Listening Environment and the Bottom Line: How a Positive Environment Can Improve Financial Outcomes

Amidst the onslaught of communication at work, employees’ voices can be neglected in favor of the bottom line. This research initiates an exploration of the relationship between employee perceptions of the listening environment at work and organizational financial performance indicators. In this exploratory pilot study, we collected data from N = 65 employees of a single firm with multiple geographically and financially independent units. Using simple regression analysis, researchers compared data between units to determine if employee perceptions of positive qualities of the listening climate are related to improvement in sales and net income. Results suggest a potentially positive relationship between employees’ perceptions of a positive listening environment and these organizational performance indicators, suggesting that listening is an important step in building the communication climate of a productive company.     

Learning Life Skills Through Challenging and Negative Experiences

Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal - Youth who are socially vulnerable are disproportionately confronted with culminating risk factors that impact their everyday lives. Within positive youth...     

Social interactions and the salience of social identity

We explore the effect of identity salience on behaviour in a simple social interaction. Specifically, we compare ultimatum bargaining across three treatments: priming subjects with a shared identity, priming subjects with an identity distinct from those with whom they will interact, and priming subjects with no particular identity. We find that subjects are most cooperative in the identity-priming treatment and least cooperative in the distinctiveness-priming treatment. Similarly, subjects reveal the highest demands in the identity-priming treatment and the lowest demands in the distinctiveness-priming treatment. We discuss the implications of these results with respect to the literature on organizational identity.     

Love and Hooking Up in the New Millennium: Communication Technology and Relationships among Urban African American and Puerto Rican Young Adults

Communication technology is a central feature of young people's lives, but its role in romantic and sexual relationships has not been thoroughly examined. This article describes how young adults use communication technology for partnering across relationship stages (formation, maintenance, and dissolution) and types (serious/casual), and proposes implications of usage in relationships. This study analyzed qualitative data from a five-week, prospective, coital diary method with related debriefing interviews (N = 70) of African American and Puerto Rican men and women aged 18 to 25 years in Hartford and Philadelphia. Cell phones, including calls, text messaging, and mobile Internet, were the most common forms of communication technology used for partnering goals. Participants reported using cell phones to pursue partnering goals across all relationship stages, including formation (meeting, screening, and getting to know new partners), maintaining existing relationships, and breaking up. Cell phone uses depended on the type of relationship (serious/casual) and the participants' intentions and desires. Results indicated that cell phones are an important element of communication among young adults in romantic and sexual relationships. Specific features of cell phone communication shape the process and context of partnering. Future research should explore emerging communication technologies and implications for psychosocial development, dating violence, and sexual behavior.     

Response Thresholds and Demand/Withdraw Communication in Domestic Labor Conflict

Guided by Alberts, Tracy, and Trethewey’s (2011) integrated theory of the division of domestic labor (ITDDL), this study examines the influence of domestic labor response threshold on demand/withdraw communication in domestic labor conflict. Response threshold represents the point at which a negative stimulus produced by an unperformed task is of sufficient intensity to compel an individual to attend to it. One hundred and fifty-five heterosexual marital dyads (mean length of marriage = 19.98 years) completed an online questionnaire about their household labor conflict and response thresholds. Response thresholds were assessed using a photograph-based measure, and data were analyzed via an actor-partner interdependence model. Consistent with theoretical predictions, a significant actor-threshold-by-partner-threshold-by-sex interaction predicted reported demand/withdraw in domestic labor conflict. Individuals with low or mean response thresholds reported more self-demand/partner-withdraw the higher their partner’s response threshold, and this effect was more pronounced among women than men.     

An Integrated Scenario Ensemble-Based Framework for Hurricane Evacuation Modeling: Part 1—Decision Support System

This article introduces a new integrated scenario-based evacuation (ISE) framework to support hurricane evacuation decision making. It explicitly captures the dynamics, uncertainty, and human–natural system interactions that are fundamental to the challenge of hurricane evacuation, but have not been fully captured in previous formal evacuation models. The hazard is represented with an ensemble of probabilistic scenarios, population behavior with a dynamic decision model, and traffic with a dynamic user equilibrium model. The components are integrated in a multistage stochastic programming model that minimizes risk and travel times to provide a tree of evacuation order recommendations and an evaluation of the risk and travel time performance for that solution. The ISE framework recommendations offer an advance in the state of the art because they: (1) are based on an integrated hazard assessment (designed to ultimately include inland flooding), (2) explicitly balance the sometimes competing objectives of minimizing risk and minimizing travel time, (3) offer a well-hedged solution that is robust under the range of ways the hurricane might evolve, and (4) leverage the substantial value of increasing information (or decreasing degree of uncertainty) over the course of a hurricane event. A case study for Hurricane Isabel (2003) in eastern North Carolina is presented to demonstrate how the framework is applied, the type of results it can provide, and how it compares to available methods of a single scenario deterministic analysis and a two-stage stochastic program.     

Honorary Authorship Practices in Environmental Science Teams: Structural and Cultural Factors and Solutions

Overinclusive authorship practices such as honorary or guest authorship have been widely reported, and they appear to be exacerbated by the rise of large interdisciplinary collaborations that make authorship decisions particularly complex. Although many studies have reported on the frequency of honorary authorship and potential solutions to it, few have probed how the underlying dynamics of large interdisciplinary teams contribute to the problem. This article reports on a qualitative study of the authorship standards and practices of six National Science Foundation-funded interdisciplinary environmental science teams. Using interviews of the lead principal investigator and an early-career member on each team, our study explores the nature of honorary authorship practices as well as some of the motivating factors that may contribute to these practices. These factors include both structural elements (policies and procedures) and cultural elements (values and norms) that cross organizational boundaries. Therefore, we provide recommendations that address the intersection of these factors and that can be applied at multiple organizational levels.     

Spatial weighting improves accuracy in small-area demographic forecasts of urban census tract populations

Existing research in small-area demographic forecasting suffers from two important limitations: (1) a paucity of studies that quantify patterns of error in either total or age/sex-specific estimates and (2) limited methodological innovation aimed specifically at improving the accuracy of such forecasts. This paper attempts to fill, in part, these gaps in existing research by presenting a comparative evaluation of the accuracy of standard and spatially-weighted Hamilton–Perry forecasts for urbanized census tracts within incorporated New Mexico municipalities. These comparative forecasts are constructed for a 10-year horizon (base 1 April 2000 and target 1 April 2010), then compared to the results of the 2010 Census in an ex post facto evaluation. Results are presented for the standard Hamilton–Perry forecasts as well as two sets that incorporate two common variants of spatial weights to improve forecast accuracy. Findings are discussed in the context of what is currently known about error in small-area demographic forecasts and with an eye toward continued innovations.     

An Integrated Scenario Ensemble-Based Framework for Hurricane Evacuation Modeling: Part 2—Hazard Modeling

Hurricane track and intensity can change rapidly in unexpected ways, thus making predictions of hurricanes and related hazards uncertain. This inherent uncertainty often translates into suboptimal decision-making outcomes, such as unnecessary evacuation. Representing this uncertainty is thus critical in evacuation planning and related activities. We describe a physics-based hazard modeling approach that (1) dynamically accounts for the physical interactions among hazard components and (2) captures hurricane evolution uncertainty using an ensemble method. This loosely coupled model system provides a framework for probabilistic water inundation and wind speed levels for a new, risk-based approach to evacuation modeling, described in a companion article in this issue. It combines the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) meteorological model, the Coupled Routing and Excess STorage (CREST) hydrologic model, and the ADvanced CIRCulation (ADCIRC) storm surge, tide, and wind-wave model to compute inundation levels and wind speeds for an ensemble of hurricane predictions. Perturbations to WRF's initial and boundary conditions and different model physics/parameterizations generate an ensemble of storm solutions, which are then used to drive the coupled hydrologic + hydrodynamic models. Hurricane Isabel (2003) is used as a case study to illustrate the ensemble-based approach. The inundation, river runoff, and wind hazard results are strongly dependent on the accuracy of the mesoscale meteorological simulations, which improves with decreasing lead time to hurricane landfall. The ensemble envelope brackets the observed behavior while providing “best-case” and “worst-case” scenarios for the subsequent risk-based evacuation model.     

Don't Ask,Don't Tell and Other LGB Civil Rights Issues: Effects of Terminology on Public Opinion

“Don't Ask, Don't Tell” was devised to combat the perceived costs associated with gays and lesbians openly serving in the military, including low unit cohesion, damage to the military's reputation, and the general population's lack of acceptance for homosexuals serving (Belkin, 2008). However, recent polls and policy reversal have shown growing public support for homosexuals being allowed to serve openly. Interestingly, the amount of support has varied as a function of question wording. Two polls conducted by CBS News found support for homosexuals serving in the military varied with greater support for “gays and lesbians” compared to “homosexuals.” Two studies were conducted to further examine the effect of terminology on reported support. Two samples reported opinions for homosexual civil rights issues. Sexual orientation was described using the terms gay men and lesbians, homosexuals, gay men, or lesbians. Percentage differences were found to be greater than those reported in the CBS polls, as wording choice had an effect on reported openness regarding homosexual civil rights. These differences indicate that it is important to consider precise terminology usage when measuring opinions. Levels of support, stereotypes activated, and the relationship between support for civil rights and general levels of prejudice were examined.