No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Since the 1980s our economy has been quickly evolving. Mergers, downsizing, privatizations and the recent economic crisis have exposed employees to a growing sense of uncertainty about their job future. Both quantitative and qualitative job insecurity has been linked to numerous negative performance and health outcomes for employees, negatively impacting organizations. Negative effects include burnout, reduced work engagement and decreased safety motivation and compliance. Most studies on job insecurity only look at one country, usually a Western country, and rely exclusively on self-reports. Therefore, the aims of the present research (including two studies) are to a) examine both qualitative and quantitative job insecurity in different cultural contexts, including an Eastern country and b) include behavioural measures to performance outcomes. Studies carried out before the economic crisis found more negative performance outcomes associated with job insecurity in collectivistic compared with individualistic cultures. The question arises whether the change in the economic environment since the economic crisis caused a change in the influence of job insecurity in Western as compared to Eastern countries. Thus, in the first study, the consequences of job insecurity for employees in the contexts of the U.S. were examined (N=969), where the crisis began, Germany (N=374), which is still affected by the subsequent Euro debt crisis, and China (N=205), which was initially mostly unaffected by the crisis but whose economy is currently experiencing a slowdown. Understanding the influence of job insecurity on employees’ performance in different national contexts is necessary for organizations to be successful and thrive. Two important performance outcomes are creativity and cognitive errors. Employees’ creativity can generate new ideas for products and procedures, which is a competitive advantage for organizations. In contrast, making and not detecting cognitive errors before they cause harm can reduce employees’ own and other people’s safety. Results of making and not detecting cognitive errors may include workplace injuries not only posing a threat to employees, but also to people around them, which can lead to significant costs for organizations. A theoretical model was developed and examined in which it was hypothesized that job insecurity influences those performance outcomes through burnout and work engagement. In the second study conducted in China (N=148), the first study was taken a step further and included observational data to investigate the relationship between performance outcomes and job insecurity. An error detection task was developed by adapting an established creativity test to examine whether the same results from the first study can be obtained using behavioural measures. In the first study, results supported the existence of cross-cultural differences in the relationship between performance outcomes and job insecurity. The second study showed similar results for self-report and observational data. To conclude, for organizations to be successful, it is highly important to understand performance outcomes of job insecurity in different national contexts and to implement measures to help employees cope with job insecurity in order to prevent negative consequences.

Trust has proven to be a vital social capital. It has been implicated in a myriad of socially beneficial initiatives. While trust vested in familiar others remain important, trust extended to strangers is crucial to the continued development of social capital. This is because such interaction, though risky at times, forms a springboard to untapped opportunities. Using a multi-round trust game and self-report assessments the present study explored explanations for observed cultural differences in trust in strangers. Data was drawn from university students in Ghana and Hong Kong. Factor analysis showed that self-report trust in strangers was associated with trust in people of another religion and people of another nationality among Hong Kong Chinese, but was associated with trust in family members and people whom one knows personally among Ghanaians. While Hong Kong Chinese students reported higher level of trust in strangers, Ghanaian students showed higher level of trust in standard behavioural measure. Perceived nepotism in public institutions explained the observed cultural difference in self-report trust in strangers. Self-report trust in strangers and perceived nepotism in public institutions did not relate to behavioural trust in both samples. However, culture specific results with the behavioural measure indicated that dealing with a generous or thrifty individual impacted trust significantly. In both samples, participants dealing with a generous individual showed higher behavioural trust compared to those dealing with a thrifty individual. These results suggest that the influence of context on trust is twofold: distal, contextual factors, such as perceived nepotism in public institutions are influential to the cultural differences in self-report trust, whereas proximal, situational factors, such as generosity of a stranger, have more impact on actual trust behaviours. Altogether, this research showed that the contexts under which people function have substantial impact on trust. Specifically, individual’s experiences with the government institutions in a sociocultural context affect their tendency to trust unfamiliar others, but one’s immediate interaction with another person is more influential to their enactment of trust in a particular situation. Future research on trust should pay more attention to the effects of contexts, depending on how trust is operationalized.

Knowledge workers are frequently bombarded with interruption and are required to constant multitask. Previous observational studies found that frequent interrupted activities cause more errors and induce feelings of stress and frustration. Therefore, the aim of the current research is to investigate how interruption affects error detection performance. Current error detection research focused on the effectiveness of different checking methods. In this thesis, we concentrate on the psychological mechanism of error detection. A series of experiments was carried out to examine the effects of self-interruption (i.e. the pilot study and Study I) and external interruption (Study II) on error detection performance respectively. The pilot study and Study I focus on the effects of working memory (WM) load and capacity. The pilot study employed a think-aloud technique to verify the predictions on WM and self-interruption. The results suggest that low-capacity individuals (LWMC) rehearsed more frequent than high-capacity individuals (HWMC). In other words, LWMC have more self-initiated interruptions during the primary error detection task. Study I was carried out to test the generated predictions from the pilot study. A reliable interaction effect WM load × capacity was found: LWMC performed significantly worse in higher WM load conditions; however, HWMC’s performances were unaffected by higher WM load. Study II focuses on the effect of interruption task types and position. There was no difference between the different interruption task types proposed. However, a significant main effect was found in interruption position: participants performed significantly worse in terms of both error detection and resumption when they were interrupted just before the actual field is displayed (i.e. between-fields interruption) compared to when they can see what is in the field (i.e. within-field interruption). The results are explained in terms of Salvucci and Taategen’s (2008) threaded cognition. The concurrent execution of error detection and WM tasks in Study I is interpreted as concurrent multitasking performance; whereas the sequential execution of error detection and interrupting tasks is interpreted as sequential multitasking. The current study contributed to the understanding of error detection performance by examining the roles of both self-interruption and external interruption and extends the application boundary of threaded cognition to interpret the effect of interruptions.