The effects of alignments: examining group faultlines, organizational cultures, and performance

By integrating literature on group faultlines, organizational cultures, and value congruence, this research presents a framework that explains how cultural alignment across organizational levels may influence the relationship between faultlines and performance. The hypotheses were tested using representatively sampled multisource qualitative and quantitative data on 138 teams from a Fortune 500 company. The present findings demonstrate that although informational faultlines were detrimental for group performance, the negative relationship between faultlines and performance was reversed when cultures with a strong emphasis on results were aligned, was lessened when cultures with a weak emphasis on results were aligned, and remained negative when cultures were misaligned with respect to their results orientation. These findings show the importance of recognizing alignments not only within groups (group faultlines) but also outside groups (cultural alignments between the group and departments) when considering their implications for group performance.     

The role of self-guided training in the relationship between task conflict and innovation in virtual teams

This study was conducted to evaluate the moderating role of self-guided training in the relationship between task conflict and team innovation in synchronic computer-mediated communication (SCMC) teams. For this purpose, a laboratory study was carried out in which 26 teams were assigned to the training condition and 24 to the control condition. Results confirmed that SCMC teams develop a negative relationship between task conflict and innovation, but also revealed that self-guided training may slow these counterproductive effects down. Our study provides new evidence of the linear relationship between task conflict and team innovation in SCMC teams, extending previous research findings obtained in face-to-face teams to virtual context and suggest that self-guided training can be useful for virtual team innovation.     

Does positive team mood mediate the relationship between team climate and team performance?

We tested whether the relationship between a team climate of support from the organization and team performance is mediated by positive team mood. Recent research has shown that this team climate facet is related to team performance, but we do not have any empirical evidence about the mechanisms involved in this relationship. The study sample was composed of 59 bank branches, and a longitudinal design with three data-collection points was implemented. The results showed that a team climate of support from the organization was positively related to positive team mood, which in turn was positively related to team members' ratings of team performance.     

Sources and management of resistance in child treatment

This paper traces the analytic work with a severely traumatised two-and-a-half-year-old girl Phoebe, whose early life was marked by chronic abuse and a violent murder she witnessed a few months prior to the beginning of treatment. Bringing the trauma in the room in a dissociative form, in line with post-traumatic stress disorder presentation, was Phoebe's unconscious means of communicating her pre-verbal encounters by projecting onto me the rage, shock and helplessness of her predicament. Thus, countertransference responses were a helpful window into her internal world, which was governed by cataclysmic losses and primitive states of fear. The importance of containment of the complex feelings aroused in the work and protecting against potential re-enactment of the abusive elements the patient, the family and often the professional network brought in the therapy is highlighted. The author hopes that this paper will encourage the offering of psychoanalytic psychotherapy to traumatised children particularly the under fives.     

Emotional reactivity and regulation in preschool-age children who stutter

Purpose.

This study experimentally investigated behavioral correlates of emotional reactivity and emotion regulation and their relation to speech (dis)fluency in preschool-age children who do (CWS) and do not (CWNS) stutter during emotion-eliciting conditions.

Method.

Participants (18 CWS, 14 boys; 18 CWNS, 14 boys) completed two experimental tasks (1) a neutral (“apples and leaves in a transparent box,” ALTB) and (2) a frustrating (“attractive toy in a transparent box,” ATTB) task, both of which were followed by a narrative task. Dependent measures were emotional reactivity (positive affect, negative affect), emotion regulation (self-speech, distraction) exhibited during the ALTB and the ATTB tasks, percentage of stuttered disfluencies (SDs) and percentage of non-stuttered disfluencies (NSDs) produced during the narratives.

Results.

Results indicated that preschool-age CWS exhibited significantly more negative emotion and more self-speech than preschool-age CWNS. For CWS only, emotion regulation behaviors (i.e., distraction, self-speech) during the experimental tasks were predictive of stuttered disfluencies during the subsequent narrative tasks. Furthermore, for CWS there was no relation between emotional processes and non-stuttered disfluencies, but CWNS's negative affect was significantly related to nonstuttered disfluencies.

Conclusions.

In general, present findings support the notion that emotional processes are associated with childhood stuttering. Specifically, findings are consistent with the notion that preschool-age CWS are more emotionally reactive than CWNS and that their self-speech regulatory attempts may be less than effective in modulating their emotions.Educational objectives. The reader will be able to: (a) communicate the relevance of studying the role of emotion in developmental stuttering close to the onset of stuttering and (b) describe the main findings of the present study in relation to previous studies that have used different methodologies to investigate the role of emotion in developmental stuttering of young children who stutter.     

Pointing gestures as a cognitive tool in young children: experimental evidence

This article explores the possible cognitive function associated with pointing gestures from a Vygotskian perspective. In Study 1, 39 children who were 2-4 years of age were observed in a solitary condition while solving a mnemonic task with or without an explicit memory demand. A discriminant analysis showed that children used noncommunicative pointing gestures only in the task with an explicit memory demand. In Study 2, 39 children who were 4-6 years of age completed an attentional task with and without the possibility of pointing. An analysis of variance showed that only those children who spontaneously pointed to solve the first task performed significantly worse in a second condition where pointing was impossible. These results suggest that besides its social interactive functions, pointing may also subserve private cognitive functions for children.     

When managers and their teams disagree: a longitudinal look at the consequences of differences in perceptions of organizational support

The authors argue that over time the difference between team members' perception of the organizational support received by the team (or team climate for organizational support) and their manager's perception of the organizational support received by the team has an effect on important outcomes and emergent states, such as team performance and team positive and negative affect above and beyond the main effects of climate perceptions themselves. With a longitudinal sample of 179 teams at Time 1 and 154 teams at Time 2, the authors tested their predictions using a combined polynomial regression and response surface analyses approach. The results supported the authors' predictions. When team managers and team members' perceptions of organizational support were high and in agreement, outcomes were maximized. When team managers and team members disagreed, team negative affect increased and team performance and team positive affect decreased. The negative effects of disagreement were most amplified when managers perceived that the team received higher levels of support than did the team itself.     

Glass maze in women's leadership

Psychological gender discrimination explanations have changed over the past thirty years, becoming more complex in order to obtain a better understanding of the social reality. At the present moment, one of the most interesting research areas is the one referring to the 'glass maze' phenomenon in women's management careers. The main purpose of this work is to reveal the theoretical evolution in an attempt to explain the leadership study from a gender perspective. The consecutive hypotheses, starting with the labour sexual division idea, are becoming more interactive in order to understand the current labour-social situation. Social psychology has underlined the role of beliefs, observed via gender stereotyped roles, prejudiced attitudes against women, sexist and neo-sexist ideology, or masculine, feminine and androgynous identity development. New psychological interpretations insist on the variability of the gender concept, where gender is sometimes observed through men and women's behaviours, and other times through those behaviour expectations. But gender is mainly observed though the power relations between men and women during social interactions in labour organizations.     

How people see others is different from how people see themselves: a replicable pattern across cultures

Consensus studies from 4 cultures--in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Estonia, and Germany--as well as secondary analyses of self- and observer-reported Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) data from 29 cultures suggest that there is a cross-culturally replicable pattern of difference between internal and external perspectives for the Big Five personality traits. People see themselves as more neurotic and open to experience compared to how they are seen by other people. External observers generally hold a higher opinion of an individual's conscientiousness than he or she does about him- or herself. As a rule, people think that they have more positive emotions and excitement seeking but much less assertiveness than it seems from the vantage point of an external observer. This cross-culturally replicable disparity between internal and external perspectives was not consistent with predictions based on the actor-observer hypothesis because the size of the disparity was unrelated to the visibility of personality traits. A relatively strong negative correlation (r = -.53) between the average self-minus-observer profile and social desirability ratings suggests that people in most studied cultures view themselves less favorably than they are perceived by others.     

A new defense of trope content view of experience

The idea that what we perceive are tropes (abstract particulars) is anything but new. In fact, it was one of the reasons why the ontology of tropes was postulated in the first place. Still, the claim that we perceive tropes is invariably and purely based on pre-philosophical intuitions or, indirectly, either as a supporting argument for the advantages of content view when compared to the relational view of experience, or as a supporting argument in favor of the irreducible subjective character of experience. In this paper, I take the content view for granted and argue in favor of what is herein referred to as the trope-content view of experience. My defense is a case of inference to the best explanation. The trope-content view can meet all reasonable desiderata on the experience and its content without assuming gaps or making the ad hoc assumption that there are different layers of content, or so shall I argue.