Valuing the invaluable: Do emotional experiences during fertility treatments affect the willingness to pay for them?

Introduction

This paper extends the accepted economic method of valuation by taking psychological factors into consideration.

Layers of engagement: Staff perceptions of spiritual care in residential aged care

ABSTRACT

Addressing the spiritual care needs of residents living in aged-care facilities should be an important dimension of quality care. We conducted semi-structured interviews with residential aged-care staff (including caregivers, nurses, managers, and chaplains) in New Zealand to explore how spiritual care is understood and operationalized. Many participants appeared to equate spiritual care with holistic care that respects the whole person. Participants discussed five types of spiritual care engagement requiring different skills, knowledge, and personal commitment, including information gathering, facilitation, companionship, end-of-life care, and counseling. Our findings suggest that the spiritual care that was offered by our participants, clergy and non-clergy alike, was predominantly informal and unplanned.     

Motivated to be socially mindful: Explaining age differences in the effect of employees’ contact quality with coworkers on their coworker support

In this research, we examine how high-quality contact can facilitate employees’ coworker support and explain why the benefits of high-quality contact are contingent upon age. First, we employ a social mindfulness lens to decipher the motivational mechanisms of high-quality contact with coworkers on providing coworker support via coworker-oriented perspective taking and empathic concern. Second, we utilize socioemotional selectivity theory to overcome the current age-blind view on workplace interactions and examine the indirect moderating effect of age via future time perspective on the link between contact quality, social mindfulness, and coworker support. We tested our hypotheses based on data from a sample of 575 employees collected in three waves. Results showed that both coworker-oriented perspective taking and empathic concern mediated the positive effects of contact quality on coworker support. The effect of contact quality on coworker-oriented empathic concern was stronger for older employees with a more constrained future time perspective as compared to younger employees with a more extensive future time perspective. Overall, we extend research on aging, workplace interactions, and support behavior by linking the literature on these topics using a social mindfulness lens and by adding employee age and age-related mechanisms as important boundary conditions that qualify the outcomes of positive workplace contact.     

Athletic identity,values and self-regulatory efficacy governing hypercompetitive attitudes

This study adaptes the identity-value model (IVM) of self-regulation to examine a structural model of the psychosocial processes governing hypercompetitive attitudes among athletes. Structural equation modeling of data from 522 competitors, aged 11–23 years, showed that the effect of athletic identity on hypercompetitive attitudes was serially mediated via athletes’ values and self-regulatory efficacy. Athletic identity positively predicted all athletes’ values for morality, competence, and status. Moral values (positively) and status values (negatively) predicted self-regulatory efficacy, which in turn negatively predicted hypercompetitive attitudes. Self-regulatory efficacy (fully) mediated the negative effect of moral values and (partially) mediated the positive effect of status values on hypercompetitive attitudes. Also, these effects were invariant across gender, sports types, and age. This study extends the application of the IVM, the athletic identity maintenance model (AIMM), and the Schwartz’ basic values theory, by suggesting that athletic identity is a strong predicator of athletes’ values and can operate in concert with athletes’ values and self-regulation efficacy in governing hypercompetitive attitudes.     

Addressing the Supply of Psychologists in the Workforce: Is Focusing Principally on Demand Sound Economics?

The growth of the psychologist workforce offers greater human capital for delivering psychological services. Workforce expansion also may contribute to excessive services or psychologists' employment concerns. Our survey revealed that interns and Internship Directors perceive the supply and demand workforce imbalance as one of the most important problems, and possibly the most challenging problem, facing professional psychology in the next decade. Organized psychology has predominantly focused on options for approaching workforce imbalances by exploring avenues for increasing the demand for psychologists' services and broadening the scope of their professional activities. Additional attention to moderating the supply of psychologists and current training levels is perceived as an important and potentially more successful means of addressing imbalances between the workforce supply and the demand for psychologists' services. Internship directors were pessimistic about the impact of most of the resolutions of the 1997 Supply and Demand Conference in addressing workforce imbalances.     

Organizational and client commitment among contracted employees: A replication and extension with temporary workers

This study replicates and extends Coyle-Shapiro and Morrow’s study (Coyle-Shapiro, J.A.-M., & Morrow, P.C. 2006. Organizational and client commitment among contracted employees. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 28, 416-431) of organizational and client commitment among contracted employees. Our study focuses on temporary workers rather than long-term contracted employees, and also finds that perceived organizational support (POS) from a client organization indeed relates to affective organizational commitment towards the client. However, this study further suggests that client POS also relates to continuance commitment towards the client as well as affective and continuance commitment towards the temporary agency. Finally, temporary workers’ desire to pursue temporary work relates to affective commitment towards the temporary agency, but continuance commitment to the temporary agency is related to a preference for permanent employment.     

Workplace violence and workplace aggression: Evidence on their relative frequency and potential causes

Recent news reports have focused attention on dramatic instances of workplace violence—extreme acts of aggression in work settings. It is suggested here that such actions, while both tragic and frightening, are only a small part of a much larger problem of workplace aggression—efforts by individuals to harm others with whom they work or the organizations in which they are employed. The present study investigated two major hypotheses with respect to such aggression: 1) contrary to what media reports suggest, most aggression occurring in work settings is verbal, indirect, and passive rather than physical, direct, and active; 2) recent changes in many organizations (e.g., downsizing, increased workforce diversity) have generated conditions that may contribute to the occurrence of workplace aggression. A survey of 178 employed persons provided partial support for both predictions. Verbal and passive forms of aggression were rated as more frequent by participants than physical and active forms of aggression. In addition, the greater the extent to which several changes had occurred recently in participants' organizations, the greater the incidence of workplace aggression they reported. © 1996 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Contingent employment in academic careers: Relative deprivation among adjunct faculty

This article utilizes relative deprivation theory to examine the careers of non-tenure-track instructors and research associates. Demographic status, motivations for accepting contingent employment, and standards of comparison used to assess the quality of the job were all related to the degree of relative deprivation experienced by adjunct faculty. Furthermore, even after controlling for the level of objective job rewards (e.g., salary) and objective working conditions (e.g., hours worked), relative deprivation was consistently and negatively related to both career attitudes and job behaviors. The article concludes with directions for future theory development, empirical research, and management practice in regard to academics and other highly-skilled professionals engaged in contingent employment.     

Policy and Financing of the Professional Psychology Workforce

The federal government has played a significant role in the financing the education of healthcare professionals since the introduction of Medicare in 1965. However, professional psychology's limited ability to argue the critical nature of its services to the welfare of the nation, and its lack of national workforce information and policy, has hindered its inclusion in Medicare's Graduate Medical Education (GME) program. This paper discusses the evolution and current status of healthcare workforce policy in the United States, and the implications for psychology and the training of future professionals. Also described are recent efforts by the American Psychological Association (APA) and a few psychologists to include professional psychology in the GME program. The importance of organized psychology's sustained involvement in national health policy is emphasized.