Search results

In North America, the profession known as ‘research management’ elsewhere across the globe, is often known as ‘research administration’ and encompasses the activities and work associated with developing, administering, accounting for and complying with sponsor requirements, guidelines, procedures, and laws relating to externally funded projects. In the United States and Canada, the expansion of respective federal government agencies and programmes was the major factor for the need and growth of the research administration profession. Initially, administrative and business staff often administered research funding, however over the decades, a fully-fledged profession has evolved with distinct specialisations. Both the United States and Canada now have maturing professions and professional societies to organise and advance research administration. This chapter outlines the chronological origins, growth, and professionalisation of research administration in North America, with a focus on the United States and Canada. Mexico has not yet evolved a formalised research administration infrastructure.

The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), a multicriteria decision support system that has been successfully applied to numerous decision-making situations, has been applied to patient assessment. The AHP was used with Timeslips™, a group storytelling program that encourages creative expression among dementia patients, to determine the optimal scale for pre and post assessment among the nine most common agitation and anxiety scales. The AHP used the six criteria identified by qualitative assessment of the nine scales: (1) validity/reliability, (2) observation period, (3) training required, (4) time to administer, (5) most appropriate administrator, and (6) accessibility/cost. The AHP indicated that the Overt Agitation & Anxiety Scale was optimal for use with Timeslips; the process and results are discussed.

“Fit” as a human resources decision criterion has emerged as an active body of research in recent years, but its “elusiveness” as a scientific construct, noted more than a decade ago by Judge and Ferris, still remains. To best address this issue, this chapter proposes an integrative theory of multidimensional fit that encompasses five relevant (and distinct) streams of current fit research: Person-Organization Fit, Person-Vocation Fit, Person-Job Fit, Person-Preferences for Culture Fit, and Person-Team Fit. It is proposed that these five dimensions of fit relate to an individual's self-concept; moreover, an individual assesses multidimensional fit utilizing a social cognitive decision-making process called prototype matching. By assessing fit across multiple dimensions, an individual can both gain a social identity and expand the self-concept, which explains the motive to fit. Testable propositions are formulated, and implications for multidimensional fit across the employment lifecycle are discussed. Furthermore, directions for future fit research are provided.

Intrinsic motivation occurs due to positive reactions that arise directly from engagement in work activities. Scholars have asserted that intrinsic motivation plays an important role in organizational phenomena such as creativity (George, 2007), leadership (Piccolo & Colquitt, 2006), and performance (Gagné & Deci, 2005). We review the research literature on intrinsic motivation and provide an overview and integration of the leading theories. We then develop a conceptual model in which positive affect serves as a primary cause of intrinsic motivation. We discuss how affect alone may induce intrinsic motivation, how affect may lead to nonconscious experiences of intrinsic motivation, and how affect and cognitions may work in concert to produce the strongest and most persistent intrinsic motivation experiences. We conclude by suggesting new avenues for research that might be pursued using this cognitive–affective model of intrinsic motivation.

We propose that off-the-job embeddedness (OTJE) be reconceptualized as a separate and distinct, albeit related, construct from job embeddedness. We conceptualize OTJE as the totality of outside-work forces which keep an individual bound to his/her current geographical area and argue that this construct includes important factors which do not fall under the umbrella of “community embeddedness.” Moreover, we propose that these outside-work forces may embed individuals in their jobs either directly or indirectly (through the perceived or expressed preferences of spouses, children, and extended family). This paper identifies the key components of OJTE, addresses the measurement of OTJE, explains the relationships between job embeddedness and OTJE (and their respective components), highlights how OTJE can either amplify or counteract the effects of job embeddedness, and illustrates the direct and indirect effects of OTJE on both work-related and personal outcomes.