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.     

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.     

Policies for Recruiting Talented Professionals from the Diaspora: India and China Compared

Despite the continuous asymmetrical power relations between the Global North and South, the “global race for talent” is no longer a privilege enjoyed only by developed countries. Comparative analysis of policy content and effectiveness has attracted increasing interest. The examination of policy initiatives resulting in return migration of highly‐skilled migrants from the Global North to the Global South, however, remains inadequate. In this article, we provide a comparative analysis of policies targeting high‐level Chinese and Indian professionals including full‐time returnees. Two key differences in policy instruments and outcomes in the two countries are identified and they have implications for migration policies in other countries in the Global South and North.     

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.     

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.     

Copula-based predictions in small area estimation

Unit-level regression models are commonly used in small area estimation (SAE) to obtain an empirical best linear unbiased prediction of small area characteristics. The underlying assumptions of these models, however, may be unrealistic in some applications. Previous work developed a copula-based SAE model where the empirical Kendall's tau was used to estimate the dependence between two units from the same area. In this article, we propose a likelihood framework to estimate the intra-class dependence of the multivariate exchangeable copula for the empirical best unbiased prediction (EBUP) of small area means. One appeal of the proposed approach lies in its accommodation of both parametric and semi-parametric estimation approaches. Under each estimation method, we further propose a bootstrap approach to obtain a nearly unbiased estimator of the mean squared prediction error of the EBUP of small area means. The performance of the proposed methods is evaluated through simulation studies and also by a real data application.     

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.     

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.