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The occupational stress and well-being literature often focuses on specific causes of stress as health risk factors to be managed, on attributes of work environments that are stressful and/or risky, or on prevention and intervention strategies for managing these causes of stress as well as individual stress responses at work (Quick & Tetrick, 2003). The occupational stress literature has not focused on how executives and organizations can cause positive stress for people at work. In this chapter, we explore a principle-based framework for executive action to create positive, constructive stress for people at work.

The first major section of the chapter discusses seven contextual factors within which the principle-based framework is nested. The second major section of the chapter develops nine principles for executive action. The third and concluding section of the chapter turns the focus to a set of guidelines for executive action in managing their personal experience of stress.

Purpose: Because past research has investigated nonverbal behaviors in clusters, it is unclear what status value is ascribed to individual nonverbal behaviors. I test status cues theory to investigate whether response latency functions as a status cue. I explore whether it affects behavioral influence or if it only signals assertiveness and does not have status value. I also explore how one's interpretation of response latency impacts behavioral influence.

Methodology: In a two-condition laboratory experiment, I isolate response latency and test its strength independently, and then I measure behavioral influence, participants' response latency, and perceptions of assertiveness. I also conduct interviews to investigate how participants interpret their partner's response latency to understand how people ascribe different meanings to the same nonverbal behavior.

Findings: I find that response latency alone does not affect behavioral influence, in part because how people interpret it varies. However, response latency does significantly impact participants' own response latency and their perceptions of their partner's assertiveness.

Practical Implications: This research demonstrates the intricacies of nonverbal behavior and status. More specifically, this work underscores important conceptual differences between assertiveness and status, and demonstrates how the interpretation of nonverbal behavior can impact behavioral influence.

Intellectual capital (IC) and social capital (SC), as forms of intangible value in organizations, are crucial assets in today's volatile business environment. Efforts to retain and develop these intangibles are becoming more deliberate and disciplined. However, organizations fail to recognize the relationship between organizational distress and the loss and/or reduction of intangible value. The loss of intangible value may potentially impact an organization with equal or greater damage than the loss of more tangible value. IC and SC generate many outcomes beneficial to the individual and the organization. These benefits are reduced when stress of employees becomes excessive and damaging. The relationship between the health of an organization and the degree of impact of distress serves as a lingering threat to organizational financial resources. Managers must build upon the growing knowledge from research and practice to help organizations account for the costs of organizational distress, translate the importance of intangible value into tangible terms, and garner support for developing IC and SC to obtain business objectives. Deliberate and disciplined effort to build collaborative capital can facilitate the growth of IC and SC which minimize the damage of organizational distress.

Adolescent students with disabilities often struggle with completing writing tasks efficiently. Until recently, most research regarding writing efficiency or fluency has examined production skills such as handwriting with young writers or examined how to use measures of fluency to assess student performance. In this chapter, 10 studies that directly address the impact of instruction on adolescents' writing fluency will be reviewed. Findings indicated that when teacher modeling and structured practice was provided for writing within a time limit, students' writing improved in the number of ideas or text parts written and in holistic quality. When measured, improvement generalized to a standardized writing fluency test. Implications for future research are noted.

In the last few decades, the obesity rate has increased along with the increasing of away-from-home food consumption at restaurants (Wei & Miao, 2013), especially the food consumption at quick-service restaurants (QSRs). Previous research stated that the main factors that influence the customers’ food selection are found. Price and quality of food are the most significant things that mostly concerned customers when they are in decision-making process. There is a controversial argument between several studies that identified calorie labelling on menu influences consumers on food choice, while others said vice versa. However, several studies argued that calorie information does not have as much impact on customers’ food purchasing as other factors such as food’s quality, ranges of food, price of food, restaurant’s atmosphere, and speed of food service (Carey & Genevive, 1995). The aim of this chapter is to examine the importance of representing calorie information on menu and its effects on customer decision-making especially at QSRs. Therefore, the following questions have been addressed in this chapter:

What are the factors that influence consumer choice at QSRs?

Does calorie labelling on menus impact customer purchasing at QSRs?

This chapter starts with the introduction of the topic and reviewing previous research on menu labelling and calorie information at QSRs. This chapter aims to provide a better understanding of customer decision-making when ordering a food with regard to calorie information on the menu and the customer preference.

This chapter proposes a more holistic approach to understanding work stress by incorporating eustress, the positive response to stressors. We begin by casting the study of eustress as part of a contemporary movement in both psychology and organizational behavior that accentuates the positive aspects of human adaptation and functioning. We discuss the development of the concept of eustress, and provide extensive evidence, both psychological and physiological, for the purpose of developing an explicit construct definition. An exploratory study of hospital nurses is presented as an initial test of our holistic model of stress. We conclude by asserting that there must exist a complement to coping with distress such that rather than preventing or resolving the negative side of stress, individuals savor the positive side of stress.

The current study investigates odd-even psychological pricing with the aid of a Price endings and Consumer Behavior (PCBM) Model for the hospitality industry. The PCBM proposes that a reciprocal relationship exists between hospitality marketers and consumers with reference to 00 and 99 price ending practices. Theoretical support for the posited model is provided by signaling theory, a persuasion knowledge model (PKM), and learning by analogy from marketing and psychology literatures. Results indicate that consumers use intuition and knowledge gained from interacting in the retail marketplace to respond to the intentions of hospitality marketers’ odd-even psychological pricing strategy. After repeated exposures to odd-even pricing, consumers learn to accept the 00 and 99 pricing endings as extrinsic cues for quality and value and as pricing norms of the hospitality industry.

Morality is primarily a system of values, meanings, convictions, beliefs, principles, and drivers of good behavior and good outcomes in any organization. Using systems thinking concepts and applications introduced and developed during the last 50 years or so by various scholars from MIT, Stanford, and Wharton, such as Chris Argyris, Russell Ackoff, G. K. Forrester, Peter Senge, Stephen Covey, and Jim Collins, this chapter seeks to explore various past and contemporary market systems and challenges in terms of specific inputs, processes, and outputs. Systems thinking reckons everything in the cosmos (usually classified as subjects, objects, properties, and events) as a system (composed of two or more interactive parts with individual and interactive effects) that is connected to every other system in the universe. Various systems thinking laws and archetypes that have been developed thus far by systems thinkers will be introduced in order to identify basic patterns, structures, and constraints of human thinking and reasoning that create market phenomena. The academic and managerial challenge is to identify, explore, and capitalize such nonobvious connections for creating and developing new markets and corporate growth opportunities in the highly turbulent markets of today. In a globalized, digitized, and networked planet and universe, systems thinking is a very effective tool for analyzing turbulent market systems holistically and in an inclusive and integrated manner, with their specific inputs, processes, and outcomes. Several contemporary market cases will be included to illustrate the contents of this chapter.

Systems thinking calls for a shift of our mindset from seeing just parts to seeing the whole reality in its structured dynamic unity and interconnectedness. Systems thinking fosters a sensibility to see subtle connections between components and parts of reality, especially the free enterprise capitalist system (FECS). It enables us to see ourselves as active participants or partners of FECS and not mere induced factors of its production–distribution–consumption processes. Systems thinking seeks to identify the economic “structures” that underlie complex situations in FECS that bring about high versus low leveraged changes. A system is strengthened and reinforced by feedback of reciprocal exchanges that makes the system alive, transparent, human, and humanizing.

In Part I, we explore basic laws or patterns of behaviors as understood by systems thinking; in Part II we examine the basic archetypes or structured behaviors of systems thinking; in both parts we strive to see reality through the lens of critical thinking to help us understand patterns and structures of behavior among systems and their component parts. In conclusion, we argue for compatibility and complementarity of critical thinking and systems thinking to identify and resolve management problems created by our flawed thinking, and sedimented by our wanton assumptions, presumptions, suppositions and presuppositions, biases, and prejudices. Such thinking will also identify unnecessary economic and political structures of the self-serving policies we create, which imprison us.