Predicting OCB Role Definitions: Exchanges with the Organization and Psychological Attachment

Purpose  To investigate the relationship between trust in the organization and employees’ exchange beliefs (i.e., exchange ideology) and both psychological attachment and role definitions. Design/Methodology/Approach  A field study based on data from 204 line and supervisory employees examined the relationships between the predictors and work role boundaries. Two important mechanisms, psychological attachment (organizational commitment) and job satisfaction were examined as mediator and moderator, respectively, to the relationship between trust and exchange ideology and role definitions. Findings  Results indicate that both relation- and exchange-based variables predict enlarged roles (i.e., employees’ perceived organizational citizenship behaviors as in-role). Additionally, organizational commitment mediated the relationship between the predictor and the outcome. Job satisfaction moderated the relationship between trust and role definition. Implications  Work role boundaries are important in the contemporary workplace, where employees are oftentimes required to enlarge their behavioral set. We provide evidence for the importance of managing the relationship with the organization (through high levels of trust) and making sure employees construe their exchanges with the organization as more open. Such knowledge may help design interventions to increase employee trust, and select employees with favorable exchange ideologies. Originality/Value  This is one of the first studies examining both relationship- and exchange-based variables as predictors of role definitions, and clarifies possible mechanisms (mediation through psychological attachment) and the role of job satisfaction as moderator.     

Are women adult human females?

Philosophical Studies - Are women (simply) adult human females? Dictionaries suggest that they are. However, philosophers who have explicitly considered the question invariably answer no. This...     

Unwanted teenage pregnancies: incidence, interpretation, and intervention.

North American and western European cultures are more permissive than they were before World War II about the increased incidence of teen sexual activity. Societies may be more open and teens are having more premarital sex than they used to, but they surely are not using contraception as often as they should. As such, there is a great deal of unintended and unwanted teenage pregnancies, especially in the US. Even the threat of contracting and/or transmitting HIV has not caused heterosexual youths to change their sexual or contraceptive behaviors. The authors conceptualize explanations for this lack of adolescent behavioral change, including procedures designed to identify deficiencies and to bring about necessary changes in contraception-relevant information, motivation, behavioral skills, and situational constraints. Examples of successful intervention programs are outlined. Sections consider the incidence of premarital intercourse, contraceptive use, and unwanted pregnancies; contraceptive neglect; unintended and unwanted pregnancies; and why teenagers have unprotected sexual intercourse. The conceptual framework of intervening to prevent unwanted teenage pregnancies is presented in sections on providing improved contraceptive information, increasing precontraceptive motivation, improving contraceptive skills, altering situational factors which inhibit contraception, and evaluation research.     

Testing a new cognitive behavioural treatment for obesity: A randomized controlled trial with three-year follow-up

It is remarkably difficult for people with obesity to maintain a new lower weight following weight loss. The aim of the present study was to examine the immediate and longer-term effects of a new cognitive behavioural treatment that was explicitly designed to minimise this post-treatment weight regain. One hundred and fifty female participants with obesity were randomized to the new treatment, behaviour therapy (the leading alternative psychological treatment) or guided self-help (a minimal intervention). Both of the main treatments resulted in an average weight loss of about ten percent of initial weight whereas weight loss was more modest with guided self-help. The participants were subsequently followed-up for three years post-treatment. The great majority regained almost all the weight that they had lost with the new treatment being no better than the behavioural treatment in preventing weight regain. These findings lend further support to the notion that obesity is resistant to psychological methods of treatment, if anything other than a short-term perspective is taken. It is suggested that it is ethically questionable to claim that psychological treatments for obesity “work” in the absence of data on their longer-term effects.     

Visual laterality in the domestic horse (Equus caballus) interacting with humans

Most horses have a side on which they are easier to handle and a direction they favour when working on a circle, and recent studies have suggested a correlation between emotion and visual laterality when horses observe inanimate objects. As such lateralisation could provide important clues regarding the horse’s cognitive processes, we investigated whether horses also show laterality in association with people. We gave horses the choice of entering a chute to left or right, with and without the passive, non-interactive presence of a person unknown to them. The left eye was preferred for scanning under both conditions, but significantly more so when a person was present. Traditionally, riders handle horses only from the left, so we repeated the experiment with horses specifically trained on both sides. Again, there was a consistent preference for left eye scanning in the presence of a person, whether known to the horses or not. We also examined horses interacting with a person, using both traditionally and bilaterally trained horses. Both groups showed left eye preference for viewing the person, regardless of training and test procedure. For those horses tested under both passive and interactive conditions, the left eye was preferred significantly more during interaction. We suggest that most horses prefer to use their left eye for assessment and evaluation, and that there is an emotional aspect to the choice which may be positive or negative, depending on the circumstances. We believe these results have important practical implications and that emotional laterality should be taken into account in training methods.     

The interactive effects of conscientiousness, work effort, and psychological climate on job performance

Historically, conscientiousness-performance relationships have been modest, suggesting the need to examine theoretically-relevant moderating variables. Based on theory and empirical research suggesting that performance variance is maximally predicted in the presence of person and situation variables, we examined the moderating potential of work effort and psychological climate on the conscientiousness-performance relationship. Data gathered from 139 predominately part-time restaurant employees revealed that conscientiousness predicted performance in the simultaneous presence of high levels of work effort and positive psychological climate. Conversely, conscientiousness had no empirical association with performance when coupled with other combinations (e.g., high-negative; low-positive; low-negative) of work effort and psychological climate. Implications for research, strengths, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.     

A Preliminary Study of COVID-19-related Stressors,Parenting Stress,and Parental Psychological Well-being Among Parents of School-age Children

Journal of Child and Family Studies - The COVID-19 pandemic has had substantial health, social, and economic effects on families. Consequent lockdowns and school closures heightened the burden on...