Organizational identification and “currencies of exchange”: integrating social identity and social exchange perspectives

We integrate social exchange and social identity perspectives to propose and test the prediction that depending on their level of organizational identification, people may reciprocate the received organizational support using different “currencies of exchange”—reducing turnover intentions or, instead, engaging in extra‐role behavior. Specifically, the relationship of perceived organizational support (POS) with turnover intentions is proposed to be stronger with lower identification, whereas POS is proposed to be more closely related to extra‐role behavior with higher organizational identification. These predictions were supported in a cross‐sectional survey of N = 1,000 employees of a financial services firm. These results speak to the added value of integrating the social exchange perspective with its roots in applied psychology and the social identity perspective with its roots in social psychology in understanding the employee‐organization relationship.     

Modeling differentiation of cognitive abilities within the higher-order factor model using moderated factor analysis

Receptive foreign language proficiency is usually measured with reading and listening comprehension tasks. A novel approach to assess such proficiencies – viewing comprehension – is based on the presentation of short instructional videos followed by one or more comprehension questions concerning the preceding video stimulus. In order to evaluate a newly developed viewing comprehension test 485 German high school students completed reading, listening, and viewing comprehension tests, all measuring the receptive proficiency in English as a foreign language. Fluid and crystallized intelligence were measured as predictors of performance. Relative to traditional comprehension tasks, the viewing comprehension task has similar psychometric qualities. The three comprehension tests are very highly but not perfectly correlated with each other. Relations with fluid and crystallized intelligence show systematic differences between the three comprehension tasks. The high overlap between foreign language comprehension measures and between crystallized intelligence and language comprehension ability can be taken as support for a uni-dimensional interpretation. Implications for the assessment of language proficiency are discussed.     

A Study of Blocking and Overshadowing in Filial Imprinting

The occurrence of blocking and overshadowing in filial imprinting was investigated in junglefowl chicks (Gallus gallus spadiceus). When subjects were exposed to a novel object in the presence of a familiar one, imprinting on the novel object was impaired in one of two experimental groups (Experiment 1). When subjects were exposed to two objects from the beginning, imprinting on each object was impaired (Experiment 2). These results suggest that phenomena resembling blocking and overshadowing in conditioning may occur in imprinting. The fact that overshadowing was much more prevalent and convincing than blocking is discussed by referring to processes involved in the formation of internal representations. It is suggested that processes connecting these representations to the executive system of filial behaviour may follow the rules of associative learning.