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Whereas most research has focused on the influence of teachers on student engagement, we postulate that peer experiences -- particularly bullying behavior as a victim or perpetrator -- impact student engagement over time. Using a sample of 525 adolescents (46% female, mean age = 13.51) nested within 31 classrooms from Chilean schools selected by convenience sampling design, we examined the relationship between victim and perpetrator on student engagement. Concurrently, we examined school bonding as a predictor of student engagement as well as its potential role as a protective factor. Our results indicated that perpetration predicted students' cognitive engagement (at the individual level), whereas both being a victim (at the individual level) and school bonding (at the individual and classroom levels) predicted emotional engagement. However, classroom-level school bonding did not moderate the relationship between bullying and student engagement. Our study highlights the importance of building positive school climates for improving student engagement.

Skill decay is the decrement in performance on acquired knowledge and skills after a period of nonuse. Although there is a fair amount of work on individual skill decay, the literature on team-level skill decay is very limited. Thus, using a synthetic task environment, the objective of this study was to compare individual and team performance in terms of skill acquisition, retention (decay), and reacquisition. Eighty-one individuals in 27 three-person teams were trained to perform a complex computer-based simulation. The initial acquisition phase comprised a 2-day, 5-hour training protocol. After an average 73.33-day nonuse interval (SD = 30.18), participants returned for a 2-hour reacquisition session. Participants completed the performance task as both individuals and teams. The results indicated that, compared to individual performance, team performance improved faster during the skill acquisition phase. However, unlike individual performance, the amount of decay for team performance was dependent on whether the first retention performance session for team members was performed as individuals—where trainees had the opportunity to perform all components of the task—or as a team, with the latter resulting in the most decay. By extension, these results highlight the impact of a relatively brief individual post-retention (nonuse) interval training to mitigate team skill decay. In short, our results indicate that a little individual practice can go a long way toward maintaining team retention performance, but in contrast, a little team practice does not do the same for individual retention performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The present study examined the effectiveness of after-action reviews (AARs; also known as debriefing) in mitigating skill decay. Background: Research on the long-term effectiveness of AARs is meager. To address this gap in the literature, we conducted an experimental study that also overcomes some research design issues that characterize the limited extant research. Method: Eighty-four participants were randomly assigned to an AAR or non-AAR condition and trained to operate a PC-based fire emergency simulator. During the initial acquisition phase, individuals in the AAR condition were allowed to review their performance after each practice session, whereas individuals in the non-AAR condition completed a filler task. About 12 weeks later, participants returned to the lab to complete four additional practice sessions using a similar scenario (i.e., the retention and reacquisition phase). Results: The performance of participants in the AAR condition degraded more after nonuse but also recovered faster than the performance of participants in the non-AAR condition, although these effects were fairly small and not statistically significant. Conclusion: Consistent with the limited research on the long-term effectiveness of AARs, our findings failed to support their effectiveness as a decay-prevention intervention. Because the present study was conducted in a laboratory setting using a relatively small sample of undergraduate students, additional research is warranted. Application: Based on the results of the present study, we suggest some additional strategies that trainers might consider to support long-term skill retention when using AARs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although safety climate research has increased in recent years, persisting conceptual ambiguity not only raises questions about what safety climate really is—as operationalized in the literature—but also inhibits increased scientific understanding of the construct. Consequently, using climate theory and research as a conceptual basis, we inductively articulated safety climate's general content domain by identifying seven core indicators of safety's perceived workplace priority: leader safety commitment, safety communication, safety training, coworker safety practices, safety equipment and housekeeping, safety involvement, and safety rewards. These indicators formed the basis for a generalized safety climate measure that we designed for use across organizations, industries, and construct levels. We then conducted a multilevel construct validation of safety climate using the newly created measure in two separate studies. Results from five samples spanning multiple organizations, industries, and cultural settings revealed that the identified safety climate indicators were parsimoniously explained by an overarching safety climate factor at the individual and workgroup levels. In addition, multilevel homology tests indicated that safety climate's associations with past safety incidents were nearly two times stronger at the workgroup level relative to the individual level, although this difference was not statistically significant. Finally, workgroup-level validity evidence demonstrated expected associations between safety climate and organization-reported pre- and postsurvey safety incidents. On the basis of this supportive evidence, we recommend that this conceptualization and measure of safety climate be adopted in research and practice to facilitate future scientific progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to situation strength theory, organizational climate should have a stronger effect on group behavior when members' perceptions of the climate are both unambiguous (i.e., very high or very low) and shared than when they are more ambiguous and less shared. In the organizational climate literature, this proposition is typically examined by testing the interaction between climate level (i.e., mean) and strength (i.e., variability); surprisingly, the preponderance of empirical research testing this interaction does not support this theoretical expectation. This may be because the traditional variable-centered approach fails to consider the possibility of overlooked subpopulations consisting of unique combinations of climate level and strength, creating distinct climate profiles. To address this issue, we use a group-centered conceptualization and analyses (i.e., latent profile analysis) to examine the extent to which 302 workgroups (Sample 1) and 107 organizations (Sample 2) evidence statistically and practically meaningful climate profiles. Results revealed four to six distinct climate profiles across multiple climate types were differentially associated with theoretically relevant outcomes, including objective financial measures. Consistent with situation strength theory, groups with strong and favorable profiles tended to have more positive outcomes, whereas groups with weaker, less favorable profiles tended to have less positive outcomes. In contrast, the traditional variable-centered approach was generally unsupportive of an interaction between climate level and strength. Overall, these findings provide evidence that the group-centered approach is a more sensitive statistical modeling technique for testing a fundamental tenet of situation strength theory in the context of organizational climate research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).