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The concept of human resilience is used in various contexts from every day speech to experts discourse. When used in everyday language, the concept of psychological resilience seems quite clear and understandable. In the professional psychological context, we encounter various problems and ambiguities on a theoretical, terminological and methodological level. When we take a closer look. A more thorough analysis of the concept of psychological resilience currently leads to the assumption that it is a complex, complexly structured multi-conditional phenomenon. The aim of the paper is to explore Czech and Slovak psychologists' concept of psychological resilience. The paper presents a theoretical definition of the phenomenon of resilience, discussing its relation with health and outlining approaches to researching hardiness. The sample was randomly assembled on the basis of respondents' willingness to participate. Responses were collected using a questionnaire completed by 348 psychologists from the academic community and other spheres in which psychology is professional practiced. The method - using a questionnaire with a small number of relatively simple questions - primarily provides information on respondents' immediate reactions to the questions. The analyzed sample was assembled randomly on the basis of willingness to participate; it is not a representative sample. In view of the research topic, no hypotheses were generated; instead, research questions were formulated concerning the definition of psychological hardiness, its relation with health, methods used in diagnosing or researching hardiness, and the opinions of experts from the academic and research community. In view of the nature of the data collected, an analysis of descriptive data was carried out, based on absolute and relative frequencies. When defining psychological hardiness, most of the respondents used the concept of ability in the general sense (either in simple or more complex terms), or they defined hardiness as a psychological characteristic (a personality trait). They assumed a strong and significant connection between hardiness and health. This corresponds with the opinions of numerous present-day researchers. The psychologists from the academic sphere gave more detailed responses. When determining hardiness, respondents use self-devised methods or methods taken from expert sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to provide preliminary evidence of the concurrent and structural validity of a novel instrument to measure students' attitudes toward school subjects. This new tool uses interactive software and measures attitudes less directly by asking students to change different visual features of objects displayed in a virtual three-dimensional space, thereby expressing their attitudes metaphorically (popularity/liking through size, importance through size, difficulty through weight, and relationship with a teacher through temperature). The results of this novel method were compared and related to the semantic differential, an already established instrument that is frequently used in the context of school evaluation and focuses on connotative meanings. The study was carried out on a sample of 147 Czech primary school students who rated three school subjects: Czech, English, and mathematics. We used structural equation modeling to analyze the measurement structure of both instruments and the relationship between them. The results showed that a single dominant factor (popularity/liking) can explain the majority of the variance shared between items. However, residual correlations suggested that two other factors are at play, namely importance (measured by the visual metaphor of size) and difficulty (measured by the visual metaphor of weight). The results did not support a three-factor structure of the semantic differential, which is proposed by the theory of the instrument, since only two semantic differential items appeared to measure something different from popularity/liking. Furthermore, the visual metaphor of distance was the best indicator of popularity/liking, and although other metaphors related to popularity/liking as well, they showed discriminant validity in relation to other metaphors, as evidenced by their pattern of residual correlations with the semantic differential items. In summary, the results support the concurrent validity of the novel instrument utilizing interactive metaphors and also the discriminant validity of individual metaphors but question the proposed factorial structure of the semantic differential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study maps the development of work and organizational psychology in the Czech Republic. The first part outlines the development of the discipline in the world, which took place in two main lines concentrated on individual and social aspects. The second part deals with the development of work and organizational psychology in the then Czechoslovakia, with particular emphasis on the Czech lands. The development of psychotechnics was supported by international institutional cooperation (the Institute of Psychotechnics at the VI Division of the Masaryk Academy of Labor started its activities in 1920) and the establishment of specialized workplaces in large companies (e.g. the Vítkovice Ironworks, Baťa Zlín, Electrical Enterprises of Prague). Psychotechnics focused mainly on work analysis, pre-employment personality attributes diagnostics, employee selection and placement, performance and productivity analysis, employee evaluation and motivation, consultancy in the choice of profession as well as personal problems etc. The development of work and organizational psychology in Czechoslovakia was briefly discontinued in the 1950s, and subsequently revived at the turn of the fifties and sixties, when professional psychological activities started taking place at universities and in various research institutions. In order to solve contemporary problems related to the human factor in industry, professional psychological workplaces were either renewed or newly created in several large enterprises and organizations and their management departments. The scope of their activities was extensive and included routine selective diagnostics as well as consulting, and expert activities including scientific research. At present, following the transition to a market economy after 1990, professional activities and staffing of psychological workplaces in individual economic organizations and companies have been gradually reduced to complete dissolution, and the efforts to meet the requirements for psychological services have been moved to specialized external companies. The third part of the study discusses selected experts who significantly contributed to the development of Czech work and organizational psychology and their publishing activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a number of psychological factors related to work engagement in teachers. Using a sample of 449 lower and upper secondary school teachers, it focuses on the Big Five personality traits, respondents' age, and several factors based on the teachers' subjective evaluation of their work -- including the meaningfulness of their work, job satisfaction, and workload. The results indicate that teachers' work engagement is connected primarily with their job satisfaction and perception of the meaningfulness of their work (which functioned as predictors), as well as respondents' Big Five personality traits (of which extraversion and conscientiousness were predictors). Perceived workload emerged as a negative predictor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a significant shift of approach to the management of organizations and workers in recent decades. This shift in management philosophy is characterized by converting from traditional, conventional (rather bureaucratic) management models to rather humanistic/existential oriented models. This transition comes partly from the understanding that human resources are the most promising and effective way for organization development, partly from a shift in the understanding of the role of organizations in society. The key point of these approaches has become a "meaning" or "meaningfulness" in relation to the work and organization. The importance of work meaningfulness is not only in its potential to increase the competitiveness of organizations, but especially in its major (mostly positive) impacts on the employee himself and his work (and by that the organization and its performance). Work meaningfulness is strongly connected to the work engagement, which represents the active personal participation in the work process, manifested by vigor, active cooperation, willingness to contribute to the company's success and dedication to work. Work engagement seems to be next important factor affecting work attitudes and achievements of employees. The paper gives an overview of various approaches to work meaningfulness and work engagement, on the basis of which authors propose new model of work meaningfulness with overlap to work engagement. The work meaningfulness is not seen as one-dimensional variable, but consists of complex of interacting factors and processes that define an individual perceived meaning and importance of the work. Meaningful work is influenced by three areas. The first is the organizational culture. This is defined as a specific pattern of values, norms, beliefs, attitudes and assumptions that are often not clearly expressed, but affect the way individuals behave in an organization and how things are done. The second area is the work design (and broadly the design of organization). It contains several variables, such as workload, work extent (e.g. number of various activities), the depth of work (the amount of the reasoning behind the necessary processes and results of work), relationships with others, work flexibility, job sharing etc. The last area represents the individual/employee himself, e.g. his personality, intelligence (including emotional), optimism, sense of mastery, self-efficacy, attitudes etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective adaptation to the stress connected with a loss of employment requires expenditure of larger or smaller amounts of energy. This paper focuses on problems faced by unemployed men and women and their selection of various coping strategies. The research was carried out via questionnaire methods in a sample of 92 men and 84 women who had been unemployed for minimum of three months. The life satisfaction of the respondents was generally evaluated as a neutral value (neither satisfied nor dissatisfied). The most frequently selected coping strategies (regardless of gender) were self-distraction, active coping, planning and acceptance. Relatively infrequent strategies were religion, substance use and behavioural disengagement. Some differences were found between men and women in their evaluation of the seriousness of unemployment-related problems and their preferences of coping strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the connection between workload and job satisfaction among teachers. Research and everyday observation show that the teaching profession brings many highly satisfying situations in combination with situations of increased load, whose negative consequences probably have negative effects on job satisfaction. However, in the case of teachers we can observe a relatively high level of job satisfaction despite relatively high levels of subjective load. A possible explanation may lie in the fact that teachers, at least those who voluntarily remain in their profession, probably manage to counterbalance their (either genuine or perceived) excessive workload by means of other factors when evaluating their work in its entirety. These factors include personality traits related to performance dispositions, temperament, the tendency to select suitable coping strategies, or attempts to maintain a healthy lifestyle, plus - as this research shows - various characteristics with a positive effect on stress management (neuropsychological stability, hardiness, sense of coherence, optimism, etc.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]