Sales Force Compensation Plans Incorporating Multidimensional Sales Effort and Salesperson Efficiency

Sales force compensation models are often constrained by the assumption that salesperson effort is unidimensional. Some models have extended this scenario to multiple products but retain the “single-effort” assumption. In addition, salesperson efficiency has been ignored. As selling is clearly multidimensional, we present a formulation of an agency model (MIPAM) that incorporates multidimensional sales effort as well as salesperson efficiency. Using the model, we also show that under certain assumptions, we can build the second-order condition of the agent’s maximization into the principalagent problem, instead of assuming it, as has been done in the past.     

Using Mail Questionnaires in Multifirm Studies of Sales Representatives

Abstract

As further efforts are made to construct theories of sales force behavior, increasing emphasis will be placed on studying sales forces across several firms in an effort to produce generalized results. This study reports on an experiment which tests four methods of improving response from sales representatives in a multifirm survey.     

Perceptions of the roles of behaviour and genetics in disease risk: Are they associated with behaviour change attempts

Objective: We examined selected survivor characteristics to determine what factors might moderate the response to two psychosocial interventions.

Design: Seventy-one prostate cancer survivors (PCSs) were randomly assigned to either a telephone-delivered health education (THE) intervention or a telephone-delivered interpersonal counselling (TIP-C) intervention.

Measures: Psychological quality of life (QOL) outcomes included depression, negative and positive affect, and perceived stress.

Results: For three of the psychological outcomes (depression, negative affect and stress), there were distinct advantages from participating in THE. For example, more favourable depression outcomes occurred when men were older, had lower prostate specific functioning, were in active chemotherapy, had lower social support from friends and lower cancer knowledge. Participating in the TIP-C provided a more favourable outcome for positive affect when men had higher education, prostate specific functioning, social support from friends and cancer knowledge.

Conclusion: Unique survivor characteristics must be considered when recommending interventions that might improve psychological QOL in PCSs. Future research must examine who benefits most and from what components of psychosocial interventions to enable clinicians to recommend appropriate psychosocial care.     

Exploring the Effects of Ostracism on Performance and Intrinsic Motivation

Two experiments investigated the effects of ostracism on performance and intrinsic motivation. Participants were either included or ostracized via an online ball-tossing game and then completed two trials of an interesting word-search task. Later, they engaged in a free-choice trial designed to assess their intrinsic motivation for the word-search task. Results indicated that ostracized participants performed more poorly and experienced lower positive mood and relatedness than included participants. Although no direct effects of ostracism on intrinsic motivation were found, in both studies ostracism indirectly affected intrinsic motivation through positive mood, such that ostracism led to poorer mood and, in turn, lower intrinsic motivation. Implications for future research on ostracism in organizations are discussed.     

Text Genre and Science Content: Ease of Reading,Comprehension, and Reader Preference

This study examined ease of reading, comprehension, and recall and preference for the same scientific content under two conditions: an informational text and a fictional narrative text. Seventy-four third and fourth graders were assessed individually around the reading of fictional narrative and informational texts that were about either snails or sand. Students’ accuracy and rate of reading were comparable across the two genres. However, students answered more comprehension questions correctly and recalled more key concepts in response to informational text than fictional narrative text. Moreover, students did not express a clear preference for one type of text over the other.     

When do people cooperate? The neuroeconomics of prosocial decision making

Understanding the roots of prosocial behavior is an interdisciplinary research endeavor that has generated an abundance of empirical data across many disciplines. This review integrates research findings from different fields into a novel theoretical framework that can account for when prosocial behavior is likely to occur. Specifically, we propose that the motivation to cooperate (or not), generated by the reward system in the brain (extending from the striatum to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex), is modulated by two neural networks: a cognitive control system (centered on the lateral prefrontal cortex) that processes extrinsic cooperative incentives, and/or a social cognition system (including the temporo-parietal junction, the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala) that processes trust and/or threat signals. The independent modulatory influence of incentives and trust on the decision to cooperate is substantiated by a growing body of neuroimaging data and reconciles the apparent paradox between economic versus social rationality in the literature, suggesting that we are in fact wired for both. Furthermore, the theoretical framework can account for substantial behavioral heterogeneity in prosocial behavior. Based on the existing data, we postulate that self-regarding individuals (who are more likely to adopt an economically rational strategy) are more responsive to extrinsic cooperative incentives and therefore rely relatively more on cognitive control to make (un)cooperative decisions, whereas other-regarding individuals (who are more likely to adopt a socially rational strategy) are more sensitive to trust signals to avoid betrayal and recruit relatively more brain activity in the social cognition system. Several additional hypotheses with respect to the neural roots of social preferences are derived from the model and suggested for future research.     

The Relation Between People's Connection With a Target and the Perceived Importance of Justice

We propose that actors will perceive justice as more important with respect to a target when they experience moderate versus extremely high or extremely low connection with the target. In two studies, we manipulated actors’ connection with (e.g., similarity to) a target and the target's standing on the appropriate justice criterion. Both studies yielded the predicted curvilinear relation between connectedness and the perceived relevance of justice. In Study 2, actors’ decisions were more affected by the justice criterion in the moderate versus extreme connectedness conditions. Our findings have important implications for the interplay between connection with others and moral motivations.     

Social Identity Change During an Intergroup Merger: The Role of Status,Similarity, and Identity Threat

Conducted during the merger between two hospitals, this longitudinal study (N = 149) revealed that at both Time 1 (i.e., questionnaire completed 12 months prior to the merger) and Time 2 (completed 1 year after the merger had been implemented), employees from the low-status premerger organization generally reported lower adjustment to the merger. Whereas Time 2 identity threat predicted lower and decreased identification with the new merged organization and perceptions of a common in group identity, perceived similarities between the merging organizations at Time 2 predicted higher identification with the new merged organization and higher perceptions of a common in group identity.     

Effective cutoffs for detecting random, partially random, and nonrandom 370-item MMPI-2 short form protocols

The ability of the 370-item short form MMPI-2 (Butcher, Graham, Ben-Porath, Tellegen, Dahlstrom, & Kaemmer, 2001) validity scales to detect random protocols was investigated using samples of 500 nonrandom protocols, 250 half-random protocols, and 250 all-random protocols. The long-form cutoff of VRIN ≥ 80 was unable to detect protocols with either level of randomness. The long-form cutoffs of Fp ≥ 100 or F ≥ 100 were able to detect all-random but not half-random protocols. Alternative cutoffs for VRIN, Fp, and F were investigated and short-form subscales of those scales were developed to improve detection of partially random protocols. An algorithm using alternative cutoffs for the scales and the new subscales was highly effective, detecting almost all of the random protocols as well as the nonrandom protocols. A follow-up cross-validation study was conducted that confirmed the effectiveness of the algorithm.     

Sample size in psychological research over the past 30 years

The American Psychological Association (APA) Task Force on Statistical Inference was formed in 1996 in response to a growing body of research demonstrating methodological issues that threatened the credibility of psychological research, and made recommendations to address them. One issue was the small, even dramatically inadequate, size of samples used in studies published by leading journals. The present study assessed the progress made since the Task Force's final report in 1999. Sample sizes reported in four leading APA journals in 1955, 1977, 1995, and 2006 were compared using nonparametric statistics, while data from the last two waves were fit to a hierarchical generalized linear growth model for more in-depth analysis. Overall, results indicate that the recommendations for increasing sample sizes have not been integrated in core psychological research, although results slightly vary by field. This and other implications are discussed in the context of current methodological critique and practice.