Purpose Drawing from the literature on person–environment fit and proactive personality, the purpose of this paper is to empirically examine whether congruence between the proactive personality of a leader and his/her follower is facilitative/inhibitive of creativity of the follower. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected in two waves from 355 followers and 36 corresponding leaders working in a large manufacturing company in India. Hypotheses were tested using polynomial regression analysis and response surface method. Findings The results indicate that leader–follower congruence in proactive personality is more likely to encourage followers’ creativity. Moreover, leader–follower congruence at higher levels of proactive personality showed higher levels of followers’ creativity than when dyads are congruent at lower levels. Practical implications Findings suggest that human resource management in organizations should consider matching leaders’ proactive personality with that of followers’ to foster employee creativity. This is critical from the perspective of recruitment and dyad formulation for jobs that demand creativity. Originality/value Research examining why and how congruence in personal characteristics between a leader and his/her follower foster followers’ creativity is at best scant. The study is a novel attempt to examine the effect of congruence in leader–follower proactive personalities on workplace creativity of the follower.

Previous studies have shown that motivation and interpersonal communication between teacher and student contribute to the learning of language. Till date, there is no quantitative study to assess the impact of prosocial and positive emotional contents that influence English learning and modulate the habits of students. This paper examines the effect of prosocial and emotional languages on the habits, attitudes and behaviours of students. Nine habits that are proposed by Covey (2013) related to emotional, productive and proactive were evaluated using an assessment sheet. Comparative analysis of the response scores collected before and after the lectures were carried out (control group, N=14 and experimental group, N=14). Our results showed that prosocial and positive emotional words accelerated the language-learning environment and also brought a positive change in the behavioural habits of students of the experimental group. The reactive behaviours of the experimental group were controlled by using prosocial and positive words. Prosocial and positive emotional languages have a profound effect on the proactive behaviours of students that reinforce greater self-efficacy and facilitate the learning environment. We interpreted these results within the socio-cognitive theory of human behaviour, learning and language processing.

No abstract

The response time and accuracy of processing verbal and nonverbal stimuli may predict the desired outcome of an event. Few studies have examined the psycholinguistic evidence of the speed-accuracy trade-off in the processing of political information to predict the outcome of an election. Therefore, we analysed the perceptual time and accuracy of two major political party names: the Indian National Congress (INC) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and their respective symbols before the Indian election 2019. Our results demonstrated that the pre-election perceptual accuracy to party symbol and name was positively linear to the index of high proportional vote share of the winning party, BJP. The high response accuracy and time for the BJP name correlated with voters’ familiarity of it, thereby establishing a link between response results and parties’ vote shares.

Gender inequalities are linguistically constructed and indexed through the strategic use of language representing the power structure in the physical world. Recently, #MeTooIndia, an Indian version of the global feminist movement, provided a scholarly opportunity to explore the gender stereotypes of emotional expressions. Even though some researchers have studied the sociocultural dimensions of #MeToo, the corpus-based linguistic analysis of this movement has yet to be explored significantly. Therefore, the current study investigated the discursive association of emotional representation of masculine and feminine genders in media texts. Given the societal nature of Indian patriarchal ideologies, power and gender stereotypes, we hypothesize that Indian mass media, as a powerful political actor, may attribute more positive lexicons to the masculine pronoun he and more negative markers to the feminine pronoun she. Textual genres of #MeToo were extracted from the print media by using the corpus framework of collocational and concordance methods. Our results revealed that, though the news of #MeToo heightened the feminine actor and largely produced the pronoun she in the referential position, the narratives of texts assigned more positive emotive markers to the masculine social actors. Overall, this study concludes that #MeToo as a gender movement has faced strategic linguistic resistance against feminine sexual victims, favouring the masculine actors.