Recent research suggests that employees perceive organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) as costly while OCB in the aggregate benefits organizations. Employees thus face an OCB dilemma. This study adopts the social dilemma perspective, proposing that employee OCB varies with the three types of psychological contracts (e.g., relational, balanced, and transactional) due to different degrees of perceived social dilemma and explains why employees engage in OCB in the context of varying levels of social dilemmas. We used moderated structural equation modelling to test the mediating and moderating hypotheses using data from 485 supervisor-subordinate dyads from 58 companies in a variety of industries in Taiwan. As predicted, results suggest that employee OCB has the strongest relationship with balanced psychological contract. Results also confirm the mediating role of felt obligations in both relational and balanced psychological contracts and the moderating role of empathie concerns in transactional psychological contract. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these results.

Chinese people are known to be strong in dialectical thinking – a cognitive tendency toward the acceptance of contradiction. Based on this finding, we conceptualized cooperative and competitive orientation as two distinct constructs that represent individual beliefs about and attitudes toward the nature of their relationship with others. We hypothesized that as stable individual differences, cooperative and competitive orientation would have differential effects on people's cognition and behaviour. Adopting a contextualization approach to Chinese management research, we developed a seven-item cooperative orientation scale and a six-item competitive orientation scale that demonstrated high reliabilities and validities. A laboratory experiment using the response latency method showed that people scoring higher on cooperative orientation responded significantly faster toward words of a cooperative nature, whereas people scoring higher on competitive orientation responded significantly faster toward words of a competitive nature. A field survey in multiple Chinese organizations further showed that cooperative and competitive orientation had differential effects on employee task performance and organizational citizenship behaviour beyond the effects of the personality differences. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed in the context of work groups in Chinese organizations and beyond.

This study contributes to strategic human resource management (HRM) research by offering a contextualized model of HRM effectiveness. Building on HR attribution theory, we propose that the high commitment work system will be more effective in a context when: (i) employees are conditioned to trust employers and (ii) regulatory institutions are less restrictive, giving management more autonomy in human resource decisions. In such contexts, we argue that employees are more inclined to view the high commitment work system as an expression of the employer's genuine concern for employees. Hence, employees are more likely to reciprocate with high commitment. We find our contextualized HRM effectiveness model particularly useful in understanding HRM – firm performance relations in China where business environments are currently under transformation on both trust and regulations.

Presenting post hoc hypotheses based on empirical findings as if they had been developed a priori seems common in management papers. The pure form of this practice is likely to breach research ethics and impede theoretical development by suppressing the falsification process. Two other forms may be more tolerable: deletion of rejected hypotheses and refinement of hypotheses inspired by empirical findings. To address this problem, the field should provide stronger recognition of replication, descriptive research, rejected and post hoc hypotheses, and critical tests of competing hypotheses. These positive changes require the concerted effort of researchers, management associations, and journal editors and reviewers.

This essay discusses the sundry ethical considerations confronting editors and reviewers. To begin, journal hierarchy and manuscript lifecycles are reviewed. From there, ethical issues faced by individuals in various editorial roles, who interact with various parties, are discussed. Issues include making fair desk rejections, assigning reviewers ethically, refraining from the promotion of HARKing (hypothesizing after results are known), promoting a holistic view of validity, balancing scientific progress with journal success, providing developmental and actionable feedback, disclosing expertise parameters, and upholding the spirit of double-blind review.

Management scholars have suggested that our research is lacking in both relevance and meaning. In this article, I argue that a primary reason for this lack of relevance and meaning is the failure of our research to be responsive to all potential research stakeholders. Adopting the committed-to-participant research perspective, I offer suggestions for how both journal editors and organizational researchers can meaningfully include our research participants as valued stakeholders of the research process.

This commentary reflects on the Academy of Management's experience since developing a formal code of ethics to guide the professional behaviour of its members over twenty years ago. Despite widespread efforts to publicize the Code within the Academy, a sizeable proportion of Academy members are unaware it exists and only a very small proportion have read it carefully. Current efforts underway to increase ethics awareness are described. In addition, it is suggested that the discussion of ethical principles needs to move beyond a printed document and annual workshops to become more influential in the day-to-day lives of management professors. Suggestions for how this might be accomplished by the Academy of Management and other similar associations with codes of ethics (e.g., IACMR) are discussed.