The B. F. Goodrich Company spends considerable money selecting and training territory managers. The hiring of territory managers generally rests with local management's "intuition." Since 1967, a substantial percentage of these highly trained salesmen have separated from the company. It was within this attrition context, that an exploratory, objective, selection program was studied. A multiple discriminant function (multigroup model) was used to analyze three groups of B. F. Goodrich Territory Managers' California Psychology Inventory and Edwards Personal Preference Schedule test scores. The data revealed that known territory managers' group membership could be significantly predicted. A longitudinal study (one year later) showed a high percentage of accuracy (i.e. 82 percent) between predicted test score probability group membership and original group membership. Further the multiple discriminant function analysis of territory managers' test scores disclosed that only a few test variables need to be considered in making a probability hiring decision.

Political skill has been described as using human resources and manipulating social exchanges to influence group outcomes (Mintzberg, 1983). Researchers have found that political skill has significant relationships with constructs such as contextual performance, career satisfaction and leadership. Based on these empirical findings it may be beneficial to include a measure of political skill as part of a selection process. In this study, different methods were explored for measuring political skill that may be appropriate for administrative purposes such as the self-rated questionnaire called the Political Skill Inventory (PSI), a situational judgment test (SJT) and the structured interview. A sample of 100 graduate business students, most of whom had extensive managerial experience, completed the previously mentioned measures in exchange for feedback on their assessments. The participants were subsequently rated on political skill by their coworkers. The only significant association with the coworker scores was the PSI; neither the SJT nor the structured interview showed a significant relationship with the peer ratings of political skill. However, there were unforeseen technical limits to the measures that might explain the negative findings. The paper concludes with recommendations for improving the measures prior to a follow-up study.

Although most working adults possess a lay understanding of understaffing in the workplace and may, in fact, feel they are experiencing such a stressor, a review of the research literature reveals a general lack of empirical work on understaffing and its consequences. Hudson and Shen (2013, Development and testing of a new measure of understaffing. Paper presented at the Southern Management Association 2013 Meeting, New Orleans, LA) recently proposed a new model of understaffing that distinguished between two types of personnel deficiencies, manpower and expertise shortages, and linked these dimensions to worker well-being and attitudinal outcomes and identified likely mediating mechanisms. However, Hudson and Shen focused exclusively on the individual level of analysis. Therefore, the current study extends their work by investigating whether prior findings also hold at the group level of analysis. Participants in this study were members of 66 intact work groups and their supervisors (N = 57 for groups with matched supervisor data) from a variety of industries and organizations, who filled out a one-time survey. Results supported that perceptions of understaffing, both manpower and expertise, are shared within work groups and that there is some convergence between work groups and their supervisors regarding levels of understaffing. Results from correlational and regression analyses also supported differential relationships between manpower and expertise understaffing and group outcomes. Finally, structural equation models generally upheld Hudson and Shen's (2013) framework at the group level of analysis; results were consistent with group quantitative workload, potency, and role ambiguity serving as key mediators in the relationships between shared group perceptions of understaffing and unit well-being and attitudinal outcomes (i.e., group emotional exhaustion and cohesion). This study broadens our understanding of the construct of understaffing and presents a number of promising directions to be pursued in future research.

Career satisfaction has become an important research topic in both psychological and business research. The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationships between general managers’ career satisfaction, the Big Five personality traits (agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, extraversion, and openness), as well as narrow personality traits. An archival data source was used consisting of a sample of 6,042 general managers and 48,726 non-managers from various industries. I investigated the relationship between personality variables and general manager’s career satisfaction. Results indicated that several personality traits were significantly related to managers’ career satisfaction. For example, emotional resilience, extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, optimism, and work drive were significantly related to general managers’ career satisfaction. Among all the personality traits, emotional resilience and optimism had the highest correlations with general manager’s career satisfaction. The difference between managers and non-managers were compared. Implications for future research and practice were discussed.

The purpose of this study was to explore the utility of frequency-based measurement as an alternative method for examining the stability of psychological capital, a higher-order construct introduced by Luthans and colleagues (2007), consisting of self-efficacy, hope, resilience, and optimism. Frequency-based measurement is a new approach based on the distributional assessment model (Kane, 1986; 2000) that provides information on the relative frequency of occurrence for specific behaviors over a given period of time, and offers a distribution that depicts the scope of an individual’s behavior. One advantage of this approach is that it can provide information on a person’s behavior over time in a single administration, allowing researchers to examine the temporal stability of constructs without having to conduct longitudinal studies (e.g., personality, Edwards & Woehr, 2007). To investigate the usefulness of this new approach, a series of studies was conducted using a sample of students from a large southeastern university. The first study compared a frequency-based measure of psychological capital to the more traditional Likert-type measure. Results indicated that the two are equivalent measures of the central tendency of psychological capital. The frequency-based measure was also compared to the Likert-type measure given across three contexts (family, school, and social settings) in a second study. Results indicated that the two approaches offered similar information in terms of consistency, with both approaches demonstrating some variability in responses over time or across contexts. Thus, this study provided further evidence that frequency-based measurement offers additional information not available in a single administration using a Likert-type measure. The last study investigated agreement between an individual’s self-reported psychological capital and ratings of their psychological capital given by an acquaintance. Contrary to my expectations, within-item consistency did not moderate self/other agreement. The implications of these findings are outlined, in addition to suggestions for future research.

This field study examined relationships of income and life satisfaction among retirees, their perceptions of whether their decisions to retire were voluntary or involuntary, and their stated reasons for retiring: “push” (to exit unsustainable work situations) or “pull” (to pursue more attractive options). Based on prior research, hypotheses predicted that voluntary / involuntary choice would moderate the relationship of income and life satisfaction, and that the relationship would vary as a function of "push" vs. "pull" reasons for retiring. A screened, national sample of 1,043 U.S. retirees completed an online survey that assessed satisfaction with multiple life domains, reason for retiring, demographic characteristics, family income, and perceived financial control. Results showed that voluntary retirees had, on average, higher income, life satisfaction, and perceived financial control than those who saw their retirements as involuntary. Type of reason for retirement did moderate the relationship between income and life satisfaction, but in an unexpected way. Based on decades of research on the relationship of control and stress, the hypothesis predicted the correlation between income and life satisfaction would be weakest in voluntary "pull" retirees, and strongest in the involuntary group. Instead, the relationship was strongest among voluntary "push" retirees (r=+.35). These surprising results highlight the importance of further research on perceived control over retirement on common predictors of life satisfaction in retirement.

Volunteerism plays an important role in modern American society with benefits accruing to the community and individuals who volunteer. This thesis evaluated the first year of operation of the ALIVE Center (A Local Information and Volunteer Exchange) by addressing four objectives of the program with data obtained from the ALIVE Center. To meet its first objective, the ALIVE Center maintains a current database of local human service organizations. The second objective, to establish a resource center and provide referrals and information to 1,000 people, was achieved. The third objective of maintaining a website was also met. Matching over 200 volunteers with local service programs, the fourth objective, was easily exceeded. Thus, each of the objectives was clearly met, indicating that the initial year of operation of the ALIVE Center was successful.

This study investigated the importance that junior and senior job-seeking undergraduates (Millennial generation members) place on transactional and relational work attributes; how ratings vary by gender, experiences with layoff, and intended loyalty; and how well ratings match with actual attributes offered by organizations. Results are discussed in context of psychological contract theory. Students (n = 199) and recent graduates working full-time (n = 180) took separate online survey. Students indicated the importance of various work attributes (Ng, Schweitzer, & Lyons, 2010), loyalty intentions, and other related questions. Graduates answered only work attribute questions related to their current employer. Work attributes were factored into new transactional (IMP-T; µ = .78) and relational scales (IMP-R; µ = .91). Key results indicated that students rated relational work attributes more highly than transactional attributes (p < .001); gender had no effect on importance ratings or intended loyalty; and students’ importance ratings were above the workplace reality.

An analysis of Peter F. Drucker (2001) and Jim Collins' (2005) theory that non-profits can teach businesses in the areas of mission orientation, board productivity and motivating workers. Extensive research was conducted on six Henry R. Kravis Prize in Leadership recipients: Roy L. Prosterman, the founder of the Rural Development Institute, a.k.a Landesa (2006), Fazle H. Abed, founder of Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (2007), Forum for African Women Educationalist (2008), Pratham (2010), mother2mothers (2012) and Soraya Salti, regional direction of INJAZ al-Arab (2012). This in-depth examination suggests that Drucker (2001) and Collins' (2005) postulation was accurate and the studied organizations excelled in the three mentioned principles.

This study was an extension of a study conducted by Roch, Paquin, and Littlejohn (2009). They investigated the relationship between rater agreement and the observability of items on a rating form. The current study found similar results in that, as items became less observable, interrater agreement increased. The purpose of this study was to introduce frame of reference training as an extension to the Roch et al. study in order to reverse their findings. In other words, trained raters would be less likely to default to a general impression on less observable items and thus would demonstrate higher rater agreement on more observable items than untrained raters. The results, based on 66 raters, replicated the findings of the Roch et al. study. The frame of reference training appeared to have no impact on the results. Results are discussed.