Search results

Recent reports suggest Singapore employees especially value practical assistance in resolving work-related issues. As such, this study explored whether the appreciation language Acts of Service was chosen as the Primary Language of appreciation by Singapore employees at a higher frequency than U.S. employees.

Nine hundred sixty-seven Singapore employees completed the Motivating By Appreciation (MBA) Inventory, which assesses individuals’ preferred ways of being shown appreciation. A sample of 921 U.S. employees was created from the general MBA Inventory population that matched the Singapore employees group on age, gender and work setting.

Acts of Service (39 per cent) was virtually equivalent with Words of Affirmation (37 per cent) as the most preferred Language of Appreciation by the Singapore employees, whereas U.S. employees preferred Words of Affirmation at a significantly higher rate (40 per cent) than Acts of Service (26 per cent).

Further research is needed before the findings should be generalized to all East Asian cultures, and additional research is needed before conclusions should be made regarding specific cultural differences in action items preferred.

Workplace leaders in Singapore need to be aware that understanding the work issues and providing practical assistance is highly valued by their employees and communicates appreciation as much as verbal and written praise. This emphasis on the desire for practical assistance is a cultural difference in comparison to their U.S. counterparts. Yet, in both cultures, the leader-employee interpersonal working relationship is a key factor that enables organizations to grow and work through changes successfully.

This is the first study to compare preferred appreciation languages of Singapore and US employees, and report Singapore employees especially value practical assistance in resolving work-related issues.

Although managers agree that showing appreciation to their employees is important, many do not know how to do so effectively. Languages of Appreciation have been identified that uniquely convey that the recipient is valued when appreciation is expressed in the “language” they prefer. Moreover, a wide range of specific actions can be effective within a given appreciation language. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to identify the top ten action items within each language of appreciation to discover the actions preferred most frequently by employees.

Of the over 200,000 individuals who have completed the Motivating by Appreciation Inventory, approximately 1% of respondents were randomly selected to represent each primary language (Words of Affirmation N = 1,000, Acts of Service N = 500, Quality Time N = 500 and Tangible Gifts N = 300). Respondents’ action item preferences were then tallied.

Numerous themes were identified, along with the most desired acts of appreciation within each language: Words of Affirmation: acknowledge when I have handled a difficult situation well; Acts of Service: offer to do some menial tasks that will allow me to focus on higher priorities for me; Quality Time: go to lunch together and not talk about business issues; and Tangible Gifts: gift cards (visa gift card or to favorite store/restaurant).

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to report on the specific actions most desired by employees within their preferred appreciation languages. The results can help inform actions that are most likely to be successful in showing appreciation to colleagues in the workplace.

Given that assessment tools based upon the Jung/Myers personality framework and the Motivating By Appreciation Inventory are used by tens of thousands of workplaces, questions have arisen regarding their interrelatedness. The purpose of the current study is to assess the relationship between TypeCoach personality type and Language of Appreciation.

In total, 300 participants took both the MBA Inventory and TypeCoach Verifier. Each person’s primary Language of Appreciation and the summary scores for each of the four languages (Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Quality Time and Tangible Gifts) were calculated. Each participant’s TypeCoach data were scored as 1 of 16 traditional four-letter types (i.e. INTJ, ENFP), as well as dichotomously coded as extraversion (vs not), sensing (vs not), thinking (vs not) and judging (vs not). Logistic regression and chi-square tests were conducted to assess the relationships between primary Language of Appreciation and TypeCoach Verifier.

None of the analyses yielded a statistically significant relationship between Language of Appreciation and TypeCoach scores (all ps > 0.05).

This study is the first to assess the relationship between Jung/Myers personality types and languages of appreciation. It appears that personality type and preferred ways of receiving appreciation are independent, but potentially complimentary constructs. This study provides suggestions on how to best combine the tools to create an engaging work environment.

Businesses are spending billions of dollars on recognition rewards with the intent of boosting employee engagement, job satisfaction, and ultimately, their bottom line. However, employee engagement is at an all-time low. The purpose of this study was designed to take a step back to understand if there are demographic differences that influence personal preferences for tangible gifts as their preferred language of appreciation and of those who prefer to receive gifts, what types of gifts are most valued.

This study compared the demographics of those who selected tangible gifts as their primary (N  =  8,811), secondary (N = 14,827) or least valued (N  = 108,586) language of appreciation (motivating by appreciation inventory, White, 2011). From those with tangible gifts as their primary language of appreciation, 500 were randomly selected to code their open-ended suggestions for a preferred gift.

There are no important factors across the demographics of gender, age or work setting that influence whether individuals are more or less likely to choose tangible gifts as their primary, secondary or least valued language of appreciation. Respondents identified gift cards, additional paid time off and gifts related to desired personal experiences as their top gift choices.

When giving gifts to colleagues, discovering individuals’ personal preferences (favorite store, restaurant, ticketed event, food, drink and lunch option) is more likely to result in a gift that “hits the mark” in showing appreciation to the recipient.

Given the increasing numbers of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) college students, it is critical to have a diverse group of faculty, staff, administrators, and student affairs professionals who are social justice minded and multiculturally competent to address their needs (Maramba, 2008b; Pope, Reynolds, & Mueller, 2004). However, higher education institutions are still faced with the challenge of increasing the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity at these professional levels. AAPIs are one such population whose representation in the field of student affairs administration is severely lacking. The purpose of this chapter is to acquire a better understanding of the AAPI women in the profession of student affairs administration.

This paper aims to explore textual patterns in ten years of electronic word-of-mouth communications amongst social media (SM) users of the Java Jazz Festival.

This study uses a data-scraping technique to gather user-generated content from Twitter. Word-cloud and word-frequency analysis, along with descriptive coding and pattern matching, are used to categorise the initial findings. Trends and differences in terms of the number of tweets over a ten-year period were examined using analysis of variance and seasonality analysis.

From more than 1.3 million Twitter tweets between 2008 and 2018, this study identified six initial themes. Quantitative analysis revealed that the number of tweets differed significantly in the four quarters of the ten-year period.

The results of this study contrast with the claim that digital media communication generally occurs before a festival begins and are least during the festival. Nevertheless, this study supports the notion that SM interaction results in positive consequences, drives conversations amongst users and increases engagement.

This study offers five practical implications for music festival organisers and related entities.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first to provide a systematic and practical data mining and interpretation approach from Twitter within a ten-year period in the Asia Pacific context, through the case of the Java Jazz Festival.

研究目的 – 本论文旨在分析十年来Java爵士音乐节的社交媒体用户发布的文字模式，从而探索其网络口碑效应。

本论文使用网络爬虫技术，从Titter上面搜集用户产生的文本数据。本论文采用文字云和词频分析法，以及描述性编码和模型匹配等方式，来对初步结果进行归类。本论文使用ANOVA和季节性分析的方法对tweets十年中的变化和趋势进行分析检验。

本论文通过对在2008年至2018年的超过130万tweets进行分析，初步指出了六大主题。定量分析结果表明十年内四个季节中的tweets数量相差甚大。

本论文结果总体上与传统上认为的电子媒体沟通发生在节庆之前或者至少在节庆发生中的论断相左。本论文结果支持论断：社交媒体互动产生积极的影响，带动用户之间的对话，以及参与度。

本论文是首篇文章，以Java爵士音乐节为例，针对亚太地区十年间Twitter数据进行系统和实际数据挖掘和解读。