Person:

Lee, Jooa

People believe that weather conditions influence their everyday work life, but to date, little is known about how weather affects individual productivity. Most people believe that bad weather conditions reduce productivity. In this research, we predict and find just the opposite. Drawing on cognitive psychology research, we propose that bad weather increases individual productivity by eliminating potential cognitive distractions resulting from good weather. When the weather is bad, individuals may focus more on their work rather than thinking about activities they could engage in outside of work. We tested our hypotheses using both field and lab data. First, we use field data on employees’ productivity from a mid-size bank in Japan, which we then match with daily weather data to investigate the effect of bad weather conditions (in terms of precipitation, visibility, and temperature) on productivity. Second, we use a laboratory experiment to examine the psychological mechanism explaining the relationship between bad weather and increased productivity. Our findings support our proposed model and suggest that worker productivity is higher on bad rather than good weather days. We discuss the implications of our findings for workers and managers.

Cognitive scientists, behavior geneticists, and political scientists have identified several ways in which emotions influence political attitudes, and psychologists have shown that emotion regulation can have an important causal effect on physiology, cognition, and subjective experience. However, no work to date explores the possibility that emotion regulation may shape political ideology and attitudes toward policies. Here, we conduct four studies that investigate the role of a particular emotion regulation strategy – reappraisal in particular. Two observational studies show that individual differences in emotion regulation styles predict variation in political orientations and support for conservative policies. In the third study, we experimentally induce disgust as the target emotion to be regulated and show that use of reappraisal reduces the experience of disgust, thereby decreasing moral concerns associated with conservatism. In the final experimental study, we show that use of reappraisal successfully attenuates the relationship between trait-level disgust sensitivity and support for conservative policies. Our findings provide the first evidence of a critical link between emotion regulation and political attitudes.

How do organizations create an environment to motivate their employees to be healthy, productive, and competent decision makers? My dissertation identifies the underlying factors that could prevent organizations from achieving their goals, and takes on three research projects to address such barriers to successful organizational functioning. To provide a theoretical foundation for my research, I bring together conceptual and methodological streams from various disciplines including organizational behavior, behavioral decision research, and cognitive and affective psychology. I then employ multiple methods, including laboratory experiments involving psychophysiology as well as field research.

Three essays compose this dissertation. My first essay examines the role of emotion-regulation processes in moral decision making. That is, emotion-regulation strategies (concealing and rethinking emotions) influence the decision maker’s preference for utilitarian choice. Using a process-dissociation approach, I also show emotion regulation selectively reduces deontological inclinations, leading to greater preference for utilitarian decisions. My second essay utilizes data from a large-scale field data as well as data from laboratory and online labor market. This research shows how seemingly irrelevant, uncontrollable factors—such as rain—may influence employee productivity by eliminating potential cognitive distractions. My third essay focuses on an intervention designed to invoke individuals’ psychosocial resources. Using a method called the Reflected Best-Self Exercise, I empirically test a set of hypotheses at the individual and team level. This research demonstrates that this intervention not only has positive health and stress-buffering effects, but also has implications for individual-level creativity, team-level functioning and performance. 

Across three essays, I argue that organizational performance should be understood in terms of the functioning of individual employees and teams. Thus, my work lays groundwork for organizational leaders to counteract the three barriers to organizational functioning.

People experience a threat to their moral self-concept in the face of discrepancies between their moral values and their unethical behavior. We theorize that people’s need to restore their view of themselves as moral activates thoughts of a high-density personal social network. Such thoughts also lead people to be more likely to engage in further unethical behavior. In five experiments, participants reflected on their past unethical behavior, and then completed a task designed to measure network density. Those who cheated more frequently in the past, recalled their negative moral identity, or decided to lie were more likely to activate a high-density network (Experiment 1-3). Using a mediation-by-moderation approach (Experiment 4), we confirm that this link between dishonesty and network density is explained by a threat to positive self-concept. Importantly, activating a dense network after engaging in dishonest behavior allows further dishonest behavior in a subsequent task (Experiment 5).