Organizational behavior and human performance最新文献

Recent literature reports a reliance on third-party intervention procedures in contract negotiation. This study suggests that the relative evaluation of the costs related to arbitration (such as the uncertainty and expense of arbitration), and the costs related to negotiation (such as loss of face or perceived incompetency) provide a partial explanation for the increasing frequency of the negotiator's use of arbitration procedures rather than reaching a negotiated settlement. The relative salience of negotiation-related costs (high and low) and the relative salience of arbitration-related costs (high and low) were manipulated in a 2 × 2 design, involving 147 subjects negotiating a five-issue contract. The results were consistent with the hypothesized relationships. Implications of the results of this study for improving the understanding of and control over negotiator behavior are discussed.

The job characteristics model has guided a great deal of research on the relationship between task characteristics and employee satisfaction and performance. Research in this area has indicated the necessity of incorporating nontask factors of jobs for further theory building in organizational behavior. Based upon the framework of organizational role theory, the dual attachment model is proposed for the integration of the job characteristic model and the leader-member exchange model. Questionnaire data from 101 employees in a federal agency is used to analyze the three models with respect to the prediction of job attitudes and performance. The results indicate the complementarity of task and interpersonal factors in the prediction of job outcomes. An additive model, as opposed to an interactive model, is supported for the combination of these factors. Findings from time lagged analysis of these models are generally consistent with those from concurrent analyses, but the findings from dynamic analysis are only partially consistent with those of the concurrent and time lagged analyses. Individual difference variables are found to be of little importance in these models.

B. M. Staw and J. Ross (Journal of Applied Psychology, 1980, 65, 249–260) present data which suggest that one barrier to experimenting management is an implicit theory of heroic leadership favoring managers who are consistent in the face of failure, The currant research tests this theory of heroism against an implicit theory of competent management. Subjects read a case study describing a manager who was either experimenting or consistent, and either immediately successful or successful only after initial failure (i.e., ultimately successful). The results supported the implicit theory of competent management with the consistent managers, whose first policies were effective, rated significantly higher than the ultimately successful-experimenting manager, whose first two policies failed. The immediately successful-experimenting manager was unexpectedly rated significantly higher than all other managers. The results show that there is not a general bias against experimentation in favor of consistency, and that reactions to managers are based more upon evidence of competence than upon experimenting and consistency per se.

This paper presents a model of performance appraisal which focuses on the cognitive processes employed by a rater attempting to form an evaluation. The model describes the method by which a rater collects, encodes, stores, and later retrieves information from memory, and the method by which he or she weights and combines this information to form an evaluation which is converted to a rating on a scale. The model is based on diverse bodies of literature which share a social-cognitive orientation, and it forms the foundation for a number of testable research propositions.

Previous research has demonstrated that performance cues can significantly influence raters' responses on leader-behavior rating questionnaires. The purpose of the present study was to explore the cognitive mechanisms that mediate this influence. Subjects watched a videotape of a problem-solving group and later rated the group leader's behavior. Perceptions of the group's performance were manipulated both before (preobservation) and after (postobservation) subjects watched the tape. Both manipulations affected the leader-behavior ratings. Analytic procedures borrowed from signal detection theory suggest that the preobservation performances cue effects were mediated by selective encoding of leader-behavior information in memory, while the postobservation effects were mediated by probabilistic response biases. Selective memory retrieval, on the other hand, did not seem to play a role. The implications of these results for developing strategies to overcome the confounding influence of performance cues on leader-behavior ratings are discussed.

An important theme in research on behavioral decision making is that decision behavior is largely contingent on characteristics of the task and context. One variation on this theme is the appearance of contingency models that explain variation in decision behavior in terms of the effects that changes in task and context have on the relative net benefit of each available decision strategy. The L. R. Beach and T. R. Mitchell (1978, Academy of Management Review, July, 439–449) model is an example of such a model. In the present study, the Beach and Mitchell (1978) model is used as a framework for generating hypotheses about the effects of two contextual variables—state uncertainty and significance of the decision—on the selection of decision strategies for the management problem of whether to investigate the cause of a cost variance. The hypotheses are supported by an experimental test.

The judgmental accuracy of group majority decision making in binary choice, multiple-item prediction tasks as a function of group size, average competence of group members, and the shape of the overall distribution of judgmental accuracy in the group are discussed. For the case where the addition of an (N + 1)th member to a group of size N has a known cost function and the value of a correct group decision can be specified, the optimal group size is calculated.

Most studies comparing the relative effectiveness of multiattribute weighting techniques have found few differences. These studies have, however, failed to systematically vary attribute properties such as number of attributes and distribution of correct attribute weights. It was hypothesized that any weighting technique would be more effective at arriving at the correct weights the smaller the number of attributes because of lessened information processing requirements. In addition, it was hypothesized that the relative effectiveness of different weighting techniques would depend on the peakedness of the distribution of correct attribute weights because different weighting techniques should generate more peaked distributions than others. Two experiments were conducted to test these hypotheses. The first experiment focused on the accuracy of the weights assigned to attributes by individuals; the second on the accuracy of groups. Both experiments confirmed the first hypothesis regarding the number of attributes, but only the first experiment confirmed the second hypothesis regarding the peakedness of the distribution of attribute weights.