The Validity of Job Knowledge Measures

The validity of written job knowledge tests as predictors of job performance and training success was examined. Based on a sample of 363,528 persons and 502 coefficients, meta-analyses were performed to investigate the extent of validity generalization and the effects of two hypothesized moderator variables: content similarity and job complexity. Corrected mean validities were 0.45 for studies predicting job performance and 0.47 for studies of training success. Support was found for both moderators since validities were higher for high complexity jobs and when job-test content similarity was high. The implications of this study for personnel selection and research in the area of work performance are discussed.     

The child as informant: Eliciting linguistic intuitions from young children

In this paper we report an interview technique we have developed to elicit judgments from young children about the well-formedness and referential properties of sentences. Judgments are compared with act-out responses of a group of 20 children ranging in age from 3 years 9 months to 5 years 4 months. We argue that judgment data are more revealing of children's grammars than are traditional performance tasks.     

Family-of-origin work and family therapy skills training: both-and.

Since the inception of field, theoreticians and teachers of family therapy have advocated for either problem-solving, skill-based training, or transgenerational training that emphasizes the therapist's own family-of-origin work. This article proposes an end to these polarized positions and argues for both-and, that is, a model of training that integrates the trainee's own family-of-origin work with live supervision and skills training. A family-of-origin curriculum designed for this purpose is described.     

Young Women's Dating Behavior: Why/Why Not Date a Nice Guy?

The purpose of this study was to investigate why some women report a desire to date nice guys but prefer dating jerks. Specifically, young women's dating choices based on their reasons for dating in general and the attractive/unattractive traits that they perceive that a man possesses were explored. Popular texts offer evidence that young women may/may not select nice guys as dating partners because nice guys may/may not be able to provide them with what they want from their dating experiences. Scholarly texts offer evidence that the answer may lie in how the young woman perceives the nice guy—does he possess attractive or unattractive personality traits? The results of the present study suggest that reasons for dating (i.e., not wanting physical contact, wanting stimulating conversation, and wanting an exclusive relationship) and perceived personality traits (i.e., sweet/nice and physically attractive) influence a young woman's desire to date a nice guy, and that perceived personality traits are better predictors of her choice of a man to date than are reasons for dating.     

Belonging and Doing: Political Churches and Black Political Participation

The importance of the political church in Black political participation has brought to the attention of scholars the differences among Black churches and their effect on Black mobilization. The Black church has on many occasions transformed itself into a politicized organization. These political churches become settings that encourage political knowledge and skills ( Tate, 1993 ) and communicate political activity as a norm ( Calhoun-Brown, 1996 ). The earlier work on political churches has established the importance of these organizations for voter turnout and other forms of political participation. What has been left unexamined is the nature of the political churches themselves. This project disentangles these churches by looking at the heterogeneity within the structures of the political churches. In general, we seek to understand which of the internal activities of the political church tend to foster acts of political participation. We hypothesize that cost- underwriting activities and obligation-creating activities within the church setting have the greatest impact on participation. By examining a robust and expansive operationalization of the political church construct, we find that these types of political church activities matter more than other activities. In specifying how churches may work to directly affect the participation of their members, we seek to expand the scope of general comprehension of political churches.     

Act Expediently,with Autonomy: Vicarious Learning,Empowered Behaviors,and Performance

Purpose

The purpose of this research is to investigate how organizations can best facilitate an empowered workforce that makes autonomous decisions and acts expediently, which the literature on high performing organizations posits will increase the likelihood of sustained performance and retaining competitive advantages. We introduce a novel mechanism for encouraging such behaviors and pursuant outcomes: vicarious learning from a supervisor who demonstrates autonomy and expediency.

Design/Methodology/Approach

We drew experimental data from a sample of participants who underwent a managerial simulation, and used these data to investigate relationships between the vicarious learning of empowered behaviors and individual task performance (n = 100).

Findings

Results indicate that when supervisors behave with autonomy and expediency this both increases the extent to which individuals behave similarly, and is associated with enhanced individual performance. Further, we find that expedient behavior fully mediates the relationship between empowered supervisor behavior and performance.

Implications

Findings show that supervisors need not necessarily engage directly in empowering others. Rather, by modeling behaviors, supervisors can craft a context where employees may act with autonomy and efficiency. This provides an opportunity for empowerment that is both actionable and cost-effective.

Originality/Value

This is the first study to consider empowerment as a managerial phenomenon that can be vicariously learned, integrating theories of social learning and empowerment, and extending existing empowerment constructs (including psychological and structural) to develop an indirect, yet potent means of encouraging empowered behavior.

     

Assessing Coparenting Relationships in Daily Life: The Daily Coparenting Scale (D-Cop)

We describe the development and validation of the Daily Coparenting Scale (D-Cop), a measure of parents’ perceptions of daily coparenting quality, to address the absence of such a daily measure in the field. A daily measure of coparenting can help us to better identify specific mechanisms of short-term change in family processes as well as examine within-person variability and processes as they are lived by participants in their everyday lives. Mothers and fathers, from 174 families with at least one child age 5 or younger, completed a 14-day diary study. Utilizing multilevel factor analysis, we identified two daily coparenting factors at both the between- and within-person level: positive and negative daily coparenting. The reliabilities of the overall D-Cop and individual positive and negative subscales were good, and we found that parents’ reports of coparenting quality fluctuated on a daily basis. Also, we established the initial validity of the D-Cop, as scores related as expected to (a) an existing and already validated measure of coparenting and to (b) couple relationship quality, depressive symptoms, and child behavior problems. Further, fluctuations in daily couple relationship feelings related to fluctuations in daily coparenting quality. The D-Cop and its subscales functioned almost identically when only utilizing 7 days of data instead of 14 days. We call for future work to study day-by-day fluctuations and dynamics of coparenting to better illuminate family processes that lead to child and family outcomes in order to improve the efficacy of family interventions.     

Can Basic Individual Differences Shed Light on the Construct Meaning of Assessment Center Evaluations?

The construct meaning of assessment center evaluations is an important unresolved issue in I/O psychology. This study hypothesized that Cognitive Ability and personality traits are primary correlates of evaluators’ overall assessment ratings (OARs). Meta–analysis results based on 65 correlations indicate the following mean construct–level correlations with OARs: .67 for Cognitive Ability, .50 for Extraversion, .35 for Emotional Stability, .25 for Openness, and .17 for Agreeableness; yielding a multiple R of .84. These findings support our hypothesis and cast light on the construct meaning of assessment center evaluations.     

Biodata Validity Decay and Score Inflation with Faking: Do Item Attributes Explain Variance Across Items?

Rating scales were developed to assess the biodata dimensions offered by Mael (1991). Biodata items assessing conscientiousness were administered under honest-responding and faking-good conditions. Item attributes were examined to determine their value in predicting item validity for honest respondents and item validity for faking respondents. Analyses were also conducted to determine whether the degree of item faking was related to item attributes. Item attributes associated with item validity for honest respondents are not the same as the item attributes indicative of item validity for the faking respondents. We suggest that this makes it very difficult to develop a biodata questionnaire which will be equally valid for both honest and faking respondents.