Professional Growth Versus Personal Growth of Salespeople: A General Systems Model

Abstract

This study was designed to test a general systems model of growth, specifically how professional growth contributes to personal growth and vice versa. After a discussion of general systems models, two hypotheses were identified for testing. Hypothesis One dealt with personality traits of personal growth as being indicators of professional growth; Hypothesis Two focused on age as it contributes to professional growth and ultimately to personal growth. Several indicators of personal growth were correlated with indicators of professional growth to test Hypothesis One, which was ultimately supported. Hypothesis Two was tested using ANOVA with several well- known professional growth measures and age as independent variables, with self-esteem measures and inner/other-directedness measures as dependent variables. Hypothesis Two was not supported.     

The Journey of Personal Growth: A Qualitative Exploration of Personal Growth Processes in Young Adulthood

The present study aimed at qualitative exploration of personal growth processes among young adults. It also explored the linkages of personal growth processes with implicit beliefs and possible selves. An extreme case sampling approach was used and it involved two groups of individuals, those high and low on action orientation. A semi structured interview was utilized to elicit subjective accounts of these individuals about their personal growth goals and related processes. A thematic analysis of the interview protocols that individuals actively striving towards personal growth often endorsed incremental theory beliefs (considered their current self as mutable) in comparison to people not working actively on their personal growth goals. As the study focused on malleable variables such as beliefs, strategies and manner of approach to life goals, it has implications in designing promotive intervention programs to help young adults discover ways of strengthening and sustaining their motivation and efforts in intentional pursuit of their personal growth goals.     

Accepting Fallibility: A Model for Personal Responsibility for Nonegregious Ethics Infractions

The profession's ethics standards require counselors to self‐monitor their professional actions and take responsibility for misconduct. However, the professional literature has focused on preventing misconduct and on response to serious violations and has offered little guidance regarding the minor infractions that all professionals are vulnerable to committing during their careers. The author presents a 4‐element model to guide counselors in ethically repairing damage when they recognize they have violated ethics codes or ethical principles in minor ways. The model uses the ethical principles that underlie the American Counseling Association's (1995) Code of Ethics and Standards of Practice and J. R. Rest's (1983, 1994) model of moral behavior as a foundation.     

Personal Growth Initiative and Mental Health: A Meta-Analysis

Personal growth initiative (PGI) is an individual's active and intentional desire to grow in personally important areas. In the past 20 years, a body of literature has emerged examining PGI's relationship to mental health. We conducted the first meta-analyses to synthesize this literature. Two meta-analyses examined the relationship between PGI total scores and distress (k = 22) and wellness (k = 37). Both average effect sizes were significant. We also examined the potential impact of nine moderators. The type of outcome assessed was a significant moderator for PGI and distress, and the PGI measure used was a significant moderator for PGI and wellness, accounting for 61% and 15% of the overall variance, respectively. Meta-analyses examining the relationship between the four PGI subscales (Readiness for Change, Planfulness, Using Resources, and Intentional Behavior) and distress (k = 4) and wellness (k = 7) yielded similar results to the total score analyses.     

A Muscle Awareness Model for Changes in Rorschach Human Movement Responses

The present series of studies sought to provide evidence that M would increase under any conditions which make an S more aware of his muscles. The studies demonstrated that at least in women, M increased over a variety of conditions involving heightened muscle awareness. Specifically M increased in conditions utilizing muscle activation, deactivation, hypnosis, and focusing thoughts on the body musculature. The muscle awareness model unlike the sensory-tonic model accounts for increases in M following hyperactivity as well as inhibition.     

Increasing Awareness of Potentially Helpful Motivations and Techniques for Forgiveness

The authors examined 3 motives and 3 techniques for forgiveness to assess differences between people high or low in dispositional forgiveness (HDF and LDF, respectively). HDF participants rated all motives as more compelling and familiar than did LDF participants. Forgiveness being the right thing to do was rated as more persuasive and familiar; however, mental and physical health benefits were rated as compelling but less familiar forgiveness motives. LDF participants rated the various techniques as less familiar and more difficult compared with HDF participants. Overall, participants rated forgive and forget as the most familiar but most difficult technique to implement.     

A Model of Neutralization Techniques

ABSTRACT

Neutralizations are important explanations for the rise and persistence of deviant behavior. We can find many different and overlapping techniques of neutralizations in the literature, which may be a reason for inconsistent research findings on the use and influence of neutralization techniques. Therefore, by following both a deductive and an inductive approach, this article develops a model that covers these techniques in a logical way. This is a novel approach in studying neutralization techniques. We distinguish four categories of neutralizations: distorting the facts, negating the norm, blaming the circumstances, and hiding behind oneself. Based on a broad inventory of neutralizations that are identified in the literature – something that has not been done before – we operationalized each of the four categories into three techniques, each of which consists of five subtechniques. The resulting model aims to reduce the risk of arbitrariness in the selection of techniques for empirical research and thereby facilitates more consistent future research findings. The model also aims to help better understand how neutralizations work.     

Cross-Cultural Awareness: A Framework for Interaction

In order to facilitate cross-cultural understanding, a framework for interaction is provided by focusing on personal experience and on attrition theory and the W-curve,     

A Motivational Model of Authoritarianism: Integrating Personal and Situational Determinants

We describe and test a collective security model of authoritarianism. This model sees Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) as directly caused by collective security motivation (CSM), which is in turn influenced jointly by personality (with its effects mediated through group identification and dangerous world beliefs) and social threat (with its effects mediated through dangerous world beliefs). Two studies tested this model using student samples—one was correlational ( N =  218), while the other included an experimental manipulation of threat using future scenarios ( N =  136). Structural equation analyses partially supported the model suggesting that CSM fully mediated the effects of threat and group identification on RWA, but only partially mediated the effect of personality, which also had important direct effects.     

Nonlinear Growth Models as Measurement Models: A Second-Order Growth Curve Model for Measuring Potential

Recent methodological work has highlighted the promise of nonlinear growth models for addressing substantive questions in the behavioral sciences. In this article, we outline a second-order nonlinear growth model in order to measure a critical notion in development and education: potential. Here, potential is conceptualized as having three components—ability, capacity, and availability—where ability is the amount of skill a student is estimated to have at a given timepoint, capacity is the maximum amount of ability a student is predicted to be able to develop asymptotically, and availability is the difference between capacity and ability at any particular timepoint. We argue that single timepoint measures are typically insufficient for discerning information about potential, and we therefore describe a general framework that incorporates a growth model into the measurement model to capture these three components. Then, we provide an illustrative example using the public-use Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten data set using a Michaelis-Menten growth function (reparameterized from its common application in biochemistry) to demonstrate our proposed model as applied to measuring potential within an educational context. The advantage of this approach compared to currently utilized methods is discussed as are future directions and limitations.     

Career Awareness and Self-Exploration (CASE) Groups: A Self-Assessment Model for Career Decision Making

A small group program (CASE groups) for self-assessment is described and advantages to education undergraduates and counseling student group leaders are detailed.     

A Heterogeneous Growth Curve Model for Nonnormal Data

The heterogeneous growth curve model (HGM; Klein &; Muthén, 2006 Klein, A.G., &; Muthén, B.O. (2006). Modeling heterogeneity of latent growth depending on initial status. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 31, 357–375. doi: 10.3102/10769986031004357[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) is a method for modeling heterogeneity of growth rates with a heteroscedastic residual structure for the slope factor. It has been developed as an extension of a conventional growth curve model and a complementary tool to growth curve mixture models. In this article, a robust version of the heterogeneous growth curve model (HGM-R) is presented that extends the original HGM with a mixture model to allow for an unbiased parameter estimation under the condition of nonnormal data. In two simulation studies, the performance of the method is examined under the condition of nonnormality and a misspecified heteroscedastic residual structure. The results of the simulation studies suggest an unbiased estimation of the heterogeneity by the HGM-R when sample size was large enough and a good approximation of the heteroscedastic residual structure even when the functional form of the heteroscedasticity was misspecified. The practical application of the approach is demonstrated for a data set from HIV-infected patients.     

Phonological Awareness Development as a Discrete Process: Evidence for an Integrative Model

The theoretical and practical implications of examining young children's acquisitions of phonological awareness skills with specific and differentiated processing tasks are explored in this study. The study presents data from 269 kindergarten children completing a phonological awareness protocol that provided information on 14 discrete phonological awareness skills. The data supported the assertion that phonological awareness develops in a gradual and continuous fashion and illustrated the importance of measuring phonological awareness while controlling for the effects of task difficulty, linguistic complexity, and phoneme position within syllables. In addition, three general patterns of literacy development were confirmed in these analyses that frame the integrated model of phonological awareness development.     

The Military Family's Influence on Soldiers' Personal Morale: A Path Analytic Model

The reciprocal relationship of military wives' attitudes to husbands' units and soldiers' personal morale was examined in two groups of soldiers: junior enlisted (El-E4, n = 127) and noncommissioned officers (NCOs; E5-E9, n = 157). We pursued two hypotheses: Wives' attitudes at a given time would influence husbands' morale at a later time both directly and indirectly through husbands' satisfaction with the work-family interface, and wives' attitudes would be influenced by husbands' attitudes and morale at an earlier time. Using a path analytic model we found that wives influence their hus- bands' morale in both groups. We also found that husbands' satisfaction with the work-family interface influenced wives' attitudes to husbands' units, but morale did not.     

男性犯罪者人格对人身危险性的影响:有中介的调节模型

以463名男性犯罪者为调查对象,在控制人口学变量后,探讨人格、成熟应付方式、社会支持与人身危险性的关系。结果表明:(1)年龄、文化程度、婚姻和犯罪次数是人身危险性的重要预测变量。(2)人格可以显著预测人身危险性。(3)社会支持调节人格与人身危险性之间的关系。(4)这种调节作用以成熟应付方式为中介变量,其中通过中介变量起作用的调节效应占总调节效应的29.4%。因此,人格对男性犯罪者人身危险性的影响是有中介的调节效应。     

Techniques for Teaching HIV Counseling: An Intensive Experiential Model

This article provides a thorough guide to experiential as well as didactic methods that have been used in teaching an HIV course at two separate graduate counselor education programs. This model is based on sound pedagogy, experimental techniques, and effective debriefing methods to enhance the skills of counselors in working more effectively with clients affected by HIV/AIDS. Pertinent themes that have emerged in the classes are discussed.     

Paradox and Personal Growth During Crisis

This paper considers situations of personal crisis, which lead to experiences of extreme helplessness and emotional upheaval. It is suggested that although crises may be precipitated by either external or internal events, all crisis situations have a common denominator. What is common to all crises is the disruption and then restitution of the ability to withstand paradox in the experience of the self. Although there is wide variety in the nature of the personal crisis, all crisis situations have similar structural features. Crises are so dramatic and so frequent a phenomenon in the human experience that they warrant serious and thorough investigation of their nature. Because crisis situations are on the one hand so disabling and potentially destructive and on the other hand can open doors to growth and development, they are extremely valuable to deepen our understanding of how crises develop and unfold.     

Coherence of Personal Narratives across the Lifespan: A Multidimensional Model and Coding Method

Personal narratives are integral to autobiographical memory and to identity, with coherent personal narratives being linked to positive developmental outcomes across the lifespan. In this article, we review the theoretical and empirical literature that sets the stage for a new lifespan model of personal narrative coherence. This new model integrates context, chronology, and theme as essential dimensions of personal narrative coherence, each of which relies upon different developmental achievements and has a different developmental trajectory across the lifespan. A multidimensional method of coding narrative coherence (the Narrative Coherence Coding Scheme or NaCCS) was derived from the model and is described here. The utility of this approach is demonstrated by its application to 498 narratives that were collected in six laboratories from participants ranging in age from 3 years to adulthood. The value of the model is illustrated further by a discussion of its potential to guide future research on the developmental foundations of narrative coherence and on the benefits of personal narrative coherence for different aspects of psychological functioning.