The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science

Legislation prohibits discrimination in most social activities. Organizations have implemented affirmative action programs to comply with the law and to attempt to reduce discrimination. Research indicates, however, that discrimination still exists. Research must therefore identify the key factors that make affirmative action programs truly effective. The authors designed this study to capture the policies of personnel and affirmative action officers in institutions of higher learning regarding criteria for effective affirmative action programs. The research identified 13 potential criteria. The results suggest that attitudinal and procedural factors — e.g., commitment from higher administration, receptive attitudes of key personnel, formal and informal grievance procedures — were the most important criteria for program effectiveness. The institution type — i.e., public versus private — and size — number of students — have no moderating effects.

This study tests the hypothesis that in a setting in which service volunteers are likely to experience meager egoistic benefits their longevity of participation is inversely related to the extent to which they feel motivated to volunteer by the need for—or expectation of—egoistic benefits. We confirmed this hypothesis in a multiple-regression analysis based on the case records of all volunteers who terminated their participation during a nine-month period in a Big Brothers/Big Sisters program.

The authors first discuss the problem of defining leadership, suggesting three minimal criteria: (1) demonstrated personal causation, (2) observed relationships between behavior and its effects, and (3) substantive performance outcomes. The authors then stress the importance of considering environmental influences on the leadership process and suggest an idiographic approach to researching leadership under such theoretic assumptions for leadership. The rest of the article presents a demonstration study for this approach. After first obtaining qualitative data concerning the problem and the context, the authors use a single-case experimental design to analyze quantitatively the impact that a production manager had on the performance of his unit. The authors feel that this article therefore represents a significant departure from the traditional ways in which leadership has been defined and researched.

In this article, the authors compare the grievance rates an organizational subunit experienced prior to, during, and after a union-management cooperative effort. This participative program provided a naturally occurring field experiment with multiple time-interval pretest measures, treatment removal, and a no-treatment, nonequivalent (intact) control-group design subject to interrupted time series analysis. Markedly fewer grievances occurred during the joint, cooperative effort than during the periods prior to and after the implementation of the one-year experimental program. The authors offer their observations and discuss the implications of these findings for the grievance process and union-management cooperative arrangements.

This article examines the introduction offlexitime in a high-technology organization. In this study, the authors employed a quasi-experimental design that uses both an experimental and a control group and preand postmeasures. They assessed the impact of flexitime on employee perceptions of flexibility, back up, superior-subordinate relations, quality of supervision, job satisfaction, and productivity, using work-group cohesiveness as a moderator variable. The results indicate that employees in highly cohesive work groups reported improvement inflexibility, back up, superior-subordinate relations, and productivity. Employees in groups that lacked cohesion did not report any statistically significant change in any variable.