Organizational behavior and human performance最新文献

One hundred and seventy-five male and female college-bound high school students reviewed a description of a managerial job, indicated their interest in the job, and rated it on a number of descriptive dimensions. The proportion of women currently holding this position (8%, 28%) and how they came to acquire their jobs (merit, preferential treatment based on gender, no information) were systematically varied. Results indicated that increased proportions of women job-holders produced greater job interest among females only when it was believed they had acquired their positions on the basis of merit. Furthermore, lower job interest among males was evidenced in preferential treatment as compared to merit conditions. An additional finding of note was the tendency for males to treat no information about position acquisition as they did information of preferential treatment and for females to treat no information about position acquisition as they did information of merit-based placement. The implications of these findings for affirmative action programs are discussed.

Previous research (cf. B. M. Staw, Academy of Management Review, 1981, 6, 577–587) has found that when managers are given negative feedback on an initial individual investment decision, they allocate more additional funds to that investment if they, rather than another member of their organization, made the initial allocation decision. Justification is thought to underlie this phenomenon. This study explored commitment in group and individual decisions and examined the plausibility of dissonance processes as the mediator of escalation of commitment. One hundred eighty-three individuals participated in a role-playing exercise in which personal responsibility for an initial decision was manipulated for groups and individuals. As expected, escalation of commitment occurred for both groups and individuals. In support of a dissonance explanation, dissonance processes did vary as a function of the personal responsibility manipulation, and individual variation in dissonance responses accounted for a substantial portion of variance in allocation behavior beyond that accounted for by the experimental manipulations. The results concerning dissonance processes suggest a number of ways in which escalation can be reduced in individuals and groups.

With extended practice on a task a shift seems to occur from controlled to automatic processing. If differential factors associated with automatic processing exist, they could only be observed after this shift occurs. Hence, any such factor would be late-appearing, in the sense that it could only be identified late in practice. The present paper reports two tests of the existence of late-appearing factors. Both tests involved extended practice on five video games; the two tests were carried out in two different populations approximately 1 year apart. The results of the two experiments were in complete agreement. In both cases all factors, with one possible exception in the second experiment, were identified by content exclusively and not by stage of practice. The results, therefore, are negative. Other studies using other materials, other subjects, or other conditions of practice may reach different conclusions; but the studies reported in this paper offer no support for the existence of late-appearing factors.

In this study two training procedures designed to reduce the adverse influence of irrelevant information were tested for their efficacy. One training procedure involved a lecture (paralleling typical classroom experience), while the other involved interaction and practice (paralleling typical laboratory experience). In a pretest, irrelevant information was shown to influence the judgments of 12 experienced student soil judges. The judges were then given lecture training; this was found to be of minimal help in reducing the influence of irrelevance. Next, the judges received the interactive training and that had a significant impact. In addition to reducing the influence of irrelevance, the interactive training also improved the accuracy of the judgments. In a followup study, five of the soil judges were reevaluated over a year later; the training appeared to have continued impact. Implications and extensions of the training procedures to other areas are discussed.

Routine decision making is a process of identifying goals, evaluating alternatives, and formulating appropriate strategies for attaining these goals. The latter two stages of this process were examined in a two-part experiment. In the first part, subjects scaled alternative combinations of the resources required for goal attainment. The results showed that an explicitly defined goal directly influenced the utility of resources. In essence, mean utilities were equivalent to point estimates of cost-benefit analyses. In the second part, subjects performed a decision-making task, allocating the initial resource combinations to achieve an explicitly defined goal. Task performance was modeled with linear programming techniques which provide a means of evaluating both the subjects' decisions and the process of resource allocation and strategy formulation. Results indicated that only 1 of 12 subjects allocated resources optimally in making decisions, even though all of the subjects had appropriately scaled the utility of these resources in the first part of the experiment. Moreover, half the subjects failed to utilize the maximum available resources in making their decisions. This outcome is discussed in terms of the memory and attentional constraints on routine decision-making processes. The results suggest that these constraints are most severe at the time of strategy formulation, even when the utility of resources and the explicit goal are known.

This study investigated the effects of four sources of environmental structuring on employee responses. These sources are job, technology, work unit, and leader behavior. Main, joint, and interactive effects were examined. Job structure had the strongest effect. It was demonstrated that technology, job, and work unit structure were found to be substitutes for leader structure. Leader structure had little unique association with employee reactions except when the other sources of environmental structure were weak. Two alternative theoretical interpretations of the findings are offered: reactivity and “closeness.”

To investigate the idea that providing information about a job applicant's past performance can avert sex discrimination in preliminary employment decisions, an experiment was conducted in which both Applicant Sex and Type of Information were varied. As predicted, highly job-relevant information was found to produce less differential treatment of male and female applicants than did information of low job relevance or no information at all. Also as predicted, the type of information provided had more impact on reactions to female applicants than male applicants, with high job-relevance information producing the most favorable responses and, unexpectedly, low job-relevance information producing the least favorable responses to female applicants. Additional results suggested that these effects were mediated by the degree to which female job applicants were characterized by stereotypic attributes. The findings are interpreted as supportive of the idea that undermining the information value of sex stereotypes as a basis of inference about the attributes of a given woman can function to reduce sex discrimination in employment settings.

This study examined the relationship between job stress and employees' performance and withdrawal behavior among nurses (N = 440) in two hospitals in a metropolitan Canadian city on the east coast. Job stressors assessed included role ambiguity, role overload, role conflict, and resource inadequacy. Employees' performance was operationalized in terms of job performance, motivation, and patient care skill. Withdrawal behaviors assessed were absenteeism, tardiness, and anticipated turnover. Multiple regressions, curvilinear correlation coefficients, and canonical correlations were computed to test the nature of the relationship between stressors and the criterion variables of the study. In general, data were more supportive of the negative linear relationship between stress and performance than for positive linear or curvilinear relationship. However, the stressor role ambiguity did exhibit a monotonic nonlinear relationship with a number of criterion variables. Employees' professional and organizational commitment were proposed to moderate the stress—performance relationship. However, the data only partially supported the role of the moderators.

Entrapping conflicts are characterized by the tendency for individuals to make increasing commitments to some failing course of action, in large part to justify the appropriateness of previous investments made in that situation. It has been suggested that (1) these dilemmas frequently arise in organizational settings, and (2) whether decision makers escalate their commitment or withdraw from a failing course of action can be affected by a variety of factors. The present four experiments were designed to determine if an individual's degree of entrapment (i.e., tendency to escalate) may be affected by the behavior of a model in a similar situation. In Experiments 1–3, considerable generality was obtained for the proposition that decision makers in entrapping conflicts can be directly influenced by a model. Individuals who witnessed an entrapped model became significantly more entrapped than those who did not. This effect was obtained (1) for subjects and models of both sexes, (2) on measures of both process and outcome, (3) across two different experimental procedures, and (4) when the model was viewed either during or before the time that subjects were called upon to make their decisions. Experiments 3 and 4 delineated several limiting conditions of the modeling-entrapment relationship. Participants did not invest more of their resources in the presence than in the absence of an entrapped model if the model expressed regret rather than pleasure about his behavior. In fact, under such conditions a significant “reverse modeling” effect was obtained, in which subjects became less entrapped in the presence of the entrapped model. The modeling-entrapment relationship was also significantly reduced when the model was unlikable and unintelligent, and thus not an appropriate person for comparison. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, including the possibility that models may be skillfully employed to help decision makers stop “throwing good money after bad.”

The purpose of this study was to examine how individual differences in repression—sensitization moderate the effects of negative feedback in task groups. Seventy-eight research participants, organized into 26 simulated task groups, were asked to work as a team on a series of anagram problems. Participants received either unfavorable individual or team feedback concerning performance. It was predicted that the direct threat associated with individual feedback would increase defensiveness among repressors. This hypothesis was supported; that is, repressors, in comparison to sensitizers, denied the group task as a measure of ability and effort and reported lower attraction to the task and group. It was predicted further that the indirect threat of team level feedback would increase defensiveness among sensitizers. This hypothesis was also supported. Here sensitizers, in comparison to repressors, denied the task as a measure of ability and effort and indicated lower attraction to the task and group. Additional analyses of covariance revealed that the cognitive processes associated with self-attributions (i.e., ability and effort) mediated the reports of task and group attraction. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings and directions for future study are also discussed.