Katherine J. Klein

Work time, work interference with family, and psychological distress.

Despite public concern about time pressures experienced by working parents, few scholars have explicitly examined the effects of work time on work-family conflict. The authors developed and tested a model of the predictors of work time and the relationships between time, work interference with family (WIF). and psychological distress. Survey data came from 513 employees in a Fortune 500 company. As predicted, several work and family characteristics were significantly related to work time. In addition, work time was significantly, positively related to WIF, which in turn was significantly, negatively related to distress. The results suggest that work time fully or partially mediates the effects of many work and family characteristics on WIF.

Is Everyone in Agreement? An Exploration of Within-Group Agreement in Employee Perceptions of the Work Environment

Multilevel researchers often gather individual-level data to measure group-level constructs. Within-group agreement is a key consideration in the measurement of such constructs, yet antecedents of within-group agreement have been little studied. The authors found that group member social interaction and work interdependence were significantly positively related to within-group agreement regarding perceptions of the work environment. Demographic heterogeneity was not significantly related to within-group agreement. Survey wording showed a complex relationship to agreement. Both evaluative items and socially undesirable items generated high within-group agreement. The use of a group rather than individual referent increased within-group agreement in response to descriptive items but decreased within-group agreement in response to evaluative items. Items with a group referent showed greater between-group variability than items with an individual referent.

Implementing computerized technology: an organizational analysis.

Why do some organizations succeed and others fail in implementing the innovations they adopt? To begin to answer this question, the authors studied the implementation of manufacturing resource planning, an advanced computerized manufacturing technology, in 39 manufacturing plants (number of individual respondents = 1,219). The results of the plant-level analyses suggest that financial resource availability and management support for technology implementation engender high-quality implementation policies and practices and a strong climate for implementation, which in turn foster implementation effectiveness--that is, consistent and skilled technology use. Further research is needed to replicate and extend the findings.

Psychological sense of community in the workplace

For working adults, the workplace may be a key referent for the psychological sense of community. Unfortunately, community psychologists have devoted little attention to workers or work organizations. This article provides a preliminary conceptual approach to the referents, determinants, and consequences of a sense of community at work. New directions for research and theory-building on work organizations and the experience of work are suggested.

Adaptive leadership in trauma resuscitation teams: a grounded theory approach to video analysis

The detailed analysis of team interactions can be a source of insight into team processes and how teams interact with technology. Video recordings afford an exciting medium for such analysis. We describe a study of team leadership in the highly dynamic, high-stakes environment of trauma resuscitation. The study was conducted through video recording team activities in actual work settings and analysing the video data using a grounded theory approach. The primary research questions were: what are the functions of team leadership and how do they vary according to task situations? A corpus of 152 video segments from 18 trauma patient resuscitation cases was compiled to address these research questions. A catalog of team leadership functions was developed, along with a categorisation of the task situations in which team leadership occurred. The implications of this catalog and the mapping between leadership and task situations are discussed in relation to the findings from an interview study and a survey study on team leadership. The methodological advantages of a grounded theory approach for in-context video analysis for studying work are also discussed.

Introduction to the Special Section on Theoretical Models and Conceptual Analyses: Theory in Applied Psychology: Lessons (Re)Learned.

Theories provide meaning. They allow us to understand and interpret data. Theories specify which variables are important and for what reasons, describe and explain the relationships that link the variables, and identify the boundary conditions under which variables should or should not be related (Campbell, 1990). Theories help identify and define problems, prescribe a means for evaluating or solving the problems, and facilitate responses to new problems. They permit generalization beyond the immediate sample and provide a basis for making predictions. Theory tells us why something occurs, not simply what occurs. Research in the absence of theory is often trivial—a technical feat more likely to yield confusion and boredom than insight. In contrast, research that is guided by theory, or that develops theory, generates understanding and excitement. To signal the commitment of the Journal of Applied Psychology not only to the publication of theory-driven and theory-building research but also to the publication of theory per se, in September 2002 the journal issued a call for papers that present new theoretical models and conceptual analyses. We urged authors to submit conceptual manuscripts that extend beyond the current literature— that offer more than a review of the existing literature and more than a repackaging of established constructs and models. We emphasized that manuscripts should offer new theoretical insights and propose new explanations of constructs, relationships, and/or

Team Communication Patterns as Measures of Team Processes: Exploring the Effects of Task Urgency and Shared Team Experience

Inter-member team communication is a rich yet challenging data source for understanding team processes. In this paper, we present a quantitative analysis of team communication based on videotaped real-life trauma patient resuscitation. Team communication patterns were compared under varying conditions: (a) when the teams task — patient treatment — was high versus low in urgency; and (b) when team members had more or less shared experience as a team. The results provide initial support for the utility of communication analysis for the study of team performance and team leadership. Tools for assessment of team processes are a key to effective research in team performance, especially in complex, time-pressured tasks. The team communication patterns depicted the adaptive nature of team structures, especially when the teams were confronted with potentially competing goals, such as on-the-job training and treatment of trauma patients.

Power and Participation in the Workplace

In the 1980s and 1990s, empowerment emerged as a central focus of research and a practical goal among community psychologists. Rappaport brought prominence to the term with his 1981 article on the subject, where he defined empowerment as the process of enhancing “the possibilities for people to control their own lives” (p. 15). Several authors have built on Rappaport’s initial conceptualization in an effort to clarify the meaning of the term. Emphasizing the implications of empowerment for human service delivery models, Swift (1984) described empowerment as the antithesis of “the paternalistic model that has dominated human service delivery during this century” (p. xi). Empowerment, she argued, “insists on the primacy of the target population’s participation in any intervention affecting its welfare” (p. xiv). Others have described empowerment as a corollary of citizen participation. Kieffer (1984), for example, described empowerment as “the transition from sense of self as helpless victim to acceptance of self as assertive and efficacious citizen” (p. 37). More recently, Perkins and Zimmerman (1995) proposed that “participation with others to achieve goals, efforts to gain access to resources, and some critical understandings of the sociopolitical environment are basic components of the construct” (p. 571). Elaborating further, Perkins and Zimmerman (1995) suggested that at the organizational level of analysis, “empowerment includes organizational processes and structures that enhance member participation and improve goal achievement for the organization” (p. 571). Implicit in all these definitions of empowerment is the assumption that an individual’s active participation in decision-making within the major organizations that substantively influence his or her daily life will engender both an increase in the individual’s sense of personal power and effectiveness, and an increase in the organizations’ abilities to meet the individual’s needs

Things Are Always More Complicated Than You Think: An Open Systems Approach to the Organizational Effects of Computer-Automated Technology

The effects of computerized office and factory automation are examined. An open systems framework is used to organize this literature. The review suggests that the benefits of technology are derived from theintermediate effects of the technology on organizational processes (the task structure, personnel system, formal structure, and informal organization). Thus, it is misleading to examine thedirect effects of computerized technology on organizational outcomes such as profits and satisfaction. Some of the effects of technology on the organizational processes are inevitable (e.g., changes in informal communication patterns). Others are determined less by the technology than by management decisions. The key to achieving success with computerized technology is matching changes in organizational processes to each other, as well as to the technology and the larger environment of the organization.

Adaptation of team communication patterns: Exploring the effects of leadership at a distance, task urgency, and shared team experience

This volume offers insights from a noted group of scholars who discuss the complex phenomenon of leadership in distributed work settings - also known as leadership at a distance. Editor Suzanne Weisband addresses the ubiquitous roles leaders play, their scale of work, and the range of technologies available to them, while setting new directions in studying leadership at a distance. A unique perspective of empirical research unfolds, representing a variety of fields and methods to foster a better understanding of the role technology plays in leadership, and how leadership is shaped by the use of technology.Leadership at a Distance begins with an overview of the challenges leaders face in the 21st century, followed by a discussion of:field studies and innovative ways of thinking about leadership in distributed work settings;experiments on the group dynamics and social processes involved in leading teams at a distance; andresearch on leadership in large-scale distributed collaborations, as well as lessons learned about leadership at a distance and future research directions.Managers, organizational behavior psychologists, human factors and industrial engineers, and sociologists will consider this book of interest and will appreciate its interdisciplinary scope.