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The Abstracts of the 5th Australian Industrial and Organisational Psychology Conference

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Commitment, trust and perceived support: Do employees make distinctions in relation to their organisation, supervisor / and workgroup? '*^
YAP, M., & ALBRECHT, S. (Curtin University).
depacey@hotmail.com

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mployee commitment has traditionally been conceptualised as an attitude directed solely towards the organisation. Recent research suggests that employees experience commitment towards different entities. Examples of such entities, or foci, include the supervisor and the workgroup. The present research extends the commitment research to examine whether employees can discriminate between commitment, trust and support at the level of the organisation, supervisor and workgroup. Confirmatory factor analytic methods performed on sample survey data from an Australian health services organisation (n = 915) demonstrate that commitment, trust and support at the different levels represent distinct constructs. Further, second-order confirmatory factor analysis reveals the presence of three higher-order factors each corresponding to 'organisational climate', 'workgroup climate' and 'supervisory climate'. These climates represent meaningful organising structures around which employees form attitudes towards each entity. Further theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

personnel assessment. In Study 1, the internal consistency and the factor structure of the GIM scale was examined with a working population sample (A' =212). Another objective of Study 1 is to explore whether there are other items in the revised version of the CPAI, CPAI-2, which could be included in the GIM scale by comparing the item endorsement rates between a social desirability responding condition and a standard instruction condition. The internal consistency and convergent validity of the new GIM scale was examined by its Cronbach's alpha and its correlation with the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR) respectively. In Study 2, the ability of the new GIM scale to identify faking good responses was compared with that of the original GIM scale in a cross-validation study with an independent MBA student sample (A^ = 173). The findings from the two studies provide support for the reliability and validity of the new GIM scale.

Senior managers' transformaffonal leadership behaviours for safety


YULE, SJ. (University of Aberdeen). s.j.yule@abdn.ac.uk

Working with foreign managers: Conflict management for effective leader relationships in China
YIFENG, C. (Lingnan University), FANG, S. (Shanghai University of Finance & Economics), & DEAN, T. (Lingnan University).
yifeng@ln.edu.hk

iven the susceptibility of crosscuitural interaction to misunderstandings and disagreements, conflict management may be especially useful for helping employees develop quality leader relationships with their foreign managers. One-hundred and eleven Chinese employees (66% males with an average age of 29) from various industries in Shanghai were interviewed on specific incidents where they had a confiict, defined as incompatible actions, with their Japanese manager or American manager. A qualitative analysis of the incidents and statistical tests of the data supported the hypotheses that a cooperative approach to confiict, but not competitive or avoiding approaches, help Chinese employees and their foreign managers strengthen their relationship and improve their productivity. Cooperative conflict management may be an important way to overcome obstacles and develop an effective leader relationship across cultural boundaries.

his paper presents an examination of the espoused transformational leadership behaviours for safety in two matched senior management samples in the UK and US. Interview data are subject to line-by-line coding in order to extract leader behaviours, attitudes, perceptions, values, and philosophies relating to industrial safety performance. These codes are classified according to the subscales of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) and a 38-category framework was created to describe senior leadership for safety. This framework was called the Senior Safety Behaviours (SSB) taxonomy and was found to be reflective of both leadership and safety research. Raters were found to be highly consistent when using it to classify leadership behaviours in an inter-rater reliability study. The taxonomy is proposed as a basis for further empirical research, specifically on the combinations of senior behaviours that may be effective in influencing high safety performance in organisations.

Testing the structurex>f a generic safety climate survey instrument


YULE, SJ. (University of Aberdeen), O'CONNOR, P. (US Navy), & FLIN, R. (University of Aberdeen). s.i.yule@abdn.ac.uk

Social desirability responding and the Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory


YIP, R., & CHEUNG, F. (Chinese University of Hong Kong). wyyip@psy.cuhk.edu.hk

he Chinese Personality Assessment Inventory (CPAI) is a comprehensive, indigenous personality test developed specially for the Chinese culture. This paper presents two studies that examined the reliability and validity of one of the validity scales of the re-standardised CPAI, the Good Impression (GIM) scale. The GIM scale is designed to detect 'fake good' responses, which is one of the most common concerns voiced in the use of personality tests in

his paper presents an examination of a generic safety climate questionnaire developed by the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) as a method of measuring safety climate across all industry sectors. The questionnaire items are based on a generic 10-factor structure and organisations are encouraged to feed back results to employees accordingly. Multi-level confirmatory factor analyses were performed to test the fit of this hypothesised generic solution to two independent data sets. Analyses indicate that a generic factor structure does not provide an acceptable fit to these data. The results are discussed in terms of the continual development and refinement of safety climate measures.

Australian Journal of Psychology SUPPLEMENT 2003

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