There is now widespread recognition that psychosocial factors play a key role in the aetiology, perpetuation, management and prevention of cumulative trauma disorders CTDs. This text addresses the strength, direction and importance of links between psychosocial factors and CTDs.; The book's contributors examine critically current research data, identify potential link mechanisms, and recommend measures for control and prevention. Topics covered include socio-organizational psychology, medical anthropology, occupational medicine, rehabilitation, orthopaedics, job stress and ergonomic interventions. The book aims to demystify the concept of the "psychosocial," so as to promote and assure effective prevention in the workplace.

First published in 1993. This book is intended for managers and occupational psychologists involved in the selection and assessment of the workforce. It details the history and development of the use of biographical data for both recruitment and promotion of employees. Grounded in relevant research literature, it offers a comprehensive analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of biodata in different contexts. It also includes examples of applications and recommendations for use, as well as examples of questionnaires. Written by experts, it represents a wide-ranging review of the contemporary research in the field. This work will be of interest to students of business and psychology.

Professionalization has come to the field of threat management. It has developed a systematic theory unique to the field, recognized authorities have emerged, and it is finding its own ethical code of conduct. It is also beginning to grow its own culture, complete with a vocabulary of its own. Although the field has a way to go, it is well along the path to becoming a profession. One product of this ongoing professionalization is the identification of certain key concepts that, until now, have been unidentified or undefined. Concepts and Case Studies in Threat Management explores the salient themes essential to the practice and profession of threat management. These concepts include case dynamics and intervention synergy, the importance of determining key factors in each situation, the power of inhibitors, differences among the various venues of violence, and avoiding myopic management strategies and isolationism. The authors illustrate these concepts and more, with detailed examples and real-life case studies that give readers practical, concrete perspectives on the myriad threat management scenarios they may encounter as they practice their profession. The book also introduces a glossary of terms, developed in a joint effort between the authors and researchers at the University of Nebraska's Public Policy Center, that have emerged during the current professionalization of threat management. Moving the field towards a more pragmatic approach, the book explores in depth the current state of the threat management process. With a full understanding of the components and challenges in each threat management situation, those charged with protecting the public will improve their approach to the tasks of identifying, assessing, and managing individuals who pose a risk of violence.

Human resource practitioners are repeatedly faced with the challenge of effectively using language to clearly describe the work performed on a job. Functional Job Analysis--an internationally recognized and respected job analysis method --has been meeting this challenge for more than forty years. In this book, the authors show how human resource practitioners can use structured task statements and comprehensive rating scales to gain the perspective needed to map the domain of any job. In response to the demands of human resource practitioners, the book focuses on the seven scales used in Functional Job Analysis. More than 450 structured tasks were used to illustrate the breadth and scope of all the levels of these scales. These tasks can be used effectively as benchmarks to chart the work requirements of virtually any job. Personnel practitioners will find insights into the challenges of job analysis, as well as the tools needed to make job analysis more comprehensive, useful, and effective for human resources.
Representing the most comprehensive information to date on the use of Functional Job Analysis scales for rating job tasks, this book:
*addresses the problems of using language to clearly describe how work is performed on the job;
*describes the relation between the need to carefully control the language of job analysis and the structure inherent in the Functional Job Analysis Worker Function scales--a conceptual link showing the reader that the key to understanding work is in the vocabulary used to describe work;
*contains the most comprehensive treatment of the way to write clear and comprehensive task statements available in the job analysis literature; and
*contains a sample task bank for the job of Functional Job Analysts--aiding the reader in understanding how a complete Functional Job Analysis should look.

Whether talking about steering a wheelbarrow over rugged terrain or plotting the course of international relations, human performance systems involve change. Sometimes changes are subtle or evolutionary, sometimes they are catastrophic or revolutionary, and sometimes the changes are from periods of relative calm to periods of vibrant oscillations to periods of chaos. As a general rule, more complex systems are likely to produce more complex forms of change.
Although social scientists have long acknowledged that change occurs and have considered ways to effect desirable change, the dynamical processes of change have been poorly understood in the past. This volume combines recent advances in mathematics and experimental design with the best available social science theories to produce a new, integrated, and compact theory of work, organizations, and social evolution. The domains of application extend from human decision-making processes to personnel selection and work motivation, work performance under conditions of stress, accident and health risk analysis, the development of social institutions and economic systems, creativity and innovation, organizational development and group dynamics, and political revolutions and war.
Relative to other literature on nonlinear dynamical systems theory (NDS), this book is unique in that it integrates new developments in NDS with substantive psychological theory. It builds on many recent developments in organizational theory to show that nonlinear dynamics were often implicit in those works all along. The result is an entirely new way of viewing social events, understanding change processes, and asking questions about social systems. This book also contains much new empirical work and explains the newly developed methods for testing these new hypotheses.

Human resource practitioners are repeatedly faced with the challenge of effectively using language to clearly describe the work performed on a job. Functional Job Analysis--an internationally recognized and respected job analysis method --has been meeting this challenge for more than forty years. In this book, the authors show how human resource practitioners can use structured task statements and comprehensive rating scales to gain the perspective needed to map the domain of any job. In response to the demands of human resource practitioners, the book focuses on the seven scales used in Functional Job Analysis. More than 450 structured tasks were used to illustrate the breadth and scope of all the levels of these scales. These tasks can be used effectively as benchmarks to chart the work requirements of virtually any job. Personnel practitioners will find insights into the challenges of job analysis, as well as the tools needed to make job analysis more comprehensive, useful, and effective for human resources.
Representing the most comprehensive information to date on the use of Functional Job Analysis scales for rating job tasks, this book:
*addresses the problems of using language to clearly describe how work is performed on the job;
*describes the relation between the need to carefully control the language of job analysis and the structure inherent in the Functional Job Analysis Worker Function scales--a conceptual link showing the reader that the key to understanding work is in the vocabulary used to describe work;
*contains the most comprehensive treatment of the way to write clear and comprehensive task statements available in the job analysis literature; and
*contains a sample task bank for the job of Functional Job Analysts--aiding the reader in understanding how a complete Functional Job Analysis should look.

Needs Assessment for Learning and Performance offers comprehensive coverage of the knowledge and skills needed to develop and conduct needs assessments and to analyze, interpret, and communicate results to clients and organizations. Though critical to planning any performance improvement system, needs assessments can feel abstract and vague to students who have not yet managed the process in a professional setting. This first-of-its-kind textbook uses a variety of real-world examples to connect major theories and models to effective principles for practice. Each chapter offers guiding questions, key terms and concepts, recommended readings, and case studies illustrating how needs assessment training can be applied. Graduate students and researchers of instructional design, human resources, performance improvement, program evaluation, and other programs will find this volume relevant to a range of academic and organizational contexts.

Joint Action: Essays in honour of John Shotter brings together a cross-disciplinary group of fifteen respected international scholars to explain the relevance of John Shotter's work to emerging concerns in twenty-first century social science. Shotter's work extends over forty years and continues to challenge conventional scientific thinking across a range of topics. The disciplines and practices that Shotter's work has informed are well established throughout the English-speaking world. This is the first publication to examine the importance of his influence in contemporary social sciences and it includes authoritative discussions on topics such as social constructionism, democratic practice, organisational change, the affective turn and human relations. The geographical diversity and disciplinary breadth of scholarly contributions imbues the book with international scope and reach. Joint Action presents a contemporary reflection on Shotter's work that demonstrates its influence across a range of substantive topics and practical endeavours and within disciplines including management studies and philosophy as well as psychology. As such, it will appeal to researchers and postgraduate students of social sciences and related disciplines, as well as to those who have heard of Shotter's work and want to know more about its utility and value in relation to their own research or practice.

With Special Contributions from Bernard Weiner Ph.D. (UCLA) and Robert Lord Ph.D. (Univ. of Akron)
Attribution theory is concerned with peoples causal explanation for outcomes: successes and failures. The basic premise is that beliefs about outcomes are a primary determinant of expectations and, consequently, future behavior. Attribution theory articulates how this process occurs and provides a basis for understanding that translates into practical action.
Attribution Theory: An Organizational Perspective serves as a primary sourcebook of attribution theory as it relates to management and organizational behavior. The text provides an integrated explanation of the role and function of attribution theory in the organization. This important new book contains original empirical research relating attributions to leader evaluations, reactions to information technologies, management of diverse work groups, achievement, and executive succession and power. The contributors are from a variety of disciplines including management, psychology, education, educational psychology, and sociology.

Changes currently occuring in the world of work are large-scale, affecting what people do everyday and altering relations among ourselves and with the physical world. There is a shift in the nature of industrial work, from a materiality of labour and product, and specialization of function, to forms of production that are discursive, or symbolic, and highly integrated. Among the far reaching implications of a postindustrial condition is a dissolution of traditional and modern bonds of social solidarity and a metamorphosis of the character of the modern self. This text examines the relationships between the institutional practices of work under post-industrial conditions and the formation of the self. Drawing on data from field work in a multi-national corporation, the book critically analyzes organizations and cultural practices in contemporary corporate work. The author interprets the deliberate construction of "designer cultures" as a response to the broad crisis in industrial production, work and culture. The book also develops a critical social psychology of corporate work.

Despite recent interest in the effects of restructuring and redesigning the work place, the link between individual identity and structural change has usually been asserted rather than demonstrated. Through an extensive review of data from field work in a multi-national corporation Catherine Casey changes this. She knows that changes currently occuring in the world of work are part of the vast social and cultural changes that are challenging the meta trends of modern industrialism. These events affect what people do everyday, and they are altering relations among ourselves and with the physical world. This valuable book is not only a critical analysis of the transformations occurring in the world of work, but an exploration of the effects of contemporary practices of work on the self.

This collection of original papers by scholars who closely analyze the talk of the clinic features studies that were conceived with the aim of contributing to clinical practitioners' insight about how their talk works. No previous communication text has attempted to take such a practitioner-sensitive posture with its research presentations. Each chapter focuses on one or more performances that clinical practitioners -- in consort with their clients or colleagues -- must achieve with some regularity. These speech acts are consequential for effective practice and sometimes present themselves as problematic.
Rather than calling for research to be simplified or reoriented in order for practitioners to understand it, these authors interpret state-of-the-art descriptive analysis for its practical import for clinicians. Each contributor delves deeply into clinical practice and its wisdom; therefore, each is positioned to identify alternative clinical practices and techniques and to appreciate practitioners' means of performing effectively. When reflective practitioners encounter these new pieces of work, productive alterations in how their work is done can be stimulated. By reading this work, reflective practitioners will now have new ways of considering their talk and new possibilities for speaking effectively.
The volume is uniquely constructed so as to engage in dialogue with these reflective practitioners as they struggle to articulate their work. A practical wisdom-as-research trend has recently emerged in the clinical fields stimulating these practitioners to explore new and more informative ways -- communication and literary theory, ethnography, and discourse analysis -- to express what they do in clinics and hospitals. With the studies presented in this book, the editors build upon this dialectical process between practitioner and researcher, thus helping this productive conversation to continue.

This concise and accessible book introduces the 30 Distinctive Features of Rational Emotive Behavioural Coaching, also known as REBC, an approach which applies the principles of REBT to coaching. Divided between 10 theoretical and 20 practical features, the book covers a range of topics, including meaning and values, development, the working alliance, dealing with obstacles and common coachee problems. The book sets out two different approaches: development-focused REBC, which concentrates on the coachee's areas of development, and problem-focused REBC, which concentrates on the coachee's practical and emotional problems of living. Within the latter category, the book also distinguishes between practical problem-focused REBC and emotional problem-focused REBC. Rational Emotive Behavioural Coaching: Distinctive Features will be an essential reference for anyone seeking to understand the key features of this unique approach to coaching.

This special issue of Military Psychology reports behavioral, pharmacological, and toxicological science research on military performance as it is affected by chemical warfare agents (CWAs) and their pharmacological countermeasures. The papers in this issue are a diverse assembly; some very pharmacological in orientation, others driven by behavioral neuroscience. The unifying theme is the psychological consequences or organic syndromes that may be confused with consequences resulting from exposure to CWAs or use of their medical countermeasures.

Bringing together renowned scholars, this handbook contains innovative current empirical and theoretical research in the area of job stress. The workplace is one of the major sources of stress in an individual's life. Placing this important topic in the context of a transactional process, this work is intended to be of use to practitioners working in clinical, organisational, family and health psychology, mental health, substance abuse, the military, and with families and women.; Chapters are arranged in five parts, the first considering theoretical approaches with an introductory article by Professor Emeritus Richard S. Lazarus. Next is an examination of various model testing formats, followed by a section on occupational stress research and coping mechanisms. Fourth is a collection of articles on the subject of burnout, and the book closes with two distinct interventions directed at stress reduction.

Mindfulness for Coaches accessibly presents theory and research on the benefits of mindfulness training and explores how mindfulness can feature in coaching work. Michael Chaskalson and Mark McMordie explain how coaches can use mindfulness to become more deeply attuned to themselves and to clients, and to create transformational resonance. The authors present a systematic methodology to cultivate and embody a way of being that enables growth and transformation in oneself and in others. The first book of its kind, Mindfulness for Coaches provides an experiential guide, inviting and supporting coaches to engage with the programme included, sharing new qualitative research into the potential impact of mindfulness on coaching process and outcomes, and explicitly linking mindfulness practice to global standards of coaching mastery. Presented in two parts, the book first outlines a unique eight-week programme, Mindfulness for Coaches, and goes on to clarify the links between mindfulness, coaching mastery and different coaching approaches, share insights from the fields of psychotherapy, leadership and organisation development, and provide guidance for further learning. Mindfulness for Coaches will be insightful and inspiring reading for coaches in practice and in training, coaching psychologists and academics and students of all coaching modalities.

In the past few years the topic of work and ageing has received much public and professional interest. The progressive "greying" of the population and its impact on work is a problem of widespread and growing concern, with major consequences for the economy in terms of productivity, performance, health care, work design and entry opportunities; and for the individual older worker. A European Symposium on Work and Ageing was held in Amsterdam in 1993. It was intended not only for a forum of scientists but also for practitioners and policy-makers who are actually involved in this growing field of social interest.; "Work and Aging," a multi-disciplinary book derives, in part, from this symposium, but also includes especially invited contribributions from experts in occupational health and safety, organizational psychology, cognitive science, and ergonomics.; Throughout the diverse chapters, incentives are suggested on how and why an organization could benefit from the asset of an ageing worker. Training programmes for human resource management, with respect to the elderly and disabled worker in particular, are offered in order to deal effectively with vocational rehabilitation.

Successful time-management can seem to be an elusive goal. Often it appears as if the harder we work the more hard pressed we become, and the stresses and strains of work begin to spill over into our personal lives. This book provides a complete guide to managing time from identifying current use of time to planning workloads and time saving hints and tips.

Context and Cognition in Consumer Psychology is concerned with the psychological explanation of consumer choice. It pays particular attention to the roles of perception and emotion in accounting for consumers' actions and their interaction with the desires and beliefs in terms of which consumer choice is frequently analyzed. In this engaging book, Gordon Foxall extends and elaborates his theory of consumer action, based on the philosophical strategy of Intentional Behaviorism. In doing so, he introduces the concept of contingency-representation to explore the ways in which consumers mentally represent the consequences of past decisions and the likely outcomes of present consumption. The emphasis is on action rather than behavior and the manner in which the intentional consumer-situation, as the immediate precursor of consumer choice, can be reconstructed in order to explain consumer actions in the absence of the environmental stimuli required by behaviorist psychology. The result is a novel reaffirmation of the role of cognition in the determination of consumer choice. Besides the concept of contingency-representation which the author introduces, the analysis draws upon psychoanalytic concepts, theories of cognitive structure and processing, and the philosophy of perception to generate a stimulating synthesis for consumer research. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in consumer behavior and economic psychology and to all who seek a deeper interdisciplinary understanding of the contextual and cognitive interactions that guide choice in the market place.

This book is about mistakes and what we can learn from them. It faces up to, and explains how organizations can escape from 'blame cultures', where fearful conformance and risk avoidance lead to stagnation, to 'gain cultures' which tolerate and even encourage mistakes in the pursuit of innovation, change and improvement. Ending the Blame Culture was written as a result of systematic analysis of the content of over 200 accounts of real mistakes within businesses and organizations. This analysis provides both insight and understanding into the type of mistakes made, the context they were made in and how they helped learning and development. As a result the authors are able to distinguish between intelligent and undesirable mistakes: those which should be tolerated and those which must be avoided. The result is a book which gives sound advice on how individuals learn, practical measures that organizations can adopt to enhance learning through better management of mistakes, and the promotion of a culture which supports and fosters experimentation and risk taking.

Transitions in life are now a reality for everyone. This book takes you through the journey to create your own Personal Brand and take ownership of and address these transitions based on your values, career, skills, knowledge and aims. A Personal Brand is a positive in the reader's life - professionally, personally and psychologically. It builds people's confidence and is founded on who they are, their achievements and successes, as well as their technical and person-to-person skills. Drawing upon well-known Personal Brands, including Walt Disney, Nelson Mandela and Steve Jobs, The Journey to a Personal Brand forces readers to reevaluate themselves critically and honestly. Readers are guided through creating a distinctive brand from scratch through to launching it on digital media. This intensely practical guide is essential reading for the professional, the return-to-worker, the student and early retiree alike or those wishing to improve their life and bring added value to their careers, personal profile or reputation.

Decision making plays a major role in virtually every theory of organizational behavior. However, decision theory has not provided organizational theorists with useful descriptions of how decisions are made, either by individuals or by individuals in organizations. The earliest offering came from economics in the form of the "normative" rational view of decision making. The underlying presumption was that decision makers are all striving to maximize return or minimize loss, that decisions are based upon unlimited information, and that they have the capacity to use the information efficiently. They know the options open to them and the consequences of pursuing one or another of those options. The optimal course of action is revealed by applying the appropriate analysis and choosing the most profitable option. The key concepts are rationality, analysis, orderliness, and maximization, and even a moment's thought demonstrates the gap between these concepts and real-life experience. From the viewpoint of organizational theory, the primary problem with the normative view of decision making, and by analogy with much behavioral decision research, is its reliance on the "gamble metaphor." That is, decisions are characterized as gambles in an effort to capture the inherent risk. This metaphor has the advantage of simplicity, but it is a flawed simplicity. This book is about a different kind of behavioral theory -- image theory. It is a psychological theory of decision making that abandons the gamble metaphor and the normative logic that the metaphor supports. Instead it sees decision making as guided by the beliefs and values that the decision maker, or a community of decision makers, holds to be relevant to the decision at hand. These beliefs and values dictate the goals of the decision. The point is to craft a course of action that will achieve these goals without interfering with the pursuit of other goals. The book begins with an overview of image theory that ou

What is it about the great negotiators? How is it they seem to manage to recover from disadvantageous positions? How do they adapt their approach to turn an unpromising start into a value creating deal? And why is it that they never seem to lose their appetite for negotiation? Some of this may be down to genes. There may genuinely be born negotiators but, as far as the rest of us go, it's down to preparation and knowledge; knowledge of how people think and how they behave. Tom Beasor's Great Negotiators is a collection of techniques that illustrate how the most successful negotiators think and behave. Good negotiators are always well prepared and there is a host of tips to help you prepare your strategy and your thinking before an important negotiation. There are also ideas to help you understand the philosophy behind your negotiating approach; to help you handle international negotiations; and to ensure every negotiation is a potential learning experience. Great Negotiators is a treasure trove of ideas from a highly successful international negotiator and trainer.

First published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor and Francis, an informa company.