Adaptive Performance: A New Scale to Measure Individual Performance in Organizations

As a component of overall employee performance, adaptive performance refers to the ability of an individual to change his or her behaviour to meet the demands of a new environment. The concept is relevant to firms that face especially complex and volatile business conditions. Research and practice have been hampered by a general lack of a widely available, psychometrically sound, multidimensional scale of adaptive performance that is applicable across a wide range of job contexts. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, we develop and evaluate a 19‐item scale measuring five dimensions of adaptive performance. Copyright © 2012 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Validating the international tourist role scale

This study was designed to validate the international tourist role scale and the three dimensions it revealed. The purpose of this attitudinal scale was to measure the tourist role typology. United States adult outbound tourists flying with 11 major airlines returned useful questionnaires. This study validated the role scale as a reliable one that properly identified three conceptual dimensions of international tourist typology and successfully provided measures of tourists’ novelty-seeking preferences on the three dimensions. The study demonstrated, however, that the scale would measure the novelty-seeking preferences of international tourists more effectively if it were supplemented by other measures.     

An Assessment of the Psychometric Properties of the Perceived Stress Scale‐10 (PSS10) with Business and Accounting Students

Using a sample of 557 undergraduate business students from three U.S. comprehensive universities, this study examined: (a) the factor structure of the Perceived Stress Scale‐10 (PSS10; Cohen and Williamson, 1988); (b) the invariance of its factor structure; (c) the scale's reliability; and (d) its convergent and divergent validity. Confirmatory factor analyses supported a structure with two primary factors, General Distress and Ability‐to‐Cope, loading on a single second‐order factor, Perceived Stress. Furthermore, this model was confirmed for designated subpopulations including the 264 accounting majors who participated in the study. Notably absent in prior research, this study found two items, numbers 2 and 9, to load significantly on both the General Distress and Ability‐to‐Cope factors with men and the full sample, respectively. Item–total correlations, coefficient alphas, and Spearman‐Brown reliability coefficients supported the reliability of the items loading on the full scale as well as on each of the two primary factors. Combined, these findings provide compelling evidence in support of the PSS10 as a stress assessment measure for business students in general, and accounting students in particular. In fact, given its practical expediency in terms of administration and scoring, the PSS10 appears to be a tool that could be used by university administrators and potentially by human resource personnel at accounting and business organizations to assess student/employee perceived stress levels before the onset of burnout tendencies, thus facilitating more timely and cost‐effective intervention strategies.     

International leisure tourists’ involvement profile

The involvement construct has received a great deal of attention in recent years. However, the majority of research on this topic has focused on internal tourists, recreational activities participants, or associated services and products. Using survey data collected from European leisure tourists at an international destination, this study examined the underlying dimensions of their involvement. Scale unidimensionality is first revealed by an exploratory factor analysis and validated by a confirmatory factor analysis. The data suggested that this is a three dimensional construct: pleasure/interest, risk probability, and risk importance. Construct validity, including discriminant, convergent and nomological validity, and reliability are also satisfactorily established.     

The effects of scale in economic development: Tourism in Bali

Eric E. Rodenburg, The Effects of Scale in Economic Development: Tourism in Bali. Annals of Tourism Research 1980, VII(2):177–196. Planners promote tourism to meet the objectives of economic development. Different scales of enterprise, however, meet the objectives of planners in different ways. Data from Bali, Indonesia, illustrate the differential social and economic effects of three scales of tourism enterprise; large industrial, small industrial and craft tourism. A comparison of these segments of the continuum of tourism enterprises in Bali shows that the objectives of economic planners (increased earnings, foreign exchange, investment, job opportunities, production, entreprenuership, infrastructure, and the minimization of adverse social and cultural effects) are not best met through the promotion of large, industrially scaled enterprises.     

Tourism as a cultural domain the case of Taos,New Mexico

This paper offers an analysis of tourism as a cultural domain through a combination of hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling procedures not previously used together in touristic studies. The data for the study were gathered from interviews with 89 tourists who completed a card-sorting task for fifty items selected as representative of the range of real behavioral choices available to visitors to the Taos region. The two solutions presented, based on the U-statistic and the KYST program, are in reasonably good agreement and also correlate well with an earlier analysis reported in this journal (Kemper 1979). The approach used here not only enhances ethnographic understanding of tourism as a cultural domain and complements field research carried out using more traditional participant-observation and survey interview methodologies, but also offers a number of valuable applications for conceptualizing and marketing tourism.     

The effects of scale in tourism projects in developing countries

The paper by Rodenburg (Annals VII:2:177–196) on the effect of scale in tourism development in Bali raises important questions relating to tourism development in Third World countries. One fundamental question is whether large-scale development is inevitable in such countries, or whether there is persuasive evidence to support smaller and craft scale enterprises. This article undertakes a critical review of Rodenburg's analysis and concludes that large scale developments are likely to be inevitable because of external economies of scale and market structures in international tourism, but that the consequences of such developments can be foreseen and therefore mitigated by appropriate pre-project planning.