Search

Interviews with 82 academic and 84 nonacademic university staff about their retirement intentions and attitudes, work attitudes, and withdrawal behaviors found that dissatisfied individuals are more likely to engage in organizational withdrawal behavior, such as lateness, absenteeism, and retirement. Academic personnel had greater satisfaction and less desire to retire. (SK)

Research has consistently documented a discrepancy between experiencing offensive sex-related behaviors and labeling these situations as sexual harassment, leading to several attempts to understand this phenomenon. The authors propose that the issue of why it is that women who report such experiences generally do not indicate that they have been sexually harassed is an important psychological question, and may provide a path through the nested meanings of workplace harassment. The authors argue for the value of moving beyond a descriptive approach to this issue by examining the effects of self-labeling on the psychological, health, and work-related outcomes of unwelcome, sex-related experiences. They present data from female employees working in 3 separate organizations, demonstrating that women exposed to such behaviors report very similar consequences, whether they label their experiences as harassment or not.

A behavioral consistency model was used to evaluate the predictive validity of ability and training performance measures as components in a two-stage pre-reject sequential selection procedure. Participants were 91 college students who completed ability tests and training relevant to an air intercept and traffic control operator task. A simulation study was conducted so that two groups could be examined: a high ability group, analogous to a screened hired employee group in an organization; and a quasi-random ability group, analogous to an applicant pool as a validation sample. The incremental validity of training performance was practically and statistically significant in the prediction of component and overall task performance after including ability as a predictor in both groups. Adding ability to the prediction of task performance after training performance had been used as a predictor had no practical effects in either sample. The validity and likely utility of using sequential procedures to select employees as well as implications of behavioral consistency measures for privacy and discrimination in employee testing are discussed. Future research directions using different types of training and employee samples are also described. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Methods from Item Response Theory were used to assess the degree to which a French-Canadian translation of the Job Descriptive Index, a job satisfaction inventory, provided measurement equivalence across source and target languages and cultures. The procedures were found to be applicable to cross-language research. (Author/LHW)

Examined attitudinal and behavioral variables associated with reemployment following job termination. Analyses revealed that reemployed persons were significantly more confident of job search skills and had engaged in a greater number of search behaviors than had individuals who had remained unemployed. Suggesting that reemployment success is related to individual differences in expectations of successful job search. (Author/BL)

Addresses the problem of the equivalence of linguistically translated items that form measurement scales used to assess psychological traits or constructs in source and target cultures and languages. Outlines assessment procedures that are standardized but that also reflect cultural-specific concepts and values. (PS)

The article presents the results of a study on trends in job-related attitudes of managerial and professional employees. The study found that overall job satisfaction decreased from 1971-1974. Throughout the four-year interval males declined in all aspects of job satisfaction except financial rewards. The most significant decline in male job satisfaction was with career future and company identification. Levels for female job satisfaction were lower in 1974 except for satisfaction with career future.

The article focuses on a study which examined job satisfaction trends in a stable organization in the U.S. setting. The study reported is a large-scale, quasi-longitudinal, cross-sectional investigation. Geographical location of the respondent, job function and job tenure were the variables selected for the study which were related to the aspects of job satisfaction. Study results are presented in terms of satisfaction trends over time. These results establish the existence of a downward trend in job satisfaction for workers who are fairly representative of the U.S. industrial employees.

We argue a divergent perspective from that taken by Barrett, Caldwell, and Alexander (1985) in a critical reanalysis of the evidence for dynamic criteria. Those authors distinguished three definitions of the dynamic criterion phenomenon and concluded, on the basis of secondary analyses of several sets of published data, that dynamic criteria do not exist. Moreover, they concluded that most of the temporal changes in criteria reported in those data sets could be explained by methodological artifacts. In several cases these artifacts were listed in summary form, without a complete consideration of the implications of involving these artifacts as post hoc explanations. The purpose of this comment is to clarify the debate on dynamic criteria by critiquing the Barrett et al. study. We suggest that a fruitful solution to the problem may lie in trying to understand criteria per se rather than searching for artifacts. (reproduced by permission of the publisher.)

We review two closely related phenomena in the study of ability and performance: (a) decreasing predictive validity in ability-performance relations when studied longitudinally and (b) the superdiagonal stability matrices (i.e., simplex-like matrices) found in the correlations between repeated trials on a variety of tasks. We discuss briefly two models that explain these phenomena, a changing task model and a changing-subject model, and report an empirical study in which (a) the generality of the simplex phenomenon in an area of human performance not previously studied and (b) whether the decrease in correlations across time would eventually stabilize (a hypothesis of the changing-task model) were investigated. Intercorrelation matrices of major league baseball performance across 10 years (four measures) indicate that the correlations systematically decrease over time with no evidence of stabilizing. We discuss the implications of these empirical findings and conceptual developments for utilities of selection programs. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Traditional correlational and regression analyses of aggregated absences are ill-suited for estimating parameters of the absence-taking process. A class of event history models is described that effectively deals with the distributional and temporal properties of absences. Once such model, a proportional hazard rate model, was applied to the daily attendance records of 2,130 incumbent, white-collar employees of a national financial service organization. Temporal and historical variables affected the hazard rate of voluntary absence taking. Demographic variables that were significantly correlated with aggregated absences did not improve prediction of the hazard rate. Consequences of violating the modeling assumptions of independent observations and large samples were examined empirically. Results indicated that the model was robust to such violations. Implications of the findings and of the successful application of the model are discussed. Several recommendations are made for using the model in organizations and for future studies of absence taking and other low base-rate events in organizations. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

The study examines the fidelity with which the Job Descriptive Index, a job satisfaction scale, was translated from English into Hebrew to determine if biases can be ingrained in translation. The research determined that 21 of 66 items tested proved to be biased. The causes of such bias can be viewed both culturally and linguistically. The biases have implications for cross-language scale evaluations.

This article presents some updates from the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, University of Illinois as of July 1965. Professor Adolf Sturmthal has completed two major research projects during 1964, and their results were published in "Workers Councils: A Study of Workplace Organization on Both Sides of the Iron Curtain," and "Current Manpower Problems: An Introductory Survey." Sturmthal has also compiled and edited a comparative study of white-collar trade unions in nine countries. The volume, now in press, consists of individual presentations by different authors on Great Britain, the U.S., Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Austria, Japan, and Australia, and a comparative essay by Sturmthal suggesting some generalizations that can be derived from the studies of the other contributors. Solomon B. Levine, in collaboration with H. Kawada, is completing a study of the historical development of Japanese manpower resources in the process of industrialization. They are also continuing to work on a long-range study of the impact of technological change and economic growth upon Japanese industrial relations systems in comparison with advanced Western nations.