Am I the right candidate? Self-ascribed fit of women and men to a leadership position

Women are assumed to show a self-ascribed lack-of-fit to leadership positions compared to men (Heilman, 1983). The present study examined whether this gender difference would diminish when agency is accounted for and whether a stimulus person’s gender would alter women’s self-ascribed fit. German management students (91 women, 95 men) received a fictitious recruitment advertisement for a leadership position that portrayed a man, a woman, or both a man and a woman. Participants indicated their perceptions of agency and suitability to the advertised position. As predicted, women judged themselves as less suitable for the leadership position than men and participants’ self-reported agency mediated this effect. Furthermore, all participants felt most suitable if a male and a female stimulus person were portrayed

Goal setting in distributive and integrative negotiations: a meta-analysis

Goal setting has been shown to be a strong predictor of attaining a negotiation outcome. However, neither the type of negotiation nor the outcome level, dyadic versus individual outcomes, has been systematically analyzed. Using multilevel meta-analysis, we investigate the effects of a) goal difficulty, b) goal specificity and c) scenario integrativeness on negotiation outcomes. We find that for individual outcomes, regardless of the negotiation setting, there is support for the effect of goal difficulty, but we do not find an effect of goal specificity in any setting. For integrative negotiations, we find an effect for the integrativeness of the scenario on joint outcomes: If the negotiation is rather integrative, more of the integrative potential is realized. Additional moderators such as goal symmetry are examined, and recommendations for more research on integrativeness and its impact in negotiations are made

Validity findings on the business-focused inventory of personality (BIP)

Das Bochumer Inventar zur berufsbezogenen Persönlichkeitsbeschreibung (BIP) erfasst berufsbezogene Persönlichkeitsmerkmale und kann in linearen Regressionen verschiedene Maße subjektiven und objektiven Berufserfolgs aufklären. Um zusätzliche Nachweise für die Kriteriumsvalidität zu erbringen, werden in der vorliegenden Arbeit Cluster- und Klassifikationsverfahren verwendet. Mithilfe von k-Means-Clusteranalysen können typische Persönlichkeitsstrukturen identifiziert werden: Personen, die sich durch Flexibilität und Gestaltungsmotivation auszeichnen, weisen einen bedeutsamen Zusammenhang zu höheren beruflichen Entgelten auf, während solche, die durch emotionale Instabilität und geringe Durchsetzungsstärke geprägt sind, häufig ein niedriges Entgelt erzielen. Klassische und neuere Klassifikationsverfahren (logistische Regressionen bzw. Random Forests) besitzen substantielle Trefferquoten in der Identifikation von Mitarbeitenden als Fach- oder Führungskraft. Die Ergebnisse sind als mittlere bis große Effekte einzustufen und liefern damit einen Nachweis über die Relevanz der Persönlichkeit für beruflichen Erfolg.The Business-Focused Inventory of Personality (BIP) measures job-related personality traits. It is able to explain variance in various measures of subjective and objective occupational success by means of linear regressions. In this paper, we used cluster and classification analyses to provide additional evidence for the criterion validity. Typical personality structures can be identified by k-means cluster analyses: Persons characterized by flexibility and power motivation receive higher wages than those characterized by emotional instability and low assertiveness, with a medium-high probability. Classical and newer classification methods (e. g., logistic regressions or random forests, respectively) have a significantly higher hit rate than random probability in identifying employees as specialists or managers using the BIP traits. The results can be classified as medium-to-large effects and thus provide evidence of the relevance of personality for professional success

The Neural Architecture of General Knowledge

Cognitive performance varies widely between individuals and is highly influenced by structural and functional properties of the brain. In the past, neuroscientific research was principally concerned with fluid intelligence, while neglecting its equally important counterpart crystallized intelligence. Crystallized intelligence is defined as the depth and breadth of knowledge and skills that are valued by one's culture. The accumulation of crystallized intelligence is guided by information storage capacities and is likely to be reflected in an individual's level of general knowledge. In spite of the significant role general knowledge plays for everyday life, its neural foundation largely remains unknown. In a large sample of 324 healthy individuals, we used standard magnetic resonance imaging along with functional magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion tensor imaging to examine different estimates of brain volume and brain network connectivity and assessed their predictive power with regard to both general knowledge and fluid intelligence. Our results demonstrate that an individual's level of general knowledge is associated with structural brain network connectivity beyond any confounding effects exerted by age or sex. Moreover, we found fluid intelligence to be best predicted by cortex volume in male subjects and functional network connectivity in female subjects. Combined, these findings potentially indicate different neural architectures for information storage and information processing.Peer Reviewe