The Trials Of A Christian s Life - 889 Words

â€Å"6 In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7 These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.† As the end of my first semester in college comes to a close I feel blessed that I am able to write about the purpose of trials in a Christian’s life. Within this paper I hope to enlighten those who question the trials and difficulties that God gives us to face. By developing understanding that the reason for trials are to build up and test your faith, to help you mature as a Christian, as well as give new insight to something beyond your current circumstance. Testing of Faith God gives us trials that knock us down to the point that we feel hopeless and the obstacle is far too difficult to overcome. His purpose is not to turn us away from Him, but instead He wants us to seek comfort and strength in Him alone. Strong not only in the Christian faith, but also in Jewish culture, it is stressed that the endurance of testings from God should be viewed as a blessing, and to find joy in them as they express faith in God’s sovereignty. Trials are not meant to create bitterness or anger in a person’s heart. When God gives us trials he has a purpose in mind that pertains only to us. Patience One of the most important virtues of the bible is patience as theShow MoreRelatedConfronting Guilt In Franz Kafka’s The Trial Essay1275 Words   |  6 PagesIn Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Josef K. is guilty; his crime is that he does not accept his own humanity. This crime is not obvious throughout the novel, but rather becomes gradually and implicitly apparent to the reader. Again and again, despite his own doubts and various shortcomings, K. denies his guilt, which is, in essence, to deny his very humanity. It is for this crime that the Law seeks him, for if he would only accept the guilt inherent in being human (and, by so doing, his humanity itself)Read MoreFear And Its Effect On The Way People Act Toward One Another849 Words   |  4 Pageslarge populations have are associated with religion; Christianity in particular. Religion is an aspect of one’s life that is used as guidance, as a set of rules to live a moral life, and as a comfort blanket; because of this, it is easy to instill fear into a religious person when they are presented with something that is able to compromise their security, in both life and their eternal life. Religion is organized in a way that unites people of common faith through social gatherings such as church,Read MoreAnalysis Of Shylock : The Vulture1063 Words   |  5 Pagesappears to be irrelevant. Which really questions what is fair or unfair. Shakespeare projects to the reader in his play The Merchant of Venice that Shylock received a fair trial. Shylock was certainly dehumanized and diminished. The adjectives that other characters use to refer about him creates the setting for his trial. For example, Gratiano addresses Shylock as an animal, he says, O, be thou damned, inexecrable dog (4.1.130). 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In his play he uses examples of how tough situations can bring out a person s true self. Using the word crucible has a significance between the characters and title since the definition is a severe trial. In The Crucible John Proctor, Rebecca Nurse, and Giles Corey are characters who illustrate being tested by the Witch Trials. These characters all struggle against

Yales Five Stage Developmental Model - Ronald Reagan -...

Exercise #4 Social Movements 1) STAGES OF THE CAMPAIGN Using Yale’s five-stage developmental model, identify the stages of Ronald Reagan’s first presidential campaign giving specific examples from history. Give specific attention to applying the stages of a campaign history. Document your sources using APA format. You must use EBSCO or other on-line sources available through Amberton Library. You may also use books available through Ebrary and net library to complete this assignment. These on-line books are available on the library’s on-line resources. Do not try to complete this assignment by using websites for speeches. Yale’s five stage developmental model gives us examples of what should†¦show more content†¦But let our friends and those who may wish us ill take note: the United States has an obligation to its citizens and to the people of the world never to let those who would destroy freedom dictate the future course of human life on this planet. I would regard my election as proof that we have renewed our resolve to preserve world peace and freedom† p. 171. Although his contenders would try to portray Reagan as a warmonger, he repeatedly told voters that it was not his intent to make war but rather to create peace by building superior forces. Legitimacy is the second step in Yale’s model and simply put is being considered trustworthy and believable by your target audience. An example in the text states that a candidate, Larson (2010) â€Å"gains legitimacy by winning his political party’s primary election† p. 285; thus us the case in 1979 when Ronald Reagan won the Republican’s nod as the candidate for president in the election of 1980. In fact, it was more the illegitimacy of the Carter Campaign that helped Ronald Reagan charm voters. Voters that were upset over low employment, the economy, and foreign policy were a driving factor behind the fears Americans felt. Voters were ripe and the Reagan Campaign was there for the picking. Scheele, Henry Z (1981) â€Å"Ronald Reagan benefited in part from the conditions of his times, the unpopularity of the seemingly inept incumbent President, the division within the Democratic Party, and the resurgence of conservative thought in

Do Personality Traits Predict Behaviour Free Essays

Do personality traits predict behaviour? The trait approach to personality is focused on differences between individuals. After type theorists such as Sheldon, who focused on body parts to determine temperament, and lexical researchers such as Galton who provided the first dictionary of words to describe behaviour, the principles underpinning trait theory were first outlined by Gordon Allport (1937). He found that one English-language dictionary alone contained more than 4,000 words describing different personality traits and suggested that it is how the traits come together that produces the uniqueness of all individuals. We will write a custom essay sample on Do Personality Traits Predict Behaviour? or any similar topic only for you Order Now Rather than relying on intuition or subjective judgement as did Freud and many other neo-Freudians, trait theorists used objective measurements to examine their constructs. The use of factor analysis was a major breakthrough in the trait approach and Raymond Cattell was the first to make the use of this to reduce the lists of traits to a smaller number. This marked the beginning of the search to discover the basis structure of personality. This essay will discuss the issues surrounding the use of personality measures such as Eysencks personality questionnaire (EPQ) and Costa and Mc Crae’s Big Five model (NEO-PIR) to predict behaviour. Cattell’s 16PF hasn’t had much of an impact but personality measures that followed such as Eysenck’s personality questionnaire, who claimed that 3 types/ supertraits, Extraversion, Neuroticism and Psychoticism, make up the basic structure of personality, and Costa and mc Crae’s Big Five Model measuring Openness, Conscientious, Extraversion, agreeableness and Neuroticism, have received a high level of support. The personality factors are found cross-culturally, in children as well as adults and specifically for Eysencks model in identical twins raised apart, evidence which seems to demonstrate that the observed personality differences are stable across time and have a genetic basis, although the underlying heritability estimate used in studies has been questioned by Plomin. Nevertheless, trait measures have great practical applications; they have been embraced by psychologists from almost every perspective and used by professionals working in a wide variety of settings, such as in the workplace and the education system etc, and are used to make important judgements about an individual’s behaviour in different situations. Employers have used scores from personality tests to make hiring and promotion decisions for many years (Roberts and Hogan, 2000). The methodology used to identify the dimensional structure of personality traits, factor analysis, is often challenged for not having a universally-recognized basis for choosing among solutions with different numbers of factors. More than one interpretation can be made of the same data factored the same way, and factor analysis cannot identify causality. However, some of the most common criticisms of trait theory centre on the fact that traits are often poor predictors of behaviour. While an individual may score high on assessments of a specific trait, he or she may not always behave that way in every situation. This was highlighted by Walter Mischel (1968, 1973) who stimulated a huge debate that raged until the early 1980s, concerning whether personality traits predict behaviour. At the heart of this debate was the questioning of the stability of traits across situations, known as the ‘personality paradox’. He demonstrated with his CAPs model that there is a complex interaction between situations and enduring individual personality differences, however the effects of many variables still have to be examined. Mischel criticised how personality measures were interpreted and used, demonstrating that on average personality measures statistically account for only around 10% of the variance observed in behaviour, therefore 90% is due to something other than the effect of personality. This reflects the fact that many factors contribute to any one piece of behaviour, such as: the characteristics of the specific situation, the person’s mood at that time, competing goals, etc. However an argument in trait theories defence is in regard to the . 30, . 40 correlation co-efficient. How high does a correlation have to be before its considered important? Research by Funder and Ozer (1983) looked at social psychological findings often cited for their â€Å"important† findings and found that they had similar co-efficient of . 36 and . 42. In their defence trait theorists argue that researchers often fail to provide a strong link between traits and behaviour is because they don’t measure behaviour correctly, only measuring one behaviour. As an alternative researchers can aggregate data, one study looked at trait measures of aggression and the number of aggressive acts students preformed, not only on one day but over the course of two weeks and found a correlation of . 1 between the aggregated measure and the trait score (Wu and Clarke, 2003). Burger (2008) states that when all the complex influences on our behaviour are taken into account we probably should be impressed that personality psychologists can explain even 10%. Mischels criticism has had beneficial effects in work settings, with the use of multiple measures of p ersonality such as, psychometric assessments, interviews, individual and group tasks used together as an assessment package to prevent overreliance on the psychometric tool. Furthermore, Mischels views led researchers to look very critically at their methodologies, admitting that measures were often weak and the selection of which traits to study was sometimes inappropriate (Funder, 1999,2001). Today most psychologists agree that the person and the situation react to determine behaviour ( Maggnusson, 1990) and Swan and Seyle (2005) conclude their review on Mischels work by saying that there are still instances where it is helpful to make distinctions between personal and situational determines of behaviour. How to cite Do Personality Traits Predict Behaviour?, Papers

Changing Corporate Culture at Vodafone free essay sample

French (1982, p. 640) defines Organizational Development (in the following abbreviated OD) as â€Å"long-range effort to improve an organization’s problem-solving capabilities †¦ to cope with changes in its external environment with the help of†¦change agents†. Different from other change approaches, OD focuses not only on parts of a system but rather on relationships and the system as an interconnected whole (Cummings and Worley 2005). OD deals with planned, episodic change but is an adaptive process for planning and implementing change in the same time. Focused on a core set of humanistic, democratic and developmental values (Palmer et al 2009), OD interventions may target changes in the organizational structure, mission, strategy, leadership or culture of a firm and wish to improve organizational effectiveness (Burke and Bradford 2005). All this is the reason why Palmer et al. (2009) use the image of a coach when referring to OD and managing change. The coach, used as a metaphor, understands managing and thus implementing change as shaping capabilities inside a system. We will write a custom essay sample on Changing Corporate Culture at Vodafone or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Possible actions might include the introduction of self-managed teams, quality circles and various methods for implementing and diagnosing change in connection with action research. Change processes in accordance with the image of coach are often pictured using Kurt Lewin’s change process model (Palmer et al. 2009). This model contains the following steps: (1)Unfreezing the context (2)Moving the situation (3)Refreezing the new state. In the following I will use this model to describe implications of the above introduced coach image when managing change. As a company of reference I chose Vodafone, a multinational telecommunications company, which was undergoing a larger change in organizational culture in the mid-1990’s (Eaton and Brown 2002). As explained earlier, the first phase of managing change is meant to unfreeze the status quo and establish the prerequisites for change (Palmer et al. 2009). Speaking in terms of OD, this includes the identification of the problem, subsequent engagement in a collaborative dialogue with an OD practitioner as well as gathering data for an initial diagnosis. According to the managing change image of the coach, classical OD interventions involve the top of the organization and are planned, action-oriented long-term undertakings (Palmer et al. 2009). Referring to the initial situation at Vodafone in the mid-1990s the company was facing an increased competition in the telecommunication market. The Management at Vodafone saw the necessity for a change of corporate culture as the rigid culture of ‘command and control’ management was weakening the ability to remain innovative in their challenging market (Anderson 2011). Knowing about the necessity for a change, Senior Management started an initial dialogue with HR specialists of the firm. As a result of this collaborative dialogue with OD practitioners (Palmer et al. 2009) the company started an intensive assessment and feedback activity with their employees (Eaton and Brown 2002). This was involving employees on different levels in the organization and resulted in more detailed information about the problem in the same time, which enabled the Management to detailed planning of necessary initiatives. The result clearly showed that the current culture was blocking teamwork and mutual accountability and employees wanted to be more included in decision making as well as participate in information exchange (Eaton and Brown 2002). Following Lewin’s model, the second stage is moving and involves the effort to â€Å"new behaviour through cognitive restructuring (Palmer et al. 2009:195)†. After the diagnosis actions are identified and implemented. As Palmer et al. state about the coach image of managing change, â€Å"he relies upon building in the right set of values, skills, and ‘drills’ that are deemed to be the best ones that organizational members, as players, will be able to draw on adeptly in order to achieve desired organizational outcomes (Palmer et al. 2009:31)†. It means the coach image centres on altering attitudes and behaviours to effect the intended change and accordingly supportive should be the actions that are implemented. For Vodafone this meant that a number of initiatives were implemented, including the development of shared values, the introduction of IT systems that shared and exchanged information inter-divisional learning as well as setting up a team-building program (Eaton and Brown 2002). As a major support to all initiatives Vodafone implemented a leadership coaching program. The goal was to teach top manager skills to conduct performance reviews, help employees to set goals, and general team coaching (Eaton and Brown 2002). Managers became change agents and sills training was used to reinforce and accelerate the change initiatives. Yet another advantage of using this method of supporting the transition to new methods was dissemination of information and individual objectives needed to create cultural change were actually carried out (Eaton and Brown 2002). The image of coach to managing change is also partly based on assumptions of group dynamics (Palmer et al. 2009). That means if one property of a system is changed (or trained differently in the case), it will activate connected parts of the system to change as well. According to Lewin’s model, the final step is refreezing the organizational operation again. This takes place after new behaviors have been incorporated into social and organizational relationships (Palmer et al. 2009). As mentioned earlier, managing a change according to the coach image is a long term undertakings. For the case of Vodafone the refreezing phase only was reached after a management of mutual accountability, delegation and empowerment was established (Eaton and Brown 2002). The result of the program became visible and managers began to trust more in teams and these teams started to solve problems themselves because feeling more confident. Palmer et al. (2009) conclude this process by referring to the importance of collecting and appraising post-action data. Even though, the change is implemented as intended, review seminars provide further data on possible follow up actions. Referring to Vodafone review seminars were held a couple of month after the leadership coaching program was finished. As Eaton and Brown (2002, p.287) determine â€Å"cultural change takes time† and â€Å"traditional attitudes to management do not die away overnight†. However, as mentioned previously, the coach image regards changes as affecting an interrelated system rather than only a single, closed entity. It holds high values as growth, self-realization and involvement as well as integrity. Maybe an organizational culture does not change all of a sudden but giving a right foundation to an evolutionary change could make this change more sustainable.