Managing demographic change and diversity in organizations: how feedback from coworkers moderates the relationship between age and innovative work behavior

In a field study of 211 employees of a midsized German high-tech company, useful feedback from coworkers was examined as a moderator of the relationship between age and supervisor ratings of radical innovative work behavior. When employees perceived higher levels of useful feedback from their coworkers, the relationship between age and radical innovative work behavior followed an inverted U-shape. This inverted U-shaped relationship was decreasingly manifested as the level of perceived useful feedback from coworkers dropped. Given demographic change and the aging of the workforce of many organizations, this finding broadens the still fragmentary knowledge of the conditions under which aging is likely to have more or less positive effects on innovative work behavior. The authors discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these results on both the individual and the team level of analysis.     

Good marriages gone bad: Health mismatches as a cause of later-life marital dissolution

This study explores the impact of health status on marital dissolution for couples in late mid-life. A key feature of the empirical framework is that it incorporates the interaction of health between the spouses. This specification allows not only a general test of whether health matters but also a specific test of an important implication of cost-benefit models of marriage dissolution. In particular,cost-benefit models imply that marriages exhibiting a ``health mismatch' (where one partner has substantially better health than the other one) are more likely to get divorced than couples who have similar health (whether good or bad). Using a Cox proportional hazards model, we test this hypothesis by estimating the impact of different spousal health combinations on the probability of marital dissolution (as indicated by separation). Data are taken from four waves of the Health and Retirement Study (1992–1998) and consist of 4,241 couples where at least one spouse is between the ages of 51 and 61 in 1992. We do find evidence for the health mismatch hypothesis, but only among couples in which both couples report their marriages to be very satisfying. Among other couples, no effect is found. This suggests that health is of minor consequence for already unhappy couples, but health mismatches pose a significant risk of dissolution to happy couples within this age cohort, possibly because of the unexpected nature of poor healthat a relatively young age.     

Control at work: a generalized resource factor for the prevention of musculoskeletal symptoms?

During the last two decades two potent groups of predictors for work-related musculoskeletal problems have been identified: physical work load and poor psychosocial working conditions. However, little is known about their combined effects. In this study the buffering effect of control at work with respect to the negative effects of psychological demands and physical work load on musculoskeletal problems is examined. All study variables were sampled from 431 people working in geriatric nursing homes in Germany by means of questionnaires. Main effects and interactions were tested with multiple regression analysis. The results showed that control buffered the effects of high psychological demands, but not of high physical work load; the buffering effect of control was observed only when physical work load was low. The combined effects of demands and physical work load were over-additive. Thus, the power of different predictors for musculoskeletal symptoms depended on the level of other predictors. This suggests that the efficiency of certain strategies for the prevention of musculoskeletal problems is likely to depend on the level of risk factors, with different strategies being appropriate for different levels of risk.     

Ethnic and gender diversity,process and performance in groups of business students in Sweden

This article investigates the complex interrelation between ethnic and gender diversity, process and performance among groups of business students. The article is based on an empirical survey of business students working on a complex assignment in groups of two to five in a small Swedish university. The results indicate that gender diversity leads to positive group outcomes, while ethnic diversity appears to create negative group outcomes. Intervening process variables, such as group communication, conflict and effectiveness in problem solving, were not found to be influenced by diversity, or to influence group outcomes. While the non‐influence of intervening variables can probably be explained by methodological difficulties, the negative outcome for ethnic diversity indicates a need to help students better manage ethnic diversity in order to reap its benefits.     

The effect of interaction and rounding error in two-way ANOVA: example of impact on testing for normality

A key issue in various applications of analysis of variance (ANOVA) is testing for the interaction and the interpretation of resulting ANOVA tables. In this note it is demonstrated that for a two-way ANOVA, whether interactions are incorporated or not may have a dramatic influence when considering the usual statistical tests for normality of residuals. The effect of numerical rounding is also discussed.