Organisational culture moderation of interpersonal trust and affective commitment in health care non-governmental organisations in Ghana

This study examined the moderating effect of organisational culture (OC) moderation on the relationship between interpersonal trust (IT; trust in management and trust in peers) and employees’ affective commitment (AC). Participants were 295 employees of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Ghana (female = 42%; age range = 18–55). The employees completed the measures of IT, OC, AC, and employee performance. Moderation analysis of the data utilising structural equation modelling revealed that OC completely moderated the relationship between trust in management and trust in peers on AC. However, the moderation impact was found to be higher with trust in management than trust in peers. Moreover, AC completely mediated between trust in management and employee performance, and between trust in peers and employee performance. These findings highlight the importance for human resource managers of NGOs to incorporate and leverage on organisational culture as a key determinant resource for employees’ trust relationships, AC and performance goals.     

THE ATTITUDES TOWARD WOMEN SCALE AND ATTITUDE CHANGE IN COLLEGE STUDENTS

To determine cohort changes in gender-role attitudes, responses to the 15-item form of the Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS; Spence & Helmreich, 1972a, 1978) were compared for students at the same university tested in 1972, 1976, 1980, and 1992. In both males and females, members of the 1992 cohort were the most egalitarian, and members of the 1972 cohort were the least egalitarian. In all groups, women were significantly less traditional in their attitudes than men. As has been found in previous studies, detailed analyses of the data from the 1992 cohort revealed that the scale was unifactorial, but that the score distributions were skewed. There was also some indication of ceiling effects at the egalitarian end of the scale, particularly in women. The implications of these latter results for the usefulness of the AWS in current research were explored.     

Magical thinking in judgments of causation: Can anomalous phenomena affect ontological causal beliefs in children and adults?

In four experiments, 4‐, 5‐, 6‐ and 9‐year‐old children and adults were tested on the entrenchment of their magical beliefs and their beliefs in the universal power of physical causality. In Experiment 1, even 4‐year‐olds showed some understanding of the difference between ordinary and anomalous (magical) causal events, but only 6‐year‐olds and older participants denied that magic could occur in real life. When shown an anomalous causal event (a transformation of a physical object in an apparently empty box after a magic spell was cast on the box), 4‐ and 6‐year‐olds accepted magical explanations of the event, whereas 9‐year‐olds and adults did not. In Experiment 2, the same patterns of behaviour as above were shown by 6‐ and 9‐year‐olds who demonstrated an understanding of the difference between genuine magical events and similarly looking tricks. Testing the entrenchment of magical beliefs in this experiment showed that 5‐year‐olds tended to retain their magical explanations of the anomalous event, even after the mechanism of the trick had been explained to them, whereas 6‐ and 9‐year‐olds did not. In Experiment 3, adult participants refused to accept magical explanations of the anomalous event and interpreted it as a trick or an illusion, even after this event was repeated 4 times. Yet, when in Experiment 4 similar anomalous causal events were demonstrated without reference to magic, most adults acknowledged, both in their verbal judgments and in their actions, that the anomalous effects were not a fiction but had really occurred. The data of this study suggest that in the modern industrialized world, magical beliefs persist but are disguised to fit the dominant scientific paradigm.