Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries.

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions' effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior-several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people's initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.

Tackling upcoming projects: The development and efficacy of event previews an experimental study.

Traditional performance management systems are increasingly seen as ill-conceived for today's dynamic organizational landscape. Researchers and practitioners advocate for agile PM systems that emphasize continuous monitoring, learning, and feedback. We present the 'event preview', a novel approach that is designed to address several shortcomings of traditional performance management practices. Event previews consist of five fixed questions, which are discussed among team members before an event, instigating a detailed reflection and mental simulation of upcoming events or projects in order to achieve the desired outcomes. In doing so, event previews support teams to utilize their projects as learning opportunities. This study provides the theoretical basis for the event preview and empirically tests its effectiveness. A sample of 119 teams participated in the experiment in which they were asked to solve as many puzzles as possible within a fixed time frame. One condition conducted an event preview beforehand, the other condition did not. Our findings, which were based on a comparison of the averages of the two conditions, suggest that the event preview holds promise for improving team performance and communication. As such, the event preview presents an additional instrument to the changing performance management landscape. This simple practice can be incorporated in the performance management cycle, emphasizing adaptability and continuous improvement in organizations.

Coaching doctors to improve ethical decision-making in adult hospitalised patients potentially receiving excessive treatment: Study protocol for a stepped wedge cluster randomised controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: Fast medical progress poses a significant challenge to doctors, who are asked to find the right balance between life-prolonging and palliative care. Literature indicates room for enhancing openness to discuss ethical sensitive issues within and between teams, and improving decision-making for benefit of the patient at end-of-life. METHODS: Stepped wedge cluster randomized trial design, run across 10 different departments of the Ghent University Hospital between January 2022 and January 2023. Dutch speaking adult patients and one of their relatives will be included for data collection. All 10 departments were randomly assigned to start a 4-month coaching period. Junior and senior doctors will be coached through observation and debrief by a first coach of the interdisciplinary meetings and individual coaching by the second coach to enhance self-reflection and empowering leadership and managing group dynamics with regard to ethical decision-making. Nurses, junior doctors and senior doctors anonymously report perceptions of excessive treatment via the electronic patient file. Once a patient is identified by two or more different clinicians, an email is sent to the second coach and the doctor in charge of the patient. All nurses, junior and senior doctors will be invited to fill out the ethical decision making climate questionnaire at the start and end of the 12-months study period. Primary endpoints are (1) incidence of written do-not-intubate and resuscitate orders in patients potentially receiving excessive treatment and (2) quality of ethical decision-making climate. Secondary endpoints are patient and family well-being and reports on quality of care and communication; and clinician well-being. Tertiairy endpoints are quantitative and qualitative data of doctor leadership quality. DISCUSSION: This is the first randomized control trial exploring the effects of coaching doctors in self-reflection and empowering leadership, and in the management of team dynamics, with regard to ethical decision-making about patients potentially receiving excessive treatment.

COVID-19 and the workplace: Implications, issues, and insights for future research and action.

The impacts of COVID-19 on workers and workplaces across the globe have been dramatic. This broad review of prior research rooted in work and organizational psychology, and related fields, is intended to make sense of the implications for employees, teams, and work organizations. This review and preview of relevant literatures focuses on (a) emergent changes in work practices (e.g., working from home, virtual teamwork) and (b) emergent changes for workers (e.g., social distancing, stress, and unemployment). In addition, potential moderating factors (demographic characteristics, individual differences, and organizational norms) are examined given the likelihood that COVID-19 will generate disparate effects. This broad-scope overview provides an integrative approach for considering the implications of COVID-19 for work, workers, and organizations while also identifying issues for future research and insights to inform solutions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Leaders' achievement goals predict employee burnout above and beyond employees' own achievement goals.

OBJECTIVE: Burnout has primarily been examined from an individual's perspective without taking the broader environmental context into account. The authors applied an integrative, multilevel perspective and investigated the influence of leaders' motivational strivings on employee burnout. In two multisource studies, we investigated relationships between leaders' achievement goals and employee burnout while controlling for employees' own achievement goals. METHOD: Study 1 consisted of 362 members and 72 leaders of the corresponding working groups. Study 2 consisted of 177 employees and 46 leaders of the corresponding working groups, and measurements were spaced apart in time. We also ran a model including the data of both Study 1 and Study 2. RESULTS: Multilevel analyses indicated that leaders' mastery-approach goals were negatively related to employee burnout above and beyond employees' own achievement goals. Leaders' performance-approach goals were positively related to employee burnout in Study 1 and in the overall analysis combining Study 1 and Study 2. CONCLUSIONS: We advance our understanding of the motivational etiology of burnout by examining the top-down effects of leaders' achievement goals on employee burnout over and above employees' own achievement goals. In order to reduce burnout, organizations should take leaders' achievement goals into account as an important contextual factor.

Home nurses' turnover intentions: the impact of informal supervisory feedback and self-efficacy.

AIM: To examine how home nurses' turnover intentions are affected by the quality and frequency of supervisory feedback and by their own self-efficacy. BACKGROUND: Little is known about effective retention strategies for the growing home healthcare sector that struggles to retain an adequate workforce. While the work environment and supervisors have been found to play a key-role in nurses' turnover intentions, home nurses mostly work autonomously and apart from their supervisors. These circumstances require a customized approach and need to be understood to ensure high-quality home health care. DESIGN: We used a correlational, cross-sectional survey design. METHOD: A convenience sample of 312 home nurses was selected from a division of a large home health care organization in Flanders, Belgium. Data were collected in 2013 using structured questionnaires and analysed using descriptive statistics, structural equation modelling and relative weight analysis. RESULTS: The quality of feedback was related to lower levels of turnover intentions. This relationship was fully mediated by home nurses' self-efficacy. Frequent favourable feedback was directly related to lower turnover intentions while the relationship between frequent unfavourable feedback and turnover intentions was conditional on home nurses' level of self-efficacy. CONCLUSION: This study contributes to our understanding of home nurses' turnover intentions and the role of informal supervisory feedback and home nurses' self-efficacy.

When idols look into the future: fair treatment modulates the affective forecasting error in talent show candidates.

People's affective forecasts are often inaccurate because they tend to overestimate how they will feel after an event. As life decisions are often based on affective forecasts, it is crucial to find ways to manage forecasting errors. We examined the impact of a fair treatment on forecasting errors in candidates in a Belgian reality TV talent show. We found that perceptions of fair treatment increased the forecasting error for losers (a negative audition decision) but decreased it for winners (a positive audition decision). For winners, this effect was even more pronounced when candidates were highly invested in their self-view as a future pop idol whereas for losers, the effect was more pronounced when importance was low. The results in this study point to a potential paradox between maximizing happiness and decreasing forecasting errors. A fair treatment increased the forecasting error for losers, but actually made them happier.

Understanding and encouraging feedback-seeking behaviour: a literature review.

OBJECTIVES: The goals of this paper are to review the literature on feedback-seeking behaviour using a self-motives framework and to provide practical recommendations for medical educators on how to encourage feedback-seeking behaviour. METHODS: To gain a better understanding of feedback-seeking behaviour, we apply a self-motives framework. Through this conceptual lens, we define feedback-seeking behaviour and review its antecedents and consequences. We provide an overview of the key findings and answer to a number of unresolved issues in the literature. RESULTS: On the basis of the literature review, we present six evidence-based insights to encourage feedback-seeking behaviour in practice. CONCLUSIONS: The literature review shows that feedback-seeking behaviour is a valuable resource for individuals in work and educational settings as it aids their adaptation, learning and performance. Several individual and contextual factors that promote the seeking of feedback are presented. Although feedback-seeking behaviour has been a subject of research for over 25 years, some unresolved issues remain. We present a self-motives framework to resolve those issues and to stimulate future research. We conclude this paper with six actionable insights for medical educators based on the evidence reviewed.

Behavioral integrity for safety, priority of safety, psychological safety, and patient safety: a team-level study.

This article clarifies how leader behavioral integrity for safety helps solve follower's double bind between adhering to safety protocols and speaking up about mistakes against protocols. Path modeling of survey data in 54 nursing teams showed that head nurse behavioral integrity for safety positively relates to both team priority of safety and psychological safety. In turn, team priority of safety and team psychological safety were, respectively, negatively and positively related with the number of treatment errors that were reported to head nurses. We further demonstrated an interaction effect between team priority of safety and psychological safety on reported errors such that the relationship between team priority of safety and the number of errors was stronger for higher levels of team psychological safety. Finally, we showed that both team priority of safety and team psychological safety mediated the relationship between leader behavioral integrity for safety and reported treatment errors. These results suggest that although adhering to safety protocols and admitting mistakes against those protocols show opposite relations to reported treatment errors, both are important to improving patient safety and both are fostered by leaders who walk their safety talk.

Implicit letter preferences in job choice: an experimental test of the role of cognitive load.

Research has shown that people prefer the letters in their names to letters that are not in their names. This name-letter effect seems to influence important life decision such as where one chooses to live or whom one chooses to marry. The authors' laboratory study investigated whether this effect generalizes to individuals' job-choice intentions under specific conditions. Furthermore, the authors hypothesized that name-letter preferences in job-choice intentions would be stronger under conditions of high cognitive load than under conditions of low cognitive load. Two experiments with final-year students attending a university in Belgium showed support for name-letter preferences in job-choice intentions. There was no support for the hypothesized moderating role of cognitive load. The authors discuss the implications of these results for theory and research on name-letter preferences and job choice.

Improving accuracy in detecting acoustic onsets.

In current cognitive psychology, naming latencies are commonly measured by electronic voice keys that detect when sound exceeds a certain amplitude threshold. However, recent research (e.g., K. Rastle & M. H. Davis, 2002) has shown that these devices are particularly inaccurate in precisely detecting acoustic onsets. In this article, the authors discuss the various problems and solutions that have been put forward with respect to this issue and show that classical voice keys may trigger several tens of milliseconds later than acoustic onset. The authors argue that a solution to this problem may come from voice keys that use a combination of analogue and digital noise (nonspeech sound) detection. It is shown that the acoustic onsets detected by such a device are only a few milliseconds delayed and correlate highly (up to .99) with reaction time values obtained by visual waveform inspection.

In search of a comprehensive value model for assessing supplementary person-organization fit.

In this study, the authors tested the comprehensiveness of the S. H. Schwartz (1992) value model as a conceptual framework for assessing supplementary person-organization fit. They conducted an extensive literature search in which they identified 42 value instruments or typologies that are used to measure life, work, or organizational values. Experts judged whether each of 1,578 items from these 42 instruments could be regarded as an indicator of 1 of the 10 value types identified by S. H. Schwartz (1992). The authors found that (a) 92.5% of the items could be classified into 1 of the 10 value types and (b) the remaining items suggested 2 possible new types (goal orientedness and relations). The authors also found indications that 2 value types could be split to obtain a more univocal meaning. Overall, these findings suggest that the S. H. Schwartz (1992) value model might be an appropriate comprehensive framework for studying supplementary person-organization fit.

Keeping up with the Joneses: a field study of the relationships among upward, lateral, and downward comparisons and pay level satisfaction.

The authors examined the relationship between the direction of pay comparisons and pay level satisfaction. They hypothesized that upward pay comparisons would significantly predict pay level satisfaction, even when controlling for other comparisons. Results reported in 2 samples (U.S. sample, N = 295; Belgian sample, N = 67) generally supported this hypothesis. Analyses showed that individuals who were paid much less than their upward pay comparison were dissatisfied with their pay level. The highest levels of pay level satisfaction were observed when actual pay was congruent with the upward comparison pay level. There was also evidence that individuals who were paid much more than their upward pay comparison were dissatisfied with their pay level. However, the negative effects of overreward on pay satisfaction were considerably smaller than were those of underreward.