Klaus Jonas

Give a person power and he or she will show interpersonal sensitivity: the phenomenon and its why and when.

The goal of the present research was to investigate whether high or low power leads to more interpersonal sensitivity and what potentially mediates and moderates this effect. In Study 1, 76 participants in either a high- or low-power position interacted; in Study 2, 134 participants were implicitly primed with either high- or low-power or neutral words; and in Study 3, 96 participants were asked to remember a situation in which they felt high or low power (plus a control condition). In Study 4, 157 participants were told to identify with either an egoistic, empathic, or neutral leadership style. In all studies, interpersonal sensitivity, defined as correctly assessing other people, was then measured using different instruments in each study. Consistently, high power resulted in more interpersonal sensitivity than low power. Feeling respected and proud was partially responsible for this effect. Empathic power as a personality trait was related to more interpersonal sensitivity, and high-power individuals who adopted an empathic instead of an egoistic leadership style were more interpersonally sensitive.

Familiarity May Breed Contempt: The Impact of Student Exchange on National Stereotypes and Attitudes

To justify the inclusion of a chapter on the impact of student exchange on national stereotypes and attitudes in a book on conflict, two assumptions have to be made that are deceptively plausible. First, it has to be accepted that stereotypes and attitudes play a causal role in creating, maintaining, or aggravating intergroup conflicts. Second, it has to be assumed that student exchange typically changes stereotypes in ways that improve the sojourners’ attitudes towards the host nation and thus serves a function in conflict reduction.

Influence of Fair and Supportive Leadership Behavior on Commitment and Organizational Citizenship Behavior

This study examines the influence of fair and supportive leadership behavior on employees’ self-reported organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). The model tested assumes that the impact of fair and supportive leadership on OCB is mediated by employees’ commitment to the organization as well as their commitment to their supervisor. A total of 260 bank employees completed a questionnaire in which they rated their supervisor’s behavior, the two commitment foci (organization and supervisor) and the degree to which they engaged in OCB. As a whole, results of structural equation modelling provide support for the hypotheses and indicate that fostering fair and supportive leadership can be worthwhile for organizations.

THE ASSESSMENT OF NATIONAL STEREOTYPES - A METHODOLOGICAL STUDY

Abstract The effect of instructions on judgments of German students concerning national stereotypes was assessed. Focus of stereotype (typical individual/whole group), nature of judgment (extent/percentage/probability), and nationality were manipulated in a 2 × 3 × 5 design, with repeated measures on the third factor. Instructions had no effect on ratings of content, certainty, or uniformity of stereotypes, but percentage-based stereotypes were significantly less intense (p<.01). All three levels of the second instructions factor were highly correlated with liking for the national groups, but not so clearly with similarity and contact. Overall, the subjects viewed the stereotyping task negatively, especially in the probability condition (p<.025).

Sensing spatial and temporal coordination in teams using the smartphone

Teams are at the heart of today’s organizations and their performance is crucial for organizational success. It is therefore important to understand and monitor team processes. Traditional approaches employ questionnaires, which have low temporal resolution or manual behavior observation, which is labor intensive and thus costly. In this work, we propose to apply mobile behavior sensing to capture team coordination processes in an automatic manner, thereby enabling cost-effective and real-time monitoring of teams. In particular, we use the built-in sensors of smartphones to sense interpersonal body movement alignment and to detect moving sub-groups. We aggregate the data on team level in form of networks that capture a) how long team members are together in a sub-group and b) how synchronized team members move. Density and centralization metrics extract team coordination indicators from the team networks. We demonstrate the validity of our approach in firefighting teams performing a realistic training scenario and investigate the link between the coordination indicators and team performance as well as experienced team coordination. Our method enables researchers and practitioners alike to capture temporal and spatial team coordination automatically and objectively in real-time.

CoenoFire: monitoring performance indicators of firefighters in real-world missions using smartphones

Firefighting is a dangerous task and many research projects have aimed at supporting firefighters during missions by developing new and often costly equipment. In contrast to previous approaches, we use the smartphone to monitor firefighters during real-world missions in order to provide objective data that can be used in post-incident briefings and trainings. In this paper, we present CoenoFire, a smartphone based sensing system aimed at monitoring temporal and behavioral performance indicators of firefighting missions. We validate the performance metrics showing that they can indicate why certain teams performed faster than others in a training scenario conducted by 16 firefighting teams. Furthermore, we deployed CoenoFire over a period of six weeks in a professional fire brigade. In total, 71 firefighters participated in our study and the collected data includes 76 real-world missions totaling to over 148 hours of mission data. Additionally, we visualize real-world mission data and show how mission feedback is supported by the data.

Image Effects of Newspapers How Brand Images Change Consumers' Product Ratings

Brand image is supposed to influence consumers’ product evaluations. The goal of this study was to enlighten this phenomenon. A total of 220 participants rated fictitious but realistic articles from newspapers that have different images: Blick, a popular tabloid newspaper and NZZ, a traditional quality newspaper. Articles were created that appeared as if they were copied from Blick or NZZ but, in fact, both contained the same text. The main hypothesis that product ratings would differ as a result of the manipulation of image was confirmed. Participants evaluated the fictitious articles completely differently. As expected, product ratings were in line with the related brand images. Also, more salient stimuli elicited stronger image effects. The effect persisted at general as well as detailed product-rating levels. Next to product ratings, image effects also influenced participants’ consumption experiences. Involvement, knowledge, and usage did not moderate the image effect.

Experienced Ambivalence as a Moderator of the Consistency Between Attitudes and Behaviors

Summary: Two studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that stronger degrees of ambivalence attenuate the attitude-behavior correspondence. We also tested the hypothesis that the weaker attitude-behavior correspondence at higher levels of ambivalence may be due to the lower temporal stability of highly ambivalent attitudes. To ensure that these hypotheses be adequately tested, both studies had a prospective design. After assessing their attitudes toward certain behaviors and ambivalence, participants recorded how often they performed these behaviors during the subsequent 14-day period. The investigated behaviors included everyday behaviors such as consuming fast food, preparing classes, and watching entertaining programs on TV. To assess attitudinal stability, attitudes were measured again after the 14-day period. As the results show, the expected moderating effect of experienced ambivalence on the attitude-behavior correspondence was obtained, however, only for a minority of the investigated behavior...

Sensing group proximity dynamics of firefighting teams using smartphones

Firefighters work in dangerous and unfamiliar situations under a high degree of time pressure and thus team work is of utmost importance. Relying on trained automatisms, firefighters coordinate their actions implicitly by observing the actions of their team members. To support training instructors with objective mission data, we aim to automatically detect when a firefighter is in-sight with other firefighters and to visualize the proximity dynamics of firefighting missions. In our approach, we equip firefighters with smartphones and use the built-in ANT protocol, a low-power communication radio, to measure proximity to other firefighters. In a second step, we cluster the proximity data to detect moving sub-groups. To evaluate our method, we recorded proximity data of 16 professional firefighting teams performing a real-life training scenario. We manually labeled six training sessions, involving 51 firefighters, to obtain 79 minutes of ground truth data. On average, our algorithm assigns each group member to the correct ground truth cluster with 80% accuracy. Considering height information derived from atmospheric pressure signals increases group assignment accuracy to 95%.

Quantifying Behavioral Mimicry by Automatic Detection of Nonverbal Cues from Body Motion

Effective leadership can increase team performance, however the underlying micro-level behaviors that support team performance are still unclear. At the same time, traditional behavioral observation methods rely on manual video annotation which is a time consuming and costly process. In this work, we employ wearable motion sensors to automatically extract nonverbal cues from body motion. We utilize activity recognition methods to detect relevant nonverbal cues such as head nodding, gesticulating and posture changes. Further, we combine the detected individual cues to quantify behavioral mimicry between interaction partners. We evaluate our methods on data that was acquired during a psychological experiment in which 55 groups of three persons worked on a decision-making task. Group leaders were instructed to either lead with individual consideration orin an authoritarian way. We demonstrate that nonverbal cues can be detected with a F1-measure between 56% and 100%. Moreover, we show how our methods can highlight nonverbal behavioral differences of the two leadership styles. Our findings suggest that individually considerate leaders mimic head nods of their followers twice as often and that their face touches are mimicked three times as often by their followers when compared with authoritarian leaders.