We investigated supervisors' mentoring motivations as a moderator of the relationship between protégé characteristics and mentoring experiences. Participants were employees of a marketing ...communications company. Results indicated that protégé advancement potential was more positively associated with psychosocial support from supervisors who were strongly motivated to mentor for intrinsic satisfaction. Potential for advancement was less positively associated with career support provided by supervisors who were motivated to mentor for the benefit of others. Protégé ingratiation was associated with greater psychosocial support from supervisors strongly motivated to mentor for their own self-enhancement but negatively related for those not strongly motivated by self-enhancement. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
The current study attempted to broaden our understanding of communication processes that occur in academic mentoring relationships. Using the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) program, it was ...found that mentors and protégés would mirror one another's communications. Moreover, mentors and protégés reacted differently in regards to their perceptions of what occurred during the course of the relationship relative to the different communication indicators. For example, mentor and protégé emotion-related communications were important for protégés, whereas cognitive-related communications were important for mentors. Assent communications were positively perceived by protégés, whereas they were negatively perceived by mentors. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Although many academic organizations offer formal mentoring programs, little is known about how individual characteristics of peer mentors and their protégés interact to reduce new-student stress. ...First-year college students participated in a peer-mentoring program designed to reduce stress. The results of this study demonstrated that protégés who received greater psychosocial and career support showed greater stress reduction. Additionally, protégés with a higher avoid performance goal orientation showed lesser stress reduction. Mentor avoid performance goal orientation was positively associated with stress reduction for protégés high on avoid performance goal orientation, but negatively associated for those low on avoid performance goal orientation.
Forty-two undergraduates completed a computer based interactive training simulation that required them to understand a potential hostage situation that arises during a customer service position in an ...Emergency Room. Each participant was given either deep or surface emotion regulation training prior to participation. Eye movements during the simulation were examined as a function of training type and understanding of the scenes in the simulation. Those given deep training had more fixations, whereas those with greater scene knowledge had longer fixations. Eye movements are predictive of understanding training during a simulation, and could be used as a trigger for adaptive training systems.
Temporal stability of ecosystem functioning increases the predictability and reliability of ecosystem services, and understanding the drivers of stability across spatial scales is important for land ...management and policy decisions. We used species‐level abundance data from 62 plant communities across five continents to assess mechanisms of temporal stability across spatial scales. We assessed how asynchrony (i.e. different units responding dissimilarly through time) of species and local communities stabilised metacommunity ecosystem function. Asynchrony of species increased stability of local communities, and asynchrony among local communities enhanced metacommunity stability by a wide range of magnitudes (1–315%); this range was positively correlated with the size of the metacommunity. Additionally, asynchronous responses among local communities were linked with species’ populations fluctuating asynchronously across space, perhaps stemming from physical and/or competitive differences among local communities. Accordingly, we suggest spatial heterogeneity should be a major focus for maintaining the stability of ecosystem services at larger spatial scales.
Global change drivers (GCDs) are expected to alter community structure and consequently, the services that ecosystems provide. Yet, few experimental investigations have examined effects of GCDs on ...plant community structure across multiple ecosystem types, and those that do exist present conflicting patterns. In an unprecedented global synthesis of over 100 experiments that manipulated factors linked to GCDs, we show that herbaceous plant community responses depend on experimental manipulation length and number of factors manipulated. We found that plant communities are fairly resistant to experimentally manipulated GCDs in the short term (10 y). In contrast, long-term (<10 y) experiments show increasing community divergence of treatments from control conditions. Surprisingly, these community responses occurred with similar frequency across the GCD types manipulated in our database. However, community responses were more common when 3 or more GCDs were simultaneously manipulated, suggesting the emergence of additive or synergistic effects of multiple drivers, particularly over long time periods. In half of the cases, GCD manipulations caused a difference in community composition without a corresponding species richness difference, indicating that species reordering or replacement is an important mechanism of community responses to GCDs and should be given greater consideration when examining consequences of GCDs for the biodiversity–ecosystem function relationship. Human activities are currently driving unparalleled global changes worldwide. Our analyses provide the most comprehensive evidence to date that these human activities may have widespread impacts on plant community composition globally, which will increase in frequency over time and be greater in areas where communities face multiple GCDs simultaneously.
Abstract
Dominance often indicates one or a few species being best suited for resource capture and retention in a given environment. Press perturbations that change availability of limiting resources ...can restructure competitive hierarchies, allowing new species to capture or retain resources and leaving once dominant species fated to decline. However, dominant species may maintain high abundances even when their new environments no longer favour them due to stochastic processes associated with their high abundance, impeding deterministic processes that would otherwise diminish them.
Here, we quantify the persistence of dominance by tracking the rate of decline in dominant species at 90 globally distributed grassland sites under experimentally elevated soil nutrient supply and reduced vertebrate consumer pressure.
We found that chronic experimental nutrient addition and vertebrate exclusion caused certain subsets of species to lose dominance more quickly than in control plots. In control plots, perennial species and species with high initial cover maintained dominance for longer than annual species and those with low initial cover respectively. In fertilized plots, species with high initial cover maintained dominance at similar rates to control plots, while those with lower initial cover lost dominance even faster than similar species in controls. High initial cover increased the estimated time to dominance loss more strongly in plots with vertebrate exclosures than in controls. Vertebrate exclosures caused a slight decrease in the persistence of dominance for perennials, while fertilization brought perennials' rate of dominance loss in line with those of annuals. Annual species lost dominance at similar rates regardless of treatments.
Synthesis.
Collectively, these results point to a strong role of a species' historical abundance in maintaining dominance following environmental perturbations. Because dominant species play an outsized role in driving ecosystem processes, their ability to remain dominant—regardless of environmental conditions—is critical to anticipating expected rates of change in the structure and function of grasslands. Species that maintain dominance while no longer competitively favoured following press perturbations due to their historical abundances may result in community compositions that do not maximize resource capture, a key process of system responses to global change.
Global change is impacting plant community composition, but the mechanisms underlying these changes are unclear. Using a dataset of 58 global change experiments, we tested the five fundamental ...mechanisms of community change: changes in evenness and richness, reordering, species gains and losses. We found 71% of communities were impacted by global change treatments, and 88% of communities that were exposed to two or more global change drivers were impacted. Further, all mechanisms of change were equally likely to be affected by global change treatments—species losses and changes in richness were just as common as species gains and reordering. We also found no evidence of a progression of community changes, for example, reordering and changes in evenness did not precede species gains and losses. We demonstrate that all processes underlying plant community composition changes are equally affected by treatments and often occur simultaneously, necessitating a wholistic approach to quantifying community changes.
Synthesising community responses to global change driver treatments is necessary to make predictions of future communities. Across 219 control–treatment comparisons, we find that communities are consistently being impacted by global change treatments, and multiple resource treatments result in the greatest community changes. However, communities are changing in many ways, and there is no ordered progression to these changes.
Data are reported from 3 studies that examined determinants of team performance-related assertiveness. Data from 149 college students demonstrated that assertiveness consists of multiple dimensions ...which were not all related to performance in a team decision-making task. Data from 225 business students indicated that correlations among self-report measures and peer ratings of the same assertive responses assigned by intact team members varied according to the interpersonal context in which scale items were framed. Data from 60 college students suggested that team performance-related assertiveness has a significant skill component. Whereas both attitudinally focused and skill-based training improved attitudes toward team member assertiveness, practice and feedback were essential to producing behavioral effects.
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