Mentoring support and power: A three year predictive field study on protégé networking and career success

Career success of early employees was analyzed from a power perspective and a developmental network perspective. In a predictive field study with 112 employees mentoring support and mentors’ power were assessed in the first wave, employees’ networking was assessed after two years, and career success (i.e. income and hierarchical position) and career satisfaction were assessed after three years. Networking was the most robust predictor of career success. Mentoring received predicted career satisfaction and its effects on objective career success were mediated by networking. Further, mentoring by a powerful mentor predicted objective career success beyond networking. Based on previous findings we argue that these findings underscore the critical relationship between early career employees’ networking behaviors and mentoring received.     

Field dependence-independence from a working memory perspective: a dual-task investigation of the Hidden Figures test

Field dependence-independence (FDI) is a construct intensively investigated within cognitive style research, but its cognitive underpinnings are not clearly specified. We propose that performance on FDI tasks primarily reflects the operations of the visuospatial and executive components of working memory. We tested this hypothesis in a dual-task experiment with a commonly used measure of FDI, the Hidden Figures Test. The results showed that performance on this test was impaired by concurrent performance of secondary tasks that primarily tap the visuospatial component (spatial tapping) and the executive component (2-back and random number generation), but was almost unaffected by other secondary tasks (simple tapping and articulatory suppression). Moreover, an analysis of secondary task performance ruled out the possibility of strategic trade-offs and revealed an intriguing dissociation for two different sets of "randomness" indices for the random number generation task. These results support the hypothesised mapping between FDI and working memory components and suggest that the dual-task paradigm can provide a useful way to bring underspecified constructs like FDI into closer alignment with theoretical ideas developed within cognitive psychology.     

Self-initiated mentoring and career success: A predictive field study

There is a growing recognition of the proactive role of individuals in the world of work. Therefore, the roles of self-initiated mentoring and networking behaviors at the work place were investigated in a longitudinal study over two years with 121 early career employees in administrative and managerial jobs. As expected, after controlling for age, gender, and general intelligence, self-initiated mentoring predicted mentoring received, income, and hierarchical position. The relationship between self-initiated mentoring and career ascendancy was not meditated by mentoring received but by networking behaviors at the work place. The receipt of mentoring can be a part of the early career success yet it is not its critical mediator. Implications and limitations are discussed.     

Role of Political Skill in Job Performance Prediction Beyond General Mental Ability and Personality in Cross‐Sectional and Predictive Studies1

Political skill is the capacity to understand others in working life effectively, and to apply such knowledge to induce others to act in ways that add to one's personal or organizational goals. The present investigation reported the results of 2 studies designed to examine the job performance prediction effectiveness of political skill when investigated in conjunction with general mental ability (GMA) and personality characteristics. The results demonstrated that political skill accounted for a significant proportion of job performance variance beyond GMA and personality variables cross‐sectionally in Study 1, and predictively (i.e., using a 1‐year timeframe) in Study 2 examining effects on multiple dimensions of job performance. The implications of these results, strengths, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.     

The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex "Frontal Lobe" tasks: a latent variable analysis

This individual differences study examined the separability of three often postulated executive functions-mental set shifting ("Shifting"), information updating and monitoring ("Updating"), and inhibition of prepotent responses ("Inhibition")-and their roles in complex "frontal lobe" or "executive" tasks. One hundred thirty-seven college students performed a set of relatively simple experimental tasks that are considered to predominantly tap each target executive function as well as a set of frequently used executive tasks: the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), Tower of Hanoi (TOH), random number generation (RNG), operation span, and dual tasking. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the three target executive functions are moderately correlated with one another, but are clearly separable. Moreover, structural equation modeling suggested that the three functions contribute differentially to performance on complex executive tasks. Specifically, WCST performance was related most strongly to Shifting, TOH to Inhibition, RNG to Inhibition and Updating, and operation span to Updating. Dual task performance was not related to any of the three target functions. These results suggest that it is important to recognize both the unity and diversity of executive functions and that latent variable analysis is a useful approach to studying the organization and roles of executive functions.