Judgmental-analytical procedures for adapting tests: Adaptation to Spanish of the Reasoning Tests Battery

Adapting a test between cultures or languages requires taking into account legal, linguistic, metric, and use-related considerations. Significantly more attention has been paid to the methodological aspects involved in the study of metric equivalence than to judgmental-analytical procedures prior to the empirical confirmation stage. However, considering the latter is crucial in the adaptation process. Along these lines, this paper seeks to describe and focus on the relevance of the previous stages, thereby offering a systematization process that comprises ten sections. This approach contributes to ensuring the construction of a test adapted and equivalent in as much as possible to the original. This process is exemplified by means of a Spanish language adaptation of a cognitive test originally designed in Portuguese for the Portuguese population, the Reasoning Test Battery. Copyright (C) 2013, Konrad Lorenz University Foundation. Published by Elsevier Espana, S.L.U.

Innovaciones organizativas en las empresas españolas: Análisis del comportamiento de las empresas.

[ES]La innovación organizativa es un fenómeno relativamente nuevo, del que existen menos estudios de los necesarios, y por lo tanto, es importante analizarlo. La innovación en el ámbito organizativo consiste en la introducción de nuevas prácticas empresariales en la organización del trabajo o de los procedimientos de la empresa, nuevos métodos de organización en los lugares de trabajo y nuevos métodos de gestión de las relaciones externas con otras empresas o instituciones públicas, una acción muy útil en la difícil situación socio-económica que se vive actualmente en España. El objetivo de este trabajo es conocer cuál es el comportamiento de las empresas españolas innovadoras en las actividades de innovación organizativa, según su número de empleados, su gasto en innovación, su facturación y su año de creación, y también, analizar cuál es el grado de importancia de distintos objetivos de las innovaciones organizativas que se han introducido en las empresas, mediante el análisis de los datos procedentes del panel de innovación tecnológica (PITEC).

Linking transformational leadership and organizational trust: has organizational commitment a mediating effect on it?

[EN] The main goal of this study is to analyze how organizational commitment has a mediating effect on the relation between transformational leadership and organizational trust. Therefore we developed an organization analysis based on a survey that was used to collect primary data from a sample of 58 employees. We obtained a 71% response rate and these data were analyzed using quantitative methodological techniques and linear regression. The research was conducted at the Serralves Foundation (Porto, Portugal) to empirically test the proposed research model and its hypotheses. The empirical results confirm that transformational leadership positively enhances organizational trust. However, transformational leadership and organizational trust are not significantly influenced by organizational commitment, thus not having a mediating effect on this relationship. Such results assume particular relevance because they become a basis for comparative studies in similar organizations. This study brings some theoretical contributions to the literature by analyzing the mediating effect of organizational commitment on the relation between transformational leadership and organizational trust in cultural organizations and has also some practical management implications, as it draws attention to the importance of a set of practices, job satisfaction oriented, which can effectively lead to organizational commitment intervention in the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational trust.