The Measurement and Interpretation of Organizational Climate

This study describes the development and application of a new organizational climate instrument, the Survey of Organizational Characteristics (SOC). The participants in the development phase were 94 master's of business administration students, and the participants in the validation phase were 77 medical professionals: 24 medical faculty, 17 postdoctoral students, and 36 medical technicians. The final instrument consisted of 8 relatively independent scales with alpha coefficients based on the combined sample ranging from .77 to .98, and with 6 coefficients that were higher than .90. Validity hypotheses based on a priori knowledge about the 3 medical groups were for the most part well substantiated, although the small sample of postdoctoral students was a limitation. In relation to the findings, an attempt was made to clarify and perhaps narrow several of the conceptual and methodological gaps that persist between organizational climate and organizational culture.     

An Application of Generalizability Theory to the Consistency-Specificity Problem: The Transsituational Consistency of Behavioral Persistence

We assessed the behavioral persistence of 65 elementary school children in five situations to explore further the consistency-specificity, or trait-situation, issue. We predicted that the cross-situational consistency of persistence would co-vary with gender, socioeconomic status, and intelligence. The data were analyzed within the context of generalizability theory, and some of our predictions were supported by the results. We contend that the consistency-specificity issue can be profitably studied by direct behavioral assessments within the context of generalizability theory. The implications of the findings for the consistency-specificity issue, and for personality assessment in general, are discussed.     

Studies of Abnormal Behavior in the Rat: XVII. Guidance Versus Trial and Error in the Alteration of Habits and Fixations

Formation of a God concept, in accordance with the developmental hypothesis of object relations theory, includes the utilization of representations acquired within the context of significant relationships. Previous researchers have attempted to determine the comparative extent to which parent representations give rise to an individual's God image. In this study, we measured the similarities between subjects' composite parental ratings and their image of God. As predicted, the parental composite was significantly closer to the God rating than were the singular parent representations.     

Learning As Support For Organizational Innovation: Possibilities And Limitations

Abstract

The present article tells an intervention story where two collectives, from business and academia, came together to address a business problem through collaborative action research. Among other things, the project created new ways of learning and therefore, knowing about the “business problem.” The author argues that in order to talk about an organizational intervention in a learning context, it was helpful to focus observation at the level of practice, in this case the different learning practices brought to the project by the organization and the research group. The “scientific narrative” focuses on how the two practices interacted. The present story's plot revolves around the following questions: What happens when one collective—used to a particular style of learning—decides to engage with another collective with a different approach to learning and what are the consequences for organizational innovation?     

Evaluating the performance of departments of psychotherapy

Conceptual and practical issues which surround attempts at assessing the efficiency of psychotherapy departments are surveyed and the advantages and disadvantages associated with performance indicators reviewed. The issues of assessing efficiency in general and the selection of appropriate indicators at both national and local levels are discussed. It is concluded that it is possible to find indicators which reflect the value of a psychotherapeutic service to the community within which it is based, and that the identification of a generally agreed set of such parameters is a matter of priority.     

Self creation and the limitless void of dissociation: the 'as if' personality

The concept of the 'as if' personality has been used variously in analytic literature without having formed part of a clinically based theoretical development over time. The author discusses the bases of her notion of the 'as if' personality, as observed across a number of patients and supervised patients in intensive, long term analytic treatment. In this composite clinical picture, a grouping of elements that form a particular kind of defence of the self is identified in certain patients with an exceptional capacity for creative engagement in the world, surpassing expectations given their background. The picture includes the presence of physical breakdown and illness, as psychic suffering arising from early narcissistic wounding and from a physical, emotional and/or sexual abusive familial environment, was held for too long in bodily memory but not in mind. A distinction is made between the 'as if' personality, the persona and the false self. The 'as if' personality concerns the action of defensive dissociation deriving from very early experiences of internalizing the presence of an absent object, creating the sense of an internal void at the core of the self. At the same time, the self is capable of acts of self creation through a succession of identifications and internalizations with other sources of environmental nourishment, which substitute for, and are constructed around, the original sense of internal emptiness. Thus are restored, but only up to a point, the resources of the originally diminished self. Until these resources have been used up, the self is often able to excel in activities to an exceptional degree. The countertransference is shown to be the means of both useful but often perilously obtained clinical experience and information, supporting the work along the hazardous analytic journey.     

Category-specific effects on the identification of non-manipulable objects

Theories of category-specific effects on visual object identification predict easier identification of non-living than living objects. The Sensory-Functional theory credits greater representational weighting of the visual properties of living objects independent of greater weighting of the functional properties of non-living objects. It predicts a lost or reversed non-living advantage for non-manipulable objects. Normal participants matched pictures of non-manipulable objects with words describing three levels of identity while visual object similarity, and concept familiarity were controlled. Consistent with the Sensory-Functional theory, living objects were matched faster than non-living objects. Concept familiarity facilitated subordinate matches. Visual similarity hampered subordinate matches and facilitated basic matches.     

A multiple case study of rape victim advocates' self-care routines: the influence of organizational context

This study assumes that rape victim advocates who provide community outreach services to victimized women must adjust to a heightened awareness of sexual violence to do their jobs. Using qualitative methodology, this multiple case study explored rape victim advocates' strategies for incorporating repeated exposure to sexual assault into their daily lives as well as ways that organizations can support such endeavors. Findings suggest that advocates' self-care routines draw upon various personal resources (i.e., cognitive, physical, social, spiritual, verbal), and serve 2 roles for coping with rape-related pain: (a) cathartic releasing of traumatic material, and (b) improving capacity to integrate the traumatic material into one's life. Additionally, over 20 organizational characteristics that workers perceive to be supportive (e.g., weekly meetings, flexible hours) were identified. Nonparametric and categorical statistical analyses were used to analyze the relationship between organizational support and self-care routines, finding that advocates working in organizations with higher levels of support utilize more strategies that are integrative in nature. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

A memory span of one? Object identification in 6.5-month-old infants

Infants' abilities to identify objects based on their perceptual features develop gradually during the first year and possibly beyond. Earlier we reported [Káldy, Z., & Leslie, A. M. (2003). Identification of objects in 9-month-old infants: Integrating 'what' and 'where' information. Developmental Science, 6, 360-373] that infants at 9 months of age are able to use shape information to identify two objects and follow their spatiotemporal trajectories behind occlusion. On the other hand, another recent study suggests that infants at 4-5 months of age cannot identify objects by features and bind them to locations [Mareschal, D., & Johnson, M. H. (2003). The "what" and "where" of object representations in infancy. Cognition, 88, 259-276]. In the current study, we investigated the developmental steps between these two benchmark ages by testing 6.5-month-old infants. Experiment 1 and 2 adapted the paradigm used in our previous studies with 9-month-olds that involves two objects hidden sequentially behind separate occluders. This technique allows us to address object identification and to examine whether only one or both object identities are being tracked. Results of experiment 1 showed that 6.5-month-old infants could identify at least one of two objects based on shape and experiment 2 found that this ability holds for only one, the last object hidden. We propose that at this age, infants' working memory capacity is limited to one occluded object if there is a second intervening hiding. If their attention is distracted by an intervening object during the memory maintenance period, the memory of the first object identity appears to be lost. Results of experiment 3 supported this hypothesis with a simpler one-screen setup. Finally, results of experiment 4 show that temporal decay of the memory trace (without an intervening hiding) by itself cannot explain the observed pattern of results. Taken together, our findings suggest that at six months of age infants can store but a single object representation with bound shape information, most likely in the ventral stream. The memory span of one may be due to immaturity of the neural structures underlying working memory such that intervening items overwrite the existing storage.