A business frame perspective on why perceptions of top management's bottom‐line mentality result in employees’ good and bad behaviors

By Mayowa T. Babalola, Rebecca L. Greenbaum, R. Amarnani, Mindy K. Shoss, Yingli Deng, Omale A. Garba, Liang Guo. Personnel Psychology, 2019

127 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Emerging research suggests that bottom‐line mentalities (BLMs) (i.e., a sole focus on bottom‐line outcomes to the exclusion of other considerations) can have dysfunctional consequences within the workplace. However, research has yet to consider how and why BLMs may result in both beneficial and dysfunctional organizational outcomes. In the present research, we examine employees’ perceptions of top management's BLM as a type of business frame that results in two cognitive states. Under the influence of this business frame, employees may adopt a mental preoccupation with work (i.e., a state of ongoing work‐related cognitions) that propels beneficial employee outcomes by reducing customer incivility and enhancing customer service performance. Yet, also in response to top management's high BLM as a business frame, employees may adopt self‐interest cognitions (i.e., a cognitive state of self‐interest) that instigate customer‐directed unethical conduct. Across two field studies, we found general support for our hypotheses. Taken together, our findings suggest that perceptions of top management's high BLM can be a mixed blessing in that it may drive employees to adopt focused work efforts (mental preoccupation with work), but also self‐interest cognitions, with each cognitive state predicting beneficial or dysfunctional behaviors. We discuss the implications of these findings and directions for future research.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Demography, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2cb577abb04dbf537e428afeb207aefe582cbf4d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

In Demography

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

Citations in the corpus

Whatever It Takes: How and When Supervisor Bottom-Line Mentality Motivates Employee Contributions in the Workplace (2020, methodology): “Thus, to mitigate this concern, we controlled for perceptions of top management’s BLM in our analyses, which has been shown to represent perceptions of context in past research (Babalola et al., 2019).”
Thriving at work but insomniac at home: Understanding the relationship between supervisor bottom-line mentality and employee functioning (2020, methodology): “Thus, when a supervisor only emphasizes bottom-line outcomes, the resulting perception of a competitive climate becomes inherently stressful, as individuals stay mentally/physically alert and adjust their work efforts to win at all costs (Babalola et al., 2019b; Hanton et al., 2005).”