Realistic group conflict theory (LeVine & Campbell, 1972) posits that people advocate policies that promote their personal and group interests, whereas they resist policies that advance the relative standing of out-group members. Consequently, diversity policies may elicit threat among some employees regarding their group's status, especially during periods when economic resources are scarce. To test the viability of realistic group conflict in an organizational context, both survey (N = 790) and experimental ( N = 108) methodologies were used to explore the influence of economic threat on subsequent acceptance of, or resistance to, organizational diversity policies. As expected, the cross-sectional survey data indicated that the strongest predictor of attitudes toward a typical affirmative action plan was the extent to which respondents thought that the plan would negatively affect the opportunities for success of people similar to them in terms of race and gender. Likewise, an experimental manipulation of economic threat caused participants to be less supportive both of diversity programs and of diverse organizational employees. Furthermore, this effect was often moderated by zero-sum beliefs and social dominance orientation, such that participants low on each of these dispositional traits supported diversity programs more than participants high in these traits in the absence of an economic threat; however, all participants regardless of their score on these individual difference variables were less supportive of diversity policies after being exposed to an economic threat. This research has broad theoretical and practical implications, including helping organizations to recognize, understand, and ultimately reduce discrimination in organizations, particularly during times of economic difficulty.

The "beauty is beastly" effect, in which physically attractive females are held at a disadvantage in selection for male sex-typed jobs, is often cited in the physical attractiveness bias research, but has rarely ever been replicated. This study addresses the issue of stimulus sampling, a key shortcoming in previous attractiveness research. Using a large sample of photographic stimuli, as well as a larger number of jobs than is usually used in such research, this study replicates the effect and demonstrates that it is more reliably driven by the extent to which physical appearance is seen as important for a given job, rather than a job's sex-type.

While existing literature on leadership articulates the importance of leader emotion, there has been little attention to the potential roles of more specific emotions. The current paper examined the effect of leader emotion on evaluations of leadership in the context of a product recall. In particular, this research examined how the expression of anger and sadness influences how effective a leader is perceived to be in times of crises. This was done by manipulating the emotion of the leader, as well as the response of the leader. The results revealed that a leader expressing either sadness or anger/sadness was evaluated more favorably than a leader expressing anger. Furthermore, a leader accepting responsibility for the crisis was evaluated more favorably than a leader not accepting responsibility.

This study examined the influence of mentor matching on job attitudes and the extent to which this relationship was mediated by the amount of gay-specific mentor functions gay and lesbian workers receive and further influenced by the centrality of a gay or lesbian individual's sexual identity. Results revealed that gay and lesbian proteges with gay mentors reported greater job satisfaction and job involvement than those with heterosexual mentors, who in turn, reported greater job satisfaction and job involvement than gay and lesbian workers with no mentors. Having a mentor, regardless of whether the mentor was gay or heterosexual, however, did not appear related to gay and lesbian workers' organizational commitment. No support was found for the proposed mediator and moderator variables. Implications for future research are discussed.

Several methods for improving the job analysis process were examined using the Position Analysis Questionnaire (PAQ). Holistic ratings of PAQ dimensions for four jobs were obtained from 63 non-experts, nine graduate students who were familiar with the PAQ, and three professional job analysts who were very familiar with the PAQ. Holistic ratings were compared to a traditional score profile obtained from professional job analysts. For all groups, holistic ratings of the dimensions were not similar to the traditional score profiles; consequently, rating PAQ dimensions holistically is probably not a viable alternative to reducing the effort required in the job analysis process. Additionally, a comparison of three rating scales in the holistic condition showed that they were moderately correlated. Future research investigating rating scales that yield independent information should be conducted. The potential benefits of a detailed item training session for job analysts are also discussed.

Structured methods of job analysis have traditionally been based upon theories of job performance that describe work in terms of discrete dimensions of behaviors, such as work output, relations with others, etc. Recent job analysis research has sought to reduce the effort of a traditional structured job analysis by reducing the demands placed upon the rater providing job analysis information. The Job Element Inventory (JEI) is one such structured job analysis inventory which seeks to reduce the effort in the job analysis process while assessing jobs through a priori theories of work activities. Early research has shown that the JEI has many desirable properties, though the replicability of its putative structure has not been addressed. This research employed confirmatory factor analysis methods designed to assess the replicability of the structure of the JEI in many different samples of data. Results indicate that the JEI's structure was recoverable, with minor modifications, across several disparate jobs. These results were consonant with popular theories of work behavior. Implications for future applications of the JEI are discussed.

The effects of a situational and a personality variable on the performance of a laboratory task were examined. Goal setting was used to provide situational performance parameters while Type A-B behavior pattern provided a measure of individual differences. The contrasting predictions of each variable were integrated to form experimental hypotheses. The results indicate that personality variables may moderate the situation-performance relationship. Implications for research in person-situation interaction are discussed.

Age-bias in employment decisions is seen as a likely result of the unwanted effects of stereotypes. The concept of stereotype has long been tied to notions of prejudice, and seen as stemming from uncontrollable unconscious or sociocultural forces. In early conceptions, thus, stereotypes had been seen as resistant to change. More recent formulations in the social cognition area may provide a means for altering at least the more extreme effects at the individual "stereotyper" level. One way this alteration may be accomplished is by manipulating the information input, such that the stereotyper is also led to attend to outcome-relevant information which is not stereotypical. Manipulation of outcome-relevant information had little effect on decision-making. However, information age-relatedness did have an effect on hypothetical hiring decisions. Results indicate that providing non-age-related information can result in significantly less of an age effect on decisions than does providing age-related information. This report discusses the use of the Policy Capturing approach, design-improvement strategies, and the benefits to be derived from this line of research.

Katz and Kahn (1978) defined leadership as "an influential increment over and above compliance with routine directives of the organization" (p. 528). Methodological shortcomings in previous tests of this concept prohibit meaningful interpretation of the results. If found to be useful, this definition of leadership has important implications for both the study and application of leadership principles. The purpose of the present research was twofold: (1) to test whether incremental influence accounts for unique variance in the dependent measures after controlling for the organizational sources of power; (2) to explore the contribution of both leader behavioral influence strategies and subordinate attributions of leader power to subordinate reasons for complying with the leader's requests. A field study was conducted in which five bases of leader power were used: expert, referent, reward, legitimate and coercive. Incremental Influence was defined as compliance based on the leader's expert and referent power. Subordinate attributions of a leader's power were assessed using the Attributed Power Index (Holzbach, 1974), which measures the same five bases of power. Leader Influence Strategies were assessed by the Kipnis and Schmidt (1980) Managerial Influence Profile, which measures seven behavioral influence strategies: Friendliness, Bargaining, Reason, Coalitions, Higher Authority, Sanctions, and Assertiveness. The usefulness of Incremental Influence was tested using a hierarchical regression framework. As predicted, results showed that Incremental Influence accounted for unique variance in measures of subordinate satisfaction and multiple source ratings of leader effectiveness. The relationship of both strategies and attributed power to the reasons for compliance also were tested with hierarchical regression procedures. The use of Reason (as rated by subordinates) was found to be a significant predictor of compliance based on both expert and referent power, while the use of Assertiveness predicted compliance based on the organizational sources of power. Attributed Power was found not to moderate the relationship between influence strategies and reasons for compliance, as had been predicted. Rather, both attributed leader power and the strategies leaders are perceived to use contributed independently to reasons for compliance.

Previous research has found that when subjects are given cognitive feedback, they reach higher levels of achievement than when they are given outcome feedback. It was hypothesized that this finding was due in part to the predictability of the task environment since outcome feedback is at a distinct disadvantage as a sole means of conveying such information. A study was conducted to compare response and outcome feedback under three conditions which varied in terms of the predictability between actual and optimum criteria. The design included a control group receiving no feedback at all, two response groups differing in precision of feedback information, and two outcome feedback groups differing on a quantity dimension. Task predictability conditions averaged across five learning blocks were high (r = .94), moderate (r = .87) and low low (r = .71). The study also attempted to clarify the definition of feedback and to equate the availability of task information in the various feedback conditions that were compared. The results, however, did not support the above hypothesis. The utility of outcome feedback was inferior to that of response feedback under all three predictability conditions tested. In fact, an interaction revealed that the effect of increased predictability raised rather than lowered the disparity between outcome and response feedback performance. Generally, a decline in task predictability accompanied a decline in performance measured in terms of achievement, hit-rate, knowledge, and control. The results also revealed that a control group that received no feedback at all performed as well as or better than those that received feedback when the availability of task information was equated. Moreover, eliminating the memory requirement inherent in the use of outcome feedback only worsened performance. Similarly, adding precision to the response feedback condition beyond the level of mere directional error information did not improve performance. The principal conclusions to be drawn from these findings are: (a) increasing predictability improves judgment performance, (b) providing outcome feedback is more detrimental to performance than providing response or no feedback when a valid task structure is available, and (c) increasing predictability does not reduce the disparity between the effectiveness of outcome and response feedback.