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This chapter examines the effect of mutual monitoring and the personality trait of need for achievement on subordinates’ budgetary-slack creation in a team-based environment. Experimental results show that the creation of budgetary slack is lower when mutual monitoring is present than when it is absent. The results also show that a two-way interaction between mutual monitoring and the personality trait of need for achievement affects subordinates’ budgetary-slack creation.

People have unconscious motives which affects their decision-making and associated behavior. The paper describes a study using thematic apperception test (TAT) to measure how unconscious motives influence travelers' interpretations and preferences toward alternative tours and hotels. Using the TAT, the present study explores the relationships between three unconscious needs: (1) achievement, (2) affiliation, and (3) power and preferences for four package tours (adventure, culture, business, and escape tours) and for seven hotel identities (quality, familiarity, location, price, friendliness, food and beverage, and cleanliness and aesthetics). The present study conducts canonical correlation analyses to examine the relationships between unconscious needs and preferences for package tours and hotel identities using data from 467 university students. The study scores 2,438 stories according to the TAT manual to identify unconscious needs. The findings indicate that (1) people with a high need for affiliation prefer an experience based on cultural values and hotels that are conveniently located, (2) individuals with a high need for power indicate a preference for high prices and good value for their money, and (3) people with a high need for achievement prefer a travel experience with adventure as a motivation. The study findings are consistent with previous research of McClelland (1990), Wilson (2002), and Woodside et al. (2008) in exploring impacts of the unconscious levels of human need.

This chapter focuses on two aspects of the achievement gap – underachievement and low achievement among Black males in urban school contexts. More specifically, the authors explain several problems/issues confronting Black male students in P-12 gifted and talented, advanced placement, and special education programs, along with the school-to-prison pipeline – inequitable discipline in the form of suspensions and expulsions. We parse underrepresentation and overrepresentation for this student group. A central part of this discussion is grounded in the achievement gap literature on Black students in general with implications for Black males in particular. Another fundamental aspect of this discussion is the need for educators to adopt an anti-racist (social justice or civil rights) and cultural competence approach to their work, which means being equity-based and culturally responsive in philosophy and action. Suggestions for closing the achievement gap and otherwise improving the achievement of Black males are provided for educators. We also compel educators to go beyond talking about equity by setting quantifiable equity goals for minimum and maximum percentages (and numbers).

Achievement goal theory traces people's behaviors, thoughts, and emotions in achievement situations to the broad goals they pursue in that activity, whether in education, sports, work, or other achievement domains (Dweck, 1986; Maehr & Midgley, 1991; Nicholls, 1984). Two goals have featured prominently: mastery goals (also sometimes called learning goals) and performance goals (also called ego goals or ability validation goals). Both goals concern the pursuit of competence and the assessment of one's own skill level, yet they do so in distinct ways. People pursuing a mastery goal strive to develop their skill or expertise, while those pursuing a performance goal instead strive to demonstrate and validate their existing skill, typically by outperforming peers. As such, those pursuing mastery goals typically use self-referential standards to define success versus failure, while those pursuing performance goals instead use normative standards to define success versus failure.

This chapter builds upon two case studies, in Flensburg (Germany) and Essunga (Sweden), within the European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education project Organisation of Provision to Support Inclusive Education (OoP). The cases highlight general policy issues and challenges relating to inclusion in Europe and, more specifically, the complex question of how to change school culture and structures in order to increase the inclusive capability of schools, thereby raising the achievement of all learners. The cases illustrate the need for co-ordinated changes both at municipal-political and administrative level and at school level. The findings also highlight the importance of what Kim and Mauborgne (Kim, W. C., & Mauborgne, R. (2003). Tipping point leadership. Harvard Business Review, April, 61–69.) termed ‘tipping-point leadership’ in a study on positive transformation of the New York Police Department’s culture and structures during the mid-1990s. In Flensburg and Essunga, the leaders at different levels co-operated in an extraordinary situation and created a common crisis awareness among the staff, an understanding of the necessity to change, and ways to support the professional organisation to develop a new, more inclusive thought-action style with greater influence on learner achievement.

In 2001, the Elementary and Secondary Act legislation was reauthorized in the U.S. as The Leave No Child Behind Act (NCLB) to place special emphasis on the importance of basing educational practice on empirical research. The reauthorization also required that America's public school systems become more accountable for the learning of students, for improving the educational achievement of all students, and for closing the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged segments of the student population.

The literature on post-completion reviews (PCRs) either does not deal with the tying of PCRs to extrinsic rewards or provides scant theoretical reasoning or empirical analysis to back up its recommendations.

Based on research from psychology and empirical studies, the present chapter proposes that several effects of a PCR, which must be deemed rather dysfunctional, will increase when extrinsic rewards are linked to such a review. At the same time some possibly functional effects, however, are likely to remain constant. The propositions, therefore, call the usefulness of tying PCRs to rewards into question and call for further investigation.

This chapter proposes the development of a compound personality trait termed “goal propensity”. Motivation is a key determinant of performance in virtually all contexts, and personality has long been viewed as an important influence on motivation. Despite the long history of exploring how personality influences motivation, we do not have a clear understanding of the linkage between individual differences in personality and work motivation or the tools to reliably and accurately predict individual differences in motivation. Advances in our understanding of personality and the convergence of motivation theories around models of self-regulation present the opportunity to achieve that understanding and predictive efficacy. Goal propensity would be a theoretically derived trait that would explain the role of personality in self-regulation models of motivation as well as allow the prediction of tendencies to engage in self-regulation. This chapter provides the rationale for the development of this construct, articulates the nature of the proposed goal propensity construct, and explores the value of such a construct for theory, future research, and human resource practice.