EMPLOYEES' CHALLENGING JOB EXPERIENCES AND SUPERVISORS' EVALUATIONS OF PROMOTABILITY

Promotability evaluations are important for individuals' career development and organizations' human resource management practices. Nevertheless, little empirical research has addressed predictors of promotability evaluations, and the studies that have, have often focused on current job performance and fixed, nonbehavioral predictors. This study takes a more behavioral approach, and investigates whether besides how one performs (i.e., job performance) what one performs also serves as an indicator of promotability. Specifically, we examine the relationship between employees' challenging job experiences and supervisors' evaluations of employees' promotability over and above employees' current job performance. Results from 3 field studies, sampling different types of employees via different measures, consistently showed that challenging job experiences explained incremental variance in supervisory and organizational evaluations of promotability over and above current job performance and job tenure.     

PATTERNS OF INTERDEPENDENCE IN WORK TEAMS: A TWO-LEVEL INVESTIGATION OF THE RELATIONS WITH JOB AND TEAM SATISFACTION

A questionnaire study in 17 school and 24 engineering teams examined affective reactions to task and goal interdependence at the group and individual level of analysis. Group-level task interdependence was positively related to group members' job and team satisfaction. Within-group differences in the degree of task interdependence were unrelated to affective responses. Interactions revealed that within-group task interdependence is positively related to both job and team satisfaction only if the degree of goal interdependence in the work team is high.     

What Moore's Paradox Is About

On the basis of arguments showing that none of the most influential analyses of Moore's paradox yields a successful resolution of the problem, a new analysis of it is offered. It is argued that, in attempting to render verdicts of either inconsistency or self-contradiction or self-refutation, those analyses have all failed to satisfactorily explain why a Moore-paradoxical proposition is such that it cannot be rationally believed. According to the proposed solution put forward here, a Moore-paradoxical proposition is one for which the believer can have no non-overridden evidence. the arguments for this claim make use of some of Peter Klein's views on epistemic defeasibility. It is further suggested that this proposal may have important meta-epistemological implications.     

THE MYTH OF CARTESIAN QUALIA

Abstract:  The standard view of Cartesian sensations (SV) is that they present themselves as purely qualitative features of experience (or qualia). Accordingly, Descartes' view would be that in perceiving the color red, for example, we are merely experiencing the subjective feel of redness rather than seeming to perceive a property of bodies. In this paper, I establish that the argument and textual evidence offered in support of SV fail to prove that Descartes held this view. Indeed, I will argue that there are textual and theoretical reasons for believing that Descartes held the negation of SV. Qualia aren't Descartes' legacy.     

Brief Therapy: Focused Solution Development

This article describes the form of brief therapy developed at the Brief Family Therapy Center. We have chosen a title similar to Weakland, Fisch, Watzlawick, and Bodin's classic paper, "Brief Therapy: Focused Problem Resolution" (20) to emphasize our view that there is a conceptual relationship and a developmental connection between the points of view expressed in the two papers.     

Clinical,developmental and social aspects of infant crying and colic

Persistent unexplained infant crying in the first few months is a common source of distress for parents and is costly for the health services. The aim was to assess the merits of developmental and social conceptualizations of this phenomenon, compared to the clinical approach as represented by the concept of colic. From a community sample of 530 infants, 67 who met the ‘rule of threes’ definition of colic by fussing and crying for 3 or more hours per day at 4-5 weeks of age were chosen. To avoid confusion, these infants were called ‘persistent criers’. Groups of ‘evening criers’ (N = 38) and ‘moderate cries’ (N = 55) were also selected. These 160 infants were assessed by researcher measures of their consolability and by maternal diary measures of their amounts of fussing, crying and colic behaviour when 5-6 weeks old. The persistent and evening criers cried more than the moderate criers. However, irritable, ‘fussy’ behaviour was the predominant form of distress for all three groups of infants. Colic bouts–defined as ‘bouts of intense, unsoothable crying and other behaviour, perhaps due to stomach or bowel pain’–were rare even among the persistent criers and only 7% of these infants were found to be inconsolable. The results support growing evidence that normal infant developmental processes are central to this phenomenon. In addition, social interactions between infants and parents, and parental subjective variables, appear to be involved. Colic was distinguished as a rare and separate form of distress by the infants' mothers. Further evidence needs to determine whether colic is a distinct clinical phenomenon or an extreme degree of normal distress interpreted within a western cultural framework.     

The Death of Resistance

For any conceptual distinction to be useful ( 5 ) within the field of family therapy, it needs to lead to some clear answers to the question: What does this distinction mean for clinical practice? The distinction between (a) the family-as-a-system, and (b) family-therapy-as-a-system leads to a clinical perspective, or stance, that includes a focus on changing. Once this focus is clear, the therapist can help to create the expectation of changing and consequently promote changing. That is, techniques can be developed using positive feedback loops. ¹ 1 It is important to remember throughout this essay that “positive” and “negative feedback loops,”“deviation-amplifying,”“deviation-counteracting processes,” etc., are just heuristic devices or metaphors. Human systems do not have such things. Human systems are described by an observer “as if.”
Moreover, this distinction leads to a therapeutic stance in which not changing is a surprise.