Ethnocentrism and Internal Compensation Structuring: An Experimental Examination of Point Factor Job Evaluation

“Comparable Worth” represents the concept that men, women, minorities, and whites should receive equal pay for work of equal value from their employer. Much research and many articles have been written in regards to overall pay inequities between men and women; however information regarding internal compensation strategies and perceived labor pools (percentage of minority applicants) has not been explored in depth. A total of 381 individuals participated in an experimental study that manipulated perceived labor market composition in order to establish the relative impact of ethnocentrism on the evaluation of compensable factors and salary. Results strongly supported the authors’ hypotheses, indicating that (a) significant discriminatory weighing of compensable factors by the perceived ethnicity and gender of labor pools occurs, (b) individual participant demographics (ethnicity and gender) contribute significantly to discrimination between perceived labor pools, and (c) participant individual differences significantly contribute to discriminatory weighting. Implications and directions for future research are considered.Compensation; Ethnocentrism; Internal Structure; Point Factor; Labor Pool; Discrimination; Social; Bias

RAPS: A Resource Allocation Production Scheduling Algorithm for Hot Food Production Systems

A procedural model for the scheduling of labor and equipment in a hypothetical food production system that operated under traditional constraints was developed, tested and analyzed. The developed model, the RAPS (Resource Allocation Production Scheduling) Algorithm, was applied to a five-day menu of hot foods with a forecasted demand per meal of 500. Based on forecasted demand and the nature of preparation of the menu item, specific production quantities were established to simulate the demands of the meal serving period. Using industrial engineering techniques of activity analysis and time estimation in conjunction with a network-based project management system, the 90 sub-projects of the five-day menu were initially analyzed for 1215 activities, then consolidated into 979 activities. Scheduling of the 979 activities was performed on a worksheet which showed resource availabilities for the 14-hour daily operational period in 10-minute intervals. Generated schedules were in the form of color-coded bar charts. The optimum schedule was obtained by scheduling predecessor and successor activities to a fixed interval according to Late Start (LS) and Early Complete (EC) times, respectively. The optimum schedule, although operationally unrealistic, was used as a guide in developing a series of logical, systematic steps that would smooth the most common exaggerated and erratic demand problems while adhering to resource limitation and simultaniety of production constraints--two of the most significant considerations in the development of a scheduling methodology for hot food production. Comparative resource data were generated showing the optimum and adjusted schedule requirements. Graphic presentation of personnel resource profiles demonstrated the peaks and valleys of demand associated with the use of fixed meal periods. Equipment resource data were presented in the form of daily utilization rates for each piece of equipment. Such data could be used by the manager in considering and/or selecting other alternatives to satisfy existing resource limitation criteria or to impose additional resource limitations. The RAPS Algorithm was determined, through executive analysis, to be a systematic and feasible means of collecting resource allocation/ utilization data with specific application in the areas of menu planning and analysis, facility design, and personnel development, both formally and informally

Relationships\u3csup\u3e1\u3c/sup\u3e Among Applications of Tacit Knowledge and Transformational/Transactional Leader Styles: An Exploratory Comparison of the MLQ and TKML

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to examine intercorrelational relations among the self-report behavioral construct Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) 5X transformational and transactional subscales and the Tacit Knowledge for Military Leaders Inventory (TKML) leader-level specific situational judgment test scenarios. Design/methodology/approach: Two leadership measures, the behavioral construct Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) and the cognitive construct Tacit Knowledge for Military Leaders Inventory (TKML) assess different aspects of how a leader functions and were administered to 125 active US Army officers representing three leader levels: platoon, company, and battalion. We examine the intercorrelational relationship between these two measures. Findings: Results show a correlational pattern that contours the evolution of a leader’s skills (from novice platoon leader to expert battalion leader), with the strongest correlation at the higher leader levels. Research limitations: The decision to restrict the number of TKML scenarios provided to respondents and to administer the MLQ and TKML to the same sample. Practical implications: Pairing the MLQ and TKML makes use of self-reported leader behaviors with maximal assessment scales that directly assess respondents’ understanding of what the best approaches to good leadership are. Social implications: Response patterns from both measures permits direct counseling on the misconceptions about leadership to create better leaders. Originality/value: No previous research has examined correlative relations among the scales/subscales of the MLQ and TKML

Three Essays in Labour Economics and Public Finance

This three-chapter thesis evaluates the potential for two major government policy levers to influence income inequality in Canada: the tax and transfer system, and the labour relations framework. The first two chapters are concerned with estimating how tax-filers respond to changes in tax rates, and the extent to which governments are limited in raising income tax rates on higher income individuals to fund transfers to lower income individuals. The final chapter examines the possibility that governments can increase the bargaining power of labour unions through changes in labour legislation, and in turn, reduce wage inequality within the labour market. The elasticity of taxable income measures the degree of responsiveness of the tax base to changes in marginal tax rates. Recent Canadian estimates of this elasticity have found moderate elasticities for earners in the top decile, and high elasticities for earners in the top percentile (for example Milligan and Smart (2015) and Department of Finance (2010)). In Chapter 1, I explore the underlying mechanisms that generate the relatively higher estimates at the top of the income distribution. Using the Longitudinal Administrative Databank (LAD), I estimate elasticities for several sub-components of taxable income, such as earned employment income and total income. In contrast to other research, I find modest elasticities of taxable income, even within the top percentile. I demonstrate that elasticities estimated using the Gruber and Saez (2002) specification are sensitive to choices of weights. In Chapter 1, I find small elasticities not only for total and taxable income, but also for another very important income concept: employment income. Specifically, I find employment income elasticites of less than 0.07 for all income deciles. These elasticities, however, represent average estimates for heterogeneous workers who face different constraints and who have different incentives to respond to changes in tax rates. In Chapter 2, therefore, I estimate elasticities for different types of workers by dividing the sample by gender and by attachment to the labour force. Using the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID), a survey with detailed information on labour hours and job characteristics, I find higher elasticities for female workers and for workers with a weaker attachment to the labour force. I test for robustness of the estimates by varying the income increment used to calculate the marginal effective tax rates (METRs), as well as varying the number of years between observations. A second-order benefit of Chapter 2 is it serves as a robustness check on the results of Chapter 1. That is, we reproduce the elasticity estimates for total income and taxable income from Chapter 1 with a different dataset, and find similar results. Chapter 3 turns to the potential role of labour relations reforms to influence Canadian income inequality. Labour relations policy in Canada, studied extensively for its impact on unions, has not been studied more generally for its role in income inequality. In this chapter, I provide evidence on the distributional effects of labour relations’ reforms by relating an index of the favorableness to unions of Canadian provincial labour relations laws to changes in industry-, occupation-, education-, and gender-specific provincial unionization rates between 1981 and 2012. The results suggest that shifting every province’s 2012 legal regime to the most union-favorable possible (a counterfactual environment) would raise the national union density by no more than 8 percentage points in the steady state. I also project the change in union density rates that would result in the counterfactual situation for several demographic subgroups of the labour force. While there is some evidence of larger gains among blue-collar workers, the differences across these groups are small and in some cases suggest even larger gains among more highly educated workers. The results suggest reforms to labour relations laws would not significantly reduce labour market inequality in Canada

Ethnocentrism and Internal Compensation Structuring: An Experimental Examination of Point Factor Job Evaluation

“Comparable Worth” represents the concept that men, women, minorities, and whites should receive equal pay for work of equal value from their employer. Much research and many articles have been written in regards to overall pay inequities between men and women; however information regarding internal compensation strategies and perceived labor pools (percentage of minority applicants) has not been explored in depth. A total of 381 individuals participated in an experimental study that manipulated perceived labor market composition in order to establish the relative impact of ethnocentrism on the evaluation of compensable factors and salary. Results strongly supported the authors’ hypotheses, indicating that (a) significant discriminatory weighing of compensable factors by the perceived ethnicity and gender of labor pools occurs, (b) individual participant demographics (ethnicity and gender) contribute significantly to discrimination between perceived labor pools, and (c) participant individual differences significantly contribute to discriminatory weighting. Implications and directions for future research are considered

Ethnocentrism and Internal Compensation Structuring: An Experimental Examination of Point Factor Job Evaluation

“Comparable Worth” represents the concept that men, women, minorities, and whites should receive equal pay for work of equal value from their employer. Much research and many articles have been written in regards to overall pay inequities between men and women; however information regarding internal compensation strategies and perceived labor pools (percentage of minority applicants) has not been explored in depth. A total of 381 individuals participated in an experimental study that manipulated perceived labor market composition in order to establish the relative impact of ethnocentrism on the evaluation of compensable factors and salary. Results strongly supported the authors’ hypotheses, indicating that (a) significant discriminatory weighing of compensable factors by the perceived ethnicity and gender of labor pools occurs, (b) individual participant demographics (ethnicity and gender) contribute significantly to discrimination between perceived labor pools, and (c) participant individual differences significantly contribute to discriminatory weighting. Implications and directions for future research are considered

Scoring method of a Situational Judgment Test:influence on internal consistency reliability, adverse impact and correlation with personality?

textabstractSituational Judgment Tests (SJTs) are increasingly used for medical school selection. Scoring an SJT is more complicated than scoring a knowledge test, because there are no objectively correct answers. The scoring method of an SJT may influence the construct and concurrent validity and the adverse impact with respect to non-traditional students. Previous research has compared only a small number of scoring methods and has not studied the effect of scoring method on internal consistency reliability. This study compared 28 different scoring methods for a rating SJT on internal consistency reliability, adverse impact and correlation with personality. The scoring methods varied on four aspects: the way of controlling for systematic error, and the type of reference group, distance and central tendency statistic. All scoring methods were applied to a previously validated integrity-based SJT, administered to 931 medical school applicants. Internal consistency reliability varied between .33 and .73, which is likely explained by the dependence of coefficient alpha on the total score variance. All scoring methods led to significantly higher scores for the ethnic majority than for the non-Western minorities, with effect sizes ranging from 0.48 to 0.66. Eighteen scoring methods showed a significant small positive correlation with agreeableness. Four scoring methods showed a significant small positive correlation with conscientiousness. The way of controlling for systematic error was the most influential scoring method aspect. These results suggest that the increased use of SJTs for selection into medical school must be accompanied by a thorough examination of the scoring method to be used

The relationship between Intelligence and reaction time varies with age:Results from three representative narrow-age age cohorts at 30, 50 and 69 years

Background: Reaction time (RT) has played a prominent part in research on mental ability for over a century. Throughout this time a number of questions have been repeatedly posed: what is the relationship of RT to general mental ability, and is this the same for simple and choice RT? Does the relationship change with age? How important is RT variability compared with mean values? Here we examine these questions in three population representative cohorts. Methods: Participants were drawn from the West of Scotland Twenty-07 study, a longitudinal population based study designed to investigate socially structured health inequalities. At the fourth wave of data collection, part I of the Alice Heim 4 (AH4) test of general intelligence was administered, and reaction times were measured using a portable device. Means and standard deviations were recorded for simple and 4-choice reaction time. Full data were available for 2196 participants, comprising 714 aged 30 years, 813 aged 50, and 669 aged 69. Results: Correlations of simple RT means with AH4 scores were − 0.27, − 0.30 and − 0.32, for age 30, 50 and 69, respectively; and − 0.44, − 0.47 and − 0.53 for 4-choice RT. The underlying relationships showed evidence of non-linearity, particularly for simple RT, with stronger association at lower AH4 scores. This was more pronounced with age. RT variability was correlated with the mean at 0.57, 0.57, 0.58 for simple RT; and 0.53, 0.53, 0.47 for choice RT. Residuals from regressing the RT variability on the mean showed no association with AH4 in the case of simple RT but a weak association for choice RT which decreased with age. Conclusions: There is a strong correlation of RT means with general mental ability which increases with age. The underlying relationship is complex for SRT. RT variability shows little association with mental ability when its dependence on the mean is removed. Combining samples with disparate ages may overestimate the association