Using a Conceptually-Based Predictor of Tenure to Select Employees

This paper describes the development and validation of a personnel selection instrument designed to predict employee tenure. The instrument was developed using models of employee turnover, psychodynamic theory, and beliefs regarding the optimal way to advance one's career. Four predictive designs were conducted to validate the instrument. Correlation coefficients ranged from .14 (p < .07) to .28 (p < .05) in predicting tenure.     

Temporal stability of a safety attitude inventory

The purpose of this study was to examine the temporal stability of a paper-and-pencil inventory on safety attitudes, the Employee Safety Inventory. 62 employees of a major publishing company completed the inventory twice with a 10-day interval between testings. A test-retest reliability coefficient of .88 was obtained for the over-all Safety Index. No significant differences in reliability coefficients were found between men and women or between those who had experienced major life events during the time between testings and those who had not experienced such events. This inventory provided a highly reliable measure of safety attitudes.     

The severity and prevalence of deviant employee activity within supermarkets

Expert ratings were used in this study to derive severity indices for a variety of types of counterproductive employee behavior. Deviant behaviors rated as most severe included taking cash, merchandise or equipment from the employer without permission and engaging in drug use on the job. Coming to work hungover from alcohol was rated as the least severe behavior. The prevalence of severe theft and counterproductivity was then explored using the admissions of a supermarket employee sample. A variety of admissions of severe counterproductive behavior were obtained, which were grouped under the five general categories of theft, theft support, time theft, counterproductivity, and other types of deviance. Major findings revealed that 35% of supermarket employees admitted to engaging in severe theft of company cash or property within the previous six months.     

Theft reduction through personnel selection: A control group design in the supermarket industry

A quasi-experimental design was used to compare the effectiveness of preemployment integrity tests at six supermarket chains. Two of the supermarket chains had used some type of overt integrity test and four had not. Responses to an anonymous survey of 234 employees at these six chains were analyzed. Respondents from the chains that did not use preemployment integrity tests perceived significantly higher dollar amounts of employee theft than did respondents for the test-using companies. Implications for the usefulness of preemployment integrity tests are discussed.     

Elements of a counter‐exhibition: Excavating and countering a Canadian history and legacy of eugenics

Into the Light, a recently mounted collectively curated museum exhibition, exposed and countered histories and legacies of 20th‐century “race betterment” pedagogies taught in Ontario's postsecondary institutions that targeted some groups of people, including Anishinaabe, Black, and other racialized populations, and disabled and poor people, with dehumanizing ideas and practices. This article advances understandings of the transformative potential of centralizing marginalized stories in accessible and creative ways to disrupt, counter, and draw critical attention to the brutal impacts of oppressive knowledge. The “counter‐exhibition” prioritized stories of groups unevenly targeted by such oppression to contest and defy singular narratives circulating in institutional knowledge systems of what it means to be human. The authors draw on feminist, decolonial and disability scholarship to analyze the exhibition's curation for the ways it collectively and creatively: (1) brought the past to the present through materializing history and memory in ways that challenged archival silences; and (2) engaged community collaboration using accessible, multisensory, multimedia storytelling to “speak the hard truths of colonialism” (Lonetree) while constructing a new methodology for curating disability and access (Cachia). The authors show how the exhibition used several elements, including counter‐stories, to end legacies of colonial eugenic violence and to proliferate accounts that build solidarity across differences implicated in and impacted by uneven power (Gaztambide‐Fernández).     

The Meeting Point: Where Language Production and Working Memory Share Resources

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - The interaction between working memory and language processing is widely discussed in cognitive research. However, those studies often explore the...     

Contrasting Grammatical and Lexical Determiners

This paper investigates the difference between the production of grammatical determiners and lexical determiners in the production of adjective-noun phrases (NPs) in Danish. Models of sentence processing (Garrett in Psychology of learning and motivation, Academic press, New York, pp 133–177, 1975; Bock in J Mem Lang 26(2):119–137, 1987) suggest that the phonological encoding stage of grammatical items can only be specified once lexical items have been phonologically encoded. In their usage-based linguistic theory of the grammar-lexicon distinction, Boye and Harder (Lang 88(1):1–44, 2012) propose that this later encoding of grammatical elements is motivated by two specific features of grammatical elements. The first feature, dependence, is that grammatical items (morphemes, words, constructions) cannot be produced in isolation, but are always dependent on a lexical host item. This feature entails a more complex processing which might lead to longer reaction times when comparing the production of NPs with a grammatical determiner to a lexical one. Additionally, a more complex processing might lead to a lower accuracy rate for the grammatical condition relative to the lexical one. The second feature, low prominence, is that grammatical items code background information and therefore cannot convey the main point of a linguistic message. Less focus on grammatical elements might lead to a lower accuracy rate for the production of grammatical elements relative to lexical ones. Those predictions were tested in a task comparing the production of Danish grammatical determiners (indefinite articles) with the production of lexical ones (numerals, which are homonymous with the articles except for a stress difference) in similar contexts. Group-based analyses were performed in order to take inter-individual differences into account. The results show that the two features as proposed by Boye and Harder (2012) are only revealed for the fastest speakers group but not the slower ones.     

Predicting counterproductivity among drug store applicants

The ability of a preemployment integrity test to predict future admissions of counterproductive behavior by employees was investigated. Job applicants completed the London House Personnel Selection Inventory (PSI) as part of an overall selection process. Approximately one year later, a survey was sent to applicants at their home addresses. The survey asked for the frequency with which these applicants engaged in a variety of counterproductive behaviors at work. The PSI accurately predicted admissions of cash and merchandise theft, theft of time, behaviors associated with poor job performance, and the frequency with which the theft of other employees was observed.