EMPLOYEE COPING WITH ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE: AN EXAMINATION OF ALTERNATIVE THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES AND MODELS

This longitudinal study seeks to determine the appropriate theoretical structure for how employees cope with organizational change. A model based on the appraisal theory of emotion is compared to competing theoretical structures of coping found in the literature: stimulus–response, partial mediation, and moderated. Structural equation model results showed that coping with organizational change is a completely mediated process best represented by the stimulus–response theoretical structure, whereby negative appraisal is associated with reduced control and increased escape coping, which are positively related to positive and negative emotions, respectively. Negative emotions predicted sick time used and intentions to quit, which then predicted voluntary turnover. Implications for coping theory and organizational change management are discussed.     

Work and Unemployed Mental Health Clients

The mental health treatment process is better served when career counseling and development are included. Their inclusion can contribute to the recovery process of clients.     

The Role of Risk‐Taking in Songwriting Success

Creativity involves generating novel concepts and products that are valued by the creator as well as by the public. In this paper, we argue that risk‐taking in songwriting increases the likelihood of any individual's product being valued as creative. By reviewing the case histories of several successful songwriters, we show that heightened creativity is associated with a willingness to express novel ideas as well as a willingness to repeatedly confront, and adapt to the possibility of failure.     

EXPERT AND NAIVE RATERS USING THE PAQ: DOES IT MATTER?

A finding by Smith and Hakel (1979) is that job expert ratings on the PAQ correlate highly with ratings obtained from college students who are given no information about jobs other than their titles. One possible explanation for this finding is that the PAQ measures only trivial or common knowledge about work that both experts and naive observers possess. This particular view, of course, has serious implications for the use of the PAQ. In this paper we point out a problem in the way Smith and Hakel calculated the convergent validity between expert raters and naive raters. We also present the results from a replication study that indicate convergent validities are much lower than those reported by Smith and Hakel. Additional points are presented in order to caution against the interpretation that the PAQ measures only common knowledge about jobs.