Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / There has been a growing literature regarding how subordinates’ reaction potentially impacts the performance management effectiveness. However, managers’ reaction to performance management has been largely overlooked. To address this research gap, the major purpose of the current study was two-fold. First, the present study proposed a three-component commitment model to conceptualize managers’ perception toward performance management. Second, by employing self-determination theory, the current study examined how managers’ implicit person theory and the perceived performance management purpose interactively shaped their commitment pattern towards performance management. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the hypothesized factor structure of performance management commitment. Further, managers’ incrementalism was a significant and negative predictor of continuous commitment to performance management. Lastly, the moderate effect of perceived purpose of performance management in the relationship between managers’ IPT and affective commitment to performance management was supported. Theoretical contribution, study limitations as well as further research directions were discussed.

Visuomotor adaptation arises when reaching in an altered visual environment, where one’s seen hand position does not match their felt (i.e., proprioceptive) hand position in space. Here, we investigated if proprioceptive training (PT) benefits visuomotor adaptation, and if these benefits arise due to implicit (unconscious) or explicit (conscious strategy) processes. A total of 72 participants were divided equally into 3 groups: Proprioceptive training with feedback (PTWF), Proprioceptive training no feedback (PTNF), and Control (CTRL). The PTWF and PTNF groups completed proprioceptive training (PT), where a participant’s hand was passively moved to an unknown reference location and they judged the felt position of their unseen hand relative to their body midline on every trial. The PTWF group received verbal feedback with respect to their response accuracy on the middle 60% of trials. The CTRL group did not complete PT and instead sat quietly during this time. Following PT or time delay, all three groups reached when seeing a cursor that was rotated 30° clockwise relative to their hand motion, followed by a series of no-cursor reaches to assess implicit and explicit adaptation. Results indicated that the PTWF group improved their sense of felt hand position following PT. However, this improved proprioceptive acuity did not benefit visuomotor adaptation, as all three groups showed similar visuomotor adaptation across rotated reach training trials. Visuomotor adaptation arose implicitly, with minimal explicit contribution for all three groups. Thus, these results suggest that passive proprioceptive training with feedback does not benefit, nor hinder, implicit visuomotor adaptation.

Explicit gender bias has been found using both experiments and field studies to favor men in hiring, promotion, and career opportunities (Eagly & Carli, 2007), but experimental studies have been criticized for over generalizing results obtained from a "stranger-to-stranger" paradigm (Copus, 2005; Landy, 2008). Landy (2008) argues that gender biases become negligible when raters are familiar with ratees. Additionally, Landy questioned the use of implicit measures to examine bias. Implicit or unconscious bias refers to a cognitive preference for one category over another, such as taking longer to associate female terms with managerial terms on a computerized task, and has also been shown to impact organizational decision making regarding women (Rudman & Kilianski, 2000). Implicit bias measures are often more predictive when bias may be socially undesirable. The goal of this research is to examine the effects of familiarity on automatic or unconscious gender bias. Study 1 examines associations between implicit and explicit measures of gender bias with evaluations of male and female job applicants who engage in agentic, negotiation behavior or not. It was expected that agentic (negotiating) female job applicants, compared to others, would suffer a backlash on ratings of communal traits and that this effect will be exacerbated by individual differences in implicit and explicit gender bias. An effect was found of negotiating being associated with higher agentic traits and lower overall ratings. Negotiating and gender did not interact, however the study did find women were rated as more communal than men. In Study 2 participants completed an Implicit Association Task (IAT) matching unfamiliar and familiar pictures of men and women with agentic and communal terms. It was expected that gender bias towards women would be stronger in the unfamiliar condition than in the familiar condition. Results indicated that there was a consistent bias against associating women with agentic terms and this effect was not influenced by familiarity. In Study 3, participants completed a gender-bias IAT and then read a scenario describing either a man or woman who is being evaluated for a promotion. They were asked to free recall positive and negative outcomes and attributes associated with the person in the scenario. It was expected that participants who have an implicit bias against women would remember negative events from the female scenario more easily than from the male scenario. There was a gender effect with participants remembering more negative events and less positive events when the employee was female compare to when the employee was male. Across all three studies differences were found between explicit and implicit measurements of gender bias. These three studies help us better understand relationships between implicit and explicit gender bias in the workplace. Additionally, Study 2 addressed criticism of gender bias findings ignoring familiarity.

Excerpt: The study by Terbeck et al. (2012) that was published in Psychopharmacology, Online First concluded that propranolol reduces implicit negative racial bias. However, this conclusion is not supported by the study because the implicit association test (IAT) (Greenwald et al. 2009) has not been sufficiently validated and because the claim for clinical treatment due to amygdala suppression is unsupported.

The conscious or unconscious acquirement of knowledge in implicit category learning was examined in accordance with predictions made by the COVIS theory of categorization (Ashby & Maddox, 2011). COVIS assumes separate category learning systems. The explicit system relies on easily verbalized rules while the implicit system requires integration of more than one stimulus dimension. Participants in this experiment categorized lines varying in length and orientation as belonging to one of two categories; in the rule-based (RB) condition only length was relevant, while participants in the information integration (II) condition needed to integrate both dimensions. Corrective feedback was provided during training. In test phases, participants were asked to attribute their responses to one of four criteria (guess, intuition, memory, or rule), a measure adapted from Dienes and Scott (2005). Neural activity in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) was recorded with a 20-optode fNIRS system. We found that in the implicit (II) learning condition, participants who reported guessing less than half the time were learning but were unconscious to the structures driving that learning, reflected by accuracy, attribution self-report and neural activation. Our results substantiate the claim that implicit category learning is mediated unconsciously and evidence the dual-system model of categorization postulated by COVIS, furthering our understanding of category learning and thus, the ways in which to improve it.

The role of grammar instruction when teaching writing has a long history of debate, and the views on the role of explicit versus implicit approaches vary. This study investigates how practicing teachers view this topic and how effective they perceive their teaching methods are when teaching grammar for writing. The study adopts a semi-structured interview with four practicing teachers, and their data is analyzed and discussed. The analysis indicates differences in views among the teachers, and although the results also indicate that both explicit and implicit approaches to teaching grammar are perceived by the teachers to be effective, they mostly favor an explicit approach. The study is significant for both practicing teachers and future teachers since gaining insight and potentially investigating this topic further can enhance our understanding of how practicing teachers perceive effective teaching methods.

Prescription drug advertisements are commonly seen in magazines and on television, and as a result, the public is familiar with them. Many drug ads are targeted toward older adults, who tend to use more medications, because they suffer from more chronic conditions than younger adults. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of drug advertising at persuading older adults to ask physicians for specific medications remains uncertain. Older adults’ explicit memory for drug ads is poor, but their implicit memory for drug ads may be better. Therefore, older adults may be implicitly persuaded by drug ads even when they cannot explicitly remember seeing them. The current study measured implicit memory with an incidental ratings exercise and an indirect test of preference; explicit memory was measured with intentional studying and a direct test of recognition. The purposes of the study were to compare implicit and explicit memory for drug ads in older and younger adults, to determine whether age differences in memory are affected by salient information or anxiety, and to demonstrate that a test of implicit memory may be useful in estimating advertising effectiveness. The results showed no age difference for implicit memory for drug ads, but an age difference was found for explicit memory for drug ads. However, contrary to hypotheses, neither salient information nor anxiety had an effect on implicit or explicit memory. The results were consistent with previous research demonstrating implicit memory in the absence of explicit memory. Although older adults had slightly worse explicit memory, both implicit and explicit memory for drug ads was generally good in both groups. The results were also obtained within the everyday context of prescription drug advertising, which extends memory research to an important real-world setting. Ethical considerations for research on aging and advertising are discussed. Drug ads are designed to be persuasive, but ads should be carefully designed to inform consumers, rather than to manipulate them. The implicit memory manipulation succeeded in demonstrating that ads are persuasive, suggesting that a complete assessment of advertising effectiveness should include a test of implicit memory.

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