The Power to Reward vs. the Power to Punish: The Influence of Power Framing on Trustworthiness Perceptions and Exploration
Do you want to understand how power framing can impact trustworthiness perceptions and exploration behavior in your organization? Join our upcoming webinar on The Power to Reward vs. the Power to Punish: The Influence of Power Framing on Trustworthiness Perceptions and Exploration.
During this webinar, Associate Professor Oliver Schilke from the University of Arizona will present his latest research findings on how the way you frame your power can affect employee exploration and willingness to experiment with new opportunities. You will learn about the concept of power framing and how it can shape trustworthiness perceptions and influence employee exploration behaviour.
This webinar will help you gain insights on the importance of emphasizing your ability to reward instead of your ability to punish, as well as how to tailor your framing strategy to maximize its effectiveness based on your employees' power distance orientations.
Don't miss this informative webinar. Register now!
About Oliver Schilke
Oliver is an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona and the Director of Center for Trust Studies. Oliver joined the Eller College of Management in 2014 after earning his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He also had the opportunity to spend two years as a research fellow at Stanford University’s Department of Sociology. Oliver’s research interests can be summarized along the following three dimensions: at a theoretical level, he studies micro-institutional processes such as trust, routines and legitimacy; at a substantive level, his research addresses inter-organizational relationships, R&D and entrepreneurship; and at a methodological level, he utilizes experiments, surveys and large archival data sets.
Project abstract
This project adopts a relational perspective to demonstrate that characteristics of the dyadic relationship between supervisors and their employees are critical to understanding individual-level exploration—understood as the extent to which organizational members pursue new opportunities and experiment with changes to current practices. To this end, we introduce the concept of power framing—that is, whether the control over valued resources is emphasized as the ability to reward or to punish—and propose that power framing shapes employee exploration via perceptions of supervisor trustworthiness.
In an experimental study, we demonstrate that reward (vs. punishment) power framing increases employee exploration behavior and that this effect is mediated by perceived trustworthiness of the supervisor. In a second survey study, we replicate these findings in a field sample and also show that the relationship between reward power framing and exploration depends upon the degree to which the focal employee is sensitive to power characteristics (i.e., power distance orientation). This investigation advances scholarship on the micro-foundations of exploration while also highlighting the ability of leaders to alter trustworthiness perceptions and induce employee exploration through power framing.
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