Organisational leaders' perceptions of the challenges and constraints of the leadership development of Blacks in South African private organisations

In recent years, it has become clear that a lot of corporate collapse can be traced down to poor leadership. As more and more black executives are climbing the corporate ladder, it is becoming all the more necessary to explore how their effective leadership development can occur with private organisations in South Africa. There are many challenges and constraints associated with the leadership development of these executives. This can be expected as they are entering an environment which has been largely white-dominated. As a result they find themselves facing the challenges of succeeding amidst negative perceptions they have experienced from their superiors and subtle pressures from subordinates. Therefore, it can only be expected that if organisations are to maintain a competitive advantage they need to understand how to effectively develop this new breed of leaders. Hence, the researcher has used a qualitative approach to investigate the complexities of the experiences of black executives in private organisations. In terms of the theoretical framework, the research focuses on some of the new approaches to leadership. It was discovered that leadership development is essentially a process that goes beyond mere training sessions, and largely involves the relationships one has within the organisation. This involves relationships with superiors, peers, and subordinates. The research indicates that if these relationships are managed effectively, leadership development is enhanced. Whilst the role of formal training programs appeared somewhat downplayed, it was clear that these programs had a strong role in terms of their psychological impact on participants. They certainly affected their perception of the organisation and their own self-efficacy. The research, therefore illustrates how there are a variety of individual and organisational attributes that form a basis for effective leadership development of blacks in private organisations. The researcher argues that if these are implemented, organisational well-being is enhanced

Design for Interpretability: Meeting the Certification Challenge for Surgical Robots

This paper presents a perspective on some issues related to safety in the context of autonomous surgical robots. To meet the challenge of safety certification and bring about acceptance of the technology by the public, we propose principles for a design paradigm that goes in the direction of safety by construction: design with certification in mind, clearly distinguish the notion of safety from that of responsibility, view the human component as scaffolding in the progressive transfer of decision-making to the machine, preserve interpretability by renouncing black-box approaches, leverage interpretability to assign responsibility, and take corrective action only when the semantic of the human-machine interface is violated

Bringing Bounded Rationality Back in: a Behavioral Approach to Incentive Systems, Organizational Design, and Social Interactions in Organizations

1Dottorato di Ricerca in Management (XXV ciclo), LUISS Guido Carli, Roma, 2013. Relatori: Prof. Paolo Boccardelli, Prof. Nicolai J. Foss.openThe Principal's Theory of Mind: The Role of Mentalizing for Reward Design and Management in Principal-Agent Relations (with Foss, N.J.). Motivating Knowledge Sharing when Rewards are Ambiguous: the Role of Complementary Motivators (with Foss, N. J., Pedersen, T., and Reinholt, M.). Physical Separation in the Workplace: Separation Cues, Sensemaking, and Behavioral Responses (with Foss, N. J., and Christensen, P. H.). Organizational Design and the Credibility of Delegated Decision Rights (with Foss, K., and Foss, N. J.). Network Size and Prosocial Behavior: Taking Bounded Rationality into Account (with Foss, N. J., and Pedersen, T.). Brokerage and Creativity: A Bounded Rationality Perspective (with Pedersen, T.).openDottorato di Ricerca in ManagementSTEA, DIEGOStea, Dieg

Bad, mad, and cooked: Moral responsibility for civilian harms in human-AI military teams

This chapter explores moral responsibility for civilian harms by human-artificial intelligence (AI) teams. Although militaries may have some bad apples responsible for war crimes and some mad apples unable to be responsible for their actions during a conflict, increasingly militaries may 'cook' their good apples by putting them in untenable decision-making environments through the processes of replacing human decision-making with AI determinations in war making. Responsibility for civilian harm in human-AI military teams may be contested, risking operators becoming detached, being extreme moral witnesses, becoming moral crumple zones or suffering moral injury from being part of larger human-AI systems authorised by the state. Acknowledging military ethics, human factors and AI work to date as well as critical case studies, this chapter offers new mechanisms to map out conditions for moral responsibility in human-AI teams. These include: 1) new decision responsibility prompts for critical decision method in a cognitive task analysis, and 2) applying an AI workplace health and safety framework for identifying cognitive and psychological risks relevant to attributions of moral responsibility in targeting decisions. Mechanisms such as these enable militaries to design human-centred AI systems for responsible deployment.Comment: 30 pages, accepted for publication in Jan Maarten Schraagen (Ed.) 'Responsible Use of AI in Military Systems', CRC Press [Forthcoming

On Knowledge Behaviors

Where large organizations make an effort to boost knowledge sharing, the solutions they fabricate can aggravate problems. Designing jobs for knowledge behaviors and recruiting people who are positive about sharing to start with will boost knowledge stocks and flows at low cost

An Evaluation Schema for the Ethical Use of Autonomous Robotic Systems in Security Applications

We propose a multi-step evaluation schema designed to help procurement agencies and others to examine the ethical dimensions of autonomous systems to be applied in the security sector, including autonomous weapons systems

Leveraging distance learning tools for broadbasing education in construction industry disciplines: The importance of a continuous social discourse

History of distance learning dates back to the late 1960’s. However with the advent of the Internet it was repositioned as a major tool for course delivery so that students who are physically prevented from attending class room settings can undertake learning within a setting of their choice aligned with a pace that they can easily cope with. Marketing of distance learning programmes is a diversified business activity in many universities and the School of Construction and property Management (SCPM)utilises the tool predominantly in delivering Masters Courses and PhD sessions over the Internet. Although structural and organisational aspects of DL courses facilitatedby computer mediated communication (CMC) have been dealt with in literature, the degree to which these tools satisfying social aspects of a classroom setting (e.g.guidance and support, body language, feedback, interactions with other learners etc.,)has not received adequate consideration in existing literature. This paper therefore investigates the extent to which the distant learning tools address the wider aspects of supporting a classroom situation during its operation so that appropriate improvements can be made in utilising these tools to attract more students for the relevant construction disciplines. The objective of the paper is to disseminate the preliminary findings out of literature review based on a Teaching and Learning Quality Improvement Scheme (TLQIS)project at SCPM

On the Transition and Migration of Flight Functions in the Airspace System

Since ~400 BC, when man first replicated flying behavior with kites, up until the turn of the 20th century, when the Wright brothers performed the first successful powered human flight, flight functions have become available to man via significant support from man-made structures and devices. Over the past 100 years or so, technology has enabled several flight functions to migrate to automation and/or decision support systems. This migration continues with the United States NextGen and Europe s Single European Sky (a.k.a. SESAR) initiatives. These overhauls of the airspace system will be accomplished by accommodating the functional capabilities, benefits, and limitations of technology and automation together with the unique and sometimes overlapping functional capabilities, benefits, and limitations of humans. This paper will discuss how a safe and effective migration of any flight function must consider several interrelated issues, including, for example, shared situation awareness, and automation addiction, or over-reliance on automation. A long-term philosophical perspective is presented that considers all of these issues by primarily asking the following questions: How does one find an acceptable level of risk tolerance when allocating functions to automation versus humans? How does one measure or predict with confidence what the risks will be? These two questions and others will be considered from the two most-discussed paradigms involving the use of increasingly complex systems in the future: humans as operators and humans as monitors

Making of an Entrepreneurial University in the 21st Century - Global Universities as a Role Model

This paper looks at what it takes to make a university entrepreneurial in the 21st century, especially with the global trend of Entrepreneurship Education.  Universities need to be entrepreneurial so as to churn out graduates who will create, rather than seek jobs.  The high rate of unemployment globally, calls for this.  The paper focuses on the concept of and economic perspective of Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurship Education as well as portraying universities as role model in teaching entrepreneurship in the 21st century. The paper finally suggested establishment of Entrepreneurship Centre in each university, fully equipped with resources; internet connectivity and a globally friendly delivery system and assessment for the teaching of Entrepreneurship Education in universities. Keywords: Entrepreneurship Education, Entrepreneurial University, 21st Century, Global universities, Entrepreneurship concepts, Economic perspective, Entrepreneurship Centre, Internet connectivity, Self-employment, Delivery system and assessment