28,365 research outputs found

    Synergistic Team Composition

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    Effective teams are crucial for organisations, especially in environments that require teams to be constantly created and dismantled, such as software development, scientific experiments, crowd-sourcing, or the classroom. Key factors influencing team performance are competences and personality of team members. Hence, we present a computational model to compose proficient and congenial teams based on individuals' personalities and their competences to perform tasks of different nature. With this purpose, we extend Wilde's post-Jungian method for team composition, which solely employs individuals' personalities. The aim of this study is to create a model to partition agents into teams that are balanced in competences, personality and gender. Finally, we present some preliminary empirical results that we obtained when analysing student performance. Results show the benefits of a more informed team composition that exploits individuals' competences besides information about their personalities

    Academic team formation as evolving hypergraphs

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    This paper quantitatively explores the social and socio-semantic patterns of constitution of academic collaboration teams. To this end, we broadly underline two critical features of social networks of knowledge-based collaboration: first, they essentially consist of group-level interactions which call for team-centered approaches. Formally, this induces the use of hypergraphs and n-adic interactions, rather than traditional dyadic frameworks of interaction such as graphs, binding only pairs of agents. Second, we advocate the joint consideration of structural and semantic features, as collaborations are allegedly constrained by both of them. Considering these provisions, we propose a framework which principally enables us to empirically test a series of hypotheses related to academic team formation patterns. In particular, we exhibit and characterize the influence of an implicit group structure driving recurrent team formation processes. On the whole, innovative production does not appear to be correlated with more original teams, while a polarization appears between groups composed of experts only or non-experts only, altogether corresponding to collectives with a high rate of repeated interactions

    A First Approach on Modelling Staff Proactiveness in Retail Simulation Models

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    There has been a noticeable shift in the relative composition of the industry in the developed countries in recent years; manufacturing is decreasing while the service sector is becoming more important. However, currently most simulation models for investigating service systems are still built in the same way as manufacturing simulation models, using a process-oriented world view, i.e. they model the flow of passive entities through a system. These kinds of models allow studying aspects of operational management but are not well suited for studying the dynamics that appear in service systems due to human behaviour. For these kinds of studies we require tools that allow modelling the system and entities using an object-oriented world view, where intelligent objects serve as abstract \'actors\' that are goal directed and can behave proactively. In our work we combine process-oriented discrete event simulation modelling and object-oriented agent based simulation modelling to investigate the impact of people management practices on retail productivity. In this paper, we reveal in a series of experiments what impact considering proactivity can have on the output accuracy of simulation models of human centric systems. The model and data we use for this investigation are based on a case study in a UK department store. We show that considering proactivity positively influences the validity of these kinds of models and therefore allows analysts to make better recommendations regarding strategies to apply people management practices.Retail Performance, Management Practices, Proactive Behaviour, Service Experience, Agent-Based Modelling, Simulation

    Towards the Development of a Simulator for Investigating the Impact of People Management Practices on Retail Performance

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    Often models for understanding the impact of management practices on retail performance are developed under the assumption of stability, equilibrium and linearity, whereas retail operations are considered in reality to be dynamic, non-linear and complex. Alternatively, discrete event and agent-based modelling are approaches that allow the development of simulation models of heterogeneous non-equilibrium systems for testing out different scenarios. When developing simulation models one has to abstract and simplify from the real world, which means that one has to try and capture the 'essence' of the system required for developing a representation of the mechanisms that drive the progression in the real system. Simulation models can be developed at different levels of abstraction. To know the appropriate level of abstraction for a specific application is often more of an art than a science. We have developed a retail branch simulation model to investigate which level of model accuracy is required for such a model to obtain meaningful results for practitioners.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables, Journal of Simulation 201

    WESTT (Workload, Error, Situational Awareness, Time and Teamwork): An analytical prototyping system for command and control

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    Modern developments in the use of information technology within command and control allow unprecedented scope for flexibility in the way teams deal with tasks. These developments, together with the increased recognition of the importance of knowledge management within teams present difficulties for the analyst in terms of evaluating the impacts of changes to task composition or team membership. In this paper an approach to this problem is presented that represents team behaviour in terms of three linked networks (representing task, social network structure and knowledge) within the integrative WESTT software tool. In addition, by automating analyses of workload and error based on the same data that generate the networks, WESTT allows the user to engage in the process of rapid and iterative “analytical prototyping”. For purposes of illustration an example of the use of this technique with regard to a simple tactical vignette is presented

    Team Learning, Development, and Adaptation

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    [Excerpt] Our purpose is to explore conceptually these themes centered on team learning, development, and adaptation. We note at the onset that this chapter is not a comprehensive review of the literature. Indeed, solid conceptual and empirical work on these themes are sparse relative to the vast amount of work on team effectiveness more generally, and therefore a thematic set of topics that are ripe for conceptual development and integration. We draw on an ongoing stream of theory development and research in these areas to integrate and sculpt a distinct perspective on team learning, development, and adaptation

    Diversity and Social Network Structure in Collective Decision Making: Evolutionary Perspectives with Agent-Based Simulations

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    Collective, especially group-based, managerial decision making is crucial in organizations. Using an evolutionary theoretic approach to collective decision making, agent-based simulations were conducted to investigate how human collective decision making would be affected by the agents' diversity in problem understanding and/or behavior in discussion, as well as by their social network structure. Simulation results indicated that groups with consistent problem understanding tended to produce higher utility values of ideas and displayed better decision convergence, but only if there was no group-level bias in collective problem understanding. Simulation results also indicated the importance of balance between selection-oriented (i.e., exploitative) and variation-oriented (i.e., explorative) behaviors in discussion to achieve quality final decisions. Expanding the group size and introducing non-trivial social network structure generally improved the quality of ideas at the cost of decision convergence. Simulations with different social network topologies revealed collective decision making on small-world networks with high local clustering tended to achieve highest decision quality more often than on random or scale-free networks. Implications of this evolutionary theory and simulation approach for future managerial research on collective, group, and multi-level decision making are discussed.Comment: 27 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables; accepted for publication in Complexit
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