The present study has two primary contributions to the existing literature linking stressors to employee reactions. First, job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion are proposed to mediate the relationship between stressors and both forms of voluntary workplace behaviors, specifically OCB and CWB. A comprehensive framework, which includes both streams of voluntary workplace behaviors (OCB and CWB) will expand the common practice of investigating them separately and helps us better understand the parallel mechanisms linked to OCB and CWB. Secondly, the role of proactive personality will be investigated to gain insights into how it relates to job attitudes and voluntary work behaviors. We will have new look at the dispositional antecedents of OCB and CWB by investigating how proactive people react, feel, and behave in the organizational context.

This dissertation examines decision making as discourse to capture subtle characteristics and processes within top management team discussions and examines their influence on decision outcomes. Additionally, this approach allows for exploration of decision making processes in real time by utilizing audio analysis techniques that can provide a more dynamic and integrative view of conversations and discussions as they relate to the dialogue and debate that goes on within top management teams, as well as providing an alternate pathway of study for top management team and group research, decision making studies, and the fields of communication and conversational analysis.

Background: For children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD), the acquisition and performance of everyday visual-motor activities such as buttoning, shoe tying, cutting with scissors or writing, presents a major challenge. Regardless of the activity considered, children with DCD are typically slower and less accurate than their peers. Given the well-acknowledged difficulties of children with DCD, it is surprising to find very few research studies systematically exploring visual-motor skill acquisition and performance in children with DCD. Objective: The overall objective of this study was to systematically describe visual-motor skill acquisition and task performance in children with DCD. Methods: Twenty-four children (8 years 11 months to 12 years 11 months) were recruited for this study; 12 children with DCD, 12 children developing typically with regards to their motor skills. A computer-based aiming task completed with three different cursor controls of increasing levels of difficulty (mouse, joystick, novel controller) was designed for this study. Mixed-effect modelling and visual graph analyses were performed to describe the influence of motor ability and task difficulty on visual-motor skill acquisition and task performance. Results: Motor ability modulated the impact of task difficulty on visual-motor skill acquisition and task performance. Children with DCD were as fast and as accurate as their peers in their initial performance of the simple, well-learned task (mouse). However, they were slower and less accurate when performing the complex and novel visual-motor task. Over repeated trials, the visual-motor task performance of children with DCD improved on all tasks, even for the simple. With regard to the complex, novel task, once children with DCD understood the features of the task, their performance also improved and approached that of their peers. Conclusion: While children with DCD can generally be characterized as less accurate and slower than their peers, this characterization needs to be specified and qualified; it is probably best not applied to a well-learned task.

Extra-role helping, defined as assisting co-workers with their work tasks, and extra-role voice, defined as arguing for constructive change, are believed to be functional for work groups. However, the mechanisms by which helping and voice might contribute to group effectiveness have not been described in detail, and relatively little empirical research has addressed the effects that helping and voice actually have within groups, or their relationships with outcomes relevant to group effectiveness. I argue that helping and voice will have their most direct and immediate effects on fellow group members, and that these effects may influence the subsequent performance of the group as a whole. I present a cross-level model of task facilitation, which describes the impact that group level helping may have on the task performance of individual group members. I present a cross-level model of climate building, which describes the impact that group level helping and voice may have on the climate perceptions of individual group members. I test hypotheses drawn from these models in three studies. Study one was conducted with 1086 Australian air traffic controllers in 45 groups. The results provided support for the task facilitation mechanism, and showed that group level helping was positively associated with the task performance and effectiveness of individual air traffic controllers. Study two was conducted in an Australian public sector organisation employing over 4000 individuals in 177 groups. The results of this study provided support for the climate building mechanism. Group level helping was positively associated with individual perceptions of affective climate. The effects of group level voice depended on the level of goal clarity within the group. I argued that group members would perceive a greater need for voice when group goal clarity was low, and that under these circumstances, group members would attribute voice behaviour to a genuine desire to benefit the group. Under conditions of high goal clarity, however, group members would not perceive a need for voice, and so the voice behaviours would be attributed to self-serving motives to gain power, influence or resources. Results supported these arguments, with group voice having a negative effect on climate perceptions when goal clarity was high, and a positive effect on climate perceptions when goal clarity was low. In study three I examined the impact of attributions for voice behaviour directly. I conducted an experiment with 69 second year management students. Students were placed in a simulated organisational context by way of a written vignette. The level of co-worker voice and the motives for voice were manipulated within this vignette to form a two by two factorial design in which the level of voice (no voice vs. some voice) was crossed with co-worker motives (self-serving vs. altruistic). Manipulation checks showed that participants attributed the co-worker's behaviour to self serving motives in the self-serving condition, and to altruistic motives in the altruistic condition. The results showed that voice behaviour had a negative impact on climate perceptions when self-serving attributions were made. When altruistic attributions were made, the presence or absence of voice did not influence climate perceptions. The results of the three studies suggest that extra-role helping and voice form important parts of the technical, social and psychological environment in which group members work. Furthermore, this environment can have important effects on the task performance and climate perceptions of group members. To the extent that group effectiveness depends on high levels of individual task performance and positive climate perceptions, these outcomes will influence subsequent group effectiveness. I close by discussing the contribution of the task facilitation and climate building models, and the practical implications of the results obtained within this thesis.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Stockholm : Karol. inst., 2002. / Härtill 4 uppsatser.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Vita. "May 2008" Includes bibliographical references.

Mémoire (M.P.M.O.)--Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 1998. / Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

Diss. (sammanfattning) Umeå : Umeå universitet, 2010.

The purpose of the current studies was to determine whether "matches", or fit, between actual task control and participants' desire for control over their environment lead to better stress and task performance outcomes than "mismatches", or misfit, in high work demand environments only. These studies also investigated the mediating effects of cognitive stressor appraisals and stress, as well as the moderating influence of hardiness on threat appraisals. Data were collected on 366 undergraduate students, who were asked to complete individual difference measures and engage in timed performance tasks. Results indicated no significant interactions between actual task control and desire for control for the outcomes of cognitive stressor appraisals, experienced stress, or task performance. No mediating influence was found for cognitive appraisals or stress, nor was there a buffering effect of hardiness on the cognitive appraisal process. Despite the non-significant results, the effects on task performance trended in the predicted direction in both studies, such that the highest task performance was found in cases of match between actual task control and desire for control, whereas the lowest task performance was found in cases of mismatch. These findings yield some support for Person-Environment Fit theory, demonstrating that actual task control and desire for control should be considered together when predicting task performance in workplace contexts.

Esse trabalho visa estudar a influência da vibração no desempenho de tarefas de pilotos de aeronaves. Para o seu desenvolvimento, foi montada uma bancada usando um assento de aeronave para avaliar a transmissibilidade da vibração vertical para os pilotos e verificar se níveis elevados de aceleração, como no caso de falha da turbina, podem prejudicar sua habilidade em desempenhar tarefas de leitura, escrita e digitação. Todos os experimentos foram realizados com sucesso, comprovando grande parte dos estudos anteriores sobre o assunto. Ainda são apresentadas comparações relacionando os mesmos níveis de aceleração usados no teste de transmissibilidade, com as normas ISO 2631-1 e ANSI S3.18 para avaliação da exposição humana à vibração de corpo inteiro, que são as mais apropriadas para a correlação com o mundo aeronáutico. / This work aims to study the influence of vibration in aircraft pilots task performance. For the study development, it was assembled a rig test using an aircraft pilot seat, in order to evaluate the transmissibility of vertical vibration to the pilots and to verify if high acceleration levels, as in the case of engine failure, are of significance to the pilots ability in performing tasks such as reading, writing and typing. All the experiments were accomplished successfully, confirming most of early studies about the subject. Comparisons are also presented, relating the same acceleration levels used in the transmissibility test with ISO 2631-1 and ANSI S3.18 standards for evaluation of human exposure to whole-body vibration which are the most appropriated for correlation with the aeronautical world.