The Match Between Recruiters’ Perceptions of Organizational Climate and Personality of the Ideal Applicant for a Management Position

The relationship between recruiters’ perception of the ideal applicant for a managerial position and their perception of organizational climate was examined in real selection procedures. Recruiters (n = 124) from 83 organizations in three sectors of industry participated in this study. They assessed the ideal applicant for the vacant managerial position with personality attributes derived from the Abridged Big Five Circumplex (Hofstee et al. 1992). Furthermore, they described the existing organizational climate with 14 climate scales based on the Competing Values framework of Quinn (1988). Results indicate that recruiters’ perceptions of goal oriented climate dimensions are related to the sector of industry. These perceptions influence the way in which recruiters perceive the ideal manager regarding conscientiousness and compliance. Recruiters’ perceptions concerning other dimensions of organizational climate are not related to the sector of industry and the personality profile of the ideal manager. Homogeneity of personality in organizations will exist for only some personality attributes.     

Confucian Order at the Edge of Chaos: The Science of Complexity and Ancient Wisdom

Many academics extol chaos theory and the science of complexity as significant scientific advances with application in such diverse fields as biology, anthropology, economics, and history. In this paper we focus our attention on structure-within-chaos and the dynamic self-organization of complex systems in the context of social philosophy. Although the modern formulation of the science of complexity has developed out of late-twentieth-century physics and computational mathematics, its roots may extend much deeper into classical thinking. We argue here that the essential ideas and predictions of the science of complexity are found within the social ordering principle of li (the rites) in Confucius's Analects .     

Weigh(t)ing for Awareness

We wished to learn if weight perception can be extinguished by studying two patients with right hemisphere brain damage. When lifting weights simultaneously, a patient with right frontal damage was not biased in her judgments of which weight was heavier. By contrast, a patient with right parietal damage reported left-sided weights as being lighter than those on the right. Psychophysical power functions revealed that her awareness of increasing weights on the left was dampened compared to the right when lifting weights individually on each side. Strikingly, her awareness of weight changes on the left was completely abolished when she lifted weights in both hands simultaneously. She demonstrated an unusual split in awareness, being motorically aware of and actively engaged with left-sided weights while being unaware of their incremental changes.     

The Relation of ERP Components to Complex Memory Processing

The relation between various ERP components generated during encoding of a word and its subsequent recall were investigated using a “rote” serial-order and an “elaborative” category memory task. Words (flashed separately) were time-locked to EEG recordings from 21 cortical sites. ERP components from the five subjects having the highest recall scores were compared to the five lowest scoring subjects. Results based on the P200 peak amplitude data as well as the N400 and late positive component peak amplitude and latency data suggest that anterior and posterior distributional differences are elicited during encoding of words for rote and elaborative memory tasks. Furthermore, strong individual differences in these patterns were found as a function of task. A tentative argument was made that the obtained anterior and posterior differences may index different word feature selection and encoding processes, which are differentially utilized by high and low recallers.     

Source Monitoring: ERP Evidence for Greater Reactivity to Nontarget Information in Older Adults

Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) were collected concurrently with stimulus presentation during a source monitoring task. Younger adults were less likely than older adults to make source monitoring errors and their ERP records showed far greater discrimination between target stimuli and familiar but nontarget foils. Older adults not only made more source errors but produced high amplitude late positivities to the nontarget foils even when these foils were correctly rejected. Under divided attention conditions, younger adults performance was similar to that of the older adults both behaviorally and electrophysiologically. These data illustrate the role that attentional resources play in the ability to inhibit response tendencies and suggest that age differences in source monitoring may be more related to attentional control than inefficiencies in the encoding of contextual information. As well, they suggest that the ERP late positivity may represent a more general response to item salience rather than serve as an index of recollection as is the current view.     

Types produce types: An examination of personality development using Holland's theory

This study was designed to test Holland's hypothesis that parents encourage the development of their own personality types in their offspring. Data were collected by personal interviews from three freshmen classes at a large midwestern university. Parent's personality types (occupations) were compared to offsprings' personality types (expressed occupational choices) using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov one-sample test to determine whether or not the comparisons were due to chance. The results indicated that relationships existed between the personality types of fathers-sons, fathers-daughters and mothers-daughters while no relationship was confirmed between mothers-sons.     

Stimulus factors and listening strategies in auditory memory: A theoretical analysis

A theory for the temporal course of perceptual coding during auditory short-term memory tasks is described. A low-level “sensor” and a high-level “identifier” process item and order information from stimulus word-strings. Both word durations and interword pauses are needed for this processing, and if adequate processing time is unavailable, perceptual delays will lead to degraded recall performance. Stimulus parameters and subject strategies interact to determine the quality and the order in which stimulus items are coded. These hypotheses are supported both by experiments using grammatical sentences and those using lists of unrelated words.