Ramona Houmanfar

Organizational Implications of Gossip and Rumor

Abstract The challenge in designing organizational interventions lies in making explicit and available what is usually implicit. Accordingly, a contribution to the understanding of complex and implicit practices such as gossip and rumor, the conditions responsible for their origin, as well as the relation they sustain to the outcome of group survival, particularly in organizational settings are the topics of this paper. Our analysis draws upon a number of perspectives: anthropological, sociological, social psychological and behavior analytic. These distinctions are followed by further elaboration on the functions rumor and gossip may serve in ambiguous circumstances since environmental ambiguity seems to be one of the primary factors that participate in the development and maintenance of gossip and rumor. Finally, we address the significance of the analysis of gossip and rumor in organizations and conclude with a discussion of the contribution that behavior analysis can make with regard to the analysis of such phenomena.

Role of Communication Networks in Behavioral Systems Analysis

This article provides an overview of communication networks and the role of verbal behavior in behavioral systems analysis. Our discussion highlights styles of leadership in the design and implementation of effective organizational contingencies that affect ways by which coordinated work practices are managed. We draw upon literature pertaining to complex systems and rule governance to understand how communication networks and verbal rules contribute to the issues involved in reengineering behavioral systems in the face of continued socioeconomic and cultural demands. An analysis of leadership in relation to communication networks in organizations is discussed.

Psychological Approaches to Values in Organizations and Organizational Behavior Management

Researchers studying individual and organizational value congruence are concerned with the degree to which the values of the employee and the organization for which he or she works agree and the affective outcomes that more or less agreement might predict. While a robust area of research, the applications following from it are somewhat limited. This paper reviews the concepts and research findings concerning value congruence, discusses various behavioral interpretations of the values construct, applies those interpretations to the organizational level, and offers recommendations for how these interpretations might point to more successful organizational change initiatives.

User-context for adaptive user interfaces

We present results from an empirical user-study with ten users which investigates if information from a users environment helps a user interface to personalize itself to individual users to better meet usability goals and improve user-experience. In our research we use a microphone and a web-camera to collect this information (user-context) from the vicinity of a subjects desktop computer. Sycophant, our context-aware calendaring application and research test-bed uses machine learning techniques to successfully predict a user-preferred alarm type. Discounting user identity and motion information significantly degrades Sycophants performance on the alarm prediction task. Our user study emphasizes the need for user-context for personalizable user interfaces which can better meet effectiveness and utility usability goals. Results from our study further demonstrate that contextual information helps adaptive interfaces to improve user-experience.

Functions of Organizational Leaders in Cultural Change: Financial and Social Well-Being

Social responsibility looms as a key feature of leadership decision making and citizenship behavior as the world’s resources are depleted, health and education crises increase, and communities, societies, and cultures adapt to a new context shaped by emerging technologies, political upheavals, global warming, and other drivers of behavior change. In this article we call for future work in behavior analysis, emphasizing the importance of organizational leaders’ decision-making behaviors in establishing organizational practices that support prosocial behavior and eliminate aversive conditions within cultural systems. The discussion expands on recent behavior analytic literature on cultural change and leadership behavior by first providing a summary of popular definitions of human well-being and relating this concept to prosocial behavior. By drawing upon these definitions, we then summarize the behavior analytic concepts of metacontingencies and macrocontingencies as a framework from which behavior analysts can continue work to promote prosocial behavior and human well-being writ large.

The Effect of Implicit and Explicit Rules on Customer Greeting and Productivity in a Retail Organization

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of presenting organizational information through implicit and explicit rules on sales-related target behaviors in a retail setting. Results indicated that when organizational information was presented in a specific form, productivity was increased and maintained longer than when presented in other forms. The data provided by secret shoppers generally resembled the findings of the data collected in the experiment.

Unity of purpose/unity of effort: private‐sector preparedness in times of terror

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to consider the analysis of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks provided by the US National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the USA from the points of view of behavior analysis and systems analysis. The 9/11 Commission provides a detailed and provocative account of the structural flaws in the US security systems that enabled the 9/11 terrorists to completely subvert efforts to detect and prevent their attack. This paper considers the role of private‐sector organizations in prevention of future attacks.Design/methodology/approach – This conceptual/theoretical paper explores how understanding verbal networks and the nature of verbal rules might contribute to understanding the issues involved in re‐engineering work cultures in the face of continued terrorist threats.Findings – An understanding of verbal networks and ambiguous communications aids the re‐design of management systems and emergency response processes so that adaptive organizational responses to te...

Using co-evolved RTS opponents to teach spatial tactics

This paper describes a co-evolutionary algorithm for generating simple spatially oriented tactics and considers whether students can learn better by playing against co-evolved opponents or by playing against an expert system or other similar hard-coded opponent. Although a number of artificially intelligent tutoring and e-learning systems exist, our work looks at using co-evolution to generate competent opponents for human students to learn from. This paper describes and discusses early results on using computationally intelligent opponents for tactical training of human students. Initial results indicate that the learning environment for human players, measured by game difficulty and transfer of training, is comparable across co-evolved and hard-coded computer opponents.

RELIGION AND CULTURAL SURVIVAL

The role of religious practices in cultural evolution and the interrelations of religious and other cultural practices are the topics of this paper. This paper provides a descriptive analysis of the social and historical conditions of which religious practices have been generated. Additionally, the relation of religious practices to the outcome of cultural survival is discussed. Our analysis draws upon a number of distinctions: cultural vs. noncultural practices, religious vs. nonreligious, religious vs. moral, and moral vs. other cultural practices. We address the significance of these distinctions to the role of religious practices in cultural survival and conclude with a discussion of the challenges facing behavior analysts as cultural engineers.

Impact of Rule Accuracy on Productivity and Rumor in an Organizational Analog

This study examined the effects of inaccurate rules on generation of rumor among participants and their productivity in an organizational analog setting. Dyads of participants were given an explicit rule that described a contingency (i.e., number of points earned for correct responses). Experiments 1 and 2 utilized quasirandom and counterbalanced alternating treatments designs, respectively, in which conditions alternated such that participants were exposed to the rule-stated contingency (accurate condition) or a variation of the contingency that was stated in the rule (i.e., different number of points awarded, inaccurate conditions). Results indicate that exposure to inaccurate rules increases frequency and duration of rumor behavior. Participants exposed to alternating rules and only inaccurate rules exhibit lower correct responding on work tasks relative to those exposed to only accurate rules.