MOTIVATION AND VALUES AMONG JAPANESE AND AMERICAN MANAGERS

There have been recent claims in the popular literature about the superiority of the Japanese-inspired participative principles of "Theory Z" management for business productivity. Yet motivational and value differences that might support these principles have seldom been evaluated psychometrically. In response to this need, middle-aged Japanese and American business managers were administered the Rokeach Values Survey and a questionnaire measure of upward mobility desires (Sarnoff). Results showed the Japanese attached greater importance to socially beneficial values in contrast to the American emphasis on individuality and straightforwardness. Yet the Japanese also showed greater valuation of accomplishments and, on the motivational instrument, more interest in advancement, money, and forward striving. Since the latter characteristics tend to be those most associated with success, it is suggested that achievement and advancement motivation may be one fuel for Japanese productivity and collective actions only their method for disciplining and rewarding it.     

ADJUSTING SALES RESULTS MEASURES FOR USE AS CRITERIA

The use of objective criterion measures in validation research raises the issue of criterion contamination. Several methods of treating sales measures in the empirical keying of a biodata instrument are compared. The relative contaminating effects of local economic conditions and company factors are evaluated. This study is an example of how practitioners can use their knowledge about the selection context to develop acceptable criterion norming strategies.     

Impacting Awareness of Child Abuse through a Spiritually Based Performing Arts Project

Using indigenous religious folklore images, a folk opera explored issues of child abuse, sexual assault and violence through a psychologically fictionalized character of Mary Magdalene. Befriended by an understanding Mary, Mary Magdalene is healed of her childhood ‘wounds through a religious conversion after almost refusing to encounter Jesus. Six hundred secondary students attended three daytime performances and 486 returned a Likert‐scaled questionnaire. The results indicated that most students perceived abuse as a personally relevant social problem, with this felt relevance increasing with age. Significant trends supported initial expectations that the play may help increase community and personal awareness of child abuse and sexual assault and that the play may also help increase a personal and community interest and effort toward helping others. Perplexing differences in school responses suggest that the schools in which prior discussion occurred may have led to students gaining more social insight and benefit from the play, although some of these same schools also tended to reject the personal relevance of the play. The latter may indicate community risk factors contributing to denial. More Hispanics responded positively to the sense of benefit, which may reflect the fact that there is a Hispanic Catholic majority in the community that sponsored the play itself. Overall, the findings suggest that performing arts can help increase awareness of child abuse as well as personal and community interest in helping and that this benefit increases with teacher discussion and age. In spite of procedural deprivations, the authors felt it was a relatively rare and useful effort to collect some data, hopefully to inspire more social scientists with more resources to consider collaborating with socially and spiritually meaningful fine arts productions in order to document scientifically the impact of the arts on human attitudes and behaviour. The reader's tolerance for the obvious limitations of investigation are requested and appreciated. A discussion of psychospiritual models of creativity and healing concludes the paper.     

EXPATRIATES' PSYCHOLOGICAL WITHDRAWAL FROM INTERNATIONAL ASSIGNMENTS: WORK, NONWORK, AND FAMILY INFLUENCES

Integrating the expatriate adjustment and employee turnover literatures, we develop a model of expatriates' decisions to quit their assignments. This model explicitly considers the role of adjustment, the project-based nature of international assignments, and the importance of several nonwork and family context factors in this withdrawal process. We test this model with a sample of 452 expatriates and a matched subsample (providing multiple sources of data) of 224 expatriates and spouses, living in 45 countries. Consistent with domestic turnover research, multiple regression analyses indicated that the work-related factors of job satisfaction and organizational commitment were significant predictors of expatriate withdrawal cognitions. We also found support for the direct, indirect, and moderating influence of nonwork satisfaction and several family context variables (i.e., family responsibility, spouse adjustment, spouse overall satisfaction, and living conditions) on decisions of expatriates to quit their assignments. Implications for both organizational withdrawal and international HRM researchers and practitioners are discussed.     

Evaluating Therapist Competency and Adherence to Behavioral Family Management with Bipolar Patients

The present study assessed fidelity to the behavioral family management (BFM) model for treating bipolar disorder patients and their families. The BFM Therapist Competency/Adherence Scale (BFM-TCAS) was developed to evaluate clinicians' competency and adherence to BFM, as outlined by Miklowitz' (1989) BFM Manual for use with bipolar patients. Therapist competency and treatment adherence was also evaluated with regard to two family characteristics: overall level of family difficulty and family expressed emotion (EE) status. The BFM-TCAS was used to code 78 videotaped sessions of 26 families with a bipolar member, selected from a larger treatment study of bipolar disorder patients. The findings suggest that, overall, clinicians adhered closely to the BFM manual. Specific areas in which there was high competency and treatment adherence were (a) skill in conveying factual information about bipolar illness, (b) establishment of a therapeutic environment, and (c) ability to take command of therapy sessions. The one area in which there was less compotency and relatively weak adherence to the manual was the use of between-session homework assignments to assist families in mastering the BFM exercises. Results of this study also suggest that, for the most part, therapist competency and adherence ratings were not related to overall level of difficulty or to family EE status.     

Using Cognitive Dissonance to Encourage Water Conservation1

In a field experiment on water conservation, we aroused dissonance in patrons of the campus recreation facility by making them feel hypocritical about their showering habits. Using a 2 × 2 factorial design, we manipulated subjects “‘mindfulness” that they had sometimes wasted water while showering, and then varied whether they made a “public commitment” urging other people to take shorter showers. The “hypocrisy” condition-in which subjects made the public commitment after being reminded of their past behavior-was expected to be dissonance-arousing, thereby motivating subjects to increase their efforts to conserve water. The results were consistent with this reasoning. Compared to controls, subjects in the hypocrisy condition took significantly shorter showers. Subjects who were merely reminded that they had wasted water, or who only made the public commitment, did not take shorter showers than control subjects. The findings have implications for using cognitive dissonance as means of changing behavior in applied settings, especially those in which people already support the desired goal, but their behavior is not consistent with those beliefs.     

Growing Pains: A Theory of Stress and Moral Conflict

This article outlines a relationship between the crises that create stress in our lives and periods of instability in moral development. Stressful issues, we suggest, are more difficult to resolve during periods of developmental instability. When problems are most stressful we often experience the impact of that stress physiologically. The physiological symptoms of stress, we argue, reflect unresolved problems in primary relationships that occurred during the early (sensorimotor) developmental stages when feelings are experienced physiologically. In this way the physiological symptoms of stress become a metaphoric map for the developmental resolution of moral issues. Thus, stress and its symptoms, rather than becoming debilitating, can be reconstructed as “Growing Pains.”     

Possibilities for a Nondominated Female Subjectivity

This essay examines one of the contributions that Sandra Bartky makes to feminist theory. Bartky critiques Foucault for his gender blind treatment of the disciplines and social practices that create “docile bodies.” She introduces several gender specific disciplines and practices that illustrate that the production of bodies is itself gender coded. This essay argues that social practices are not monolithic, but are composed of various strands that may be in tension with one another.