Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, Dec., 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Studies of small and medium-sized enterprises have provided evidence that CEOs of such firms can have a dominating influence on firm activities. Drawing on upper echelons theory, we analyze the influence of CEO personality (CEO internal locus of control), CEO ownership and CEO education on the evaluation of middle manager performance. In line with our expectations, we find evidence for a direct effect of CEO ownership (negative) and CEO education (positive) on the use of objective performance evaluations and for a direct effect of the CEO's internal locus of control on the use of subjective performance evaluations. Moreover, we provide evidence for a moderating role of both CEO ownership and education with respect to the influence of the CEO's locus of control on the use of subjective evaluations. We use a sample of 247 small and medium-sized manufacturing firms to test our hypotheses.

This study was conducted to estabilish the validity of the Turkish Armed Forces Personality Battery (TAFPB) in selecting Turkish Air Force Academy (TAFA) cadets. Before the data collection some items of TAFPB were made suitable for the TAFA cadets by SME&rsquo / s. Data were collected from first, second and third year students on TAFPB, 16 PF, psychomotor scores and objective and subjective performance measures. The data of 647 TAFA cadets were evaluated. The correlation matrixes, means and SD&rsquo / S of this study is found consistent with the TAFPB applications of Sumer et al. (2000) and Kale (2004) in military settings. TAFPB is face valid because of the common aims of TAFA and TAFPB, selecting ideal officer. TAFPB is content valid because all traits are determined by using job analysis and the relevance and importance of the traits are scored by SME&rsquo / s. Criterion-related validity was measured by analysing the correlations of TAFPB with objective (academic and sport score) and subjective (commander evaluation, flight, military score) performance. Correlations, and a series of regressions pointed out that TAFPB predicts significantly objective performance. TAFPB has incremental validity over 16 PF and BSI in explaining objective performance. The source and class variances were compared by ANOVA. Cadets from military source had significantly higher scores on 11 factors of TAFPB and on performance factors. Moreover they got significantly low scores on BSI. Military high school graduates seems more preferable by selecting cadets. To conclude, TAFPB is a valid test for TAFA.

Because of their seemingly universal appeal, game elements such as points, goals and leaderboards, are increasingly being incorporated into non-entertainment situations with the aim of increasing user performance. This process is referred to as gamification. However, little empirical research exists on gamification’s effectiveness in enhancing performance, particularly with respect to moderating influence of user personality traits. Social gamification that involves more than one participant incorporates social interdependence, which takes form as negative interdependence (competitive in nature) or positive interdependence (cooperative in nature). Based on the hypothesis that the interdependence type underlying a gamification system would appeal to differing personality traits, this study reports a quasi-experiment involving a platform designed to manipulate participant interdependence structure among cooperation, competition, and neutrality, with the latter acting as the control condition. These three interdependence structures functioned as the experiment’s independent variable, with measures of participant performance as dependent variables, together with the participant personality traits assessed using the five factor model of personality acting as moderating variables. 294 undergraduate participants worked with the platform on a voluntary basis over an eight-week period, spending 38,180 minutes and performing 3,275 actions. At the conclusion of the experiment, the data collected were analysed using Kruskal-Wallis, ANOVAs, multilevel mixed method regression models, and a generalised estimating equation. The study’s results yield significant evidence that incorporating gamification in the experimental platform increases participant performance as measured by completed actions on the platform, and that participant personality traits moderated performance depending on interdependence structure. Significant results suggest that within the gamified platform, Extraversion positively moderates performance under competition and Openness positively moderates performance under cooperation.

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