Supply chain resilience in mindful humanitarian aid organizations: the role of big data analytics

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand the nomological network of associations between collective mindfulness and big data analytics in fostering resilient humanitarian relief supply chains.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conceptualize a research model grounded in literature and test the hypotheses using survey data collected from informants at humanitarian aid organizations in Africa and Europe.FindingsThe findings demonstrate that organizational mindfulness is key to enabling resilient humanitarian relief supply chains, as opposed to just big data analytics.Originality/valueThis is the first study to examine organizational mindfulness and big data analytics in the context of humanitarian relief supply chains

Organizational Ethnography and the Art of Judgment in-the-Moment

This paper responds to the conveners’ call on exploring and advancing Organizational Ethnography (OE) as a paradigm for the organizational sciences. This sub-theme is linked through my empirical study of senior managers in international development organizations and how they make sense of using their judgment ‘in-the-moment’ in the context of their leadership roles and work environments. I adopt an “ethnographic orientation” (Watson, 2011, p.216) and emphasize the need for a highly reflexive approach in an ethnographer’s role as making judgments throughout the challenging processes of doing “fieldwork, headwork and textwork” (Van Maanen, 2011, p.218). Theoretically, this study contributes to the existing judgment and decision making literature from a social constructionist perspective by drawing linkages to judgment as a co-constructed phenomenon. How senior managers understand their judgment-making in situations ‘in-the-moment’ is an understudied area thus far and even scarcer in the context of international development organizations. Methodologically, the ethnographic and radically reflexive approach taken addresses a gap in the literature, builds awareness and raises in importance examining the ‘multiple selves’ (Reinharz, 1997) of the ethnographer. How I influenced my research and was influenced by it as both subject and object were key to my findings. In addition to the sub-theme call, this paper also links to the overarching Colloquium theme, ‘Bridging Continents, Cultures and Worldviews’, by connecting the cultures and co- constructed views of the researcher and practitioners. The collaborative, ethnographic approach taken was a unique way to get ‘up close and personal’ in understanding what judgment meant to senior leaders in the two participating UK-headquartered organizations. With international development missions in African nations, the senior leaders continuously constructed their own bridges across borders in their financing, operations and communications between their team members and external stakeholders located in multiple countries, reliant on virtual offices and mobile and Internet technology to stay connected. My judgment as an ethnographer was necessary to determine how to best embrace this way of ‘working’ during fieldwork and become another type of stakeholder to them. I will begin with a brief theoretical and methodological background of my exploratory study, identifying the gap in the literature and how my study fills it. Then I will outline the methodology, methods, data collection and analysis and findings. Finally, I will conclude with the challenges of ‘doing organizational ethnography’ inside small international development organizations and the contributions made to advance OE as a unique way to study the social phenomenon of judgment ‘in-the moment’

Cultivating a Culture of Compassion Among Newly Graduated Registered Nurses: An Evidence-Based Mobile Learning Toolkit

Empathy, kindness, and compassion are some of the humanistic values essential to nursing practice particularly in today’s patient and family-centric healthcare environment. A genuinely empathetic and caring relationship between a nurse and a patient not only enhances the quality and safety of care but also contributes to patient satisfaction, compliance to treatment, and overall health outcomes. Debate amongst educators and researchers continues to grow as to whether these uniquely humanistic values are innate or if they can be taught. How do nurses acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes towards the delivery of compassionate patient care? What strategies are best suited to cultivate and sustain a competent and compassionate nursing workforce? This evidence-based quality improvement project is built on existing findings from Simulation-Based Education (SBE), as an effective pedagogy, to enhance professional nursing practice. A smartphone mobile education application (app) was developed, implemented, and evaluated for a cohort of newly graduated registered nurses to improve their transition to practice experiences in a nurse residency program at a large integrated healthcare system in Southern California. By incorporating the science of caring, experiential learning, mindfulness practice, self-reflection, and peer-to-peer feedback, through the use of a state-of-the-art mobile app, into an existing simulation-based nurse residency program, participants reported an increase in clinical competency, communication skills, reflective practice, and self-compassion

Supply chain resilience in mindful humanitarian aid organizations:the role of big data analytics

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand the nomological network of associations between collective mindfulness and big data analytics in fostering resilient humanitarian relief supply chains. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conceptualize a research model grounded in literature and test the hypotheses using survey data collected from informants at humanitarian aid organizations in Africa and Europe. Findings: The findings demonstrate that organizational mindfulness is key to enabling resilient humanitarian relief supply chains, as opposed to just big data analytics. Originality/value: This is the first study to examine organizational mindfulness and big data analytics in the context of humanitarian relief supply chains

COMMUNICATING INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE MINDFULNESS: UNDERSTANDING LISTENING AND SENSECHECKING AT WORK

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations made workplace changes, which added an additional challenge to employees’ communication. However, mindfulness may help members strengthen their workplace interactions. Mindfulness is an intentional open awareness to the present moment (Shapiro, 2009). The theoretical framework of collective mindfulness includes organizational mindfulness, which is mindfulness from a top-down approach and mindful organizing, which is a bottom-up approach to mindfulness at work. This dissertation extends research on collective mindfulness by including listening, individual mindfulness aspects, and sensemaking to examine how collective mindfulness members make meaning of changes due to COVID-19. I observed 26 meetings and interviewed 23 employees in an automotive organization in the East Coast of the United States (U.S.) that conducts annual leadership and communicating mindfully training. Findings indicate that (a) employees communicated collective mindfulness as they managed conflict through open discussions to solve problems, (b) employees communicated individual mindfulness practices of listening to form collective mindfulness by conducting their annual leadership training and creating open learning environments, (c) employees made sense together through a new term called sensechecking, and (d) employees made sense of changes due to COVID-19 by appreciating their company’s support and by being resilient. Sensechecking is an extension of sensemaking, in which employees check with their teams to understand how their message is perceived and ask their teams to make meaning collectively. The results of this dissertation also expand on the theoretical components of collective mindfulness by adding the following: focusing on the bright side of situations, building trust among employees, and making operations more efficient. Organizations may adopt trainings that teach employees how to mindfully communicate to create collective mindfulness. Additionally, employees may learn how to engage in the sensechecking process to strengthen team communication at work

Choosing a Fit Technology: Understanding Mindfulness in Technology Adoption and Continuance

Mindfulness is an important emerging concept in society. This research posits that a user’s mindful state when adopting a technology is a crucial factor that determines how the technology will fit the task context at the post-adoption stage and, thus, has profound influence on user adoption and continued use of technology. Based on the mindfulness literature, we conceive of a new concept (mindfulness of technology adoption (MTA)) as a multi-faceted reflective high-order factor. We develop a MTA-TTF (task-technology fit) framework and integrate it into the cognitive change model to develop a research model that delineates the mechanisms through which MTA influences user adoption and continued use of technology. We examined the model via a longitudinal study of students’ use of wiki systems. The results suggest that mindful adopters will more likely perceive a technology as useful and choose a technology that turns out to fit their tasks. Hence, mindful adopters are likely to have high disconfirmation, perceived usefulness, and satisfaction at the post-adoption stage. The findings have significant implications for IS research and practices

Inspired Positive Organizational Development (ipod): The Beneficial Effects Of Mindfulness For Nonprofit Organizational Leadership

This research attempted to illustrate the benefits of utilizing positive organizational development (IPOD) and mindfulness in leading a nonprofit toward overall long-term success. The major research that was used to enhance the leadership acumen and performance of nonprofit leaders came from previous for profit studies on the beneficial effects of mindfulness for corporate leaders. This study went further and focused on the benefits of mindfulness and inspired positive organizational development strategies for nonprofit leaders. An exploratory, qualitative research perspective was used to further knowledge of the benefits of practicing IPOD and mindfulness for nonprofit leaders. Current research is focused on corporate and general populations. This study added to the current research by going beyond previous studies and benefiting a vital sector of within our society. Five nonprofit leaders were picked using a random name generator from a list of 467 nonprofits in Kentucky. All five leaders who participated in the study were eager to learn more about how to utilize IPOD and mindfulness leadership strategies in their workplace and experience first-hand the positive benefits of practicing IPOD and mindfulness. A pre-survey, IPOD and mindfulness training and a post-survey were used to garner the effects of practicing the IPOD and mindfulness strategies. A comparison of the results of the surveys and viewpoints of the non-profit leaders was carried out. The results of all analyses revealed positive benefits from practicing mindfulness and inspired positive organizational development strategies as well as some interesting patterns. It was concluded that IPOD and mindfulness practices would benefit all nonprofit leaders, help them perform better and feel more satisfied in their roles. The transformational, psychological, emotional and behavioral effects of mindfulness and inspired positive organizational development were impressive

A Temporal Model of Mindful Interactions Around New Service Conception

The organizational ability to innovate is widely acknowledged as crucial to sustained success. For libraries and other service providers, innovation entails the continuous development of new services that propose value to customers. This new service development process can be understood as comprising a front end, in which new service ideas are conceived and developed, and a back end, in which selected ideas are implemented. Our understanding of the former - that is, of new service conception in libraries - is particularly underdeveloped. To build a conceptual foundation for research in this area I used qualitative data collection techniques and constant-comparison analysis within the framework of a comparative, embedded case study. Fourteen new service ideas conceived by three case organizations - two public library systems and one library consortium - served as the units of analysis. The model that emerged from the data - a Temporal Model of Mindful Interactions Around New Service Conception - depicts library administrators as active producers of new service concepts. More specifically, the model posits that the innovative library administrator continuously identifies new customer needs and new external solutions through seven types of mindful interactions. At the same time, she tries to match unmet customer needs with potential external solutions in order to produce a new service concept that is ready for implementation. The model extends the concept of individual mindfulness as developed by Weick and Sutcliffe (2006) and Weick and Putnam (2006). In short, it proposes that an individual can concurrently maintain two modes of mindfulness - cognitive-flow mindfulness and content mindfulness - in order to facilitate knowledge creation in the form of a new service concept. More specifically, one can be mindful during an interaction of its potential for engendering novel content (cognitive-flow mindfulness) while keeping in mind certain organizationally-influenced content (content mindfulness). The individual who can concurrently maintain both modes of mindfulness is better able to make novel associations between new information and the content about which she is mindful (e.g., the library\u27s mission and major goals, unmet customer needs, potential external solutions). While the data behind the model suggest that mindfulness can be maintained by admini-strators in smaller, more resource-challenged libraries, and in libraries with non-consolidated organizational structures, the data also reveal that the new service concepts produced by these administrators were yielded only after an external funding source was obtained. For these libraries, developing and delivering new services without grant monies, or without a mechanism within the service for generating revenue, may not be feasible. This does not mean that the administrators of these libraries should stop trying to innovate, or should stop being mindful of new service possibilities, but rather that (1) they must be mindful, perhaps to a greater degree than their counterparts at better-funded libraries, of an interaction\u27s potential for engendering an external funding source, and (2) they may not be able to devote as much time to identifying new customer needs and potential external solutions. Instead, they may need to devote much of their time to addressing ongoing financial challenges

Confronting Wicked Issues Through the Implementation of a Business Development Unit

Universities and Faculties in Ontario are faced with wicked issues that are limiting the financial sustainability of the organizations. Wicked issues refer to problems that are not technical in nature, are not easily fixed, offer no single solution, and because of organizational interdependencies often create other problems when unraveled. Such issues introduced in this Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) are: decreasing governmental funding, increased competition for students, the emergence of the non-traditional student and geopolitical pressure. The leadership approach to help address these issues is a combination of Boundary Spanning, Adaptive Leadership and Mindfulness. It is the grouping of these three leadership theories that can help this Faculty be more connected and responsive to external forces impacting it. These approaches introduce an optimistic view that organizational improvement is possible, while recognizing that change is often challenging for organizational members. This OIP is concerned with the advancement of business development acumen grounded in High Reliability Principles. It explores innovations such as data informed decision making, contemporary student engagement practices, and technological infrastructure that can help the Faculty remain financially sustainable as well as a place of higher learning. If executed correctly, this approach can contribute significantly to the Faculty’s financial resilience and sustainability