As the nature of work becomes more complex, teams have become necessary to ensure effective functioning within organizations. The healthcare industry is no exception. As such, the prevalence of training interventions designed to optimize teamwork in this industry has increased substantially over the last 10 years (Weaver, Dy, & Rosen, 2014). Using Kirkpatrick's (1956, 1996) training evaluation framework, we conducted a meta-analytic examination of healthcare team training to quantify its effectiveness and understand the conditions under which it is most successful. Results demonstrate that healthcare team training improves each of Kirkpatrick's criteria (reactions, learning, transfer, results; d = .37 to .89). Second, findings indicate that healthcare team training is largely robust to trainee composition, training strategy, and characteristics of the work environment, with the only exception being the reduced effectiveness of team training programs that involve feedback. As a tertiary goal, we proposed and found empirical support for a sequential model of healthcare team training where team training affects results via learning, which leads to transfer, which increases results. We find support for this sequential model in the healthcare industry (i.e., the current meta-analysis) and in training across all industries (i.e., using meta-analytic estimates from Arthur, Bennett, Edens, & Bell, 2003), suggesting the sequential benefits of training are not unique to medical teams. Ultimately, this meta-analysis supports the expanded use of team training and points toward recommendations for optimizing its effectiveness within healthcare settings. (PsycINFO Database Record

On the basis of hypotheses derived from social and experiential learning theories, we meta-analytically investigated how safety training and workplace hazards impact the development of safety knowledge and safety performance. The results were consistent with an expected interaction between the level of engagement of safety training and hazardous event/exposure severity in the promotion of safety knowledge and performance. For safety knowledge and safety performance, highly engaging training was considerably more effective than less engaging training when hazardous event/exposure severity was high, whereas highly and less engaging training had comparable levels of effectiveness when hazardous event/exposure severity was low. Implications of these findings for theory testing and incorporating information on objective risk into workplace safety research and practice are discussed.

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Although executive coaching has been shown to be effective, few research initiatives have attempted to understand the importance of the emergent relationship between a coach and coachee. This article explores the factors that influence coaching outcomes from both the coach and coachee’s perspective and presents the results of the mediating effect that working alliance and information sharing have on coachee goal attainment and coachee insight outcomes. The authors explored these factors in both an academic coachee sample as well as an executive field sample. Results showed that coachee motivation was significantly positively related with coachee goal attainment and coachee insight in an academic sample but not in a field sample. Moreover, working alliance and information sharing partially mediated the relationship between a coach’s psychological mindedness and coachee insight in an academic, but not field, sample. Another notable result was that the difficulty of the coaching goal did not impact how successful the coaching engagement was in terms of goal attainment. Implications of these findings for both research and practice are discussed.

Most modern organizations engage in some form of performance appraisal in an effort to determine how well employees are performing their jobs. In the United States, these appraisals tend to be fairly formal and structured, in part because of potential legal liability when employment decisions are made on the basis of appraisals. Regardless of the system used, in the vast majority of cases, all of the parties involved are unhappy with the appraisal process. That is, employees often feel as though appraisal systems do not fairly assess their contributions, and many also believe that ratings are biased. The managers who typically conduct the appraisals often feel that they are not adequately trained in appraising performance, and they feel uncomfortable being put in the role of "judge." Managers at higher levels in the organization are often not convinced that there is a relationship between the appraisals and any measure of corporate performance. At all levels in the organization, there is often the feeling that appraisals are done because they have to be done but that nothing productive ever comes out of the process. These problems are well documented in both the academic literature (e.g., Murphy & Cleveland, 1995) and the practitioner literature (e.g., Pulakos, 2004). Yet, despite these problems and some calls for the abolishment of appraisals (cf. Coens & Jenkins, 2000), most organizations continue to conduct performance appraisals. Why?Performance appraisal is the managerial evaluation of an employee's performance, often annually, in which an evaluator assesses the extent to which certain desired behaviors have been observed or achieved (note that our primary focus is on the performance of individual employees and not the performance of teams-that topic needs to be discussed in its own right). Organizations conduct appraisals for a number of reasons, such as providing documentation for decision making, providing performance feedback, and developing a basis for pay decisions (cf. Cleveland, Murphy, & Williams, 1989), but it is our view that the ultimate purpose for conducting appraisals is to improve organizational performance. In this chapter, however, we focus most of our attention on improving the performance of the individual because that is the area in which most of the attention in industrial and organizational psychology has been focused. We also make note of how organizational functioning can be enhanced by implementing performance management systems (PMSs) to complement performance appraisal systems. (See also Vol. 1, chap. 10, this handbook.) More formal attempts to build the linkages between individual-level and organizational-level performance are beyond the scope of this chapter (see, e.g., the review in DeNisi, 2000), but we show how effective performance management can affect organizational-level performance by aligning individual performance goals with organizational performance goals. That is, we believe that in an ideal system employees are told about areas in which they need to improve, are...

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These findings indicate that the training intervention was partially effective, but more work needs to be done to determine the conditions under which training is most effective, and the ways in which to sustain improvements. Future research is needed to confirm its generalizability to additional OB units and departments.

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