Resolving Compensation Disputes with Three-party Job Evaluation

Des conflits naissent dans les organisations a propos du montant de la retribution versee aux titulaires de certains postes. Aux Etats-Unis par exem-ple, le probleme de la contribution-retribution a provoque recemment plusieurs conflits autour des postes traditionnellement reserves aux femmes. Mediation et arbitrage sont les procedures habituellement retenues, mais une evaluation du travail regroupant trois partenaires est une solution originate dont les retombees favorables sur l'organisation depassent la resolution d'un conflit particulier.
Un groupe tripartite a exploite pour 1'evaluation du travail des dimensions pourvues d'echelles precises. Des equipes de deux personnes representant les parties adverses ont evalue des postes "convenablement retribues" a partir des dimensions sus-mentionnees. Les donnees ont été statistiquement synthetisees. Des equipes de deux personnes ont ensuite evalue tous les postes defendus par le syndicat implique dans le conflit. Cet eventail de postes incluait ceux qui etaient en litige.
Une tierce partie neutre devait conseiller les adversaires dans l'application d'une methode d'evaluation du travail qui resolvait le conflit, depistait les postes susceptibles de poser probleme a l'avenir et fournissait un moyen pour retribuer equitablement les nouveaux postes.     

Contextual conditional discriminations

Three experiments used a discriminated operant procedure to study conditional discrimination learning in rats. The first experiment showed that rats were capable of learning a biconditional discrimination in which two contexts served as conditional cues signalling the reinforcement contingencies associated with two discriminative stimuli. The discrimination was learned equally well when one discriminative stimulus signalled food, the other its absence, and when one stimulus signalled food, the other extinction plus mild footshock.

In Experiment 2 it was shown that prior training on such a conditional discrimination enhanced the subsequent context specificity of simple conditioning relative to control groups of animals for whom the prior training had not been conditional. Experiment 3 showed that a reversal of the significance of one pair of discriminative stimuli produced no spontaneous reversal in performance to a second, target, pair.

The pattern of results is best accounted for by an analysis of contextual conditional discrimination learning in terms of stimulus configurations and offers no support for the notion that rats may learn a general conditional rule or set.