Abstract. Employees’ innovative work is a facet of proactive work behavior that is of increasing interest to industrial and organizational psychologists. As proactive personality and supervisor support are key predictors of innovative work behavior, reliable, and valid employee ratings of these two constructs are crucial for organizations’ planning of personnel development measures. However, the time for assessments is often limited. The present study therefore aimed at constructing reliable short scales of two measures of proactive personality and supervisor support. For this purpose, we compared an innovative approach of item selection, namely Ant Colony Optimization (ACO; Leite, Huang, & Marcoulides, 2008 ) and classical item selection procedures. For proactive personality, the two item selection approaches provided similar results. Both five-item short forms showed a satisfactory reliability and a small, however negligible loss of criterion validity. For a two-dimensional supervisor support scale, ACO found a reliable and valid short form. Psychometric properties of the short version were in accordance with those of the parent form. A manual supervisor support short form revealed a rather poor model fit and a serious loss of validity. We discuss benefits and shortcomings of ACO compared to classical item selection approaches and recommendations for the application of ACO.
Cultural differences in performance and solution strategies on the Mental Rotations Test (MRT;Peters et al., 1995;Vandenberg & Kuse, 1978) and the Cube Comparison Test (CCT; Amthauer, Brocke, Liepmann, & Beauducel, 2001) were studied in 656 Cambodian and German students. Germans outperformed Cambodians on both the MRT (d = 1.57) and CCT (d = 0.99). The large differences could be explained by Cambodian participants being more prone to analytic strategies, whereas most Germans preferred a holistic strategy. Sex differences on the MRT in favor of males were found in both Cambodia (d = 0.37) and Germany (d = 0.87). On the CCT, sex differences with males outperforming females were only found for the German sample (d = 0.43). In both samples, more females preferred an analytic solution strategy, whereas more males tended to use a holistic strategy. We argue that the huge differences between nations can partly be attributed to differences in the mathematics curriculum.Spatial skills are important for many professions such as science, architecture, engineering, graphical studies, and medicine, but also for daily life activities, including such things as parking a car, orientation and navigation in a new environment, manual work, and mechanical skills. Consequently, spatial abilities have been investigated in a great number of studies across different disciplines.There are two specific aspects of spatial abilities that have received much attention in the literature. First are sex differences in favor of males that occur consistently for some facets of spatial ability and are especially large for problems involving mental rotation (MR) of three-dimensional objects. Second is the question of whether individuals use different solution strategies to solve
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