The aim of this study was to identify the chief social and economic factors predicting the strength of national Association Football (soccer) teams. Copyright (c) 2007 Southwestern Social Science Association.

The authors examine the dependence of organizational commitment on satisfaction with job characteristics that are valued differently in 29 nations. Evidence is found for the moderating effects of national culture. Satisfaction with job characteristics that are highly valued in individualistic cultures has an increasingly strong effect on commitment as national individualism increases, while satisfaction with collectivist job characteristics has an increasingly weaker effect. Similarly, satisfaction with job characteristics that are highly valued in masculine cultures has an increasingly strong effect on commitment as national masculinity increases, while satisfaction with feminine job characteristics has an increasingly weaker effect. These findings show that the sources of organizational commitment are culturally conditioned and that their effects are predictable from Hofstede's value dimensions. The authors discuss the practical implications of these findings and suggest that cultural differences in the psychological contract may also affect the relationships between job satisfaction and commitment.

This research reports an investigation into the relationship between neuroticism, extraversion and cognitive test performance in a real selection situation. Strong support is found for the proposition that neuroticism is associated with lower performance on numerical reasoning tests in stressful situations and that the obtained scores provide a significant under-estimate of the neurotic's true ability in such circumstances. The state-trait model of anxiety and the concept of cognitive interference appear to provide an adequate explanation of the findings. The implications of these findings for the assessment of cognitive ability in selection are discussed.

This article examines organizational commitment in a sample of 49 countries. Affective commitment (AC) varies significantly by country and is strongly related to dimensions of personality. AC is high in countries where the population is extravert and low in countries where the population is neurotic. Consistent with the notion that high extraversion and low neuroticism are indicative of positive affect, AC is also found to be high in countries where the population is happy. Socioeconomic conditions have a statistically significant but marginal influence on AC. AC tends to be slightly higher in countries with low levels of unemployment and high economic activity rates but is unrelated to per capita national income. There are significant relationships between AC and some aspects of national culture. AC is negatively related to societal cynicism and positively to egalitarian commitment. In general, however, most cultural dimensions are unrelated to AC.

We present a criterion for uniform in time convergence of the weak error of the Euler scheme for Stochastic Differential equations (SDEs). The criterion requires (i) exponential decay in time of the space-derivatives of the semigroup associated with the SDE and (ii) bounds on (some) moments of the Euler approximation. We show by means of examples (and counterexamples) how both (i) and (ii) are needed to obtain the desired result. If the weak error converges to zero uniformly in time, then convergence of ergodic averages follows as well. We also show that Lyapunov-type conditions are neither sufficient nor necessary in order for the weak error of the Euler approximation to converge uniformly in time and clarify relations between the validity of Lyapunov conditions, (i) and (ii). Conditions for (ii) to hold are studied in the literature. Here we produce sufficient conditions for (i) to hold. The study of derivative estimates has attracted a lot of attention, however not many results are known in order to guarantee exponentially fast decay of the derivatives. Exponential decay of derivatives typically follows from coercive-type conditions involving the vector fields appearing in the equation and their commutators; here we focus on the case in which such coercive-type conditions are non-uniform in space. To the best of our knowledge, this situation is unexplored in the literature, at least on a systematic level. To obtain results under such space-inhomogeneous conditions we initiate a pathwise approach to the study of derivative estimates for diffusion semigroups and combine this pathwise method with the use of Large Deviation Principles.