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Increasing market pressures force companies to implement drastic organizational changes in order to remain competitive. Budget decreases, reduction efforts, and similar changes create significant morale and job-satisfaction concerns. This study assesses the effects of budget reductions and other organizational changes on the morale of hospital employees. A survey dealing with employee perceptions of stress, workload, and performance was given to hospital employees. Not surprisingly, the survey found that morale problems resulted from the organizational changes. Employees' gender and job classification showed little significant effect on the survey results, while respondents' length of employment with the organization influenced the results slightly. The findings provide information useful for dealing with challenges of employee satisfaction, morale, and trust during times of budget limitations.

When people revise subjective probabilities in light of data, revisions are less than the amount prescribed by the normative model, Bayes's theorem. Previous research suggests that this results from the subjects' lack of understanding of the implications of the data; i.e., from inaccurate subjective sampling distributions. This experiment examined the effects on conservatire revisions of training subjects about, the implications of data. The subjects estimated sampling distributions for two binomial populations, were shown samples from the populations in order to teach them veridical distributions, and again estimated sampling distributions. Estimated sampling distributions were good predictors of revisions and, as a result of training, both the sampling distributions and the revisions became more veridical. A number of recent experiments have shown that when people revise their subjective probabilities about hypotheses in light of data, the revisions tend to be less than the amount prescribed by the appropriate normative model (e.g.,

Provo, UtahThis simulation study investigated the effect on mean flow time and makespan of localized scheduling rules with dynamically established priorities in a flow shop with multiple processors. The study examined the effects of problem characteristics (number of jobs, number of machine stages and number of parallel processors at each stage) and the performance of priority rules using regression analysis. Although structural characteristics explained most of the variation in performance, priority rules also had an effect. The "shortest processing time first" rule was consistently superior; its superiority was greater for mean flow time than for makespan.