Does Employee Age Moderate the Association Between HR Practices and Organizational Commitment? An Application of SOC Theory to Organizational Behavior

Drawing hypotheses from Selective Optimization with Compensation theory (SOC), we explored the degree to which employee age moderates the relationship between employees’ satisfaction with high-commitment human resource practices (HCHRPs; e.g., providing training, work–life balance) and organizational commitment. Customer-facing employees (N = 6,360) from an international transportation company completed the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ) and rated their satisfaction with various HCHRPs offered by their organization. Results show that although there was a strong overall correlation between organizational commitment and satisfaction with various HCHRPs (r = .66), employee age was a significant moderator of only the relationships between organizational commitment and maintenance-related HCHRPs (e.g., work–life balance) and not of developmentrelated HCHRPs (e.g., training opportunities). Furthermore, moderation effects had small effect sizes, suggesting that employee age is not a characteristic organizations need to consider when making strategic decisions about HCHRPs

The Moderating Effect of Employee Age on the Association between Affective Commitment and Human Resource Practices

Drawing hypotheses from a theory of lifespan development called selective optimization with compensation (SOC, Baltes & Baltes, 1990; Baltes, Staudinger, & Lindenberger, 1999), the study explored the degree to which employee age moderates the relationship between employee affective commitment and satisfaction with various high commitment human resource practices (HCHRPs; e.g., providing training, opportunity for advancement, work/life balance). In addition, as exploratory hypotheses, the study also tested whether other employee-level variables such as gender, job tenure, and job type also serve as moderators of the HCHRP-affective commitment relationship. Customer-facing employees (N = 6,360) representing three job types (O*NET titles: Shipping, Receiving, and Traffic Clerks; Truck and Delivery Services Drivers; Couriers and Messengers) from an international transportation company completed an eight-item version of the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ, Mowday, Steers, & Porter, 1979) and a questionnaire assessing their satisfaction with various HCHRPs offered by their organization. Path analyses assessed the significance of two-way interactions concerning age (i.e., age-by-HCHRP) and job tenure (i.e., tenure-by- HCHRP), as well as three way interactions concerning gender (i.e., gender-by-age-by- HCHRP) and job type (i.e., job type-by-age-by-HCHRP). Results show that, although there was a strong overall correlation between affective commitment and satisfaction with HCHRPs (r = .66), employee age was a significant moderator of only the relationships between affective commitment and maintenance-related HCHRPs (e.g., life/work balance, job security) and not of development-related HCHRPS (e.g., training opportunities, opportunities for advancement). More importantly, although the moderation effects were statistically significant, the effect size of every moderation was small, suggesting from a practical perspective that employee age is not a characteristic that organizations need to consider when making strategic decisions about HCHRPs

Materials, skills and gender identities: men, women and home improvement practices in New Zealand

The paper explores the interactions of materials, skills and gender identity through examining DIY practices in New Zealand. It traces the relationship between materials used for home repairs, the competences needed to use them and the (re)production of specific gendered identities. It argues that housing and building materials were an important part of the European settler history of the country and this history forms the context within which New Zealanders work on their houses today. Drawing on interviews with 30 Pākehā homeowners, it explores how both men and women respond to the materials of their homes, how skills are acquired in relation to the demands of the materials used and how these skills become part of the (re)production of specific white, heterosexual gender identities. The figure of the ‘Kiwi bloke’ is discussed as an important imaginary in the negotiation of gender identities for both men and women. Interviewees saw their DIY activities in the light of the creation and re-creation of this specific national and gendered identity. The paper reveals the intertwining of history and materiality in the continual negotiation and contestation of gendered identities

Demystifying the dendralenes

We present herein an overview of our ongoing studies with dendralenes. The first synthetic routes to this fundamental family of compounds have revealed long-hidden secrets in hydrocarbon chemistry and set the scene for synthetic and materials chemistry applications.We thank the Australian Research Council for financial support

Evidence for two distinct mechanisms directing gaze in natural scenes

Various models have been proposed to explain the interplay between bottom-up and top-down mechanisms in driving saccades rapidly to one or a few isolated targets. We investigate this relationship using eye-tracking data from subjects viewing natural scenes to test attentional allocation to high-level objects within a mathematical decision-making framework. We show the existence of two distinct types of bottom-up saliency to objects within a visual scene, which disappear within a few fixations, and modification of this saliency by top-down influences. Our analysis reveals a subpopulation of early saccades, which are capable of accurately fixating salient targets after prior fixation within the same image. These data can be described quantitatively in terms of bottom-up saliency, including an explicit face channel, weighted by top-down influences, determining the mean rate of rise of a decision-making model to a threshold that triggers a saccade. These results are compatible with a rapid subcortical pathway generating accurate saccades to salient targets after analysis by cortical mechanisms

Systematic review and meta analysis

Aim: This paper provides an overview of the research methodologies of systematic review and meta-analysis and uses a commentary on the analysis of data from a previously published study to illustrate the procedures and decision-making involved for consumers and those who may be considering carrying out a systematic review. Rationale: Systematic review and meta-analysis are located within a hierarchy of evidence-based practice, and their underlying epistemological and theoretical basis considered. The advantages of systematic review over traditional narrative reviews are discussed, together with the case for the use of meta-analysis to synthesise research findings. The feasibility of the use of these methodologies by educational psychologists is also considered. Findings: The worked example details the steps necessary to carry out a systematic review and meta-analysis and the commentary addresses key issues such as specifying inclusion/exclusion criteria and determining relevance; specifying the literature search strategy and coping with the ‘grey’ literature; extracting and coding data from the included studies and the importance of reliability checks; study quality; selecting the most appropriate effect size; selecting the most appropriate model for meta-analysis (fixed-effect versus random-effect), combining and averaging effect sizes across studies; running weighted ANOVAs or meta-regression analyses to investigate heterogeneity; checks for publication bias; and sensitivity analysis to deal with outliers. Conclusions: Future developments in these methodologies, details of available software and resources, and implications for educational psychologists who may wish to carry out systematic reviews and meta-analysis are discussed

The Historical Development of Private Education in Canada

The Canadian educational system has been influenced by geography, population, and natural resources. In some provinces, denominational schools exist within the public school system. Although committed to a multiethnic society, private education also exists within the larger system, with religious or Christian schools considered a subset of private education. The early French and British immigrants to Canada shaped the educational system and their influence is still evident in the contemporary educational milieu, including the dual-language system and the adoption of a multicultural model. The Roman Catholic and Church of England influences were particularly strong since, unlike education in America, religion was integrated into public education. Canadian educational history passed through several stages with both public and provincially funded education under the direction of provincial governments. These included church-controlled education (1700s to mid 1800s); a more centralized authority, universal free education, and taxation at the local level (mid 1800s); the creation of provincial departments of education, a more consistent curriculum, better trained teachers, continued local taxation together with provincial grants (late 1800s to 1900); and from 1900 to the present day, the creation of Ministers of Education in each province and provincial governments playing an increasingly significant role in the shaping of policy and administration

Optimal strategies for operating energy storage in an arbitrage or smoothing market

We characterize cost-minimizing operating strategies for an energy store over a given interval of time [0, T]. The cost functional here can represent, for example, a traditional economic cost or a penalty for time-variation of the output from a storage-assisted wind farm or more general imbalance between supply and demand. Our analysis allows for leakage, operating inefficiencies and general cost functionals. In the case where the cost of a store depends only on its instantaneous power output (or input), we present an algorithm to determine the optimal strategies. A key feature is that this algorithm is localized in time, in the sense that the action of the store at a time t ∈ [0, T] requires cost information over only some usually much shorter subinterval of time [t, tk] ⊂ [t, T]

Optimal embedding parameters: A modelling paradigm

Reconstruction of a dynamical system from a time series requires the selection of two parameters, the embedding dimension $d_e$ and the embedding lag $\tau$. Many competing criteria to select these parameters exist, and all are heuristic. Within the context of modeling the evolution operator of the underlying dynamical system, we show that one only need be concerned with the product $d_e\tau$. We introduce an information theoretic criteria for the optimal selection of the embedding window $d_w=d_e\tau$. For infinitely long time series this method is equivalent to selecting the embedding lag that minimises the nonlinear model prediction error. For short and noisy time series we find that the results of this new algorithm are data dependent and superior to estimation of embedding parameters with the standard techniques