Book Summary: In the modern workplace, millions of dollars are spent each year on employee training. All too often, however, little thought and effort is spent on evaluating training and ensuring that the correct training is taking place. Successful training is about understanding both organizational goals and employee behavior. The basis for this book is the 9th Annual River Cities Industrial and Organizational Psychology Conference held on the campus of The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in October 2013. The theme of the conference was Trends in Training. Accordingly, the focus of many of the talks was on how to train people to thrive and succeed in the environment where they spend a large portion of their lives the workplace.

This two-part study was conducted as part of a larger project exploring leadership, organizational processes, and performance in local governments. In Study 1, we conducted interviews with exemplary leaders in local governments across a medium sized southeastern state. Results of these interviews suggested leadership and organizational processes consistent with organizational mindfulness. In Study 2, we created a survey instrument based on existing work in organizational mindfulness. Responses from 96 local governments provided evidence suggesting that organizational mindfulness is related to self reports of organizational performance. We end with a discussion of these results, study limitations, and opportunities for future research.

We investigated race and gender differences in regulatory focus, which distinguishes between two modes of motivational regulation: promotion and prevention focus. Item response theory was used to examine measurement equivalence/invariance and mean differences across groups were examined. Several items functioned differently across groups, but differences cancelled out at the test-level. Analyses using an undergraduate student sample (N = 1,845) revealed that females were significantly more promotion and prevention focused than males and African Americans were significantly more promotion and prevention focused than Caucasians. Interestingly, both gender and racial minority groups scored higher on regulatory focus indicators than the majority groups. Arguably, unlike minority group members, majority group members would have less of a necessity to prevent failure or to promote their own success. Implications for these motivation regulation differences can be applied to workforce settings in which managers seek to provide equal opportunities for both genders and racial groups.

Historically researchers have focused much attention on performance appraisal practices, such as the rating form and rater training. However, there is a growing movement to eliminate not only annual performance reviews but to eliminate all formal employee ratings. This conversation hour will focus on the future of performance rating research.

The purpose of this session is to provide interested researchers with information regarding the development of photographic research methods in the social sciences, their potential as a novel qualitative tool in organizational research, and the decisions that are required when planning or conducting research leveraging these methods. The intent of this session is to promote the integration of photographic research methods and organizational research by emphasizing the unique contributions that photographic research methods can provide as a data source and as a tool to facilitate interactions between researcher and participant, and communication from researcher to audience.

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Accurate and objective performance appraisals are absolutely necessary due to their utility in important personnel decisions such as promotion, demotion and training. This study examines the contaminating effects of sex bias on performance evaluations and it's relationship to the sex-stereotype of the job and levels of performance. Unlike previous studies, this study not only examines these effects at the extremes of performance, but at average levels as well. Also, unlike previous studies, the subjects empirically determined the sex-typed nature of the jobs and the levels of performance within those jobs rather than the experimenter having made a priori decisions. Hypothetical employees in male, neutral, and female sex-typed jobs who performed at high, average, and low levels were rated on four performance dimensions and one overall performance dimension. There were no main effects for either the sex of the rater or the sex of the ratee. There was, however, an interaction between the level of performance and the sex-type of the job that was significant on four of the five dimensions. Possible explanations are developed within an Equity Theory framework for the findings.

Small business enterprises (SBEs) are significant contributors to business growth and employment in the United States, but despite governmental support, the failure rate of SBEs is high. Some small business leaders lack the critical management skills to detect or discover when underperformance in revenue-generation is due to gaps in organizational knowledge or business practices associated with managing knowledge assets. Guided by the knowledge-based view of the firm, the purpose of this multiple case study was to address that gap by exploring the skills needed by leaders to understand how deficiencies in their knowledge management practices contribute to underperformance. Semistructured interview data were collected from a sample of 10 small business leaders in the northeast and west. Data from publicly available documentation consisting of sales brochures, press releases, and participant company websites were also collected. Data analysis entailed using keyword frequency comparisons, coding techniques, and cluster analysis. The key themes indicate that the participants' document management practices and misaligned core business practices impeded value creation. The recommended change in business practices for small business leaders is to formalize social engagement with customers, use document management tools, and adopt process management techniques. The implications for social change include mitigating the harmful effects of business failure on society associated with job loss, stress-related disabilities, and reduced charitable donations to groups serving disadvantaged citizens. The beneficiaries of this research include small business leaders, business practitioners, and policy makers.