Relocation attitudes and adjustment: A longitudinal study

This study identified correlates of attitude toward an impending employer-initiated relocation, then followed up by predicting post-transfer attitude and adjustment difficulty in the same sample. Predictors suggested by past research on mobility attitudes (i.e. demographic characteristics and attributes of the pre-move location) were less important in explaining pre-move attitude toward the transfer than were expected attributes of the new location. After the move, experienced aspects of the new location such as role ambiguity, degree of advancement, and community and job satisfaction were the strongest predictors of overall post-move attitude and adjustment difficulty. In many cases, pre-move expectations about attributes of the new location were not related to affect or adjustment after the move, suggesting that pre-move expectations may have been inaccurate. Implications for theory, research, and organizational practice are discussed.     

The role of situational factors in disciplinary judgements

This study examined the effects of four situational factors on the severity of punishment chosen by a manager following a rule infraction. Two attributes of the offender, gender and performance history, and two outcomes of the infraction, physical damage and personal injury, were combined within a scenario evaluated by 421 graduate business students in a 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 ANOVA design. Results indicated strong main effects for performance history, physical damage, and personal injury but not for gender. Further analyses indicated that the gender composition of the superior/offender dyad did not have a significant effect on the severity of discipline, although some variation occurred across dyads. These results imply that superiors are likely to base disciplinary judgements on situational factors, and that situational factors affect superiors' decisions in a simple, linear fashion.     

Using evidence to improve reproductive health quality along the Thailand-Burma border

The Mae Tao Clinic, located on the Thailand-Burma border, has provided health services for illegal migrant workers in Thailand and internally displaced people from Burma since 1989. In 2001, the clinic launched a project with the primary aim of improving reproductive health services and the secondary aim of building clinic capacity in monitoring and evaluation (M&E). This paper first presents the project's methods and key results. The team used observation of antenatal care and family-planning sessions and client exit interviews at baseline and follow-up, approximately 13 months apart, to assess performance on six elements of quality of care. Findings indicated that improving programme readiness contributed to some improvement in the quality of services, though inconsistencies in findings across the methods require further research. The paper then identifies lessons learned from introducing M&E in a resource-constrained setting. One key lesson was that a participatory approach to M&E increased people's feelings of ownership of the project and motivated staff to collect and use data for programme decision-making to improve quality.     

Adaptation and mitigation strategies in agriculture: an analysis of potential synergies

As climate changes due to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, agriculture will be one of the key human activities affected. Projections show that while overall global food production in the coming decades may keep pace with the food requirements of a growing world population, climate change might worsen existing regional disparities because it will reduce crop yields mostly in lands located at lower latitudes where many developing countries are situated. Strategies to enhance local adaptation capacity are therefore needed to minimize climatic impacts and to maintain regional stability of food production. At the same time, agriculture as a sector offers several opportunities to mitigate the portion of global greenhouse gas emissions that are directly dependent upon land use, land-use change, and land-management techniques. This paper reviews issues of agriculture and climate change, with special attention to adaptation and mitigation. Specifically, as adaptation and mitigation strategies in agriculture are implemented to alleviate the potential negative effects of climate change, key synergies need to be identified, as mitigation practices may compete with modifications to local agricultural practices aimed at maintaining production and income. Under future climate and socio-economic pressures, land managers and farmers will be faced with challenges in regard to selecting those mitigation and adaptation strategies that together meet food, fiber and climate policy requirements.     

Fitting Data to Linear Combinations of Covariograms

We pursue a regression model for spatially-indexed data whose spatial correlation is determined by a linear combination of simple covariograms. The main interest lies in the estimation of the spatial parameters. As several common techniques appear ineffective for this setting, an algorithm is proposed to obtain parameter estimates and is assessed through simulation. It is found to provide greater stability than other methods of estimation. We discuss the influence of parametrization and site location on the efficacy of the estimation algorithms, and develop some guidelines as to the placement of sampling sites to improve the algorithm's performance. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

NEW HAMPSHIRE WATER LAW: AN INTERPRETIVE OVERVIEW1

ABSTRACT: New Hampshire's riparian water law, first modified judicially, has been more drastically changed by recent legislative and administrative action. As it stands, however, the judicially enforced doctrine of reasonable use appears to be utterly inadequate to handle increasing water demands. The protection of the public interest has imposed substantial limitations on the use of riparian water rights, all under the guise of the exercise of the police power, i.e., the protection of the public health, safety, and welfare. The efficient use of the state's water resources has been further crippled by the widespread and indiscriminate exercise of eminent domain. As a result, the state is now considering the imposition of a permit system that has the potential to streamline the allocation of water. Such a system should take into consideration the public interest factors that have recently frustrated the exercise of riparian rights and the effective use of the state's water resources.     

Environmental community relations: A vital component in TQEM

In the current regulatory climate, environmental professionals are becoming increasingly involved with a side of the business that has often been given low priority in the past: communicating with the public about environmental and health risk issues. This article describes effective approaches to such communication, and demonstrates their implementation success.     

Why do lay people believe that satisfaction and performance are correlated? possible sources of a commonsense theory

Decades of research have shown that the correlation between job satisfaction and job performance is modest in magnitude, yet lay people are thought to believe strongly that satisfied or ‘happy’ employees are more productive at work. This paper first documents the strength and pervasiveness of belief in several versions of the happy–productive worker hypothesis (Study 1), then proposes and explores potential substantive explanations for these beliefs (Study 2). It is possible that lay people base their beliefs on genuinely stronger relationships that occur at a different level of analysis than usually studied by researchers, and/or that exist between satisfaction‐like and performance‐like variables other than the constructs typically investigated by scholars. Study 2 provides data relevant to several of these possibilities. The most compelling findings were at the within‐person level of analysis. The average within‐person correlation between momentary task satisfaction and concurrent perceived task performance was 0.57. Individuals feel more satisfied than usual when they believe they are performing better than usual for them. If lay persons mistakenly generalize from their own within‐person experiences of satisfaction–performance covariation to the between‐persons level, this relationship may be the basis for the strong lay belief that satisfied workers perform better. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.