Psychology, Industrial

Animal rights organizations, in attempting to affect institutional change in industrial
animal agriculture, face an institutional mountain. I show how these organizations,
though contesting institutions which are highly reified, tacitly endorsed, and historically
inertial, leverage emotional experiences and regulation to incrementally move this
mountain. Using a grounded qualitative study of interview data from animal rights
advocates and archival data generated by animal rights organizations, this study finds that
animal rights organizations have encoded both response- and antecedent-focused emotion
regulation into two distinct strategies used to garner support for their institutional change
project: transgression mining and seed planting. Furthermore, this study expounds upon
the role of moral emotional experiences in the individual-level process by which persons
alternate into support for animal rights organizations and their goals, here labeled
autodidactic frame alignment. Drawing on Goffman’s backstage/frontstage distinction,
this study illustrates how emotion’s role in institutional change efforts varies across both level of analysis and areas of interactive life. In doing so, this research adds empirical
weight to and extends recent theoretical work expounding upon the emotionally-charged
nature of the lived experience of institutions.

This research focuses on obesity and other major risk factors for chronic diseases
such as Type II Diabetes Mellitus, Heart Disease, and Stroke. Worksite wellness
programs have been successful in this realm of health promotion and disease prevention
for heart disease and stroke, but their effectiveness in treating diabetes has been uncertain
partially due to poor patient compliance, lack of stress reduction strategies, poor diet and
lack of persuasive health education on the risk of being obese. Published peer-reviewed
articles were reviewed, coded and analyzed to determine best practices, using a modified
systematic review approach. The findings from these studies yield results that were used
to develop a new employer-sponsored wellness program that is in accordance with the
recently passed Affordable Care Act.

This study rejects the hierarchical perspective of traditional leadership approaches in public administration. The hierarchical perspective tends to treat public managers at the top as leaders, public employees at the bottom as followers, and leadership as management. This study proposes shared leadership as an alternative to traditional leadership approaches. In theory, shared leadership is not about a hierarchical position but about a mutually shared process that occurs throughout public organizations. The literature has made assertions that shared leadership emerges from horizontal organizations, adaptable cultures, and turbulent environments. However, little research has been conducted to test the effects of these organizational dimension variables on shared leadership in either the public or private sector. This study is a first step to examine the multiple relationships among organizational structure, culture, and context and shared leadership. It is also a first attempt to measure the concept of shared leadership. This study presents case-based empirical research. The study collects data from public employees across the bottom and the top of Broward County government in Florida because the study asserts that every public employee, regardless of hierarchical position, can be a public leader and display leadership. The data was collected using a mail survey of 261 public employees in the county government. Multiple regression analysis was conducted to test the conceptual model developed in this study. The model consists of five hypothesized positive relationships (hierarchy of position, functional specialization, supportive culture, technology, and organizational crisis), five hypothesized negative relationships (hierarchy of authority, centralization, bureaucratic and innovative cultures, and organizational size), and one positive or negative control variable (gender) with shared leadership. The results show that organizational crisis, technology, innovative culture, and hierarchy of position variables are significantly and positively associated with shared leadership. Public employees' perceptions of shared leadership are partially explainable from organizational structure, culture, and context factors. Indicating that shared leadership occurs in the perceptions of street-level public employees, this study implies that the horizontal and hierarchical perspectives on leadership coexist in bureaucratic organizations. This study concludes that every public employee displays leadership and is a public leader.

Archival data collected from a private-practice career counseling center was analyzed to evaluate the extent to which situational constraint measures can be applied as moderators of person-occupation congruence. Demographic, personality, and career interest inventory responses, particularly those for the Strong Interest Inventory (SII), the 16PF, and the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory, served as the primary units of analyses. Data was collected by career counselors over a ten-year period for 202 clients (125 men and 77 women; M age = 36.9). Difference score measures were calculated for clients by comparing SH scores to normative means for the general reference sample of the SH and appropriate occupational samples. Situational constraints such as age, income, marital status, having children, time spent in one's career field, and time spent in one's job were hypothesized to be positively associated with seeking career counseling for less voluntary reasons (i.e., terminations or lay-offs) than those who sought counseling for other reasons (i.e., career change, relocations, reentry, or resignation). Although situational constraint hypotheses were not supported, career counseled clients were highly incongruent with the occupational interests of their occupations. The magnitude of this finding exceeds that of those typical of the career-interest congruence literature. Despite clients' incongruence with the interests most commonly associated with their occupations, clients were more congruent on those interest dimensions when scores were compared to general reference sample means. That is, through selection practices or socialization, clients have achieved a minimal degree of congruence yet do not completely match the characteristics of the majority of others in their occupations. The results of this study suggest there is a maximum level of incongruence expected of interest congruence studies. Career-counseled clients in this sample spent considerable sums of money to find work situations that would improve their level of work satisfaction. Further research is necessary to verify whether the inclusion of career counseled clients provides a ceiling for the measurement of congruence-satisfaction relationships. Although situational constraint measures were not identified as effective moderators, their inclusion in future nonarchival studies may yield more sensitive tests of situational constraint hypotheses.