CAREER SELF-MANAGEMENT: A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL ASSESSMENT OF THE EFFECTS OF A TRAINING INTERVENTION

A growing trend is to encourage employees to become actively involved in the management of their own careers. Career self-management, the degree to which one regularly gathers information and plans for career problem solving and decision making, includes two main behaviors: developmental feedback seeking and job mobility preparedness. Although career self-management training is a commonly used employer intervention to re-socialize individuals to increase their own career management activity, it is rarely rigorously evaluated. Relying on an expectancy theory framework, the goal of this study was to evaluate the general effects of career self-management training using a quasi-experimental design. Based on data from several hundred professionals at a major U.S. employer, the results showed formal training efforts were generally not successful in resocializing people to engage in career self-management activities, and when done as an isolated human resource strategy, decreased trainees' likelihood of engaging in career self-management behaviors. To the extent that Time 2 expectancy perceptions got worse, the results showed that an individual's attitudes toward feedback seeking mediated the relationship between the training intervention and the level of preparation for job mobility conducted 6-8 months following the training.     

Age‐related Changes in Creative Thinking

Age‐related differences in cognitive processes were used to understand age‐related declines in creativity. According to the Geneplore model (Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992), there are two phases of creativity — generating an idea and exploring the implications of the idea — each with different underlying cognitive processes. These two phases are measured in the Creative Invention Task (CIT; Finke, 1990). Younger adults (n = 41) and older adults (n = 41) completed the CIT, the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT), and a measure of working memory capacity (Paper Folding test). In addition, the CIT was scored by both younger and older adults. There were age‐related declines on both phases of the CIT, but not on the TTCT. These declines were noted by both the younger and older raters. After adjusting for working memory capacity, however, age‐related differences on the CIT were nonsignificant.     

A Comparison of the Day-Care Needs,Attitudes, and Practices of Intact and Single-Parent Families

This article compares the day-care needs, attitudes, and practices of intact and single-parent families. Factors differ between single and married parents in the selection of child-care programs. Implications are presented for counselors and employers working with employees in the area of child-care support.     

Relation of Creativity to Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence

The threshold hypothesis regarding creativity and intelligence suggests that these two constructs are positively correlated except at the higher end of the IQ distribution, where they are unrelated. Much of the support for this hypothesis comes from comparisons of correlations within average and high‐IQ groups. However, a common methodological flaw in these comparisons is that the high IQ group is smaller in variance than the average IQ group. In the present study we equated variances for a better test of the threshold hypothesis. College students in two IQ groups completed tests of creativity and intelligence. IQ and creativity correlated at least as strongly in the high IQ group as in the average IQ group, generally failing to support the threshold hypothesis. However, breakdown of composite IQ into fluid and crystallized IQ indicated minimal support for the threshold hypothesis with crystallized IQ, but support for an inverse threshold effect with fluid IQ. Fluid IQ correlated significantly with creativity in the high IQ group but not in the average IQ group, and this pattern was corroborated by regression analyses. Possible explanations for the pattern of results are offered.     

COGNITIVE COMPLEXITY MEASURES AND THE RELATIONSHIP OF COGNITIVE COMPLEXITY TO COMMUNICATION

This review assesses the adequacy of several commonly employed cognitive complexity measures on the basis of five criteria: high test-retest reliability with adults, association with chronological age across childhood and adolescence, independence from intelligence and verbal abilities, association with other indices of developed social cognition, and association with measures of developed communicative functioning. Extant research indicates that only one complexity measure—Crockett's Role Category Questionnaire—is satisfactory on all these criteria, whereas Bieri's widely used measure is deficient on most. However, research to date concerning the relationship of cognitive complexity (as assessed by Crockett's measure) to communication has failed to illuminate the specific role played by complexity as opposed to other social-cognitive factors with which it is associated.