Role of Political Skill in Job Performance Prediction Beyond General Mental Ability and Personality in Cross‐Sectional and Predictive Studies1

Political skill is the capacity to understand others in working life effectively, and to apply such knowledge to induce others to act in ways that add to one's personal or organizational goals. The present investigation reported the results of 2 studies designed to examine the job performance prediction effectiveness of political skill when investigated in conjunction with general mental ability (GMA) and personality characteristics. The results demonstrated that political skill accounted for a significant proportion of job performance variance beyond GMA and personality variables cross‐sectionally in Study 1, and predictively (i.e., using a 1‐year timeframe) in Study 2 examining effects on multiple dimensions of job performance. The implications of these results, strengths, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.     

Immunity to proactive interference is not a property of the focus of attention in working memory

The Focus of Attention (FOA) is the latest incarnation of a limited capacity store in which a small number of items, in this case four, are deemed to be readily accessible and do not need to be retrieved. Thus a corollary of these ideas is that those items in the FOA are always immune to proactive interference. While there is empirical support for instances of immunity to PI in short-term retention tasks that involve memory for four-item lists, there are also many instances in which PI is observed with four-item lists as well as instances where PI and immunity to PI can be shown in the same experiment. In contrast to the FOA assumptions, an alternative cue-based account predicts both the presence of PI and immunity to PI as a function of the relation between the cues available and the particular test. Three experiments contrasted the FOA assumptions and the cue-based approach in a short-term cued recall task in which PI is manipulated by testing whether the presentation of previous, similar items would interfere with immediate recall of three list items. The results indicated that even with very short lists, both PI and immunity to PI could be observed. The PI effects observed in our experiment are at odds with the FOA approach and are more readily explained using the cueing account.     

Sometimes happy people focus on the trees and sad people focus on the forest: context-dependent effects of mood in impression formation

Research indicates that affect influences whether people focus on categorical or behavioral information during impression formation. One explanation is that affect confers its value on whatever cognitive inclinations are most accessible in a given situation. Three studies tested this malleable mood effects hypothesis, predicting that happy moods should maintain and unhappy moods should inhibit situationally dominant thinking styles. Participants completed an impression formation task that included categorical and behavioral information. Consistent with the proposed hypothesis, no fixed relation between mood and processing emerged. Whether happy moods led to judgments reflecting category-level or behavior-level information depended on whether participants were led to focus on the their immediate psychological state (i.e., current affective experience; Studies 1 and 2) or physical environment (i.e., an unexpected odor; Study 3). Consistent with research on socially situated cognition, these results demonstrate that the same affective state can trigger entirely different thinking styles depending on the context.     

THE USE OF ROLEPLAYING JOB INTERVIEWS WITH JOB CORPS FEMALES

Observation of the schism between employers and disadvantaged females, leads to the preparation of counselees for job interviews and exploration of the world of work with them. By chance, roleplaying a job interview was used during a group guidance session with Job Corps females, and the comparative success encountered with the technique encouraged this investigation. As a technique, it was found to be flexible, adaptable, and timesaving. It was of benefit to the counselor in six areas, and students indicated that they found the technique of value as a means of preparation for a real job interview, acquainting them with the scope of their communications problems and reducing these shortcomings.