Personality traits and work performance among academicians in university: leadership styles as a mediator

Psychologists have argued that Western-based explanations of personality traits, leadership styles, and work performance may not capture Eastern norms and values. This study compares academicians’ personality traits and work performance in a traditional Indonesian Javanese community using transformational and Asta Brata as western and Hindu philosophy of leadership styles scales, respectively. This study uses transformational and Asta Brata leadership styles to examine how leadership styles act as mediators between personality traits and work performance. The respondents were 342 academics from East Java universities selected using multistage cluster random sampling. The results showed that the transformational leadership style mediates only the relationship between agreeableness with contextual performance and openness to task performance. Asta Brata’s leadership style mediates openness to experience, extraversion, and agreeableness with tasks and contextual performance. In conclusion, academicians recognize that Asta Brata is better than the transformational leadership style as a mediator between personality traits and work performance. These data imply Asta Brata’s leadership approaches better resemble Javanese leadership and are accepted by followers than transformational leadership. Finally, Asta Brata’s leadership styles explain the big five personality traits and work performance better than transformational leadership styles

A Team Formation Framework for Managing Diversity in Multidisciplinary Engineering Project

Team formation is one of the essential elements in constructing effective teamwork of any team size that requires different skill sets. Diversity in team encourages students to challenge and compete with one another while searching for new ideas, which in turn can lead to a better team performance. In a well-functioning diverse teams, the students who performed poorly may gain benefit by observing how excellent students approach the assignments. They may also benefit by getting advice and assistance from the excellent students. Studies have shown that Malaysian university graduates lack of team skills. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for forming a diverse multidisciplinary team among engineering undergraduates based on selected criteria such as individual personality type, gender, and other relevant demographic information. The proposed framework can also be used to design an automated team-formation system based on the identified metrics. The purpose of the framework is to consolidate the existing team formation literature, and to develop and test interventions for maximizing individual member and team performance as a whole that makes an effective team. For this study, a multidisciplinary approach was used where first year engineering students from three different faculties, namely Faculty of Electrical Engineering (FKE), Faculty of Mechanical Engineering (FKM), and Faculty of Biosciences and Medical Engineering (FBME) at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) worked on an innovation project using the Conceive, Design, Implement, and Operate (CDIO) framework. Keirsey Temperament Sorter was used as an instrument to identify an individual's personality type

A Team Formation Framework for Managing Diversity in Multidisciplinary Engineering Project

Team formation is one of the essential elements in constructing effective teamwork of any team size that requires different skill sets. Diversity in team encourages students to challenge and compete with one another while searching for new ideas, which in turn can lead to a better team performance. In a well-functioning diverse teams, the students who performed poorly may gain benefit by observing how excellent students approach the assignments. They may also benefit by getting advice and assistance from the excellent students. Studies have shown that Malaysian university graduates lack of team skills. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for forming a diverse multidisciplinary team among engineering undergraduates based on selected criteria such as individual personality type, gender, and other relevant demographic information. The proposed framework can also be used to design an automated team-formation system based on the identified metrics. The purpose of the framework is to consolidate the existing team formation literature, and to develop and test interventions for maximizing individual member and team performance as a whole that makes an effective team. For this study, a multidisciplinary approach was used where first year engineering students from three different faculties, namely Faculty of Electrical Engineering (FKE), Faculty of Mechanical Engineering (FKM), and Faculty of Biosciences and Medical Engineering (FBME) at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) worked on an innovation project using the Conceive, Design, Implement, and Operate (CDIO) framework. Keirsey Temperament Sorter was used as an instrument to identify an individual's personality type

Change Management Implementation Strategies for Small Businesses

Most organizational change initiatives fail because managers lack effective change management strategies. The purpose of this single case study was to explore change management strategies that outpatient care facility managers used to positively affect process improvements. The population consisted of 6 managers who completed change initiatives at a military, outpatient medical facility in Texas and 6 of their team members. Data were collected using semistructured interviews and organization documents, then analyzed based on the conceptual framework of Lewin’s change theory. Rowley’s 4-step process for analysis—organizing; getting acquainted with; classifying; coding and interpreting; and presenting and writing up the data—was used to identify 4 major themes through data saturation. From the data analysis, the following strategy themes emerged: building effective teams, establishing the foundation for the change, communicating throughout the change process, and solidifying the change. Managers in the healthcare industry can use the findings of this study as a guide to improve the outcomes of their process improvement initiatives by implementing the strategies provided by the manager participants. Thus, the findings of this study may be used to affect positive social change to improve patients’ quality of healthcare and community healthcare outreach programs through increased efficiencies and reduced expenditures