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The purpose of this paper is to explores the factors that might lead an individual to pursue part‐time (PT) employment.

The paper hypothesized that employees have very different motivations for PT working, and that these motivations will affect their work experiences. The paper builds on recent research focusing on attitudinal differences between “voluntary PT” and “involuntary PT” employees by developing and evaluating a measure of reasons for accepting PT work. Current full‐time (FT) and PT employees from several samples (n=1,069) completed a survey including our reasons scale, plus measures of facet job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intentions.

Cluster analyses of reasons indicated four groups of PT employees – voluntary, involuntary, caretakers, and students. These sub‐groups differed from each other, and from FT workers, on most outcome measures. Students and involuntary PT workers generally reported lower job attitudes and greater intentions to turnover than did caretakers, voluntary PT workers, and FT workers.

Future research should attempt to sample a larger number of PT workers, and begin investigating understudied outcomes (e.g. task and contextual performance, actual withdrawal behavior).

It is shown that PT workers are heterogeneous in both their reasons and their attitudes. The paper stresses the value of examining specific factors which result in an individual choosing to work PT in an effort to better understand his or her experiences on that job. A short measure is presented which may be used to further examine the implications of various reasons behind PT job choice.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate a model of how cognitive biases and framing effects influence managerial decision‐making about strategic initiatives.

Because the author was interested in understanding real‐world practices about strategic decisions, he chose to conduct a quasi‐experimental field study over a three‐year period with managers in a multinational corporation. He developed a questionnaire and a series of vignettes for the independent measures, and examined database records of decisions for the dependent measures.

After validating the instrument items, the author conducted a confirmatory factor analysis for model fit, and then tested the model's predictive ability and interactions. The model indicated that risk aversion, overconfidence, anchoring, and expected utility affected commitment decisions, and these factors interacted with framing effects.

Decision‐makers often fall victim to biases and make sub‐optimal decisions, especially regarding long‐term strategic initiatives. To illustrate, some managers may continue to invest in initiatives that have little or no hope of succeeding because they have already invested heavily in them, or they may prematurely terminate them. An explanatory model is helpful to management and organizational developers to learn how to make optimal decisions using normative rules.

Funding agencies such as the Office of Naval Research, Department of Homeland Security, and others, have reduced funding for non‐tactical operations. Simultaneously, organizations are squeezing their overhead budgets (where security initiatives fall) and are focusing more on revenue generation given current economic climates. Thus, in both governmental sectors and in commercial settings, there are reasons to believe that strategic security initiatives are being sacrificed, and those that survive must be compelling. To assist organizational leaders with these difficult choices, it is critical to understand biases that affect decisions about strategic security initiatives. The purpose of this paper is to validate and empirically test the predictability of a theoretical model, from which implications can be made for research and practice.

Using behavioral decision theory, a randomized longitudinal study was conducted over three years with a multinational corporation with headquarter‐offices in the UK and the USA, and regional offices in India, Germany and France. From these data, a model was developed and tested for fit with a confirmatory factor analysis and its predictive ability was tested using structured equation modeling.

It was found that risk aversion, overconfidence, adjustment of cognitive anchors, and expected utility biases affected whether managers and other stakeholders continued or terminated strategic security initiatives.

Prematurely terminating or over commitment to a strategic initiative can be costly if not significantly damaging to an organization or government military or intelligence agency. Understanding how biases factor into these decisions can help strategic initiative decision makers improve their decisions and assist them in recognizing normative rules or optimal (straddle point) solutions.