A critical review of relationship quality measures: Is a fresh start needed? An agenda to move forward

Social relationships in and around work are a fundamental building block of organizational life. According to a number of relationship theories, the quality of those relationships is a critical aspect of their influence on a variety of employee and organizational outcomes. Relationship quality is, therefore, one of the most commonly studied constructs in management research. Our paper critically reviews the landscape of relationship quality measures used in management studies, identifying critical issues with how the construct has been conceptualized and measured. To help advance research on the subject and improve measurement, we identify and evaluate 21 relationship quality measures that have been developed for, or used in, management research. Overall, we find that the instruments used to measure relationship quality in management research have significant limitations associated with their conceptualizations and operationalizations. Many of these limitations stem from the fact that most of the measures used to assess the construct were not originally designed to measure relationship quality, which impedes research clarity and implications. We offer a future research agenda and several recommendations for the advancement of management research on relationship quality.     

Social Cognition in Paediatric Traumatic Brain Injury: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Neuropsychology Review - Recent evidence suggests social cognitive deficits may be among the most profound and disabling consequences of childhood traumatic brain injury (TBI); however, it is only...     

Machinery,Monstrosity, and Bestiality: An Analysis of Repulsion in Kierkegaard's Practice in Christianity

In reaction to a particularly scathing review of his Practice in Christianity, Kierkegaard postulated what he called a ‘preacher‐machine.’ As we will see, the preacher‐machine is only one type of character‐machine, for, in Practice in Christianity, there are five other such machines. Starting up these character‐machines will allow for an analysis of the repulsion of the God‐man, Christ himself. This repulsion is important because Kierkegaard claims that it is the condition for the emergence of faith. After discussing repulsion, Kierkegaard will locate a singular mistake of Christendom, which will allow him to offer his remedy to this problem. In doing so, I will claim, Kierkegaard makes a particularly forceful claim about the true status of Christianity. We begin by attempting an articulation of a definition of monstrosity before setting the scene of these six machines.     

Disagreement behind the veil of ignorance

In this paper we argue that there is a kind of moral disagreement that survives the Rawlsian veil of ignorance. While a veil of ignorance eliminates sources of disagreement stemming from self-interest, it does not do anything to eliminate deeper sources of disagreement. These disagreements not only persist, but transform their structure once behind the veil of ignorance. We consider formal frameworks for exploring these differences in structure between interested and disinterested disagreement, and argue that consensus models offer us a solution concept for disagreements behind the veil of ignorance.     

Pilgrims sailing the Titanic: Plausibility effects on memory for misinformation

People rely on information they read even when it is inaccurate (Marsh, Meade, & Roediger, Journal of Memory and Language 49:519–536, 2003), but how ubiquitous is this phenomenon? In two experiments, we investigated whether this tendency to encode and rely on inaccuracies from text might be influenced by the plausibility of misinformation. In Experiment 1, we presented stories containing inaccurate plausible statements (e.g., “The Pilgrims’ ship was the Godspeed”), inaccurate implausible statements (e.g., . . . the Titanic), or accurate statements (e.g., . . . the Mayflower). On a subsequent test of general knowledge, participants relied significantly less on implausible than on plausible inaccuracies from the texts but continued to rely on accurate information. In Experiment 2, we replicated these results with the addition of a think-aloud procedure to elicit information about readers’ noticing and evaluative processes for plausible and implausible misinformation. Participants indicated more skepticism and less acceptance of implausible than of plausible inaccuracies. In contrast, they often failed to notice, completely ignored, and at times even explicitly accepted the misinformation provided by plausible lures. These results offer insight into the conditions under which reliance on inaccurate information occurs and suggest potential mechanisms that may underlie reported misinformation effects.     

Manager–salesperson congruence in customer orientation and job outcomes: The bright and dark sides of leadership in aligning values

To create customer-oriented organizations, managers are often asked to promote a values-based vision. Yet, many managers struggle with transferring their values to employees making strategic value changes difficult. Despite this challenge, research has yet to demonstrate how managers effectively align values within the sales force, or the impact alignment has on job outcomes. Therefore, we develop and empirically test a conceptual framework to examine the role of transformational leadership in aligning salesperson customer orientation (CO) values. We find that transformational leadership is a strong mechanism in creating perceived value congruence, yet may have a surprising dark side. Results suggest that transformational managers achieve congruence by raising or, contrary to conventional wisdom, lowering salesperson CO values to meet the perceived values of the manager. Response surface modelling results support the importance of perceived manager values. Customer-oriented salespeople have higher job satisfaction and sales performance when they perceive their manager to also have high CO. When values are misaligned, job satisfaction increases more for low CO salespeople as perceptions of manager CO increase. Exploratory findings show that performance was higher under situations of perfect alignment but also under severe misalignment suggesting that values generate performance under complementary or supplementary conditions.     

Spanning our differences: moral psychology,physician beliefs,and the practice of medicine

Moral pluralism is the norm in contemporary society. Even the best philosophical arguments rarely persuade moral opponents who differ at a foundational level. This has been vividly illustrated in contemporary debates in bioethics surrounding contentious issues such as abortion and euthanasia. It is readily apparent that bioethics discourse lacks an empirical explanation for the broad differences about various topics in bioethics and health policy. In recent years, social and cognitive psychology has generated novel approaches for defining basic differences in moral intuitions generally. We propose that if empirical research using social intuitionist theory explains why people disagree with one another over moral issues, then the results of such research might help people debate their moral differences in a more constructive and civil manner. We illustrate the utility of social intuitionism with data from a national physician survey.     

Threatening scenes but not threatening faces shorten time-to-contact estimates

We previously reported that time-to-contact (TTC) judgments of threatening scene pictures (e.g., frontal attacks) resulted in shortened estimations and were mediated by cognitive processes, and that judgments of threatening (e.g., angry) face pictures resulted in a smaller effect and did not seem cognitively mediated. In the present study, the effects of threatening scenes and faces were compared in two different tasks. An effect of threatening scene pictures occurred in a prediction-motion task, which putatively requires cognitive motion extrapolation, but not in a relative TTC judgment task, which was designed to be less reliant on cognitive processes. An effect of threatening face pictures did not occur in either task. We propose that an object’s explicit potential of threat per se, and not only emotional valence, underlies the effect of threatening scenes on TTC judgments and that such an effect occurs only when the task allows sufficient cognitive processing. Results are consistent with distinctions between predator and social fear systems and different underlying physiological mechanisms. Not all threatening information elicits the same responses, and whether an effect occurs at all may depend on the task and the degree to which the task involves cognitive processes.     

Marines,medics, and machismo: Lack of fit with masculine occupational stereotypes discourages men's participation

Women have made substantial inroads into some traditionally masculine occupations (e.g., accounting, journalism) but not into others (e.g., military, surgery). Evidence suggests the latter group of occupations is characterized by hyper‐masculine ‘macho’ stereotypes that are especially disadvantageous to women. Here, we explore whether such macho occupational stereotypes may be especially tenacious, not just because of their impact on women, but also because of their impact on men. We examined whether macho stereotypes associated with marine commandos and surgeons discourage men who feel that they are ‘not man enough’. Study 1 demonstrates that male new recruits' (N = 218) perceived lack of fit with masculine commandos was associated with reduced occupational identification and motivation. Study 2 demonstrates that male surgical trainees' (N = 117) perceived lack of fit with masculine surgeons was associated with reduced identification and increased psychological exit a year later. Together, this suggests that macho occupational stereotypes may discourage the very men who may challenge them.     

The residual spatial abilities of hippocampally lesioned rats can be enhanced by peripheral sympathetic-adrenal interventions

In order to test the possible effectiveness of peripheral interventions with the adrenergic system for the alleviation of certain disorders that typically follow bilateral hippocampal lesions, rats with bilateral lesions of the hippocampus, the overlying neocortex, or sham operations were tested at two postoperative times in the Morris water maze, a frequently used "spatial task." Half of the animals in all groups were exposed to the adrenergic manipulations, i.e., a chronic, 7-day, systemic bretylium regime (5 mg/kg) and, in addition, a peripheral injection of norepinephrine (4 micrograms/kg) 30 min before the start of each training day. The other half received saline chronically and a single saline injection before each training day. Five days of training were given at each of the two training periods. The first began 7 days after surgery while the second began 33 days after surgery. As expected, the hippocampally lesioned animals were severely impaired in the task. The adrenergic treatment produced enhanced performances in the rats with hippocampal lesions at both training sessions, although the improvement was greatest at the later period. Although the animals receiving the pharmacologic treatment located the general area of the hidden platform better than the saline-treated animals with hippocampal lesions, the treated animals were still impaired, swimming directly to the hidden platform on fewer trials than did animals in the other groups.