Henry A. Alker

Achieving consistency: A Study of basketball officiating

Abstract This study investigates the characteristics of professional basketball referees which can account for their successful or unsuccessful performance on the court. Several role inactment skills such as achievement via independence contribute to the prediction of this performance. The main determinant identified, however, is at the group or organizational level. Superior referees have less interindividual variance than do average or relatively unsuccessful referees. This result is discussed in terms of the role requirements of performance in this case. Interpersonal consistency of judgment is relied on for matters permitting only consensual validity. Extensions of these findings to other role enactments are suggested.

Football games: Victory, defeat, and spectators' power preferences

Abstract A conceptual distinction between two types of experienced power was proposed, and an experimental-field study examined its relevance to participation in vicarious power-related activities. After two college football games, spectators could volunteer for an experiment in which they would “work in the role of experimenter.” Respondents chose an image-of-power position soon after home-team defeat and an actual-power position soon after home-team victory, this difference between choices dissipating with time. The results suggest that the experience of vicarious success or failure at power-related activities influences peoples subsequent preferences between the appearance of power and the actual use of power.

Biographical, trait, and behavioral-sampling predictions of performance in a stressful life setting.

Biographical, trait, and behavioral-sampling predictors, when combined, yield a substantially and significantly larger prediction of performance, R = .72, in a natural setting than any of these approaches achieve separately (Rs, respectively, of .64, .44, and .42; all ps less than .01). A canonical correlational analysis designed to determine which predictors best predict which component of the multifaceted criterion suggests that traits best predict other traits, while specific past behaviors and learning experiences best predict specific future skilled performances. Personality assessment, which has been preoccupied with simple competitions between behavioral-sampling and trait approaches, might progress faster if it reformulated its task in a broader, more cooperative fashion.