Women's liberation: A case study of organizations for social change.

Acase study approach was used to investigate the history and organizational structure of five women's liberation groups. The organizations were analyzed from a systems frame of reference. The most salient organizational features to emerge included: (1) a splintering effect which was related to inadequate conflict resolution; (2) a narrow range of input with membership in all groups primarily radical, well educated, professional women; (3) lack of feedback and output specifications indicating that these organizations are unable to determine the extent of their effectiveness, primarily because of insufficient resources. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Organizational consulting in the local newsroom.

The local TV newsroom is a relatively high-profile community organization that has received little formal attention to date in the organizational literature. A number of challenging trends and issues have emerged for this type of organization, and the challenges appear to have a national breadth. Local TV news organizations are experiencing the seemingly conflicting demands of a mission historically rooted in community service and civic responsibility now moving toward a mission increasingly driven by corporate profit motives. The rapidly evolving and demanding world of local TV news is briefly reviewed here, with a focus on the potential value of organizational consultants and organizational development in managing increasing change demands in these settings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Thriving Person and the Thriving Organization Parallels and Linkages.

A paradigm is offered to make explicit certain bridges between individual psychology and organizational culture in order to support a view of culture and cultural change that is multifaceted, rooted in the complexity of human adjustment, long in duration, and not amenable to programmatic quick fixes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Learning from successful and failed experience: The moderating role of kind of after-event review.

The claim that appropriate "after-event review (AER)" may increase the relative value of drawing lessons from successes, as compared with failures, was examined in the present study. The study was a laboratory experiment in which the effect of type of AER (failure-focused, success-focused, failure- and success-focused, and no AER review) on performance improvement and causal attributions was tested under conditions of earlier success and earlier failure. In general, 2 results were demonstrated: (a) Drawing lessons from successful experience is feasible, and its effectiveness is contingent upon the type of AER. More specifically, after successful events, the most effective review is that of wrong actions, whereas after failed events, any kind of event review (correct or wrong actions) is effective. (b) AERs elicit more internal (as opposed to external) and specific (as opposed to general) attributions. These 2 classifications moderate the effect of AERs on task performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effecting organizational change: A "mineralogical" theory of organizational modifiability.

This article presents a "mineralogical" theory of organizational modifiability. The basic idea is that organizations differ in the degree to which they are modifiable. Interventions within organizations may succeed or fail as much as a junction of the modifiability of the organization as a junction of the intervention itself. The article considers the questions addressed, by the theory, the theory itself, concrete examples of the theory, implications for interventions, the measurement of aspects of the theory, and conclusions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The experimental change of a major organizational variable.

A field experiment in an industrial setting is conducted in order to test hypotheses concerning the relationship between the means by which organizational decisions are made and (a) individual satisfaction, and (b) productivity. Two programs are instituted in the clerical operations of an organization. One program, Autonomy, is designed to increase the role of rank-and-file employees in the decision making process of the organization. The other, the Heirarchically controlled program, increased the role of management in making decisions. After a year of observation and measurement, it is found that: (1) The experimental programs produced changes in the decision making allocations. (2) The individual satisfactions of the members of the work group increased significantly in the Autonomous program and decreased in the Heirarchical program. (3) Using one measure of productivity, both decision-making systems increased productivity, with the Heirarchically-controlled program resulting in a greater increase. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Business and politics.

From the point of view of a student of political science, Bauer's article (Amer. Psychologist, 1960, 15, 650-655) ends on any but "a happy note." While business organizations undoubtedly share features with social and political systems in general, the differences are significant. Bauer has not given any attention to the differences in goals of business and political systems, and the consequent implications for organization. If we believe that it is possible for a society, as well as its members, to have goals not derived from its system of production, and that it is possible for such goals to take precedence over the values of business, including productivity, then we are not compelled to accept organizational studies as our picture of reality. We would be far happier in emphasizing the differences between business organizations and political societies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

No security: A meta-analysis and review of job insecurity and its consequences.

Meta-analytic techniques were used to estimate how job insecurity relates to its postulated outcomes. Consistent with the conceptual framework, the results indicate that job insecurity has detrimental consequences for employees' job attitudes, organizational attitudes, health, and, to some extent, their behavioral relationship with the organization. Moderator analyses suggest that these relationships may be underestimated in studies relying on single-item measures of job insecurity and that the behavioral consequences of insecurity are more detrimental among manual, as compared with nonmanual, workers. Recommendations made for future research include utilization of multidimensional measures, consideration of a broader spectrum of outcomes and moderators, and use of longitudinal designs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

莱钢创建学习型企业实践

莱钢在学习型企业创建过程中，通过建立团队学习、注重能力培养、将工作与学习相融合、形成培训立体网络，解决了发展能力问题；为释放职工潜能，莱钢积极倡导自省、号召挑战传统和极限，解决了发展动力问题；通过系统思考，解决了发展过程中的瓶颈和重大改革问题，提升了企业的核心竞争力。     

The Family-School Partnership: An Opportunity to Promote the Learning Competence of All Students.

In this article, family-school partnerships are discussed as a viable and essential way to increase the opportunities and supports for all students to enhance their learning progress and meet the recent demands of schooling inherent in accountability systems and most notably of Title I No Child Left Behind legislation. School psychologists are encouraged to make the family-school partnership a priority by collaborating with school personnel to (a) apply principles from systems-ecological theory to children's learning; (b) maintain an opportunity-oriented, persistent focus when working with youth and families living in challenging situations; and (c) attend to the process of partnering with families. Example opportunities for school psychologists to make this partnership a priority for children's academic, social, and emotional learning are delineated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

What does it profit an organization if it gains the whole world and loses its own soul?

There are many indicators of serious decline in the moral and ethical standards of many public and private organizations. These declines have been marked by increased violence and aggression in the workplace, by slipping standards for technical functions like accounting, and a general sense of greed at the highest levels of management. Although these types of behaviors are not new, the increasing frequency with which they occur is concerning. The purpose of this article is to review some general concepts of ethical and moral thought, and then to apply those concepts to organizations. Highly structured, mandated ethics programs being applied to corporate settings may prove to be of some operational value but are not adequate to address the broad moral challenges faced in organizational life today. Instead, fundamental structural and behavioral change in the character of organizations is advanced as the only reasonable solution. Consulting psychologists, it is suggested, are well situated to facilitate the challenging processes organizational members must engage in to explore and define the moral dimensions of working and living together as a fundamental organizational change process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social Interaction Systems: Theory and Measurement: Book review.

Review of book: Robert Freed Bales (Au.) Social Interaction Systems: Theory and Measurement. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1999, 396 pp. Reviewed by A. Paul Hare. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Managing the unknowable: Strategic boundaries between order and chaos in organizations.

Reviews the book, Managing the unknowable: Strategic boundaries between order and chaos in organizations by Ralph D. Stacey (1992). This book should have a prominent label on the cover Warning, reading this book can be hazardous to all the sacred beliefs that you have about organizations as systems; organizational development, effectiveness and growth; and learning and innovation in organizations. While Stacey draws upon the work of other more mainstream systems theorists such as Senge (1990, reviewed in CPJ, Fall 1993), Miller (1990), and Hamel and Prahalad (1989), he extends General Systems Theory (GST) (von Bertalanffy, 1950; Berrien, K. 1968) in new exciting and icon-breaking directions. Senge's extension of system's thinking is mostly evolutionary, granted, elegantly evolutionary, but not a radical break from the sort of systems theory that forms the backbone of organizational development and most of organization consultation theory. This is not to say that Stacey's aim is to attack or invalidate more traditional system's theory. The theories of Einstein and Quantum Physics, were not introduced to attack or diminish the brilliance and usefulness of Newtonian theories of physics. These theories, after all, proved quite useful and valid in many conditions conditions that approximated closed energy systems. When these closed energy models proved inadequate or too error-prone to be useful, newer theories were developed that either extended or superseded the older, now less useful, theories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Herding Cats: Lessons Learned From Managing and Coordinating Organization Development Consultants.

Organizations need to prevent or ameliorate the unanticipated counterproductive consequences of recruiting, selecting, contracting with, deploying, and holding their consultants accountable. This article documents the creation of what was, in 1991-1992, a new organizational role: A designated "coordinator of consultants" for the client system. Also documented are a number of lessons learned during the first 14 months of experience with this new role. These observations, or "Lessons Learned," also seem to be pertinent to the emerging and increasingly recognized field of consulting psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

构建学习型组织的培训模式与创新

随着科学技术的迅猛发展,以创造性人才为核心的智力资源成为各国企业竞争的焦点,培养和提高全员整体素质的员工培训理论出现新的发展趋势,而创建学习型组织的员工培训模式便成为响应学习时代要求的重要之举。文章通过对企业员工培训现状的分析,依据学习型组织理论及其与企业培训的关系,构建出学习型组织的员工培训模式,提出了学习型组织的培训模式创新的具体策略。     

Committee on the Practice of Clinical Psychology: A brief review of activities.

The first meeting of the new Committee on the Practice of Clinical Psychology (CPCP), held on October 22, 1962, served to clarify its mission and to develop ideas as to the critical issues in its area of responsibility. There was immediate agreement that, during its first year of operation in particular, the Committee should serve as a clearing house to assemble and organize information and to open channels of communication. Additionally, the Committee developed 23 areas of interest that seemed to warrant study and clarification. That the Committee has been effective in establishing channels of communication is attested by the fact that it has been in contact with 35 national, state, regional, and local groups, and some 60 individual psychologists have expressed views which also have been included in the Committee's deliberations. A 2-day meeting held April 12 and 13 resulted in a plan to direct attention to the following: (1) Standards of competence for clinical practice; (2) Clinical training aspects of the doctoral program as they relate to practice; (3) Postdoctoral training; (4) Training and competence for the practice of psychotherapy; (5) The place of psychological assessment techniques in clinical practice; (6) The content and conditions of institutional and private practice; (7) Involvement of clinical practitioners in training programs; (8) Local clinical groups and their relation to the growth of clinical practice; (9) Communication among practitioners and other psychologists; and (10) Evaluate whether a need exists for an APA journal for professional issues in practice and contribute ideas concerning the contents and nature of such a journal. CPCP also made plans to produce an initial report within 10 months on the training needs of the areas of clinical application and practice. It designated subcommittees to prepare initial reports for the August meeting on: (1) The Content and Conditions of Practice; (2) A Model of Competence for Clinical Practice; and (3) Problems of Postdoctoral Training. During the year, the Committee members were John J. Brownfain, Robert C. Challman, Seymour B. Sarason, Max Siegel, and Theodore H. Blau, Chairman. The Committee on the Practice of Clinical Psychology invites communications from all interested individuals and organizations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Learning rule-described and non-rule-described categories: A comparison of children and adults.

Three experiments investigated the ability of 3-, 5-, and 8-year-old children as well as adults to learn sets of perceptual categories. Adults and children performed comparably on categories that could be learned by either a single-dimensional rule or by associative learning mechanisms. However, children showed poorer performance relative to adults in learning categories defined by a disjunctive rule and categories that were nonlinearly separable. Increasing the task demands for adults resulted in child-like performance on the disjunctive categories. Decreasing the task demands for children resulted in more adult-like performance on the disjunctive categories. The authors interpret these results within a multiple-systems approach to category learning and suggest that children have not fully developed the same explicit category learning system as adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Implicit Sequence Learning: Effects of Level of Structure, Adult Age, and Extended Practice.

The influence of structure and age on sequence learning was investigated by testing 24 young and 24 older participants for 10 sessions in an alternating serial response time task in which pattern trials alternated with random trials. Individuals encountered lag-2 or lag-3 structure, and learning was measured by the difference (in response time and accuracy) between pattern and random trials. Both ages learned lag-2 structure, but the young learned more than the older participants. Only the young people learned lag-3 structure, and they did so more slowly and to a lesser degree than they learned lag-2 structure. These age deficits in higher order sequence learning after extended practice are consistent with simultaneity theory and with theories positing that age-related deficits in neuromodulation lead to less distinctive representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Executive dilemmas: Coaching and the professional perspectives of Harry Levinson.

This paper is a revision and extension of a paper presented at the 2006 American Psychological Association Convention as a result of the senior author's receipt of the Harry and Miriam Levinson Award in 2005. Coauthored with Harry Levinson, it presents a complex case vignette, describes 9 core concepts either introduced or emphasized by him during his career, and then applies these concepts to the case study. The article provides a brief overview of the significant contributions to the field of consulting psychology made by Harry Levinson during his career and how they can be applied in executive coaching engagements. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Erotic Transference and Countertransference: Clinical Practice in Psychotherapy: Book review.

Review of book: David Mann (Ed.) Erotic Transference and Countertransference: Clinical Practice in Psychotherapy. London: Routledge, 1999, 175 pp. Reviewed by Molly Jones-Quinn. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)