Psychology Commons^™

The Occupational Depression Inventory: A New Tool For Clinicians And Epidemiologists, Renzo Bianchi, Irvin Sam Schonfeld

Publications and Research

Background: Depressive symptoms induced by insurmountable job stress and sick leave for mental health reasons have become a focal concern among occupational health specialists. The present study introduces the Occupational Depression Inventory (ODI), a measure designed to quantify the severity of work-attributed depressive symptoms and establish provisional diagnoses of job-ascribed depression. The ODI comprises nine symptom items and a subsidiary question assessing turnover intention. Methods: A total of 2254 employed individuals were recruited in the U.S., New Zealand, and France. We examined the psychometric and structural properties of the ODI as well as the nomological network of work-attributed depressive symptoms. …

Gender Differences In Personality: An Item-Level Analysis, Casey C. Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Personality is a social and organizational construct with a substantial history and discourse. One particular area in personality that is of interest is gender differences in personality. Gender differences have been found on scales measuring various aspects of personality, such as narcissism (Grijalva et al., 2014). While there are differences present in personality data, there hasn’t been a consistent explanation for why this occurs. This research looked specifically at the construction of personality items to begin to understand the differences in personality by gender. While social roles and social context are mostly referenced to inform the response patterns of men …

#Fired: Survivor Reactions To Facebook Firing In Organizations, Rachel Omansky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Facebook firing (i.e. employee termination due to social media activity) is a novel type of termination that has developed in recent decades. Though Facebook firing is becoming increasingly common, almost no research has been conducted on this practice. Using a multi-step, multi-method approach, this dissertation attempted to better define the construct and examine its implications for inciting negative reactions from surviving employees, or those employed with the terminated employee at the time of termination, who knew or knew of the employee but were uninvolved in the incident. Study 1 details an effort to identify Facebook firing’s characteristics through a case …

The Dynamic Linkages Between Structural Interdependencies, Computer-Mediated Communication, And Emergence In Newly Formed Virtual Groups, Erik Pesner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Virtual groups and teams are increasingly common in today’s organizations, particularly since the onset of the Covid-19 crisis. However, little is known about how specific design features predict communicative team processes and emergent phenomena in the days immediately following virtual team formation. This dissertation examined the effects of task interdependence (i.e., shared resources) and outcome interdependence (i.e., shared goals and feedback) on task-oriented and relationship-oriented electronic communication between group members and emergent group perceptions over a 5-day experimental simulation. Results showed that while the majority of hypotheses were not supported, three key findings were culled from the analysis. First, virtual …

The Squeaky Wheel Gets The Oil? On The Interpersonal Effects Of Boredom Expression, Manuel F. Gonzalez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I explored how people react to employees who express boredom at work. I consider boredom expression as a social signal that the current situation does not adequately stimulate the expresser. The expression may then propel others to help stimulate the expresser, depending partly on others’ initial appraisals and reactions to the expression, and on the surrounding context. In Study 1, using qualitative surveys, I uncovered various affective, cognitive, and behavioral reactions to employees who expressed boredom. In Study 2, using experimental vignettes, I manipulated the emotion expressed by a “subordinate” (boredom, enthusiasm, or no emotion) and the manager’s beliefs about …

Work–Family Conflict In Low-Income Households, Maritza G. Hiciano Ramos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The United States is the only country not offering paid parental leave. Paid leave is left at the discretion of employers and only a few states offer Paid Family Leave benefits. The FMLA was established to protect workers from losing their jobs in case they needed to care for an elderly person or for their children. However, since value is not placed in family structures there has not been much development in that area. The FMLA fails to account for the grand majority of people in the U.S., especially those of lower socioeconomic status. Moreover, the vast inequalities that exists …

New Tower Of Babel: Probing The Antecedents And Consequences Of Linguistic Ostracism, Julia N. Leone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While workplace interactions are likely to be conducted in English, the lingua franca of international business (Janssens, Lambert, & Steyaert, 2004), employees may occasionally switch to their native language in their interactions with coworkers who share knowledge of this language. Linguistic ostracism (LO) refers to situations in which two or more people use a language that others in their presence cannot understand (Dotan-Eliaz, Sommer, & Rubin, 2009). This dissertation explored the contextual antecedents of LO in a business setting, probed managerial techniques currently used to mitigate the effects of LO, and examined the relationship between LO and organizational citizenship behaviors. …

Exploring The Relationship Between Perceived Interpersonal Influence And Citizenship Behavior: The Mediating Roles Of Social Identity And Team Member Exchange, Laura Sywulak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Social or interpersonal influence has been widely studied in both social and organizational psychology, however no research to date has examined how perceptions of one’s ability to influence their coworkers impacts work-related attitudes and behavior. Experimental work in lab settings provides evidence that successfully influencing others consistently leads to increased helping behavior (Bruno, 2013; Bruno et al., 2008; Sywulak, Sommer & Bourgeois, 2013), but the relationship between influence and helping has not been studied in an organizational setting. Further, while several mediating mechanisms have been tested, how perceived influence leads to helping is still unknown. I present a study that …

An Affective Events Theory Analysis Of Conflict Perception Emergence, Michael J. Covell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Popular conceptualizations of conflict conflate conflict perception with other discrete constructs such as disagreement and emotions. This makes research using those conceptualizations difficult to interpret. I invoke affective events theory to describe how constructs conflated with conflict perception, as well as negative prescriptive expectancy violations (EVs), may collectively serve as antecedents to conflict perception. By reconceptualizing conflict perception as an evaluative judgment and distinguishing between episodic (short-term) and global (long-term) conflict perceptions, my model describes how episodic conflict perceptions cumulatively influence global conflict perceptions over time. Two types of events (disagreements and negative prescriptive EVs) were proposed to predict episodic …

A Five-Sample Confirmatory Factor Analytic Study Of Burnout-Depression Overlap, Renzo Bianchi, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Jay Verkuilen

Publications and Research

Objective: It has been asserted that burnout—a condition ascribed to unresolvable job stress—should not be mistaken for a depressive syndrome. In this confirmatory factor analytic study, the validity of this assertion was examined.

Methods: Five samples of employed individuals, recruited in Switzerland and France, were mobilized for this study (N = 3,113). Burnout symptoms were assessed with the Shirom–Melamed Burnout Measure, the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI)—General Survey, and the MBI for Educators. Depressive symptoms were measured with the PHQ‐9.

Results: In all five samples, the latent factors pertaining to burnout’s components correlated on average more highly with the latent Depression …