<p> The onset or inception of organizational decline has been largely bypassed in management research over the past two decades, even though understanding this fundamental typology is key to mitigating organizational failure, while also providing important insight regarding how managers respond to phenomena that they may neither expect or understand. Understanding how managers observe, decide, and act in times of uncertainty, and how organizational culture and other factors may shape that environment, are important for scholars and practitioners alike to understand. This dissertation argues that corporate decline has largely been misunderstood from the perspective of onset or initiation; that the manager's decision-making process in times of decline must be considered in relation to the actual causes and factors associated with decline, and that the fundamental definition of organizational decline must be revised in light of advances in our understanding in management over the past three decades. This qualitative empirical descriptive study reviews literature regarding organizational decline with emphasis on the onset of decline, presents an equation for understanding a firm's propensity for decline, provides a revised definition of organizational decline, and examines the decision-making process of management when faced with decline based on symbolic interactionism theory.</p>

<p> This study was designed to investigate the difficulties and challenges facing counseling practitioners that result in secondary traumatic stress, compassion satisfaction and burnout. Secondary traumatic stress, compassion satisfaction and burnout in Licensed Professional Counselors may have a relationship to their quality of life ratings. The risks of working directly with traumatized individuals on a regular basis are well documented. These three variables (Secondary Traumatic Stress, Compassion Satisfaction and Burnout) are prominent in the human services field with counselors being in the top five affected (in helping professions). A total of 77 participants completed a demographic questionnaire and the Professional Quality of Life Scale (ProQOL). This quantitative research design is classified as descriptive research/correlational study (non-experimental) between variables. A multiple regression analysis was utilized to collect the data. The findings were not as expected by the researcher. It appeared that counselors become satisfied from working with traumatized victims. Recommendations and future research directions are explained.</p>

The aim of this study was to explore conflict as perceived by Industrial Psychologists in the workplace. The sample of (N=6) consisted of registered Industrial Psychologists. A qualitative research approach was used to explore how Industrial Psychologists in the workplace perceive and experience issues of conflict. A purposive sample was employed. Data was analysed using thematic analysis. The emerging themes were: (1) the Industrial Psychologists’ perceptions and reactions to conflict; (2) organisational structure; (3) organisational management style; (4) the nature and condition of job assignment; (5) individual characteristics; (6) mutual understanding and interaction; and (7) the consequences of conflict. The first six themes describe the sources of the conflict as well as strategies to manage them. The findings of this study reveal that issues such as the perception of and reaction to conflict, organisational structure, and organisational management style, the nature and conditions of job assignment, individual characteristics, and mutual understanding and interaction are important factors contributing to the occurrence and management of conflict. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2011.

<p> I have designed and implemented a new online communication training tool (XHTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, MySQL) that potentially maximizes a job candidate's ability to obtain job offers. All demographic statistics show people with disabilities as the largest minority group currently unemployed in the United States. Those who seek work have a higher chance of being unemployed, find a low-level job, or find part-time employment. With communication training, job candidates gain the ability to market their skills to potential employers and increase the likelihood of obtaining a job offer. I researched into ADA law that provided guidelines when developing the system and discuss a job candidate's rights in each step of the interview process. Using a Model-View-Controller (MVC) based framework, I have built a system that adapts to a user's disability, and presents them with a tailored list of interview questions and answers. For this paper, mobility and visual disabilities were focused on. The database contains legal interview questions, illegal questions under ADA law, and gray area questions (questions that may seem illegal but really not). This allows us to challenge the communication skills and knowledge of the user and encourage them to learn how to improve. PHP modules were built to be flexible and independent from each other. Different modules can be loaded and unloaded in the Controllers thereby allowing flexibility in the system. Having independent modules also reduces the time to debug code. Participants are given multiple choice answers to each interview question in a 10-question training session and rated based on their performance. Answers are assigned points (from 1 to 4) and are calculated at the end of a training session. A group of California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) students were given a 2-part survey before and after communication training and provided promising results on the effectiveness of the system. Overall, attitudes of participants showed the entire group agreed that communication is a key aspect in a job interview and that communication training would help them obtain more job offers. Participants that completed part-2 of the survey indicated that communication training through the system has overall helped their abilities. Long-term usage of the system could potentially show an increase in job interview performance (i.e., job interviews vs. job offers) and therefore, increasing the employment rate for people with disabilities.</p>

<p> The built environment increasingly contributes to improving human health, well-being, and performance in measurable, predictable, and tailorable ways. Achieving high-performance environmental systems requires real-time-interactive sensing, monitoring, actuation, and communication subsystems, as well as real-time interactions of these environmental systems with their users and other internal and external systems. Developing theories, constructs, methods, and tools necessary for designing such high-performance, complex, interactive systems is an active area of research. </p><p> This dissertation focused on methods and tools for representing the cognitive and physical affordances of complex, interactive, architectural systems (CIAS). The Complex, Interactive, Architectural Systems Design Methodology (CIAS-DM) was proposed as a method and tool for helping designers uncover and document the scope of proposed CIAS. CIAS-DM was evaluated qualitatively. This project used the design of a `smart' mattress in a patient room `smart' bed/mattress/over-the-bed table ecosystem as the basis for a series of design cases. Fourteen clinicians participated as subject matter experts. Four research associates participated as raters. The results of evaluating CIAS-DM indicate that CIAS-DM is useful for scoping CIAS design challenges. The contributions of this dissertation are: 1) identifying and characterizing CIAS; 2) introducing the systems modeling language (SysML) and a cognitive work analysis (CWA) representational and analytic methods into architecture; 2) mapping constructs and methods from CWA into SysML; and 3) providing these methods and tools in an integrated package appropriate for those designing CIAS.</p>

<p> Human service workers have a history of working with our neediest populations, and their work often entails long hours, challenging situations, and limited resources. When the focus of the work is on human strengths and positive approaches, more positive results emerge. In order to determine the process of how human services workers maintain a positive perspective in their work, 15 human service workers from a diverse spectrum were interviewed. A narrative analysis was applied to elicit the participants' insights, revealing common themes and strategies. The findings indicated that having a fundamental belief in human potential, seeing the client's positive attributes, and having inherent capacities of caring were fundamental. Participants believed their work was meaningful and made a difference, and that they were a part of something bigger. They felt empathy and compassion toward clients, and generally believed that their temperament and upbringing also influenced their capacity to maintain a positive perspective. Aside from their beliefs, workers depended on receiving support from like-minded people, colleagues, and others in their environment. They utilized self-care, self-monitoring techniques, and demonstrated self-awareness and a mature capacity to adapt to the unexpected. They were able to apply their learning from past experiences in support of the services they offer to others.</p>

<p> Stress has long been conceptualized as consisting of two factors, eustress, or good stress, and distress, or bad stress (Selye, 1956). The occupational stress literature identifies <i>challenge</i> stressors as those associated with favorable outcomes, and <i>hindrance</i> stressors as those associated with negative outcomes (Cavanaugh, Boswell, Roehling, &amp; Boudreau, 2000). The current study had three objectives: 1) to investigate occupational level stressor appraisal by K-12 teachers, 2) to explore how the perception of the availability of resources influences individual level stressor appraisal, and 3) to test differential outcomes of challenge and hindrance stress. Results indicate that K-12 teachers appraise workload as a hindrance stressor more than as a challenge stressor, which is contrary to existing management literature categorizing workload a challenge stressor. Perceived resources also accounted for significant variance in individual appraisal of stressors as a hindrance. Results pinpoint precise personal and organizational resources that contribute to stressor appraisals as a hindrance. Finally, hindrance stress significantly detracted from engagement while challenge stress did not affect work engagement.</p>

<p> The present research study examined the strength and direction of the correlations between three leadership styles (transformational, transactional, &amp; servant) and satisfaction with leadership and motivation as outcomes of leadership style. A web-based survey was used to collect data from 181 professional Latino employees in the U.S. <i>The Leadership Style Survey </i> was combined from the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) and the Servant Leadership Questionnaire (SLQ), which measured transformational, transactional, and servant leadership styles, as well as satisfaction with leadership and motivation. Data was collected about Latino employees' perceptions of their supervisors' leadership styles, and satisfaction with leadership and motivation. Results from one-sample t-tests indicated Latino employees' responses to the leadership, satisfaction, and motivation scales were significantly lower than the norm. All Pearson correlations indicated there were strong positive relationships between each of the leadership styles and satisfaction with leadership and motivation. More importantly, Fisher <i>r</i>-to-<i> Z</i> transformations demonstrated that correlations found on the Latino sample were significantly higher than the correlational norms. The findings suggest Latinos are less motivated and less satisfied with their current leaders, however characteristics of transformational, transactional, and servant leadership are highly important to Latino employees and are highly correlated to their motivation and satisfaction with leadership. Cultural values may have a strong impact on Latino professional employees' evaluation of their supervisors. The results also highlight that the responses from the Latino sample are significantly higher in terms of the relationship between servant, transformational, and transactional leadership and satisfaction with leadership and motivation. </p>

<p>Personality-type measures should be viable tools to use for selection. They have incremental validity over cognitive measures and they add this incremental validity while decreasing adverse impact (Hough, 1998; Ones, Viswesvaran &amp; Schmidt, 1993; Ones &amp; Viswesvaran, 1998a). However, personality measures are susceptible to faking; individual's instructed to fake on personality measures are able to increase their scores (Barrick &amp; Mount, 1996; Ellingson, Sackett &amp; Hough, 1999; Hough, Eaton, Dunnette, Kamp, &amp; McCloy, 1990). Further, personality measures often reveal less than optimal validity estimates as research continually finds meta-analytic coefficients near .2 (e.g., Morgeson, Campion, Dipboye, Hollenbeck, Murphy, &amp; Schmitt, 2007). Some researchers have suggested that these two problems are linked as faking on personality measure may reduce their ability to predict job performance (e.g., Tett &amp; Christansen, 2007). Empirically keyed instruments traditionally enhance prediction and have been found to mitigate the effects of faking (Kluger, Reilly &amp; Russell, 1991; Scott &amp; Sinar, 2011). Recently suggested as a means to key to personality measures (e.g., Tawney &amp; Mead, In Prep), this dissertation further investigates empirical keying methods as a means to both mitigate faking effects and as a means to increase validity of personality-type measures. A Monte Carlo methodology is used due to the difficulties in obtaining accurate measures of faking. As such, this dissertation investigates faking issues under controlled and known parameters, allowing for more robust conclusions as compared to prior faking research. </p>

<p> This quantitative replicated study was adapted from Nielson et al. (2008). It explored the relationship between exposure to bullying and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder as experienced by Licensed Professional Counselors (L PCs), who are themselves targets or have witnessed bullying in the workplace. The research questions probed (a) incidences of workplace bullying of LPCs, (b) the occurrence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms because of workplace bullying, and (c) the manner in which sense of coherence moderates PTSD-related symptoms for counselors experiencing bullying. Online surveys were sent to LPCs via email as a means of data gathering. LPC email addresses were obtained from Medical Solution links. The instruments chosen for the study were three validated surveys. The 54 LPC participants have provided their perceptions and personal experiences on workplace bullying, post-traumatic stress disorder, and a sense of coherence. The findings showed that the LPC respondents in this study were extensively exposed to workplace bullying. It was also established that there were no significant differences in the self-reported PTSD symptoms of LPCs who have experienced workplace bullying and those who did not. Lastly, the study concluded that high, moderate, or low sense of coherence (SOC) makes no significant differences in the development of PTSD-linked aftereffects to bullying. These findings add to the body of knowledge concerning bullying of licensed professional counselors, its aftermath, and any long-lasting effects of post-traumatic stress.</p>