The importance of employee attitude in activity-based work environments and the potential role of personality.

In studies of activity-based work environments, employees' prior attitude towards activity-based work environments has been identified as a potentially essential antecedent to how they perceive the new work environment. Using longitudinal data-collected once before and three times after moving to an activity-based office-we seek to reaffirm the moderating effect of this prior attitude on employee perceptions of privacy and psychological ownership in a sample from two smaller organisations (n = 38 combined). We also explore if employee attitude towards an activity-based work environment is related to personality dimensions. The findings support that prior employee attitude to an activity-based work environment moderates subsequent perceptions of privacy and psychological ownership. Only conscientiousness is significant when examining the association of personality and employee attitude towards an activity-based work environment. Implications of the findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.Practitioner summary: Questions remain about activity-based work environments. The data shows employee perceptions of privacy and psychological ownership are lower after moving to an activity-based office, but only for employees with less favourable attitudes towards activity-based environments beforehand. Conscientiousness is positively associated with employees' attitude towards activity-based environments before the move.

Parents' estimations of their own intelligence and that of their children: a comparison between English and Icelandic parents.

In this study, 158 parents (79 fathers and 79 mothers) with a mean age of 38.3 yrs (SD = 8.2), estimated their own, and their children's, overall intelligence as well as their children's score on the 12 intelligence scales from the Wechsler's Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-III). The sample included English (n = 122) and Icelandic parents (n = 36), and a comparison between them showed few differences except that Icelandic parents' estimates were lower than English parents' estimates. The results showed fathers estimated their own overall intelligence higher than mothers estimated theirs and sons were estimated higher than daughters on overall intelligence. Two factors (verbal, performance) of intelligence were identified through factor analysis of the ratings of the 12 WISC subscale score estimates. A hierarchical regression showed that these two factors explained most of the variance in the estimation of the child's overall intelligence; however, gender of child and parents' self-estimated own overall intelligence added incremental variance.