Mediating role of mentoring functions on linking personality and occupational commitment in Indian organizations

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the mediating effect of mentoring on the relationship between the Five Factor Model (FFM) Personality traits and occupational commitment (OC). The study used cross-sectional survey-based research design. Data were collected from 362 managers of public and private sector organizations located in North India. The results indicated that psychosocial mentoring acts as a partial mediator for facilitating the linkage between all the FFM traits and OC. Contrary to this, career mentoring was found to partially mediate the link between only conscientiousness-OC, agreeableness-OC and emotional stability-OC. No mediating effect of career mentoring was found for personality factors of openness and extraversion. HRD practitioners are encouraged to implement train-for-trainers’ sessions for raising awareness among senior managers/mentors about the importance of psychosocial mentoring functions. This study is unique, because it is among the few to appropriately capture the mediating role of mentoring functions vis a vis the personality and OC relationship. Further, it also enriches the existing body of research on workplace mentoring and careers, especially in the South-Asian context.     

Righting anachronistic exclusions: The ethics of blood donation by men who have sex with men

ABSTRACT

Recently, the FDA announced that it would soon lift the long-standing lifetime ban on blood donation by men who have sex with men (MSM). Reexamining blood donation by MSM, it is clear that there are several ethical goods that must be balanced. Through balancing the primary duty to safety with the imperatives to craft a policy that is formally equal, upholds the public's trust, and is nondiscriminatory, an ethical blood donation deferral guideline may be advanced, both for MSM and the population at large.     

Power analysis for clustered non-continuous responses in multicenter trials

Power analysis for multi-center randomized control trials is quite difficult to perform for non-continuous responses when site differences are modeled by random effects using the generalized linear mixed-effects model (GLMM). First, it is not possible to construct power functions analytically, because of the extreme complexity of the sampling distribution of parameter estimates. Second, Monte Carlo (MC) simulation, a popular option for estimating power for complex models, does not work within the current context because of a lack of methods and software packages that would provide reliable estimates for fitting such GLMMs. For example, even statistical packages from software giants like SAS do not provide reliable estimates at the time of writing. Another major limitation of MC simulation is the lengthy running time, especially for complex models such as GLMM, especially when estimating power for multiple scenarios of interest. We present a new approach to address such limitations. The proposed approach defines a marginal model to approximate the GLMM and estimates power without relying on MC simulation. The approach is illustrated with both real and simulated data, with the simulation study demonstrating good performance of the method.     

Is There a Trade-off Between Parent Care and Self-care?

Caregiving for family members is often described as a 36-hour day. Previous literature has suggested that family caregivers have little time to attend to their own health needs, such as participating in leisure-time physical activity. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we analyze whether time-allocation decisions reflect a conflict between time devoted to informal care and time devoted to self-health promotion through physical activity. The empirical model is a system of four correlated equations, wherein the dependent variables are hours spent caregiving, frequency of moderate and vigorous physical activity, and hours spent in paid work. Results from joint estimation of the four equations indicate limited evidence of a competition between time spent in caregiving and frequency of physical activity. Parental factors that increase allocation of care time to parents do not comprehensively induce reductions in the frequency of any type of physical activity, or in hours of work, among either men or women.     

THE END OF THE ART CONNOISSEUR? EXPERTS AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN THE VISUAL ARTS IN THE DIGITAL AGE

In this digital age, declarations surface of the death of the expert and the democratization of information. Crowd wisdom is seen as the new guide in constructing and evaluating knowledge. In the context of the art world, this tension between the amateurs and the experts becomes particularly pronounced as popular meets high culture. Questions arise such as: what is the role of the expert in the evaluation of art in contemporary times? Do social media dismantle age-old hierarchies and established priesthoods in the art world? And can we assume that mass participation in valuation results in better judgments? This article addresses such popular notions of participation and expertise concerning social media in the art world through a historical lens by re-examining and positioning art experts from past to present. Particularly, characteristics of intermediaries in the art market are examined closely regarding their strategies in knowledge production and the establishment of expertise. This historical situatedness enables us to move beyond the hype of new media expectations, generating more appropriate avenues of investigation to better grasp possible changes amongst actors within the contemporary art world. This examination is not just theoretically relevant but practically so, given current pressures on art institutions to embrace and reach out to new audiences online.     

Models for surveillance data under reporting delay: applications to US veteran first-time suicide attempters

Surveillance data provide a vital source of information for assessing the spread of a health problem or disease of interest and for planning for future health-care needs. However, the use of surveillance data requires proper adjustments of the reported caseload due to underreporting caused by reporting delays within a limited observation period. Although methods are available to address this classic statistical problem, they are largely focused on inference for the reporting delay distribution, with inference about caseload of disease incidence based on estimates for the delay distribution. This approach limits the complexity of models for disease incidence to provide reliable estimates and projections of incidence. Also, many of the available methods lack robustness since they require parametric distribution assumptions. We propose a new approach to overcome such limitations by allowing for separate models for the incidence and the reporting delay in a distribution-free fashion, but with joint inference for both modeling components, based on functional response models. In addition, we discuss inference about projections of future disease incidence to help identify significant shifts in temporal trends modeled based on the observed data. This latter issue on detecting ‘change points’ is not sufficiently addressed in the literature, despite the fact that such warning signs of potential outbreak are critically important for prevention purposes. We illustrate the approach with both simulated and real data, with the latter involving data for suicide attempts from the Veteran Healthcare Administration.     

Human Interindividual Variability in Parameters Related to Health Risks

This paper reviews existing data on the variability in parameters relevant for health risk analyses. We cover both exposure-related parameters and parameters related to individual susceptibility to toxicity. The toxicity/susceptibility data base under construction is part of a longer term research effort to lay the groundwork for quantitative distributional analyses of non-cancer toxic risks. These data are broken down into a variety of parameter types that encompass different portions of the pathway from external exposure to the production of biological responses. The discrete steps in this pathway, as we now conceive them, are:Contact Rate (Breathing rates per body weight; fish consumption per body weight)Uptake or Absorption as a Fraction of Intake or Contact RateGeneral Systemic Availability Net of First Pass Elimination and Dilution via Distribution Volume (e.g., initial blood concentration per mg/kg of uptake)Systemic Elimination (half life or clearance)Active Site Concentration per Systemic Blood or Plasma ConcentrationPhysiological Parameter Change per Active Site Concentration (expressed as the dose required to make a given percentage change in different people, or the dose required to achieve some proportion of an individual's maximum response to the drug or toxicant)Functional Reserve Capacity–Change in Baseline Physiological Parameter Needed to Produce a Biological Response or Pass a Criterion of Abnormal FunctionComparison of the amounts of variability observed for the different parameter types suggests that appreciable variability is associated with the final step in the process–differences among people in functional reserve capacity. This has the implication that relevant information for estimating effective toxic susceptibility distributions may be gleaned by direct studies of the population distributions of key physiological parameters in people that are not exposed to the environmental and occupational toxicants that are thought to perturb those parameters. This is illustrated with some recent observations of the population distributions of Low Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol from the second and third National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys.     

A learning collaborative approach to training school-based health providers in evidence-based mental health treatment

Collaborative care models among pediatric primary care and child and adolescent mental health providers are increasingly emphasized to improve quality of and access to mental health services. The current case example of a multi-site clinical training opportunity in school-based collaborative care settings illustrates the success of a learning collaborative approach to improve children's mental health care in schools. Quality improvement data from participating sites indicated an increase in use of evidence-based practices (i.e., “core skills”) and an improvement in quality service delivery indicators for children's mental health (i.e., screening, risk assessment, diagnostic processes, associated diagnostic coding, use of core skills, associated procedural coding, and follow-up assessment and referral) over time. Clinician self-report and chart review data are supplemented by qualitative data from site leader interviews conducted following completion of the project. Implications for mental health workforce development to improve the quality of care to children and adolescents in schools and other community mental health settings are discussed.     

Power analysis for cluster randomized trials with binary outcomes modeled by generalized linear mixed-effects models

Power analysis for cluster randomized control trials is difficult to perform when a binary response is modeled using the generalized linear mixed-effects model (GLMM). Although methods for clustered binary responses exist such as the generalized estimating equations, they do not apply to the context of GLMM. Also, because popular statistical packages such as R and SAS do not provide correct estimates of parameters for the GLMM for binary responses, Monte Carlo simulation, a popular ad-hoc method for estimating power when the power function is too complex to evaluate analytically or numerically, fails to provide correct power estimates within the current context as well. In this paper, a new approach is developed to estimate power for cluster randomized control trials when a binary response is modeled by the GLMM. The approach is easy to implement and seems to work quite well, as assessed by simulation studies. The approach is illustrated with a real intervention study to reduce suicide reattempt rates among US Veterans.     

Caste,socio-economic status and fertility -- a study of proximate determinants of fertility in village Riwasa

The intermediary variables of ritual stratification, i.e., caste, and secular stratification, i.e., socioeconomic status, were examined to explain fertility in a survey of 140 fertile women in Riwasa village, Bhiwani District, Haryana state, India, in 1981. The subjects interviewed were equally divided among 17 castes on the basis of untouchability. The intermediary variables evaluated were caste-consciousness, modernization, conformity to family ethical codes and husband-wife communication. The fertility indices were live births, living children, expected additional births and ideal family size. Results were expressed in percentages. Results of the survey confirmed previous findings that fertility was inversely related to caste and socioeconomic status. These associations were explained here, however, by the behavior of the intermediary variables. Fertility was inversely related to level of modernization and to husband-wife communication. Although caste-consciousness and conformity to family ethical codes were directly related to fertility, even among the higher castes. There were no differences in this study population between high and middle socioeconomic class, probably because the high socioeconomic group in this village resembled middle class in typical urban settings.