An enhanced examination of Holland's consistency and differentiation hypotheses

The research support for Holland's concepts of consistency and differentiation has been equivocal (Nauta, 2010). To provide a reexamination of these concepts, a new method of operationalizing Holland's constructs of consistency and differentiation using the cosine fit function to the RIASEC score profile is proposed. The relation of these new indices to career certainty, congruence and the moderation of the congruence–certainty relation were examined in a sample of 118 college students (study 1). Support was found for the superiority of the cosine fit definitions of consistency and differentiation over the traditional representations. The cosine fit indices were further examined in a second study on 167 adults examining interest stability over 15 years. The cosine fit indices of consistency and differentiation were related to both occupational stability over 15 years and career satisfaction. The results suggest that the concepts of differentiation and consistency may still have merit but only with more exact methods of specification.     

Assessing Aberrant Personality in Managerial Coaching: Measurement Issues and Prevalence Rates across Employment Sectors

The convergent and discriminant validity of two methods to assess a broad spectrum of aberrant personality tendencies was examined in a large sample of managers who were administered the NEO‐PI‐R (N = 11 862) and the Hogan Development Survey (N = 6774) in the context of a professional development assessment. Five‐Factor Model (FFM) aberrant compounds, defined as linear combinations of NEO‐PI‐R facets, converged for the antisocial, borderline, histrionic, avoidant and obsessive–compulsive tendencies with their respective Hogan Development Survey counterparts. Alternative linear FFM combinations did improve convergent results for the schizoid and obsessive–compulsive pattern. Risk for various aberrant tendencies was roughly equal across different employment sectors, with a higher prevalence of borderline, avoidant and dependent tendencies in the legal and more histrionic tendencies in the retail sector. Adopting FFM aberrant compound cut‐offs developed for coaching purposes to flag at risk individuals showed that 20% to 25% of all managers qualified for at least one and 10% to 15% were flagged as at risk for two or more aberrant tendencies. The theoretical implications and the repercussions of this research for the design of professional development and coaching trajectories are discussed. Copyright © 2013 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Observed need-supportive and need-thwarting teaching behavior in physical education: Do teachers' motivational orientations matter?

ObjectivesThe behaviors physical education (PE) teachers engage in affect a number of important student outcomes. Therefore, it is essential to study the antecedents of these teaching behaviors.Design and methodGrounded in Self-Determination Theory, this cross-sectional study explored the relations between PE teachers' autonomous and controlled motivational orientations and a variety of observed need-supportive and need-thwarting teaching behaviors in 79 PE classes by means of regression analyses.ResultsControl-oriented teachers made less use of an overall need-supportive teaching style and provided less structure during the activity in particular, while they engaged in more need-thwarting teaching behavior in general and in more controlling and cold teaching behavior in particular.ConclusionAlthough autonomy-oriented teachers tended to display the opposite pattern of correlates, these associations were non-significant. As the current findings suggest that teachers' actual teaching behavior is rooted at least partly in their own dispositional motivational orientation, they may inform the design of effective continuous professional development programs and interventions aimed at enhancing teachers' need-supportive teaching. Directions for future research are discussed.     

The impact of need for closure on conservative beliefs and racism: differential mediation by authoritarian submission and authoritarian dominance

The present study explores the influence of need for closure as well as authoritarian submission (Right-Wing Authoritarianism [RWA]) and authoritarian dominance (Social Dominance Orientation [SDO]) on the genesis of conservative beliefs and racism. For this purpose, two structural equation models were compared. In Model 1, RWA and SDO were entered as independent variables and the need for closure facets Decisiveness and Need for Simple Structure acted as mediator variables. In Model 2, the need for closure facets served as independent variables and RWA and SDO acted as mediators. In two student samples (Sample 1, N = 399, Sample 2, N = 330) and one adult sample (Sample 3, N = 379), Model 2 showed superior fit to the data. These results corroborate the hypothesis that authoritarianism should be interpreted in terms of generalized beliefs rather than in terms of personality characteristics. In addition, analyses show that the effects of Need for Simple Structure on conservative beliefs and racism are fully mediated by RWA but only partly by SDO. These results suggest a differential genesis of RWA and SDO.     

The congruence of personal life values and work attitudes

The authors examined the congruence between an individual's personal-life value placement and attitudes at work. Specifically, they examined how people place value on work, family, religion, and themselves (the personal life values), respectively, and how that choice influences affect, commitment, conscientiousness, and honesty in the workplace (attitudes at work). The authors also examined and tested exploratory hypotheses by using both simple correlations and multiple linear regression analyses. Results suggested varying relationships between value placement and work attitudes. The authors discussed implications and directions for future research.     

Sound and vision

When a brief flash appears at the same position as a moving object, the flash is perceived to lag behind. This so-called flash-lag effect tells us something about the perception of space and time: where is the moving object when the flash appears? A recent paper by Alais and Burr on auditory and crossmodal flash-lag effects indicates that our (often implicit) models of the perception of space and time might be flawed.     

Religiosity and conservatism revisited: relating a new religiosity measure to the two main conservative political ideologies

The relation between the two religiosity dimensions which Wulff (1997) described (Exclusion vs Inclusion of Transcendence and Literal vs Symbolic) and two conservative political ideologies (Cultural and Economic Conservatism) was investigated in a sample of 714 students, a heterogeneous sample of 262 adults, and a sample of 301 religiously affiliated adults gathered in Flanders (Belgium). Both Exclusion vs Inclusion of Transcendence and Literal vs Symbolic were expected to relate only to Cultural Conservatism. Analysis supported these hypotheses, providing further evidence for the close association between religiosity and Cultural Conservatism and the validity of the Post-Critical Belief scale as a measure of Wulff's dimensions of religiosity.     

The resurrection of vocational interests in human resources research and practice: Evidence,challenges, and a working model

A large number of studies conducted over the past two decades reconsidered and supported the validity of vocational interests for predicting a range of important work outcomes. Yet to date, interests remain relatively underused in professional settings, in part because discussions of why, how, and where to use interest assessment tools in an evidence-based manner are lacking and often incomplete. In this article, we briefly review and summarize the available evidence to then further discuss ways in which interest assessment can support various stages of the human resources (HR) cycle, including recruiting, selecting, retaining, and developing employees. From this overview, a number of challenges and apparent paradoxes are derived when working with interests, which may hinder the effective application of these assessments. Therefore, we propose a new working model that treats interest assessments both as “select-out” and “select-in” tools, to identify personal attributes that can either be “must-haves” for an organization in the short term, but at the same time can represent “unique potential” for that organization in the long term. Throughout the text, we also discuss where additional research is needed to further substantiate the use of interests in the HR cycle.     

Patterns of nonverbal behavior among adolescents responding to a formal reasoning task

This study investigated nonverbal behavior patterns of 11 adolescents who responded to the Inhelder-Piaget (1958) balance task, which provides an assessment of proportional reasoning and was the first study of how students behave while being assessed for formal reasoning ability. Interdependency among the precisely defined categories of behavior was found, even when the categories were collapsed on a conceptual basis. Consequences of this categorical interdependency were discussed.     

Scholastic achievement and family marital structure: Bedouin-Arab adolescents from monogamous and polygamous families in Israel

In a sample of Bedouin-Arab adolescents from monogamous and polygamous families in the Negev region of Israel, the authors examined scholastic achievement levels in the subjects of Arabic, English, Hebrew, and mathematics. There were no significant differences in the scholastic achievement levels in those 4 disciplines between adolescents from monogamous families and those from polygamous families. There was, however, a significant interaction between gender and family marital structure for Hebrew scores: Polygamous family structures tended to engender higher Hebrew scores for the male participants, whereas monogamous family structures tended to engender higher Hebrew scores for the female participants. However, the major overall finding was that polygamous family marital structures did not affect deleteriously the scholastic achievement levels of the Bedouin-Arab participants.