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The Development And Validation Of A Conditional Reasoning Test Of Withdrawal, Levi Ryan Gust Nieminen

Wayne State University Dissertations

This study developed and evaluated a measure of implicit dispositional tendencies associated with lateness, absenteeism, and permanent withdrawal behaviors. The conditional reasoning framework developed by Lawrence James and colleagues was adopted. Novel cognitive biases or justification mechanisms associated with withdrawal were proposed, drawing on research and theory from the attribution (marginalization of withdrawal), commitment (revocable commitment), and fairness/equity (social injustice bias) domains. As part of the empirical validation design, college students enrolled in an Introductory Psychology course completed the conditional reasoning measure, and corresponding behavioral withdrawal criteria were collected unobtrusively throughout the 16-week course. Results of scale development analyses pointed …

Antecedents And Outcomes Of Workplace Engagement, Ariel Maya Lelchook

Wayne State University Dissertations

There has been a recent interest in positive organizational scholarship. Leadership stemming from a positive framework and employee engagement in the workplace have become of increasing interest to researchers and practitioners. Antecedents and outcomes of employee engagement were examined using a sample of 327 employees from retail organizations in the Midwest United States. The leadership styles of authentic, transformational, and transactional leadership were examined as antecedents of employee job engagement, beyond employees' psychological meaningfulness, safety, and availability. Engagement was examined as a mediator between the leadership constructs and employees' extra-role behaviors and work withdrawal behaviors. The results suggest employee job …

Investigating A Leadership Fix For A Suboptimal Mix: A Transformational Leadership Intervention For Teams With Incompatible Personalities, Marcus Daniel Weller

Wayne State University Dissertations

This study uses experimental methodology to examine transformational leadership as a buffering mechanism for problematic personality combinations. 118 German university students comprising 59 dyadic teams participated in a lab-based investigation to examine matched high levels of extraversion within dyadic teams. The presence of transformational leadership (TL) as opposed to a non-leadership intervention was investigated to examine the effects of TL on group members' task performance on both conjunctive and disjunctive tasks. To assess conjunctive task performance, participants performed an employee selection task, and to assess disjunctive task performance participants performed a NASA survival ranking task. Performance was measured against expert …

Consumer Xenocentrism And Consumer Cosmopolitanism: The De-Velopment And Validation Of Scales Of Constructs Influencing Attitudes Towards Foreign Product Consumption, Steven James Lawrence

Wayne State University Dissertations

Like many other attributes, consumers exhibit varying degrees of preference with regard to foreign and domestic products. Some consumers have preferences for domestic products while other, seemingly similar, consumers prefer the foreign counterpart. Product quality differences aside, we aim to investigate the attitudinal constructs behind the varying preferences among consumers as they relate to foreign and domestic products.

The author created two new scales for the measurement of the consumer xenocentrism and consumer cosmopolitanism constructs. The consumer xenocentrism scale is intended to measure consumers' favorable orientations to products from outside their membership group. The consumer cosmopolitanism scale is designed to …