Interpersonal needs and functional area of management

This study examines a sample of first-semester MBA students to determine the relationship between their interpersonal needs and their preferences for a functional area of management. The students were categorized according to their preference for one of the following eight functional areas: accounting, systems analysis, finance, small business management, engineering, marketing, manufacturing management, and personnel management. Interpersonal needs were measured by the Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation (FIRO-B) instrument developed by W. C. Schutz. Significant differences in interpersonal needs were found among students preferring different functional specialities. Implications of the results are discussed in terms of occupational choice processes.     

Workers' central life interests and personality characteristics

Industrial workers who perceive work as their central life interest (CLI) also describe themselves as having a higher level of decisiveness, initiative, and supervisory ability than workers with other CLI orientations. Workers with CLI orientations in nonwork institutions have the lowest scores on decisiveness, need for occupational achievement, and initiative, and the highest need for job security, of the groups studied. Workers with no anchored CLI had the highest need for self-actualization and need for occupational achievement, of all groups. These personality characteristics are seen as consistent with the CLI orientations of individual workers, suggesting that the personality does “fit” some institutional setting, but not necessarily all those in which the individual functions.     

A comparison of female supervisors in business and government organizations

This exploratory study compared the life style and interpersonal need orientation, leadership style, and perception of the organization structure of female supervisors in business and government organizations. The government group had a significantly higher formalistic and lower sociocentric and personalistic life style orientation; lower needs for expressed control, expressed affection, wanted inclusion, wanted affection, and a higher need for wanted control; were lower on consideration and higher on structure leadership dimensions; and perceived their organization as being more bureaucratic and less collaborative and coordinative than the business group. The findings were discussed in terms of the processes of individual-organization congruity and organizational socialization.     

Resolving contradictory findings on sex and social class differences in children's responses to reinforcement

Contradictory results have been reported on the effectiveness of various reinforcers with children of different ages and socioeconomic classes. The present study considered the relative effectiveness of two types of verbal and one type of tangible reinforcement on a two-choice discrimination task (marble-in-the-hole) for preschool children. IQ and operant level were treated as covariates and accounted for the observed differences in performance between the 24 middle-class and 24 lower-class children and between the 24 males and 24 females. Disparate findings of previous studies regarding sex and social class differences might have been reconciled if baseline and IQ had been considered.     

A developmental study of recognition of pictures and nouns

Children at four age levels (4, 6, 8, and 10 years) were given continuous recognition tasks using concrete noun, abstract noun, and pictorial stimuli in a 4 × 3 factorial design. Pictures were recognized significantly better than concrete and abstract nouns at the 4- and 6-year age levels and significantly better than abstract nouns at the 8- and 10-year age levels. This supported Paivio's contention that pictures are easier to remember than words because of a greater possibility of dual encoding, while Rohwer's contention that there is a shift in recognition memory development received no support. There were no significant differences between recognition of concrete and abstract nouns at any age level, which opposed the findings from adult studies and suggested that Paivio's theoretical orientation would have to be extended in order to account for developmental data. Recognition for both concrete and abstract nouns was found to be linear and increasing significantly with age, but no age trends for picture recognition were found.