Self-control demands, cognitive control deficits, and burnout

Self-control involves inhibiting undesired behaviours and emotions, and it can be particularly relevant in the service sectors. Recent theoretical developments in cognitive and social psychology suggest that the demands on an individual of exercising self-control have an effect as a source of stress at work. In turn, burnout could be associated with being unable to meet those demands. It was expected that cognitive control deficits, as assessed by a questionnaire measure of self-reported failures in perception, memory, and action, would function as a vulnerability factor in the relationship between self-control demands and indicators of job strain. Data from 630 staff members of a German municipal administration revealed significant main effects of both self-control demands and cognitive control deficits on the burnout dimensions of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization. Both predictors were positively related to burnout. In addition, the results provided clear evidence of the vulnerability hypothesis of cognitive control deficits. By way of contrast, musculoskeletal complaints did not reflect similar main and interactive effects of self-control demands and cognitive control deficits. The requirements for self control in the service sector are expected to increase as the sector expands, and the practical implications for this are discussed.     

Editorial

Immigrants from Asian countries who are living in Canada are more likely to live with extended families than Canadian-born seniors. This article focuses on the living arrangements of 161 South Asian immigrant seniors in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and examines the relative importance of various factors that influence living arrangements. Demographic characteristics were associated with living arrangements; seniors who immigrated when they were young and were married were the most likely to live independently. Logistic regression analyses suggest that economic and cultural factors were more important than health and availability of kin factors in explaining living arrangements, after controlling for demographic and immigration variables.     

Making Junior High School History Real

This article addresses the subject of teaching about women in world history in K–12 schools and in programs of social studies teacher education. It includes a review of the place of gender in teaching about world history to current and future teachers at Teachers College, Columbia University. This informal research serves as the platform for a set of recommendations concerning necessary steps for “gender-balancing” the world history curriculum in social studies teacher education.     

Ein Optimierungsmodell für die wöchentliche Tourenplanung unter Einbeziehung der EU-Sozialvorschriften

The Regulation (EC) No 561/2006 and the Directive 2002/15/EC concern the driving and working hours as well as breaks and rest periods of drivers in road transportation. Although the regulations have an enormous effect on vehicle routing and scheduling, only parts of them have been integrated in few solution approaches and some vehicle routing models so far. This paper starts with the presentation of the restrictions of the relevant European Community regulations. Then, a mixed integer linear programming model for the vehicle routing problem with time windows including all rules of the regulations for a planning horizon of an entire week is presented. The model is solved with CPLEX and the impact of the regulations on the resulting vehicle schedules is analyzed by means of computational experiments.     

The determinants of organizations’ usage of employee dismissal: Evidence from Australia

Substantial variation exists across organizations in their use of dismissal. While it has been suggested that this variation reflects organizational-level factors relating to disciplinary issues, little evidence exists regarding the effect of these factors. Using data from 1,596 workplaces in the Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey, we examine how organizational-level factors that reflect the incidence of disciplinary problems as well as the expected costs and benefits of dismissal are related to dismissal usage. For each organization, data were collected on organizational characteristics and practices in interviews with the employee relations manager and the senior line manager. Data were also collected on whether or not dismissal was used by the firm and on the number of employees dismissed. Using both logistic regression and tobit analysis, our results suggest that dismissal is affected by procedural and institutional restrictions on the use of discipline, interactions among those restrictions, compensation level, labor market factors, workforce human capital, operating capacity, work group influence, the use of incentive pay, workforce size, and industry classification. Copies of the AWIRS Data set are available for purchase from the Australian Government Publishing Service, Commonwealth Department of Industrial Relations, Canaberra, Australia. The authors thank Alan Morris and Lindsay Turner for their assistance in managing the AWIRS data set. Michelle Brown is now at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, WI 53201.     

Efficacy of Cyberbullying Prevention on Somatic Symptoms—Randomized Controlled Trial Applying a Reasoned Action Approach

The theory of reasoned action (ToRA) has been proposed as a framework for cyberbullying prevention design, targeting attitudes and norms. In this study effects of a long (10 weekly sessions) and a short (one day, four sessions) cyberbullying prevention program based on the ToRA were compared with a control group over 9 months. Longitudinal data from 722 students (mean age = 13.36) on cyberbullying, somatic symptoms, attitudes, and norms were analyzed within a structural equation model. Participation in the long intervention group significantly reduced cyberbullying (d = ?0.584) and somatic symptoms (d = ?0.316). No between‐group differences emerged for attitudes and norms. Developmental trajectories and associations were found to be as suggested by ToRA in both cross‐sectional and change‐score analyses.     

One-mode projection analysis and design of covert affiliation networks

Within the field of national security and counterterrorism a great need exists to understand covert organizations. To better understand these cellular structures we model and analyze these cells as a collection of subsets of all participants in the covert organization, i.e., as hypergraphs or affiliation networks. Such a covert affiliation network structure is analyzed by evaluating the one-mode projection of the corresponding hypergraph. First we provide a characterization of the total distance in the one-mode projection using its corresponding cell-shrunken version. Secondly we evaluate the one-mode projection with respect to the secrecy versus information tradeoff dilemma every covert organization has to solve. We present and analyze affiliation networks representing common covert organizational forms: star, path and semi-complete hypergraphs. In addition we evaluate an example of a covert organization wishing to conduct an attack and compare its performance to that of the common covert organizational forms. Finally we investigate affiliation networks that are optimal in the sense of balancing secrecy and information. We show how any affiliation tree can be improved by altering its structure. Finally we prove that among covert organizational forms in the class of hypertrees with the same number of cells uniform star affiliation networks are optimal.     

MATCHED PAIRS DISCRIMINATION: METHODOLOGY AND AN INVESTIGATION OF CORPORATE ACCOUNTING POLICIES

The matched-pairs methodology is becoming increasingly popular as a means of controlling extraneous factors in business research. This paper develops discriminant procedures for matched data and examines the properties of these methods. Data from a recent study by Hunt [14] on the determinants of inventory method choice are used to contrast the performance of the different methods. While all of the methods yield the same set of discriminating variables, those procedures that allow for the dependence among observations within a pair provide greater classificatory power than traditional multivariate techniques.     

“Salting” the contractors’ labor force: Construction unions organizing with NLRB assistance

The sharp decline in construction union membership during the last twenty years has led to a number of programs by these unions and unionized contractors to reverse their losses of members and business. The union activities have included several novel approaches designed both to narrow the cost gap between unionized and “open-shop” (largely nonunion) construction as well as to regain members. This article deals with one such program, “salting,” that is, the placing of union organizers or members in a nonunion facility to disrupt, to increase the costs of, or to organize the open-shop contractor. Union salting programs are examined, using actual cases to demonstrate how they work in practice, and policies of the National Labor Relations Board, on which the success of salting is heavily predicated, are analyzed. Professor Emeritus of Management; formerly, Director, Industrial Research Unit, and Chairman, Labor Relations Council.