Career Adapt-Abilities Scale—Iran Form: Psychometric properties and relationships with career satisfaction and entrepreneurial intentions

This study examined the psychometric properties of a Persian translation of the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS—Iran Form) and its relationships with career satisfaction, business opportunity identification, and entrepreneurial intentions. It was hypothesized that career adaptability relates positively to these three outcomes, even when controlling for demographic and employment characteristics. Data were provided by 204 workers from Iran. Results showed that the overall CAAS score and sub-dimension scores (concern, control, curiosity, and confidence) were highly reliable. Moreover, confirmatory factor analyses indicated that the CAAS—Iran Form measures four distinct dimensions that can be combined into a higher-order career adaptability factor. Findings also demonstrated criterion-related validity of the scale with regard to career satisfaction and entrepreneurial intentions. In contrast, overall career adaptability was not significantly related to opportunity identification, while concern related positively, and control related negatively to opportunity identification. Overall, the CAAS—Iran Form has very good psychometric properties and predicts important career outcomes, suggesting that it can be used for career counseling and future research with Persian-speaking workers.     

Within-person relationships between daily individual and job characteristics and daily manifestations of career adaptability

Previous research showed that daily manifestations of career adaptability fluctuate within individuals over short periods of time, and predict important daily job and career outcomes. Using a quantitative daily diary study design (N = 156 employees; 591 daily entries), the author investigated daily job characteristics (i.e., daily job demands, daily job autonomy, and daily supervisory career mentoring) and daily individual characteristics (i.e., daily Big Five personality characteristics, daily core self-evaluations, and daily temporal focus) as within-person predictors of daily career adaptability and its four dimensions (concern, control, curiosity, and confidence). Results showed that daily job demands, daily job autonomy, daily conscientiousness, daily openness to experience, as well as daily past and future temporal focus positively predicted daily career adaptability. Differential results emerged for the four career adaptability dimensions. Implications for future research on within-person variability in career adaptability are discussed.     

Micro-breaks matter: A diary study on the effects of energy management strategies on occupational well-being

Organizational researchers and practitioners are increasingly interested in self-regulatory strategies employees can use at work to sustain or improve their occupational well-being. A recent cross-sectional study on energy management strategies suggested that many work-related strategies (e.g., setting a new goal) are positively related to occupational well-being, whereas many micro-breaks (e.g., listening to music) are negatively related to occupational well-being. We used a diary study design to take a closer look at the effects of these energy management strategies on fatigue and vitality. Based on conservation of resources theory, we hypothesized that both types of energy management strategies negatively predict fatigue and positively predict vitality. Employees (N = 124) responded to a baseline survey and to hourly surveys across one work day (6.7 times on average). Consistent with previous research, between-person differences in the use of work-related strategies were positively associated with between-person differences in vitality. However, results of multilevel analyses of the hourly diary data showed that only micro-breaks negatively predicted fatigue and positively predicted vitality. These findings suggest that taking micro-breaks during the work day may have short-term effects on occupational well-being, whereas using work-related strategies may have long-term effects.     

The role of consolidation for perceptual learning in temporal discrimination within and across modalities

Training people on temporal discrimination can substantially improve performance in the trained modality but also in untrained modalities. A pretest–training–posttest design was used to investigate whether consolidation plays a crucial role for training effects within the trained modality and its transfer to another modality. In the pretest, both auditory and visual discrimination performance was assessed. In the training phase, participants performed only the auditory task. After a consolidation interval of either 5 min or 24 h, participants were again tested in both the auditory and visual tasks. Irrespective of the consolidation interval, performance improved from the pretest to the posttest in both modalities. Most importantly, the training effect for the trained auditory modality was independent of the consolidation interval whereas the transfer effect to the visual modality was larger after 24 h than after 5 min. This finding shows that transfer effects benefit from extended consolidation.     

Diakonia Trinitatis Dei as/and Transformational Development

The paper acknowledges that different agencies acting against poverty and participating in poverty alleviation use different languages, for example, diakonia versus development and transformational development, while dealing with the same issues. Against the background of poverty in South Africa as well as development policies from South Africa, this paper discusses the importance of diakonia as founded in the trinitarian God, Father, Son, and Spirit. Using a missional paradigm, the paper discusses the missio Dei as it unites with the covenant, forgiveness, empowerment, and to make God known. The paper concludes that although diakonia has a more holistic and comprehensive approach, it is important to use language which is generally understood and accepted. It therefore suggests using the term “transformational development” to educate society about the concept of diakonia.     

Young children understand multiple pretend identities in their object play

This set of studies examined the ability of 3‐year‐olds to conceptualize multiple pretend identities with objects. Rather than relying on verbal response measures, as has been done in the past, children's creative and inferential pretend actions were used as indicators of their understanding. The common structure to all four studies was that children were confronted with one pretend scenario, moved to a second pretend scenario and then back again to the first. Children proficiently tailored their pretence to an object whose pretend identity changed between scenarios despite being less able to name each identity. Thus, using an inferential action methodology, these studies provide early and particularly convincing evidence that children can track the multiple pretend identities of objects.     

What Does it Take to Break the Silence in Teams: Authentic Leadership and/or Proactive Followership?

Leadership may help break the silence in teams, but this may not be equally true for all employees. Using behavioral plasticity theory, we propose that authentic leadership—a set of leadership behaviors through which leaders enact their true selves—reduces silence and motivates speaking up in employees low on proactive personality, but hardly affects employees who are proactive by nature, because proactive employees are less susceptible to social influences. Using data from 223 employees (nested in 45 work teams), we indeed find authentic leadership to reduce silence in employees with less proactive personalities, but not in more proactive employees. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for silence and authentic leadership.