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We investigate how teams develop and transfer general problem-solving skills across two ill-structured problems. We draw on cognitive flexibility theory in the instructional literature and propose that teams will achieve a higher performance on a novel task or transfer when they receive an external task intervention (i.e., task variation) and when the internal mechanisms (i.e., divergent mental models) are developed to make sense of the external intervention. To test these predictions, we designed a longitudinal experiment with 17 student teams that encountered task variation during their work on an initial task. Consistent with our predictions, we found that teams that experienced variations and whose mental models diverged during their work on an initial task achieved higher performance on a novel task than teams that experienced variation and whose mental models converged. Implications for the transfer of learning in teams on ill-structured problems are discussed.

Maximizing IT return on investment requires new approaches to designing and managing assets, determining priorities, setting strategies, and allocating constrained resources. Adapted from the source document.

Personal and collective threat can breed ethnocentrism and intergroup conflict. We present a model of group‐based control to elucidate motivational underpinnings of these effects from a social psychological perspective. Reviewed empirical evidence illustrates the effects of personal threat on ethnocentric attitudes. Moreover, evidence reveals that perceived lack of personal control of important aspects of one's life induces people to support and defend social in‐groups. This is because people heuristically believe that groups are homogeneous actors of shared goals that may promise the symbolic restoration of group members' sense of global control. We discuss the effects complex real‐world threats (economic crises, terrorism, and climate change) have on ethnocentric tendencies and how we explain this within the control model. Finally, we elaborate on implications for reducing ethnocentric threat responses and on possible prosocial consequences of threat that may help to solve societal crises.

According to common wisdom, which is supported by extant psychological theorizing, a core feature of political conservatism (vs. liberalism) is the resistance to (vs. acceptance of) societal change. We propose that an empirical examination of the actual difference in political liberals' and conservatives' attitudes toward change across different sociopolitical issues may call into question this assumed association between political orientation and relation to change. We examined this proposition in four studies conducted in Germany. In Study 1, we assessed lay people's intuitions about liberals' and conservatives' attitudes toward change. Results of this study concur with theoretical assumptions that liberals accept and conservatives resist change. In Study 2a, Study 2b, and Study 3, self‐identified liberals and conservatives were asked whether they would resist or accept change on various sociopolitical issues. Results of these studies suggest that both conservatives and liberals resist and accept societal changes, depending on the extent to which they approve or disapprove of the status quo on a given sociopolitical issue. Overall, our findings provide no evidence for a one‐directional association between political orientation and the tendency to accept or resist change. These findings therefore challenge theoretical and lay assumptions regarding general, context‐independent psychological differences underlying political ideologies.

As part of a mail survey about their work experiences, university faculty members reported their specific emotional reactions to group inequities in faculty pay and benefits. The results indicate that sadness, fear, and anger are distinct emotional responses to a collective disadvantage. Group‐based anger mediated the relationship between collective disadvantage and willingness to protest whereas group‐based sadness mediated the relationship between collective disadvantage and organizational loyalty. Based on an integration of cognitive appraisal models of emotion with RD theory, four other predictors of intergroup emotions—(1) the legitimacy of the process that produced the deprivation, (2) whether another agent was responsible, (3) group efficacy, and (4) whether the situation would improve or become worse—were identified and tested. The measurement of specific emotional reactions to perceived collective disadvantage extends and refines RD approaches to collective action and organizational loyalty.

AbstractPublic legitimation of legal decisionmaking can be promoted through various strategies. We examine strategies of legitimation that are premised on personalizing the public image of legal agents. A personalized public administration emphasizes individual decisionmakers and seeks legitimacy through familiarity with the character, identity, and virtues of individual agents, whereas a non‐personalized public administration projects an ethos of technocratic decisionmaking, seeking legitimacy through institutional objectivity and impartiality. We conducted an experiment to examine the efficacy of personalization strategies in the context of a politically charged legal affair: the criminal cases involving the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. We focus on people's perceived objectivity of the office of the Israeli attorney general (AG), given exposure (vs. no exposure) to different types of personal information about the AG, and while manipulating the salience of contrasting decisions concerning Netanyahu (indicting him on several counts of corruption versus exculpating him in others). We find that exposure to personal information about the AG decreased the perceived objectivity of his office, compared to no exposure to personal information, regardless of the type of information, decision salience, and respondents' political leanings. Our findings, therefore, support the legitimating potential of the non‐personalization of decisionmakers, and show that it pertains to people positioned as both "losers" and "winners" with regard the political impact of the decision. The study further reflects the capacity of nonabstract real‐world, real‐time, analyses to shed light on the drivers of public trust in legal decisionmaking in politically polarized contexts—an issue of pertinence in many contemporary democracies.