Personnel risk management assessment for newly emerging forms of employee crimes

Advances in digital technology have led to new forms of employee crime and organizational risk. Employee collusion with external criminals engaged in theft is increasing in the digital age. Digital storage of company and customer information puts both at risk of hacking, which may be aided, or accidentally facilitated, by insiders. Both negligent and risk-taking employees may cause cyber-safety violations, leading to accidents whose scope is multiplied by digital interconnectivity. Prospective employees can use digital software and social media sites to misrepresent their identities while creating bogus credentials and the misleading appearance of a work history. Disgruntled employees can engage in cyber-sabotage of the organization, and cyber-harassment of co-workers. To address these emergent threats, new forms of personnel risk assessment can be developed and deployed. One such measure is the Reid Background Check Plus (RBCP). A meta-analysis of 39 studies supporting the five dimensions of the new RBCP produced encouraging construct and criterion-related validity evidence.     

Contextual cues aid recovery from interruption: the role of associative activation

A series of experiments introduced interruptions to the execution phase of simple Tower of London problems and found that the opportunity for preparation before the break in task reduced the time cost at resumption. Retrieval of the suspended goal was facilitated when participants were given the opportunity to encode retrieval cues during an "interruption lag" (the brief time before engaging in the interrupting task) but was impeded when these visual cues were subsequently altered following interruption. The results provide useful support for the goal-activation model (E. M. Altmann & G. J. Trafton, 2002), which assumes that context--at the points of both goal suspension and goal retrieval--is critical to efficient interruption recovery.     

The development of sensitivity to biological motion in noise

We investigated developmental changes in sensitivity to biological motion by asking 6-year-olds, 9-year-olds, and adults (twenty-four in each group) to discriminate point-light biological motion displays depicting one of a variety of human movements from scrambled versions of the same displays. When tested without noise dots, participants at all ages performed near ceiling levels and no differences in accuracy were found among the three age groups. Age differences emerged in the second task, in which we used a staircase procedure to determine threshold values of the number of noise dots that could be tolerated in producing a percentage correct value corresponding to a d' value of 1.4. Sensitivity to biological motion improved linearly with age (p < 0.01), with 6-year-olds performing significantly more poorly than adults. This immature performance contrasts with adult-like accuracy by 4 years of age for sensitivity to global motion (Parrish et al, 2005 Vision Research 45 827-837). The comparison implies an immaturity at 6 years of age in the neural networks involved specifically in the processing of biological motion, networks that may include the superior temporal sulcus (STS).     

Exploration or imitation? The effect of music on 4-week-old infants' tongue protrusions

In a newborn imitation paradigm, an auditory stimulus--music--replaced the standard adult behavioral model. Alternating intervals of music and silence affected 4-week-old infants' rates of tongue protruding--evidence that tongue protruding is a general response to interesting distal stimuli.     

Higher order pattern structure influences auditory representational momentum

Representational momentum refers to the phenomenon that observers tend to incorrectly remember an event undergoing real or implied motion as shifted beyond its actual final position. This has been demonstrated in both visual and auditory domains. In 5 pitch discrimination experiments, listeners heard tone sequences that implied either linear, periodic, or null motions in pitch space. Their task was to judge whether the pitch of a probe tone following each sequence was the same or different from the final sequence tone. Results suggested that listeners made errors consistent with extrapolation of coherent pitch patterns (linear, periodic) but not with incoherent (null) ones. Hypotheses associated with internalized physical principles and pattern-based expectations are discussed.     

Measuring the value of nonwage employee benefits: building a model of the relation between benefit satisfaction and value

Researchers have commonly assumed benefits that employees view as more valuable have a greater influence on their attitudes and behaviors. Researchers have used 2 common methods to measure benefit value: attaching a monetary value to benefits and using self-reports of benefit importance. The present authors propose that the 2 approaches are conceptually distinct and have different implications. They use a social exchange perspective to justify this distinction and integrate both approaches and benefit satisfaction into a more comprehensive model of benefit perception. Results suggest that both measures have practical applications depending on the nature of the exchange relationship between the organization and employees. However, this relationship depends on the specific benefit and on employee satisfaction with that benefit. Some benefits lend themselves to a monetary estimate, whereas others lend themselves more to a nonmonetary valuation.     

Leadership, collective personality, and performance

By viewing behavior regularities at the individual and collective level as functionally isomorphic, a referent-shift compositional model for the Big 5 personality dimensions is developed. On the basis of this compositional model, a common measure of Big 5 personality at the individual level is applied to the collective as a whole. Within this framework, it is also hypothesized that leadership (i.e., transformational, transactional, and passive) would predict collective personality and that collective personality would be significantly related to collective performance. The results supported these hypotheses using a sample of franchised units. On the basis of recent research at the individual level, several interactions among the various personality dimensions were hypothesized and supported. Implications are discussed.