Text. When staff absenteeism seems catching, it could be the team culture that’s sick

When the morning alarm carves us out of our slumber, restoring the previous night’s raspy throat and foggy head, we have a decision to make: get up and go, or call in sick. What happens next is influenced by workplace norms about whether absence is commonplace or exceptional, a current pulling us towards the office or letting us settle back into bed. But new research in Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processing from a Dutch-Canadian team, led by Lieke ten Brummelhuis, suggests this isn’t automatic: we’re more likely to fight against the tide when we care about our team, and when we know our absence will cost them.

The researchers asked 299 participants recruited online – American adults with an average of 20 years job experience and who worked in a team of three or more members – to imagine either that over the last three months someone had been absent from their team almost every week, although the understaffing had finally ended, or that their full team had been present throughout that period. Next they were to imagine that they were feeling a little out of sorts, although not actually ill, and were considering calling in sick to their workplace. The participants’ simply had to say whether they would choose to call in sick. Finally, they completed a survey about their attitude toward their real-life team.

As expected, participants asked to imagine high absence in their team were more likely to decide to call in sick, but still a majority did not. Ten Brummelhuis’ team looked at the 19 per cent who did take a sickie, finding that they considered their relationship with their real-life team to be more transactional in nature – for instance by affirming statements like “I watch very carefully what I get from my team, relative to what I contribute.” Meanwhile, the 81 per cent who chose not to call in sick were significantly more likely to sign off on statements like “My relationship with my team members is based on mutual trust.” This fits with the researchers’ thesis, based on social exchange theory, that although absence typically begets absence, this may be neutralized when the team has developed a trusting relationship rather than a tit-for-tat attitude to hassles.

The researchers next looked to deepen their understanding using actual worker absenteeism rates from a three-month period. They recruited hundreds of participants from Dutch companies in industries including health, facilities and commercial services, comprising 97 teams with an average of 8 members. Again, a given team member was more likely to take more sick days when their co-worker absence was greater. But this association was weaker in more cohesive, tight-knit teams, supplementing the finding from the online experiment. In addition, participants were less influenced by high rates of others’ absence when work within their team was highly interconnected and interdependent – when your day is made very difficult by the absence of a team-mate, you’re more aware of that cost and less prepared to inflict it on others without good reason.

Absence costs around 200 billion annually in the US economy, so understanding the factors that contribute to inessential absence matters to organizations. Tackling an absence culture where employees “repay co-workers” absence by calling in sick means looking at the nature of work performed by a team, to amplify and clarify its interconnected nature. And it means supporting high-quality relations within a team, in which a hard week in an understaffed office isn’t earning a credit to spend later, but a matter of duty, because someone you care about needs that recovery time.

By Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest. http://digest.bps.org.uk/2016/07/why-does-copy-cat-absenteeism-afflict.html

Послетекстовые задания.

1. Give adequate Russian equivalents of the italicized worlds in the text.

2. Find 10 words with suffixes. Give their Russian equivalents.

3. Translate the sentences of the bold type into Russian.

4. Make up a summary of the text in three-four sentences in English.

5. Add more ideas to the list. Do you agree with the author? Write down your opinion on the paper in three-four sentences in English.

РЕКТОРСКАЯ КОНТРОЛЬНАЯ РАБОТА

АТТЕСТАЦИОННЫЙ БИЛЕТ № __13__

Направления подготовки:

44.04.01 Педагогическое образование

Психология

ЗАДАНИЕ. Прочитайте текст. Выполните послетекстовые задания.

Text. Social Influence

Individual men display outlooks and behavior that vary from fierce competitive-ness to caring nurturance. As adults, women in individualist cultures describe themselves in more relational terms, welcome more help, experience more relationship-linked emotions, and are more attuned to others’ relationships (Addis & Mahalik, 2003; Gabriel & Gardner, 1999; Tamres & others, 2002; Watkins & others, 1998, 2003). In conversation, men more often focus on tasks and on connections with large groups, women on personal relationships (Tannen, 1990). When on the phone, women’s conversations with friends last longer (Smoreda & Licoppe, 2000). When on the computer, women spend more time sending e-mails, in which they express more emotion (Crabtree, 2002; Thomson & Murachver, 2001). When in groups, women share more of their lives, and offer more support (Dindia & Allen, 1992; Eagly, 1987). When facing stress, men tend to respond with “fight or flight”; often, their response to a threat is combat. In nearly all studies, notes Shelley Taylor (2002), women who are under stress more often “tend and befriend”; they turn to friends and family for support. Among first-year college students, 5 in 10 males and 7 in 10 females say it is very important to “help others who are in difficulty” (Sax & others, 2002).

Women’s connections as mothers, daughters, sisters, and grandmothers bind families (Rossi & Rossi, 1990). Women spend more time caring for both preschoolers and aging parents (Eagly & Crowley, 1986). Compared with men, they buy three times as many gifts and greeting cards, write two to four times as many personal letters, and make 10 to 20 percent more long-distance calls to friends and family (Putnam, 2000). Asked to provide photos that portray who they are, women include more photos of parents and of themselves with others (Clancy & Dollinger, 1993). For women, especially, a sense of mutual support is crucial to marital satisfaction (Acitelli & Antonucci, 1994).

Smiling, of course, varies with situations. Yet across more than 400 studies, women’s greater connectedness has been expressed in their generally higher rate of smiling (LaFrance & others, 2003). For example, when Marianne LaFrance (1985) analyzed 9,000 college yearbook photos and when Amy Halber-stadt and Martha Saitta (1987) studied 1,100 magazine and newspaper photos and 1,300 people in shopping malls, parks, and streets, they consistently found that females were more likely to smile.

When you want empathy and understanding, someone to whom you can disclose your joys and hurts, to whom do you turn? Most men and women usually turn to women. One explanation for this male-female empathy difference is that women tend to outperform men at reading others’ emotions. In her analysis of 125 studies of men’s and women’s sensitivity to nonverbal cues, Judith Hall (1984) discerned that women are generally superior at decoding others’ emotional messages. For example, shown a 2-second silent film clip of the face of an upset woman, women guess more accurately whether she is criticizing someone or discussing her divorce. Women also are more often strikingly better than men at recalling others’ appearance, report Marianne Schmid Mast and Judith Hall (2006). Finally, women are more skilled at expressing emotions nonverbally, says Hall. This is especially so for positive emotion, report Erick Coats and Robert Feldman (1996). They had people talk about times they had been happy, sad, and angry. When shown 5-second silent video clips of those reports, observers could much more accurately discern women’s than men’s emotions when recalling happiness. Men, however, were slightly more successful in conveying anger.

Retrieved from Social Psychology (10-th ed.) by David G. Myers, Glencoe/Mcgraw-Hill; 2010, P. 169.

Послетекстовые задания.

1. Give adequate Russian equivalents of the italicized worlds in the text.

2. Find 10 words with suffixes. Give their Russian equivalents.

3. Translate the sentences of the bold type into Russian.

4. Make up a summary of the text in three-four sentences in English.

5. Add more ideas to the list. When you want empathy and understanding, someone to whom you can disclose your joys and hurts, to whom do you turn? Write down on the paper in three-four sentences in English.

РЕКТОРСКАЯ КОНТРОЛЬНАЯ РАБОТА

АТТЕСТАЦИОННЫЙ БИЛЕТ № _14___

Направления подготовки:

44.04.01 Педагогическое образование

Психология

ЗАДАНИЕ. Прочитайте текст. Выполните послетекстовые задания.

Text. . Expecting less

In 1978, psychologist discovered that women’s pay satisfaction tends to be equal to or higher than that of men in similar position, even though women typically earn less then men doing the same work. For years later, a broader study looked at many different types of organizations and reached a similar conclusion, which the author of this study, the social psychologist Faye Crosby called “the paradox of the contented female worker.” Seventeen years later, in 1999, a study of two management researchers confirmed this finding again. Even at the turn of the twenty first century, in other words, with all of the gains made by women during the previous four decades, even though they continue to earn less for the same work.

How to explain this phenomenon? Why would women be just as satisfied as men while earning less because they expect less: They go into the work force expecting to be paid less than men, so they’re not disappointed when those expectations are met. To test this theory, the psychologist Beth Martin surveyed a group of business students. After presenting them with information about salary ranges for the different types of jobs they would be qualified to take after graduating, she asked them to identify which job they expected to obtain and what they thought their starting salary would be. Working from the same information, women reported salary expectations between 3 and 32 percent lower than those reported by men for the same work.

In another study, two social psychologist, Brenda Major and Ellen Konar, conducted a mail survey of students in management programs at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In this survey, students were asked to indicate their salary expectations upon graduation as well as at their “career peak” – how much they expected to earn the year they earned the most. They found that the men expected to earn about 13 percent more than the women during their first year of working full time and expected to earn 32 percent more at the career peaks. Major and Konar ruled out several potential explanations for these differences, such as gender differences in the importance of pay or in the importance of doing interesting work, gender differences in their supervisors’ assessments of the student’s skills or qualifications.

Another study also found similar gender differences in ideas about how much money was “fair pay” for particular jobs. Using college senior at Michigan State University, researchers discovered that women’s estimates of “fair pay” averaged 4 percent less than men’s estimates for their first jobs and 23 percent less than men’s for fair career-peak pay. These three studies suggest that women as a rule expect to be paid less than men expected to be paid for the same work.

Our interviews bore out these findings. One standard question we asked was “Are you usually successful in getting what you want?” To our initial surprise, almost every woman we talked to said yes. When we probed further, however, it turned out that many of the women we talked to felt as though they were successful at getting what they wanted in part because they didn’t want very much. But this doesn’t male sense, you may say. Why would a woman who is poorly paid be satisfied with her salary under any circumstances? Surprisingly, expensive research has documented that pay satisfactions correlates with pay expectations, and not with how much may be possible or with what the market be bear. In other words, satisfactions depends not whether it falls in line with your expectations. People are dissatisfied with their pay only when it falls short of what they expected to get, not when it falls short of what they could have gotten. And most women don’t expect to get paid very much, so when they don’t get much – as so often happens – they are less likely to be disappointed.

Retrieved from Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide by Linda Babcock, Sara Laschever. – Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford; 2003. – P. 41-43.

Послетекстовые задания.

1. Give adequate Russian equivalents of the italicized worlds in the text.

2. Find 10 words with prefixes. Give their Russian equivalents.

3. Translate the sentences of the bold type into Russian.

4. Make up a summary of the text in three-four sentences in English.

5. Add more ideas to the list. Are you usually successful in getting what you want? Do you agree with Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881, British politician) “What we anticipate seldom occurs, what we least expected generally happens”? Write down your opinion on the paper in three-four sentences in English.

РЕКТОРСКАЯ КОНТРОЛЬНАЯ РАБОТА

АТТЕСТАЦИОННЫЙ БИЛЕТ № __15__

Направления подготовки:

44.04.01 Педагогическое образование

Психология

ЗАДАНИЕ. Прочитайте текст. Выполните послетекстовые задания.

Text. Life Skills Education

For health promotion, life skills education is based on the teaching of generic life skills and includes the practice of skills in relation to major health and social problems. Life skills lessons should be combined with health information, and may also be combined with other approaches, such as programmes designed to effect changes in environmental and social factors which influence the health and development of young people.

In life skills education, children are actively involved in a dynamic teaching and learning process. The methods used to facilitate this active involvement include working in small groups and pairs, brainstorming, role play, games and debates. A life skills lesson may start with a teacher exploring with the students what their ideas or knowledge are about a particular situation in which a life skill can be used. The children may be asked to discuss the issues raised in more detail in small groups or with a partner.

The wide range of motives for teaching life skills to children and adolescents include the prevention of drug abuse and teenage pregnancy, the promotion of mental well-being and cooperative learning. For adults, life skills appear in programmes such as communication and empathy skills for medical students and counsellors, problem solving and critical thinking for business managers, and coping with emotions and stressors for people with mental health problems.

Given the wide ranging relevance of life skills, an optimal strategy for the introduction of life skills teaching would be to make it available to all children and adolescents in schools. Life skills teaching promotes the learning of abilities that contribute to positive health behaviour, positive interpersonal relationships, and mental well-being. Ideally, this learning should occur at a young age, before negative patterns of behaviour and interaction have become established.

Life skills lessons are both active and experiential. In passive learning, the teacher passes on knowledge and the learner is the recipient of information (as in didactic teaching). Active learning, however, engages the teacher and pupil in a dynamic process of learning by using methods such as brainstorming, group discussion and debates.

Experiental learning is based on actual practice of what is being taught, for example, using games and role play. Life skills lessons use such active and experiental methods, and should also include homework assignments that encourage pupils to extend their analysis and practice of life skills to their lives at home and in their communities. Traditional children's games, often used in life skills lessons, offer one good example of how life skills are learned through doing, and are taught using activities that can be continued outside the classroom. For example, games like being led blindfold around a room are used to teach trust, and whispering games, where a message is whispered from person to person, are used to teach listening skills.

Retrieved from Life Skills Education in School. Programme on Mental Health. World Health Organization. Geneva; 1997, P. 5.

Послетекстовые задания.

1. Give adequate Russian equivalents of the italicized worlds in the text.

2. Find 10 words with prefixes. Give their Russian equivalents.

3. Translate the sentences of the bold type into Russian.

4. Make up a summary of the text in three-four sentences in English.

5. Add more ideas to the list. Do you agree with the author that Life skills are abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour? Write down your opinion on the paper in three-four sentences in English.