The Person/Environment Dynamics of Employee Empowerment: An Organizational Culture Analysis

Using an organizational culture framework, this case study examines the critical preconditions necessary for employee empowerment and highlights how the multiple cultures within one public bureaucracy differently impacted their implementation. SERVE, a large human service organization, initiated an employee empowerment program that contradicted and thus collided with many elements of its overall organizational culture. Despite the best intentions of the organizational leaders, upper management support, and opportunities for participatory decision making, the organization could not foster the critical preconditions needed for employee empowerment. Leaders had difficulty expanding the employees' power and promoting member inclusion. Concurrently, most employees rejected these new opportunities for control and distrusted the leader's intentions. Yet, despite the widespread rejection of these empowerment initiatives, most employees described their work lives as empowering. The role the local site subculture played in promoting employee empowerment is examined. We discuss how a localized (vs. system-wide) empowerment endeavor may be a more appropriate and feasible focus for public bureaucracies seeking to initiate greater staff empowerment. Particular attention is paid to the interaction between individuals and their environments, and how this interaction affects the empowerment process.     

The Problem of local optimality with OSMOD

The possibility of obtaining locally optimal solutions with categorical data is pointed out for the original version of OSMOD development by Saito and Otsu. A revision of the initialization strategy in OSMOD is suggested, and its effectiveness in diminishing this possibility is demonstrated.     

Sources of visual field interference in children and adults

Subjects at three grade levels, third, sixth, and college (8, 11, and 20 years of age, respectively), were asked to identify briefly presented words accompanied by either words or letter strings in the same or opposite hemifield. Results indicated two sources of visual field interference, one relating to the presence of alphanumeric information elsewhere in the visual field and the second concerning the meaningfulness (lexical identity) of that information. The former showed a decrease in importance with age, and the latter an increase. Results were discussed in terms of the development of selective attention and hemispheric interaction.     

CONTROL OF ARITHMETIC ERRORS USING INFORMATIONAL FEEDBACK AND GRAPHING1

The effect of informational feedback and graphing on reducing the number of arithmetic worksheet errors was investigated. The present study replicated and extended earlier findings with other populations (Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1974, 7 , 547–555; 1970, 3 , 1–4; 1970, 3 , 235–240) to a first-grade classroom. Ten first-grade pupils (four males and six females) served in an ABAB design. During the feedback-only phase, subjects were provided informational feedback, in the form of a written number, on the number of errors made on individual arithmetic worksheets. The feedback-only phase lasted seven days and was followed by the feedback-plus-graphing phase, during which subjects graphed the number (of errors written at the top of the individual worksheet) daily on individual graphs on their desks. The feedback-plus-graphing phase lasted 10 days and was followed by a reversal to feedback only for 10 days. The final phase was a replication of the feedback-plus-graphing phase. All subjects showed a change in number of worksheet errors, in the predicted direction, during the feedback-plus-graphing phases. An overall mean difference of ?2.66 was found to be statistically significant (P < 0.01), using a Wilcoxson Matched-Pairs Sign Test. The results were interpreted as being empirical support for earlier findings in other populations. In addition, the present findings represented a successful extension of feedback and graphing interventions to the management of academic behaviors in a first-grade classroom.     

Training public-speaking behavior: an experimental analysis and social validation

The effect of an instructional package on public-speaking behaviors was analyzed in two experiments. The instructional package was designed to teach public-speaking trainees to look at the audience, make gestures, and perform a number of speaking behaviors. The results of Experiment I, with a university student serving as the trainee, showed that the percentage of each category of public-speaking target behavior increased only after the instructional package was introduced for that category. The results of Experiment 2, with three low-income paraprofessional staff members of a neighborhood service center serving as trainees, showed that the percentage of target behaviors increased after the instructional package was introduced for the respective trainee. Audience ratings of public-speaking performance were correlated with direct observations of target responses. All trainees showed marked improvements in audience ratings from pretraining to posttraining. This study demonstrated an effective procedure for training public-speaking behaviors.     

MODIFICATION OF SEIZURE DISORDERS: THE INTERRUPTION OF BEHAVIORAL CHAINS1

This study investigated the effects of interruption and differential reinforcement on seizures in children. Seizures were conceptualized as the terminal link in a behavioral chain, resulting in a strategy aimed at identifying and modifying behaviors that reliably preceded the seizure climax. Seizure frequency was reduced in four of five subjects, whereas the frequency of preseizure behavior was reduced in only three subjects. Parents and school personnel were successfully used as change agents.     

Asymmetries in the acquisition of polar adjectives: Linguistic or conceptual?

This study was designed to determine whether the asymmetry in children's acquisition of polar adjective pairs is based on linguistic factors related to differences in adult usage and frequency or on an underlying conceptual difference. 24 children, aged 3;7–4;11, took part in a concept-learning task in which nonsense syllables replaced English words for the positive and negative ends of four dimensions: size, height, length, and thickness. The data indicate that the syllables for the negative end of each dimension have a longer learning period and a greater prelearning error rate. These results support the hypothesis that the asymmetry observed in the acquisition of polar adjectives is based on an underlying conceptual asymmetry.     

“Generalized imitation” on a nonimitative task: Effects of modeling and task history

Two experiments investigated characteristic generalized imitation procedures on a nonimitative successive visual discrimination task. In Experiment I, no discriminative behavior was obtained though a number of procedures designed to enhance discrimination were employed. The introduction of a differential modeling procedure after nine or 10 sessions of nondifferential performance was ineffective in producing differential responding for three of four Ss. In the second experiment, the differential modeling procedure was introduced as an initial manipulation and was successful in establishing discriminative performance in all Ss. After several sessions of differential responding, the observation of a model performing nondifferentially was relatively ineffective in altering the pattern of responding. These results suggest (1) that modeling may be functional in altering a S's behavior depending on what point in the procedures the manipulation is introduced and (2) that certain procedural variables may define a functional response class characterized by the failure to develop discriminative responding.     

Social isolation as a punishment procedure: a controlled study

Contingent social isolation was investigated as a punishment procedure for the disruptive behavior of emotionally disturbed children in a classroom setting. The methodological limitations of previous studies were outlined, and alternatives adopted. Within a reversal and multiple baseline design, contingent social isolation was found to be an effective and relatively specific punisher. By introducing a new observation procedure, “pseudo-timeout”, it was determined that the punishing effect of social isolation was not attributable to observation artifact. A means for resolving the terminological confusion in the present use of timeout and social isolation was recommended.