On the Nature and Importance of Cultural Tightness-Looseness

Cross-cultural research is dominated by the use of values despite their mixed empirical support and their limited theoretical scope. This article expands the dominant paradigm in crosscultural research by developing a theory of cultural tightness-looseness, the strength of social norms and degree of sanctioning within societies, and advancing a multilevel research agenda for future research. Through an exploration of the top-down, bottom-up, and moderating impact that societal tightness-looseness has on individuals and organizations, as well as on variability across levels of analysis, the theory provides a new and complementary perspective to the values approach

Once, Twice, or Three Times as Harmful? Ethnic Harassment, Gender Harassment, and Generalized Workplace Harassment

Despite scholars’ and practitioners’ recognition that different forms of workplace harassment often co-occur in organizations, there is a paucity of theory and research on how these different forms of harassment combine to influence employees’ outcomes. We investigated the ways in which ethnic harassment (EH), gender harassment (GH), and generalized workplace harassment (GWH) combined to predict target individuals’ job-related, psychological, and health outcomes. Competing theories regarding additive, exacerbating, and inuring (i.e., habituating to hardships) combinations were tested. We also examined race and gender differences in employees’ reports of EH, GH, and GWH. The results of two studies revealed that EH, GH, and GWH were each independently associated with targets’ strain outcomes and, collectively, the preponderance of evidence supported the inurement effect, although slight additive effects were observed for psychological and physical health outcomes. Racial group differences in EH emerged, but gender and race differences in GH and GWH did not. Implications are provided for how multiple aversive experiences at work may harm employees’ well-being

Negotiating Relationally: The Dynamics of the Relational Self In Negotiations

Although negotiation research is thriving, it has been criticized as having an arelational bias—emphasizing autonomy, competition, and rationality over interdependence, cooperation, and relationality. In this article, we advance a new model of relationality in negotiation. Drawing on research in social psychology, we describe the construct of relational self-construals (RSC) and present a temporal model of RSC and negotiation. After delineating the conditions through which RSC becomes accessible in negotiation and conditions that inhibit its use, we discuss how RSC affects negotiators\u27 pre-negotiation psychological states, early and later tactics, and negotiation outcomes. We illustrate a number of distinct relational dynamics that can occur based on the dyadic composition of RSC, each of which brings distinct benefits and costs to the negotiation table. Implications for the science and practice of negotiation are discussed

Culture and Egocentric Perceptions of Fairness in Conflict and Negotiation

In this article, the authors advanced a cultural view of judgment biases in conflict and negotiation. The authors predicted that disputants’ self-serving biases of fairness would be more prevalent in individualistic cultures, such as the United States, in which the self is served by focusing on one’s positive attributes to “stand out” and be better than others, yet would be attenuated in collectivistic cultures, such as Japan, where the self is served by focusing on one’s negative characteristics to “blend in” (S. J. Heine, D. R. Lehman, H. R. Markus, & S. Kitayama, 1999). Four studies that used different methodologies (free recall, scenarios, and a laboratory experiment) supported this notion. Implications for the science and practice of negotiation are discussed

Hierarchical multi-class segmentation of glioma images using networks with multi-level activation function

For many segmentation tasks, especially for the biomedical image, the topological prior is vital information which is useful to exploit. The containment/nesting is a typical inter-class geometric relationship. In the MICCAI Brain tumor segmentation challenge, with its three hierarchically nested classes 'whole tumor', 'tumor core', 'active tumor', the nested classes relationship is introduced into the 3D-residual-Unet architecture. The network comprises a context aggregation pathway and a localization pathway, which encodes increasingly abstract representation of the input as going deeper into the network, and then recombines these representations with shallower features to precisely localize the interest domain via a localization path. The nested-class-prior is combined by proposing the multi-class activation function and its corresponding loss function. The model is trained on the training dataset of Brats2018, and 20% of the dataset is regarded as the validation dataset to determine parameters. When the parameters are fixed, we retrain the model on the whole training dataset. The performance achieved on the validation leaderboard is 86%, 77% and 72% Dice scores for the whole tumor, enhancing tumor and tumor core classes without relying on ensembles or complicated post-processing steps. Based on the same start-of-the-art network architecture, the accuracy of nested-class (enhancing tumor) is reasonably improved from 69% to 72% compared with the traditional Softmax-based method which blind to topological prior.Comment: 12pages first versio

Regulation of miR-146a by RelA/NFkB and p53 in STHdhQ111/HdhQ111 Cells, a Cell Model of Huntington's Disease

Huntington's disease (HD) is caused by the expansion of N-terminal polymorphic poly Q stretch of the protein huntingtin (HTT). Deregulated microRNAs and loss of function of transcription factors recruited to mutant HTT aggregates could cause characteristic transcriptional deregulation associated with HD. We observed earlier that expressions of miR-125b, miR-146a and miR-150 are decreased in STHdhQ111/HdhQ111 cells, a model for HD in comparison to those of wild type STHdhQ7/HdhQ7 cells. In the present manuscript, we show by luciferase reporter assays and real time PCR that decreased miR-146a expression in STHdhQ111/HdhQ111 cells is due to decreased expression and activity of p65 subunit of NFkB (RelA/NFkB). By reporter luciferase assay, RT-PCR and western blot analysis, we also show that both miR-150 and miR-125b target p53. This partially explains the up regulation of p53 observed in HD. Elevated p53 interacts with RelA/NFkB, reduces its expression and activity and decreases the expression of miR-146a, while knocking down p53 increases RelA/NFkB and miR-146a expressions. We also demonstrate that expression of p53 is increased and levels of RelA/NFkB, miR-146a, miR-150 and miR-125b are decreased in striatum of R6/2 mice, a mouse model of HD and in cell models of HD. In a cell model, this effect could be reversed by exogenous expression of chaperone like proteins HYPK and Hsp70. We conclude that (i) miR-125b and miR-150 target p53, which in turn regulates RelA/NFkB and miR-146a expressions; (ii) reduced miR-125b and miR-150 expressions, increased p53 level and decreased RelA/NFkB and miR-146a expressions originate from mutant HTT (iii) p53 directly or indirectly regulates the expression of miR-146a. Our observation of interplay between transcription factors and miRNAs using HD cell model provides an important platform upon which further work is to be done to establish if such regulation plays any role in HD pathogenesis

When self-management and surveillance collide: Consequences for employees’ trust, autonomy, and discretionary behaviors

Despite arguments for the benefits of self-management for enhancing employees’ trust and willingness to put in extra effort for the organization, many managers fail to give their employees control and instead engage in surveillance to gain compliance. Drawing on personal control and reactance theories, we proposed self-management would relate to increased discretionary behavior – i.e., organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) – while the combination of self-management and surveillance would diminish OCB and increase counterproductive work behavior (CWB). We further proposed these effects would be mediated by employees’ perceptions of trust and autonomy. In a series of two studies, we establish the beneficial effects of self-management on OCB and illustrate the detrimental effects for employees and organizations when self-management and surveillance collide

Once, Twice, or Three Times as Harmful? Ethnic Harassment, Gender Harassment, and Generalized Workplace Harassment

Despite scholars’ and practitioners’ recognition that different forms of workplace harassment often co-occur in organizations, there is a paucity of theory and research on how these different forms of harassment combine to influence employees’ outcomes. We investigated the ways in which ethnic harassment (EH), gender harassment (GH), and generalized workplace harassment (GWH) combined to predict target individuals’ job-related, psychological, and health outcomes. Competing theories regarding additive, exacerbating, and inuring (i.e., habituating to hardships) combinations were tested. We also examined race and gender differences in employees’ reports of EH, GH, and GWH. The results of two studies revealed that EH, GH, and GWH were each independently associated with targets’ strain outcomes and, collectively, the preponderance of evidence supported the inurement effect, although slight additive effects were observed for psychological and physical health outcomes. Racial group differences in EH emerged, but gender and race differences in GH and GWH did not. Implications are provided for how multiple aversive experiences at work may harm employees’ well-being.Nishii8_Once_twice_three_times_as_harmful.pdf: 1465 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020