Customer Reactions to Staff Empowerment: Mediators and Moderators

For over a decade, the empowerment of service staff has been touted as an effective means of improving worker satisfaction and performance. The 2 studies described in this paper assess likely customer reactions to staff empowerment. In Study I, conditions of full empowerment produced higher customer satisfaction ratings than did either limited or no empowerment, with evidence that the link between empowerment and satisfaction is mediated primarily by perceptions of procedural fairness. In Study 2, full empowerment was again associated with high satisfaction and with positive appraisals of the empowered staff member, although these effects were moderated by the employee's communication style.     

A defense of local miracle compatibilism

David Lewis has offered a reply to the standard argument for the claim that the truth of determinism is incompatible with anyone’s being able to do otherwise than she in fact does. Helen Beebee has argued that Lewis’s compatibilist strategy is untenable. In this paper I show that one recent attempt to defend Lewis’s view against this argument fails and then go on to offer my own defense of Lewis’s view.

Southern Culture and Homicide: Examining the Cracker Culture/Black Rednecks Thesis

Recent scholarship traces the roots of southern violence to the Scots-Irish, who brought a relatively violent “cracker culture” with them to the United States in the eighteenth century. The tolerance for violence inherent in cracker culture was believed to be transmitted throughout the south to other whites and was maintained, in part, through evangelical Christian doctrine. Moreover, Thomas Sowell (2005) recently argued that some southern blacks were also influenced by “cracker culture,” leading to the emergence of a “black redneck” phenomenon influencing homicide among blacks. Using county-level data circa 2000, this study empirically evaluates the merit of the cracker culture/black redneck thesis. Negative binomial regression analyses for a full sample of counties suggest that a measure of southern cracker/black redneck culture is an important factor affecting contemporary rates of argument homicide among both whites and blacks. When counties are divided into south and non-south sub-samples, the results are also consistent: a cracker/black redneck culture effect is evident for both racial groups in the south, and is also apparent outside of the southern region. We interpret these latter findings as possible support for the thesis that southern cracker/black redneck culture has been transported through migration to non-southern localities.     

Psychology,Religion, and Spirituality

This study focused on the relation between the manner in which pray-ers perceive God (God concept) and their tendencies to choose various prayer types. A sample of 114 Jewish Israeli religious men responded to multidimensional measures of God concept (Benevolent, Evaluation, Omniness, Guiding, and Deisticness) and of prayer type (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication, Reception). Canonical correlation analysis uncovered a significant canonical model. Two canonical functions, explaining a total of 36.5% of the variance, were selected for interpretation. Function 1 indicated a perception of God as a benevolent and guiding God together with supplicative prayer. Function 2 indicated a perception of God as a meaningful and close God with active thanksgiving prayer. These results provide support for the notion that the manner in which an individual perceives God and the manner in which that individual chooses to pray to God are indeed related.     

Attribute coding at different levels of processing

Schoolchildren, aged 16 years showed poorer incidental learning for nouns if the orienting task was one of finding rhymes for the items compared to assigning each word to a semantic category. On a recognition task including homophone and synonym foils, rhyming subjects made significantly more phonemic errors, whereas categorizing subjects produced a significantly greater number of semantic confusions. Subjects instructed to construct images for each of the nouns showed a performance pattern similar to the categorizing group. The results are interpreted in terms of Herriot's (1974) view that different levels of processing are associated with the coding of different clusters of stimulus attributes.