FACTORS INFLUENCING EMPLOYEES' PROPENSITY TO USE AN EMPLOYEE ASSISTANCE PROGRAM

Using data collected from 1,987 employees at several locations of a large firm, this study investigates relationships between these employees' cognitive and attitudinal perceptions of an employee assistance program (EAP) and their propensity to use it. Familiarity with the program, perceived accessibility of it, and perceived managerial support for it are hypothesized to affect both employees' confidence in the program and their propensity to use it, and confidence in the EAP is further hypothesized to affect propensity to use. LISREL analysis supported the overall model, but the direct paths from the cognitive variables to propensity to use were not supported and confidence in the program was therefore indicated to be an essential mediating variable. Propensity to use an EAP is argued to be an important indicator of effective EAP implementation and suggestions are offered to management for promoting employee confidence in an EAP and ultimately their propensity to use it.     

Structure, Self-Regulating Sequences, and Institutional Third Parties in Therapy: The Veterans Administration as a Model

This article examines the structural organization and sequences of interaction among therapists, institutions, and patients and their families that contribute to the problem of institutional dependence. Our contention is that when patients have become dependent on an institution for the livelihood and/or for the stability it represents, they are only one part of a systemic relationship characterized structurally by enmeshed boundaries, and sequentially by self-regulating feedback loops. We use this premise to outline the nature of the enmeshed transactions in patient-therapist, patient-institution, and therapist-institution relationships. Family interfaces with this triad are also addressed. Sequentially, we outline the interactions among patient, family, therapist, and institution that lead to hierarchical incongruities. These sequences tend to produce self-regulating feedback loops that perpetuate and maintain the structure of the system and its patterns of interaction. The final part of this article demonstrates how we strategically use a therapy team to manipulate the hierarchical incongruities and, hence, the recursive complementarity, that characterize the interactions between and among the members of this suprasystem. Besides manipulating the role of the therapist through team intervention, we also present several paradoxical and structural interventions that have been helpful when institutions have become third parties to therapy.     

Outranking-Based Interactive Exploration of a Set of Multicriteria Alternatives

Interactive procedures are very effective for exploring sets of alternatives with a view to finding the best compromise alternative. In this paper we consider the interactive exploration of implicitly or explicitly given large sets of alternatives. Upon review of classical interactive procedures, which usually assume a utility function preference model, we distinguish three typical operations used in various interactive procedures: contraction of the explored set, exploration of some neighbourhood of a current alternative and reduction of a sample of the explored set. After pointing out some areas for improvement in the traditional procedures, we describe three interactive procedures performing the three operations respectively using an outranking relation preference model. Owing to the proposed ways of building and exploiting the outranking relation, the weak points of the traditional procedures can be overcome. Finally we solve an exemplary problem using all three procedures. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

AN INVESTIGATION OF THE EFFECT AND ECONOMIC UTILITY OF CORPORATE-WIDE TRAINING

This study describes a 4 year effort to investigate the effect and utility of managerial and sales/technical training. The effort relied upon quasi-experimental designs to investigate the effect of training programs, meta-analysis to summarize the effect of different types of training, and utility analysis to estimate the economic impact of training. The utilized multi-attribute utility analysis model, based on Raju, Burke, and Normand's 1990 (RBN) model, was modified and approved by the senior management of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company; it included a measure of criterion deficiency and corrected for differences due to alternative methods of calculating effect sizes (e.g., repeated measures ANOVA vs. ANCOVA). Results of 18 training program evaluations (range of N = 10 to 216), which were conducted in one company on the basis of supervisor, subordinate, or peer ratings, are reported. Great variation existed between the effectiveness of the programs (range of d = -.09 to 1.11), and managerial training was found to have less effect (d = .31) and utility (mean ROI = 45%) than sales/technical training (d = .64, mean ROI = 418%). In addition, the use of a 2-point performance scale in application of the RBN utility model as well as the role of management pre-approval of utility analysis are investigated.