Every year, a growing number of students leave their home environments and relocate to study at universities abroad. Relocation, however, can be a challenging and stressful experience. This longitudinal study surveyed 294 international and domestic student sojourners to examine and compare their adjustment and distress or strain responses during the first six months of their entry into a medium-sized, mid-western US state university. The findings revealed that international student sojourners, compared to domestic sojourners, had greater difficulty in adjusting during their initial transition into the university. Although sojourners experienced increasing adjustment over time, the pattern of strain was curvilinear, peaking three months after the start of the semester. Self-efficacy, social support and cultural novelty predicted adjustment and strain at different times during the transition period.
Relationships of empowerment and span of control with 2 safety measures (unsafe behaviors and accidents) were investigated among 24 workgroups comprising 531 employees of a large chemical company in 3 U.S. states. The company recently implemented a reengineering process. Data were from an anonymous survey (unsafe behaviors), company records (accidents, span of control), and trained expert raters (empowerment). Span of control (positively) and level of empowerment (negatively) correlated with both measures of poor safety performance, but only empowerment predicted unique variance in safety criteria. Together, these structural measures predicted one third of the variance in safety measures. Structural variables such as span of control and team empowerment have been largely overlooked in past safety research but can be important.
This article develops a theoretical framework for understanding the appeal and tone of letters of recommendation using an evolutionary psychological perspective. Several hypotheses derived from this framework are developed and tested. The authors’ theoretical argument makes two major points. First, over the course of human evolution, people developed a preference for narrative information about people, and the format of letters of recommendation is compatible with that preference. Second, because recommenders are acquaintances of applicants, the tone of letters should reflect the degree to which the relationship with the applicant favors the recommender’s interests. We hypothesized that, over and above an applicant’s objective qualifications, letters of recommendation will reflect cooperative, status and mating interests of recommenders. We used 532 letters of recommendation written for 169 applicants for faculty positions to test our hypotheses. The results indicated that the strength of the cooperative relationship between recommenders and applicants influenced the favorability and length of letters. In addition, male recommenders wrote more favorable letters for female than male applicants, suggesting that male mating interests may influence letter favorability. We conclude with implications for practice and future research.
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