The Story of Goldilocks Told by Organizational Psychologists

摘要

The Too-Much-of-a-Good-Thing Effect (TMGT) occurs when ordinarily beneficial antecedents/predictor variables reach inflection points after which their relations with desired outcomes/criterion variables cease to be linear and positive. It is undesirable to exceeding these inflection points because it leads either to no additional benefit or, to unwanted outcomes, like decreased organizational performance or high turnover. Recent research on demonstrating TMGT effect together with Goldilocks principle and nonlinear dynamics are putting organizational psychologists in a strange position, demonstrating that well known beneficial aspects of classical predictor variables used as a panacea in personnel management could bias organizational decisions. This article presents a case study of the curvilinear relationship between job performance and job satisfaction. This new nonlinear dynamic perspective questions previous meta-analysis findings on the monotonic relationship between job satisfaction and job performance in real work contexts. Methodological principles and inferences of actual research are discussed, together with offering suggestions for future development of nonlinear dynamics trend in organizational psychology.