed behavior. Next, participants had to identify a trait word that appeared gradually behind a mask and that either matched or did not match the primed behavior. STI effects, defined as shorter identification latencies for matching than nonmatching traits, were stronger for S than for O traits, after graphical rather than semantic encoding decisions and after encoding failures. These findings can be explained by assuming that trait inferences are facilitated by open versus closed mindsets supposed to result from distracting (graphical) encoding tasks or encoding failures (involving nonfitting interpretations).