Innovation across cultures: Connecting leadership,identification, and creative behavior in organizations

Innovation is considered essential for today's organizations to survive and thrive. Researchers have also stressed the importance of leadership as a driver of followers' innovative work behavior (FIB). Yet, despite a large amount of research, three areas remain understudied: (a) The relative importance of different forms of leadership for FIB; (b) the mechanisms through which leadership impacts FIB; and (c) the degree to which relationships between leadership and FIB are generalizable across cultures. To address these lacunae, we propose an integrated model connecting four types of positive leadership behaviors, two types of identification (as mediating variables), and FIB. We tested our model in a global data set comprising responses of N = 7,225 participants from 23 countries, grouped into nine cultural clusters. Our results indicate that perceived LMX quality was the strongest relative predictor of FIB. Furthermore, the relationships between both perceived LMX quality and identity leadership with FIB were mediated by social identification. The indirect effect of LMX on FIB via social identification was stable across clusters, whereas the indirect effects of the other forms of leadership on FIB via social identification were stronger in countries high versus low on collectivism. Power distance did not influence the relations.     

Psy-BaDo

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Antihypertensive treatment,compliance, and quality of life: Review of a little-understood relation

If patients notoriously violate treatment regimens known to effectively control hypertension, then there must be some subjective costs associated with adherence to these regimens. Generally speaking, there must be some reduction in quality of life associated with antihypertensive medication. Unfortunately the concept of quality of life, due to its lack of specificity, is of little help in further investigating the nature of these subjective costs. We developed a simple neuropsychophysiological model based on fundamental psychological and physiological processes: corticoinhibitory effects of phasic blood pressure elevation reduce the aversive or painful qualities of many stressors. This negative reinforcement increases the rate of the reinforced physiological behavior, i.e., phasic analgesic blood pressure increases. Such negatively reinforced operant behavior is known to be extremely resistant to extinction. Counter actions such as taking antihypertensive medication not only lead to reduced quality of life due to their cancellation of the analgesic effect of conditioned blood pressure increase, but also lead to some form of reluctance to comply with treatment. The model not only provides an innovative etiological path to the emergence of neurogenic essential hypertension, but also yields a highly specific and lean concept of quality of life. Furthermore, it supplies the health care community with a concise explanation for the well-known low compliance of patients with their antihypertensive regimens. In addition to its parsimony, the model fits well with various experimental findings and has been operationalized and tested empirically. Specific therapeutic implications can be derived.     

Situational effects in trait assessment: The FPI,NEOFFI, and EPI questionnaires

While most researchers do agree now that situations may have an effect in the assessment of traits, the consequences have been neglected, so far: if situations affect the assessment of traits we have to take this fact into account in studies on reliability and validity of measurement instruments and their application. In the theoretical part of this article we provide a more formal exposition of this point, introducing the basic concepts of latent state–trait (LST) theory. LST theory and the associated models allow for the estimation of the situational impact on trait measures in non-experimental, correlational studies. In the empirical part, LST theory is applied to three well known trait questionnaires: the Freiburg Personality Inventory, the NEO Five-Factor Inventory and the Eysenck Personality Inventory. It is shown that significant proportions of the variances of the scales of these questionnaires are due to situational effects. The following consequences of this finding are discussed, (i) Instead of the reliability coefficient, the proportion of variance due to the latent trait, the consistency coefficient, should be used for the estimation of confidence intervals for trait scores, (ii) To reduce the situational effects on trait estimates it may be useful to base such an estimate on several occasions, i.e., to aggregate data across occasions. (iii) Reliability and validity studies should not only be based on a sample of persons representative of those to whom the test will be applied; they should also be conducted in situational contexts representative of the intended applications.     

VOLITIONAL ASPECTS OF VOICE PERFORMANCE: AN EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH

The subjects (all females) were instructed to hold a certain note. In some of the trials an alien (female) voice with a continuously falling or rising frequency unexpectedly replaced the subject's own voice as the auditory stimulus in her headphone. Most of the subjects took the alien voice as their own and experienced a complete lack of volitional control over their own voice. A compensatory behaviour was found; when the subjects tried to hold the note the frequency of their voices went in the opposite direction to the frequency of the alien voice.     

What is anger provoking?—Provokers and provoked in anger situations: Developmental trends and sex differences

Some structural properties of situations, described as anger-provoking by teenagers, were investigated. The study was directed toward exploring developmental trends and sex differences with respect to who was the provoker and who was provoked in the described situations. A simple classification, identical for both situational properties (provoker and provoked) was formed. The results showed that at age 18 years there was no sex difference in any of the aspects investigated. At age 12 years boys seemed to be more general than girls in their views on provokers. With increasing age the provoked in the described situations was more often someone else than the describing subject. This is interpreted as corroborating the often proposed relatedness between anger and morality.     

Selective search in short-term memory under ideal conditions of test stimulus categorization

It has often been claimed that short-term memory search is not selective because it takes longer to categorize the test stimulus than to search throughout the whole memory set. Four experiments investigated whether evidence for selective search can be obtained when effectively no time is required to categorize the test stimulus. Even under this favorable condition, no evidence was found for selective search of only the relevant memory subset. Therefore, the time to categorize a test stimulus cannot be the only reason why short-term memory search is not selective.     

On the analysis of psychometric functions: The Spearman-Kärber method

With computer simulations, we examined the performance of the Spearman-Kärber method for analyzing psychometric functions and compared this method with the standard technique of probit analysis. The Spearman-Kärber method was found to be superior in most cases. It generally yielded less biased and less variable estimates of the location and dispersion of a psychometric function, and it provided more power to detect differences in these parameters across experimental conditions. Moreover, the Spearman-Kärber method provided information about the skewness and higher moments of psychometric functions that is beyond the scope of probit analysis. These advantages of the Spearman-Kärber method suggest that it should often be used in preference to probit analysis for the analysis of observed psychometric functions.     

“We” are not stressed: Social identity in groups buffers neuroendocrine stress reactions

The presence of others in threatening situations can be a mixed blessing since it is not always perceived as supportive but can also impair well-being. Building on the social identity approach, we tested the idea that the presence of others has a buffering effect on neuroendocrine stress reactions only if a sense of shared social identity is evoked. Therefore, the salience of social versus personal identity was manipulated. To induce social-evaluative stress, the Trier Social Stress Test for groups (TSST-G) was employed, while in the control conditions the Placebo-TSST-G was used. As predicted, social identity salience attenuated the stress-induced cortisol reaction in the TSST-G condition. By contrast, there was no effect of identity salience in the Placebo-TSST-G conditions. These findings provide the first experimental evidence for the idea that being part of a group buffers neuroendocrine stress only if group members develop a sense of shared social identity.     

Trajectories of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Oppositional Defiant Disorder Symptoms as Precursors of Borderline Personality Disorder Symptoms in Adolescent Girls

Little empirical evidence exists regarding the developmental links between childhood psychopathology and borderline personality disorder (BPD) in adolescence. The current study addresses this gap by examining symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) as potential precursors. ADHD and BPD share clinical features of impulsivity, poor self-regulation, and executive dysfunction, while ODD and BPD share features of anger and interpersonal turmoil. The study is based on annual, longitudinal data from the two oldest cohorts in the Pittsburgh Girls Study (N = 1,233). We used piecewise latent growth curve models of ADHD and ODD scores from age 8 to 10 and 10 to 13 years to examine the prospective associations between dual trajectories of ADHD and ODD symptom severity and later BPD symptoms at age 14 in girls. To examine the specificity of these associations, we also included conduct disorder and depression symptom severity at age 14 as additional outcomes. We found that higher levels of ADHD and ODD scores at age 8 uniquely predicted BPD symptoms at age 14. Additionally, the rate of growth in ADHD scores from age 10 to 13 and the rate of growth in ODD scores from 8 to 10 uniquely predicted higher BPD symptoms at age 14. This study adds to the literature on the early development of BPD by providing the first longitudinal study to examine ADHD and ODD symptom trajectories as specific childhood precursors of BPD symptoms in adolescent girls.