Alessandro Rovetta, Alessandro Bortolotti, Claudio Di Berardino
Artificial systems increasingly participate in organizational work as recurrent contributors to interdependent activity, yet research remains fragmented across system capabilities, individual responses, episodic interactions, and constructs derived from human-only teams. This article develops Organismic Human-Artificial Intelligence (OHAI) as a bounded integrative theoretical framework for studying collective intelligence in persistent organizational human-AI teams. Its focal unit is a bounded collective of distinguishable human and artificial contributors whose interdependent activity extends across successive cycles and whose prior collective activity can affect later artificial participation. The framework distinguishes system configuration, collective functioning, and collective intelligence (CI) as analytical objects, with CI as its primary theoretical target. CI denotes a general group-level capacity manifested across diverse tasks within a specified and empirically qualified task universe. Task performances may provide indicators for estimating CI or serve as external criteria, while the framework separately examines broader employee, team, and organizational consequences, including changes in human working relationships and employee wellbeing. Its central inferential rule is that a property implemented in an artificial component does not by itself establish a corresponding team-level phenomenon. Collective functioning must instead be demonstrated in the enacted organization and use of distributed contributions. Partner modeling, transactive-memory-system-related coordination, and shared-mental-model-related representational alignment provide selective lenses on such functioning. Persistence makes collective history consequential, bringing recursive updating, overlapping timescales, reconfiguration, and collective-intelligence trajectories into view without presuming adaptation or improvement. Human-only teams serve as secondary epistemic references for bounded tests of observable-pattern and functional correspondence, while relational-pattern correspondence remains a limited future methodological possibility. The empirical program distinguishes four nonmandatory stages of research maturity: configuration and measurement qualification, local relations, longitudinal team-level phenomena, and integrated multilevel studies. The framework thereby provides a disciplined basis for cumulative research on how heterogeneous contributions become collectively consequential and change over time.
The authors examine whether women and men working in financial services have different perceptions of a hypothetical mistake at work. Using a survey of 1,485 U.K. financial-sector professionals, we analyze three self-reported measures: comfort in admitting a mistake, expected penalization for the mistake, and whether the mistake would be seen as a learning opportunity. Regression analysis relates these perceptions to the respondent's gender and the gender composition of their workplace. The results suggest that women's perceptions of mistakes are significantly more negative than men's, and this gap is amplified in male-dominated environments. In heavily-male teams (e.g., those with ≥75% men), women report feeling markedly less comfortable about mistakes and less likely to view mistakes as learning opportunities compared to men. By contrast, women report the most positive attitudes toward mistakes in environments with low shares of men, where mistakes are also most likely to be viewed as learning opportunities; men's perceptions vary comparatively little with workplace composition. In other words, male-dominated workplaces are associated with more negative perceptions of errors, especially for women.
Andrea Bazzoli, Thao T. Vo, Ana Campillo-Martínez, Alexis N. Downey, Laura Pires Gifford, Brian F. French
This review examined what types of validity evidence are presented in recent I-O psychology validation articles and the extent to which these studies incorporate justice-oriented features. We reviewed 63 empirical articles published between 2021 and 2025 in five leading journals that presented new work-relevant instruments or provided validation evidence for existing ones. We used a theory-guided coding protocol to map reported evidence onto the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, Kane's interpretation/use argument, and Randall's justice-oriented validity framework. Validation evidence mostly consisted of psychometric analyses that supported domain description, scoring, generalization, and extrapolation inferences. Response-process evidence was uncommon and typically limited to evaluations of item clarity. There was limited attention to the consequences arising from score use. Similarly, justice-relevant evidence focused on statistical comparability across groups, with less emphasis to interest holder involvement, construct representation, structural inequality, or potential harm. These patterns suggest that, in the reviewed articles, psychometric adequacy was prioritized over arguments connecting scores to their meaning and use. We discuss the implications of these findings and outline the challenges of AI-enabled assessments. Stronger validity arguments will need clearer specification of the intended uses of score, greater involvement of affected interest holders, increased focus on respondent interpretation and cultural context, consideration of justice and equity throughout the validation process, and evaluation of the consequences of score use.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed critical vulnerabilities in organizational workforce structures, particularly in the hospitality industry, where unemployment peaked at 39.3% in April 2020 before a turbulent recovery. As organizations worked to rebuild their workforces, questions about which leadership behaviors sustain employee engagement and promote retention became strategically urgent. This study examines how leadership behavior influences employee engagement and, in turn, employee retention in the hospitality context, reflecting on lessons from the pandemic experience. Using a quantitative cross-sectional design, data were collected from N = 223 employed participants across 13 countries via social media recruitment. Leadership behavior was measured using the 48-item Managerial Practices Survey, employee engagement using the 17-item Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, and retention using a three-item intention-to-remain scale. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) assessed construct validity. Mediation and moderated mediation analyses tested the indirect effect of leadership on retention through engagement, with industry (hospitality vs. non-hospitality) and employee age as moderators. CFA supported construct validity, with the proposed three-factor model providing the best fit among the models tested (RMSEA [90% CI] = 0.042 [0.026, 0.056], CFI = 0.982, TLI = 0.979, SRMR = 0.031). Leadership behavior significantly predicted employee engagement (β = 0.562) and retention (β = 0.205), and engagement mediated the leadership-retention relationship. Decomposing the leadership composite showed task-oriented behavior was the only significant predictor of engagement. The indirect effect of task-oriented leadership on retention through engagement was significant in both hospitality [IE = 0.421, 95% CI (0.269, 0.605)] and non-hospitality contexts [IE = 0.211, 95% CI (0.119, 0.344)], and was stronger in the hospitality industry, according to the significant index of moderated mediation [IMM_IE = 0.209, 95% CI (0.076, 0.392)]. The direct effect of leadership on retention was significantly stronger for older employees, while the indirect effect through engagement was significant across all age groups and somewhat larger for younger workers, though the formal moderation test did not reach significance. Dedication emerged as the primary engagement dimension through which leadership was associated with retention. Task-oriented leadership appears to support retention primarily by sustaining employee dedication, an effect amplified in hospitality settings. These findings offer guidance for post-pandemic leadership development and retention strategy in high-turnover industries.
This study reconceptualizes employee performance by integrating gendered role conflict into performance theory within bureaucratic contexts. Existing literature predominantly treats performance as a technical and organizational outcome, often detached from employees' social realities. At the same time, research on work-family conflict has focused largely on psychological outcomes, with limited integration into performance discourse. This creates a fragmented understanding of how gendered experiences shape organizational effectiveness. Drawing on Role Theory, this paper develops a context-based conceptualization of performance, arguing that employee outcomes are shaped by the interaction between gendered role expectations, organizational structures, and institutional constraints. This study adopts a critical integrative literature review to synthesize and critically evaluate multidisciplinary literature on women's family-career conflict (WFCC), organizational context, and employee performance within the South African public sector. The review integrates fragmented theoretical perspectives to develop a new conceptual understanding of employee performance as a contextually negotiated capacity. The findings reveal that the relationship between WFCC and job performance is inconsistent and context dependent. Organizational support emerges as a key structuring factor, while rigid bureaucratic systems intensify role conflict. The study proposes Performance as a Context-Based and Socially Embedded Process framework that positions performance as socially embedded rather than purely technical. The paper contributes to organizational behavior and human resource management literature by integrating gender, role conflict, and performance into a unified model. It also provides practical insights for public-sector reform by highlighting the need for context-sensitive performance systems.
