No description available.

The escalation of commitment to a particular course of action has, in the past eleven years, become an increasingly popular area for research in the psychological aspects of decision making. The major question posed by this line of research is: "Does an individual become so committed to a particular course of action that he/she can no longer analyze the situation objectively and, consequently, makes irrational decisions to continue investing when such activity is no longer advisable?" Staw (1981) states that the escalation phenomenon can occur when an individual becomes overly committed to a chosen course of action. He adds that the underlying assumption of this line of research is "that individuals may go beyond the passive distortion of adverse consequences in an effort to rationalize a behavioral error" (p. 579). In other words, if an individual is committed to a particular course of action, then he/she may commit a greater amount of resources, following negative feedback, in order to "turn the situation around" and in an attempt to eventually appear competent.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Any discussion of computer-assisted instruction (CAI) cannot proceed very far without first examining the issue of programmed instruction (PI). CAI is a relatively recent development in the area of education and training, whereas PI enjoys a somewhat longer history. Nonetheless, PI lies at the very heart of CAI and forms the base on which CAI exists. CAI then, may be viewed as a mode or type of PI. B. F. Skinner's work in the 1940's with the principles of operant conditioning laid the groundwork for the concept of PI (Garner, 1966). Operant conditioning is a type of conditioning whereby an emitted response is reinforced. The reinforcement should increase the strength of the response and presumably increase the chances that the response will occur again (Munn, Fernald, & Fernald, 1972). Operant conditioning, in which an individual is conditioned to behave in the direction of a predetermined goal, is achieved through the contingent reinforcement of a series of steps. These steps of action are linked together in a chain of successive approximations. Each link of the chain approximates the end goal slightly more than the previous link. This chain of successive approximations is followed until the end behavior is achieved (Garner, 1966). In this respect, PI makes use of the sequencing of small successive steps and contingent reinforcement to achieve some desired end goal, namely, achieving the lesson objective. This "Skinnerian" or linear form of PI requires the student to proceed through a forward moving chain in a step-by-step fashion until the end behavior is achieved. The step-by-step sequence, as it pertains to PI, refers to the individual segments or frames of a PI lesson. Each frame might be considered one step of the entire PI lesson. These frames, which should flow logically from one to the next, should build upon each other and approximate the lesson objective. Periodically, progress should be monitored in order to assure that the student is comprehending the lesson material (Wilson & Tosti, 1972). Typically, this is accomplished by incorporating multiple choice or true/false questions within the PI lesson itself. By so doing, student performances can be checked and appropriate actions taken within the concept of reinforcement. Deterline (1962) argues that all learned behavior is based on, reinforcement. Individuals learn by acting on their environment and, in turn, are influenced by the consequences of their actions (Deterline, 1962). Then consequences strengthen behavior, reinforcement is said to have taken place.

Globalization requires that organizations in a broad variety of sectors collaborate with individuals from different ethnic groups around the world (Harrison, Price, & Bell, 1998). Cross-cultural collaboration involves various processes including information sharing that are critical to tasks such as decision making, innovating, and problem solving (Homan, van Knippenberg, van Kleef, & De Dreu, 2007). This research examines the role of openness to diversity and perceived similarity on the relationship between surface-level ethnic diversity and information sharing. Results suggest that participants in the homogeneous ethnic condition shared more information than those in the heterogeneous condition. Findings also indicate that openness to diversity mediates the relationship between surface-level ethnic differences and information sharing across condition when individuals do not perceive other team members to be very similar. Implications from this research suggest that attitudes about diversity matter and can potentially help ethnically diverse teams to share information and overcome challenges to collaboration.

This thesis examines the constructs of organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and work stress, and the extent to which they are affected by perceptions of organizational justice and leadership styles. Much of the literature related to these topics focuses on exploring the relationship between either justice and commitment or leadership and commitment, with very little research investigating the way that justice and leadership combine to affect outcome variables such as commitment, satisfaction, and stress. This study reviewed the literature that details these topics in order to facilitate the understanding necessary to then focus on the relationship between commitment, organizational justice, and leadership style, as well as job satisfaction and work stress. It is important to understand how these three concepts affect one another, as increasing employee commitment is a goal of many, if not all organizations, and understanding how to better influence and facilitate it could be very valuable information.

To stay competitive, many employers are looking for creative and innovative employees to add value to their organization. However, current models of job performance overlook creative performance as an important criterion to measure in the workplace. The purpose of this dissertation is to conduct two separate but related studies on creative performance that aim to provide support that creative performance should be included in models of job performance, and ultimately included in performance evaluations in organizations. Study 1 is a meta-analysis on the relationship between creative performance and task performance, and the relationship between creative performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Overall, I found support for a medium to large corrected correlation for both the creative performance-task performance (ρ = .51) and creative performance-OCB (ρ = .49) relationships. Further, I also found that both rating-source and study location were significant moderators. Study 2 is a process model that includes creative performance alongside task performance and OCB as the outcome variables. I test a model in which both individual differences (specifically: conscientiousness, extraversion, proactive personality, and self-efficacy) and job characteristics (autonomy, feedback, and supervisor support) predict creative performance, task performance, and OCB through engagement as a mediator. In a sample of 299 employed individuals, I found that all the individual differences and job characteristics were positively correlated with all three performance criteria. I also looked at these relationships in a multiple regression framework and most of the individual differences and job characteristics still predicted the performance criteria. In the mediation analyses, I found support for engagement as a significant mediator of the individual differences-performance and job characteristics-performance relationships. Taken together, Study 1 and Study 2 support the notion that creative performance should be included in models of job performance. Implications for both researchers and practitioners alike are discussed.

The present study tested a nomological net of work engagement that was derived from its extant research. Two of the main work engagement models that have been presented and empirically tested in the literature, the JD-R model and Kahn’s model, were integrated to test the effects that job features and personal characteristics can have on work engagement through the psychological conditions of meaningfulness, safety, and availability. In this study, safety refers to psychological perceptions of safety and not workplace safety behaviors. The job features that were tested in this model included person-job fit, autonomy, co-worker relations, supervisor support, procedural justice, and interactional justice, while the personal characteristics consisted of self-consciousness, self-efficacy, extraversion, and neuroticism. Thirty-four hypotheses and a conceptual model were tested in order to establish the viability of this nomological net of work engagement in which it was expected that meaningfulness would mediate the relationships between job features and work engagement, safety would mediate the relationships that job features and personal characteristics have with work engagement, and availability (physical, emotional, and cognitive resources) would mediate the relationships that personal characteristics have with work engagement. Furthermore, analyses were run in order to determine the factor structure of work engagement, assess whether or not it exhibits differential validity from organizational commitment and job satisfaction, and confirm that it is positively related to the outcome variable of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). The final sample consisted of 500 workers from an online labor market who responded to a questionnaire composed of measures of all constructs included in this study. Findings show that work engagement is best represented as a three-factor construct, composed of vigor, dedication and absorption. Furthermore, support was found for the distinction of work engagement from the related constructs of organizational commitment and job satisfaction. With regard to the proposed model, meaningfulness proved to be the strongest predictor of work engagement. Results show that it partially mediates the relationships that all job features have with work engagement. Safety proved to be a partial mediator of the relationships that autonomy, co-worker relations, supervisor support, procedural justice, interactional justice, and self-efficacy have with work engagement, and fully mediate the relationship between neuroticism and work engagement. Findings also show that availability partially mediates the positive relationships that extraversion and self-efficacy have with work engagement, and fully mediates the negative relationship that neuroticism has with work engagement. Finally, a positive relationship was found between work engagement and OCB. Research and organizational implications are discussed.