Samir Nurmohamed is an award-winning professor & organizational scientist at The Wharton School.
Studying what enables people to better respond to adversity at work.
Beyond the First Choice: The Impact of Being an Alternate Choice on Social Integration and Feedback Seeking
Existing work on newcomer adjustment and socialization typically assumes that selected employees are the first choice for a role or job. However, this is not always the case. To address this oversight, we introduce and examine the phenomenon of alternate choices: Employees who are selected for a role but perceive or discover that they were not the first choice. Drawing on social identity theory, we contend that alternate choices seek less feedback directly from others due to experiencing less social integration and examine whether leader inclusion offsets these effects. Our studies cycling between experimental and field survey designs support the proposed theory. Taken together, we illuminate how selection processes and decisions made before role entry can impact employees’ subsequent work experiences and behavior after they enter the role, providing insights for theory and research on socialization, feedback seeking, and inclusion at work.
Time and Punishment: Time Delays Exacerbate the Severity of Third-Party Punishment
Punishments are not always administered immediately after a crime is committed. Although scholars and researchers claim that third parties should normatively enact punishments proportionate to a given crime, we contend that third parties punish transgressors more severely when there is a time delay between a transgressor’s crime and when they face punishment for it. We theorize that this occurs because of a perception of unfairness, whereby third parties view the process that led to time delays as unfair. We tested our theory across eight studies, including two archival data sets of 160,772 punishment decisions and six experiments (five preregistered) across 6,029 adult participants. Our results suggest that as time delays lengthen, third parties punish transgressors more severely because of increased perceived unfairness. Importantly, perceived unfairness explained this relationship beyond other alternative mechanisms. We explore potential boundary conditions for this relationship and discuss the implications of our findings.
