The roles of leader emotion management and team conflict for team members' personal initiative: A multilevel perspective

Employees' personal initiative (i.e., their active and future-oriented engagement at work) is of high relevance to organizations that strive for innovation and competitiveness. To better understand its drivers and diminishers, the present study refers to Affective Events Theory and examines the impact of leader emotion management, team conflict, and affective well-being on personal initiative. Data from 300 members of 59 work teams in Germany were gathered from multiple sources at three points in time over the course of 2 weeks. Multilevel analyses indicated that leader emotion management positively affected team members' personal initiative and that this effect was mediated by team members' affective well-being. Data also revealed a contrasting negative indirect effect of task conflict within the team on team members' personal initiative via team members' affective well-being. The study's results suggest that the improvement of leaders' emotion management as well as the establishment of work conditions and experiences that foster affective well-being should be seriously considered by organizations wishing to facilitate personal initiative in team settings.     

Effects of membership change on open discussion and team performance: The moderating role of team tenure

This study identified temporal conditions when membership change may enhance or diminish team functioning. Using a longitudinal repeated measures design surveying 41 R&D teams, this study examined whether team tenure moderated the relationship of membership change with open discussion and team performance. The results illustrated that increasing membership change was positively associated with both open discussion and team performance for newly formed teams, whereas this association was negative for long-serving teams. Thus, what matters is not so much whether a team's membership changes but rather whether the team's longevity supports or impedes adaptation to personnel changes.     

Fostering innovation in functionally diverse teams: The two faces of transformational leadership

Empirical research on the effects of functional diversity on team innovation has yielded largely inconsistent results, showing positive, negative, as well as nonsignificant effects. For capitalizing on the positive potential inherent in functionally diverse teams, opening the black box between cross-functionality and team innovation by analysing mediating and moderating processes thus seems to be highly relevant. In this article, task and relationship conflicts are introduced as mediators of functional diversity and team innovation. Within this framework, transformational leadership is discussed as a moderator. It will become apparent that the role of transformational leadership in fostering the innovativeness of cross-functional teams is rather ambiguous. The discussed mediators and the moderator transformational leadership are integrated into a comprehensive framework and propositions for future research are derived.     

Book reviews

Books reviewed:
Dale Mathers, An Introduction to Meaning and Purpose in Analytical Psychology
Jane Cabot Reid (ed. & narrator), Jung, My Mother, and I: The Analytic Diaries of Catharine Rush Cabot
Heather Formaini (compiler), Landmarks. Papers by Jungian Analysts from Australia and New Zealand
Neil Russack, Animal Guides in Life, Myth and Dreams: An Analyst's Notebook
Rose–Emily Rothenberg, The Jewel in the Wound
Judith Edwards (ed.), Being Alive, Building on the Work of Anne Alvarez     

A Thurstonian Analysis of Preference Change

This paper presents a Thurstonian model for the analysis of preference change. Preferences are expressed in the form of rankings, possibly with ties. A vector-autoregression framework is used to investigate relationships between past and current rankings. It is shown that this approach yields a parsimonious and easily interpretable representation of individual preference differences in time-dependent ranking data. A detailed analysis of the 1992 National Election Study illustrates the proposed approach.     

From Noosphere to Theosphere: Cyclotrons, Cyberspace, and Teilhard's Vision of Cosmic Love

Two theme–setting quotations introduce this essay—that of Yeats's falcon, deaf to the falconer's call, adrift in space above the blood–dimmed tide, counterpoised to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's call to abandon old nationalistic prejudices and build the earth. With primary references to the thought of Teilhard, along with, among others, to Ewert Cousins, Andrew M. Greeley, Karl Jaspers, Marshall McLuhan, Ilya Prigogine, Karl Rahner, Leonard Swidler, David Tracy, and Alfred North Whitehead, I argue that the most crucial intellectual paradigm shift of the twenty–first century will challenge humanity to take the turn from uncritical attachment to rigid absolutism or atomistic fragmentation toward a sense of open–ended, off–centered centeredness and fluid connections—from a static to a dynamic model of reality. Central to my argument is the Teilhardian reinterpretation of the Christian metaphors of creation, fall, incarnation, salvation, and the eschaton in the evolutionary terms of the emergence of cosmic consciousness from the chrysalis of the world of the past—from chaos to order, from biosphere via noosphere to theosphere. Facilitated by the exponential growth of populations, collaborative research, science, technology, and global communication (most dramatically manifested by the Internet), this emergent understanding of what it means to be human can, first, foster the awareness that in humanity evolution has become conscious of itself, and then, gradually, precipitate the formation of “the global village” (the mystical body of Christ), as respectful dialogue replaces diatribe and the dualistic pugilism of Samuel Huntington's “Clash of Civilizations” is gradually transformed into a nonadversarial mentality that values shared humanity and a common purpose. Thus, eons hence, empowered by love–energy, the transmutation of the human into the ultra–human can take the ultimate quantum leap into a yet higher dimension where spirit/energy is no longer in need of flesh/mass, and Earth can be safely left behind.     

God and Evolutionary Evil: Theodicy in the Light of Darwinism

Pain, suffering, death, and extinction have been intrinsic to the process of evolution by natural selection. This leads to a real problem of evolutionary theodicy, little addressed up to now in Christian theologies of creation. The problem has ontological, teleological, and soteriological aspects. The recent literature contains efforts to dismiss, disregard, or reframe the problem. The radical proposal that God has no long–term goals for creation, but merely keeps company with its unfolding, is one way forward. An alternative strategy to tackle the problem of evolutionary theodicy is outlined, with an implication for environmental ethics and suggestions for further work.     

Is how it is said important? The association between quality of therapist interventions and client processing

This study examined the association between the quality of therapist interventions and client in‐session processing using the York Therapist Process Measure (YTPM; Toukmanian and Armstrong, 1998). The instrument's three dimensions — attunement, tentativeness and meaning exploration — were tested separately for their impact on clients' manner of processing and depth of experiencing. For each of the 20 mild‐moderately depressed clients, treated in short‐term experiential therapy, a high and a low client‐process segment was isolated from a session that was judged by an experienced therapist to manifest the greatest amount of “good therapy moments”. Therapist interventions within these segments were then rated on the YTPM. Results revealed significant differences in the quality of therapist interventions between high and low segments. Attunement and tentativeness were associated significantly with greater complexity in manner of processing, and meaning exploration with greater depth in experiencing. The implications of these findings for psychotherapy research and practice are discussed.     

Simple matrix methods for analyzing diffusion models of choice probability, choice response time, and simple response time

Diffusion processes (e.g., Wiener process, Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process) are powerful approaches to model human information processes in a variety of psychological tasks. Lack of mathematical tractability, however, has prevented broad applications of these models to empirical data. This tutorial explains step by step, using a matrix approach, how to construct these models, how to implement them on a computer, and how to calculate the predictions made by these models. In particular, we present models for binaries choices for unidimensional and multiattribute choice alternatives; for simple reaction time tasks; and for three alternatives choice problems.