Personality traits in leadership behavior

Correlational analyses of the personality traits measured by the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992) and three leadership styles, that is, Change, Production, and Employee (CPE) measured by Ekvall and Arvonen's (1991) CPE questionnaire, were performed. The sample was 106 Norwegian leaders. Three common factors comprising leadership styles and personality domains were interpreted as "looking for new possibilities,"hard working," and "dealing with people." Considering personality traits as behavior tendencies in unspecified situational contexts and leadership styles as behavioral tendencies in the leadership context, and due to the self-report nature of the data, it is argued that the factors show consistency in self-perceptions independent of context. The strongest predictors of the CPE total score were Conscientiousness and Extraversion; Openness and Agreeableness were specific predictors of Change and Employee, respectively.     

A latent consolidation phase in auditory identification learning: time in the awake state is sufficient

Large gains in performance, evolving hours after practice has terminated, were reported in a number of visual and some motor learning tasks, as well as recently in an auditory nonverbal discrimination task. It was proposed that these gains reflect a latent phase of experience-triggered memory consolidation in human skill learning. It is not clear, however, whether and when delayed gains in performance evolve following training in an auditory verbal identification task. Here we show that normal-hearing young adults trained to identify consonant-vowel stimuli in increasing levels of background noise showed significant, robust, delayed gains in performance that became effective not earlier than 4 h post-training, with most participants improving at more than 6 h post-training. These gains were retained for over 6 mo. Moreover, although it has been recently argued that time including sleep, rather than time per se, is necessary for the evolution of delayed gains in human perceptual learning, our results show that 12 h post-training in the waking state were as effective as 12 h, including no less than 6 h night's sleep. Altogether, the results indicate, for the first time, the existence of a latent, hours-long, consolidation phase in a human auditory verbal learning task, which occurs even during the awake state.     

Variety‐Seeking and Perceived Expertise

People often infer expertise from the choice of unique, rare, or sophisticated options. But might mere variety‐seeking also serve as a signal of expertise, and if so, how? Six studies show that the relationship between variety‐seeking and perceived expertise is not unidirectional and depends on the perceiver's own level of expertise. Category experts perceive lower variety‐seeking as indicative of discernment, which in turn increases perceived expertise in that category. Consequently, experts choose less variety to portray themselves as experts. In contrast, novices perceive high variety‐seeking as indicative of category breadth knowledge, which in turn increases their perception of category expertise. Consequently, novices choose more variety to portray themselves as experts. The findings make novel theoretical contributions to research on variety‐seeking, consumer expertise, and social perception, as well as practical contributions for marketers of product assortments and bundles.     

Are You Being Served? The Relationship between School Climate for Service and Teachers' Engagement,Satisfaction, and Intention to Leave: A Moderated Mediation Model

The notion of service has been receiving increasing attention in organizational psychology literature in recent years, due to the client-oriented managerial movement. Yet, little to no attention has been paid to the service notion in educational psychology despite its high relevance to educational settings, given the pressure to be more service-oriented and possess a client-focused state of mind. The present study explores the notion of service in school domains by examining the joint effects of climate for service and the internal service in schools on teachers' work attitudes: work engagement, job satisfaction, and intention to leave their work. The notion of climate for service emphasizes the school's attitude of teachers as service providers to its clients (students and their parents); internal climate emphasizes the school's attitude of providing service to its teaching staff. The study was conducted via a sample of 423 teachers from 30 different schools in Israel. We hypothesized that the indirect relationship between the climate for service and teachers' job satisfaction and intention to leave work would be mediated by teacher work engagement. Our findings supported this hypothesis. Moreover, this indirect relationship via teacher work engagement was demonstrated most strongly when the internal service quality received was high, providing teachers with the capability to deliver what the service climate motivates them to do. Therefore, service-oriented resources—both climate for service and internal service—may be crucial in affecting teachers work attitudes and should be specifically targeted by principals and other educational decision makers.