Organizational Climate and Company Productivity: the Role of Employee Affect and Employee Level

Consistent with a growing number of models about affect and behaviour and with arecognition that perception alone provides no impetus for action, it was predicted thatassociations between company climate and productivity would be mediated by average levelof job satisfaction. In a study of 42 manufacturing companies, subsequent productivity wassignificantly correlated in controlled analyses with eight aspects of organizational climate(e.g. skill development and concern for employee welfare) and also with average jobsatisfaction. The mediation hypothesis was supported in hierarchical multiple regressions forseparate aspects of climate. In addition, an overall analysis showed that companyproductivity was more strongly correlated with those aspects of climate that had strongersatisfaction loadings. A second prediction, that managers¿ perceptions of climate would bemore closely linked to company productivity than would those of non-managers, was notsupported. However, managers¿ assessments of most aspects of their company¿s climatewere significantly more positive than those of non-managers.Organizational structure, organizational climate, employee welfare, manager,productivity.

Human Performance Assessments in Cadet Populations

This study assessed potential physiological differences between the Ranger Challenge (RC) Competition team and junior year cadets in an Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program. The method included: RC (m = 11, f = 2) and junior year cadets (m = 7, f = 3) were assessed in the following areas: 1) quickness and agility (5-10-5 shuttle run), 2) total-body power (standing broad jump), and 3) grip strength (hand grip dynamometry) assessed. The 5-10-5 shuttle run was performed twice (opening once to the left and once to the right). The standing broad jump required that cadets stand with their toes behind a line, perform a maximum of three preparatory movements, triple extend their knees, hips, and ankles while using their upper body to propel them as far forward as possible. After the jump the distanced reached was measured from the line to the heel of the nearest foot. Hand grip dynamometry was performed once on each hand. The cadet held the dynamometer out to his or her side and squeezed it as they lowered it to their hip. The results were that there were no significant differences between groups for the 5-10-5 shuttle run (p = 0.91), standing broad jump (p = 0.49), or grip strength (p = 0.31). RC did not outperform

The emotional geography of prison life

Accounts of prison life consistently describe a culture of mutual mistrust, fear, aggression and barely submerged violence. Often too, they explain how prisoners adapt to this environment—in men’s prisons, at least—by putting on emotional ‘masks’ or ‘fronts’ of masculine bravado which hide their vulnerabilities and deter the aggression of their peers. This article does not contest the truth of such descriptions, but argues that they provide a partial account of the prison’s emotional world. Most importantly, for current purposes, they fail to describe the way in which prisons have a distinctive kind of emotional geography, with zones in which certain kinds of emotional feelings and displays are more or less acceptable. In this article, we argue that these ‘emotion zones’, which cannot be characterized either as ‘frontstage’ or ‘backstage’ domains, enable the display of a wider range of feelings than elsewhere in the prison. Their existence represents a challenge to depictions of prisons as environments that are unwaveringly sterile, unfailingly aggressive or emotionally undifferentiated. This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Sage at http://tcr.sagepub.com/content/18/1/56

Four-quadrant investigation of job-related affects and behaviours

Emphasizing differences in activation as well as valence, six studies across a range of situations examined relations between types of job-related core affect and 13 self-reported work behaviours. A theory-based measure of affect was developed, and its four-quadrant structure was found to be supported across studies. Also consistent with hypotheses, high-activation pleasant affect was more strongly correlated with positive behaviours than were low-activation pleasant feelings, and those associations tended to be greatest for discretionary behaviours in contrast to routine task proficiency. Additionally as predicted, unpleasant job-related affects that had low rather than high activation were more strongly linked to the negative work behaviours examined. Theory and practice would benefit from greater differentiation between affects and between behaviours. © 2014 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

The energy flux into a fluidized granular medium at a vibrating wall

We study the power input of a vibrating wall into a fluidized granular medium, using event driven simulations of a model granular system. The system consists of inelastic hard disks contained between a stationary and a vibrating elastic wall, in the absence of gravity. Two scaling relations for the power input are found, both involving the pressure. The transition between the two occurs when waves generated at the moving wall can propagate across the system. Choosing an appropriate waveform for the vibrating wall removes one of these scalings and renders the second very simple.Comment: 5 pages, revtex, 7 postscript figure

Towards a middle-range theory of mental health and well-being effects of employment transitions: Findings from a qualitative study on unemployment during the 2009-2010 economic recession.

This article builds upon previous theoretical work on job loss as a status passage to help explain how people's experiences of involuntary unemployment affected their mental well-being during the 2009-2010 economic recession. It proposes a middle-range theory that interprets employment transitions as status passages and suggests that their health and well-being effects depend on the personal and social meanings that people give to them, which are called properties of the transitions. The analyses, which used a thematic approach, are based on the findings of a qualitative study undertaken in Bradford (North England) consisting of 73 people interviewed in 16 focus groups. The study found that the participants experienced their job losses as divestment passages characterised by three main properties: experiences of reduced agency, disruption of role-based identities, for example, personal identity crises, and experiences of 'spoiled identities', for example, experiences of stigma. The proposed middle-range theory allows us to federate these findings together in a coherent framework which makes a contribution to illuminating not just the intra-personal consequences of unemployment, that is, its impact on subjective well-being and common mental health problems, but also its inter-personal consequences, that is, the hidden and often overlooked social processes that affect unemployed people's social well-being. This article discusses how the study findings and the proposed middle-range theory can help to address the theoretical weaknesses and often contradictory empirical findings from studies that use alternative frameworks, for example, deprivation models and 'incentive theory' of unemployment

Aging dynamics and density relaxation in granular compaction

We present an analytical approach to the out of equilibrium dynamics of a class of kinetic lattice gases under gravity. The location of the jamming transition, the critical exponents, and the scaling functions characterizing the relaxation processes are determined. In particular, we find that logarithmic compaction and simple aging are intimately related to the Vogel-Fulcher law, while power-law compaction and super-aging behavior occur in presence of a power-law diffusion.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. Eq.7 corrected plus minor changes. To appear in Europhys. Let

Asymmetric Organocatalysis and Continuous Chemistry for an Efficient and Cost-Competitive Process to Pregabalin

Herein, we present the scale up development of an innovative synthetic process to pregabalin. The process is underpinned by two enabling technologies critical to its success; continuous chemistry allowed a safe and clean production of nitroalkene, and asymmetric organocatalysis gave access to the chiral intermediate in an enantioenriched form. Crucial to the success of the process was the careful development of a continuous process to nitroalkene and optimization of the organocatalyst and of the reaction conditions to attain remarkably high turn-over frequency in the catalytic asymmetric reaction. Successful recycle of the organocatalysts was also developed in order to achieve a cost-competitive process