World-wide work stress multi-case study of the stress-coping process in distributed work

The changing world of work is increasing demands on workers through greater need for flexibility in global collaboration. Many organizations utilize distributed teams in which a group of people with a common purpose carry out interdependent tasks across locations and time, using technology to communicate more than face-to-face meetings. Prior literature on distributed teams shows that distributed work creates several challenges for team members' well-being, but our knowledge about the unique stressors that arise from these new work settings is limited and calls for further investigation. This multiple-case study uses a qualitative research approach to study context-specific job stressors that contribute to employees' psychological strain, and the coping mechanisms employees use to alleviate that strain. Ninety-seven team leaders and members from ten distributed real-life work teams were interviewed. The semi-structured interview data was analyzed qualitatively on team and individual levels. Results reveal the unique stressors and coping mechanisms of distributed work and model their relations to psychological strain. Geographic distance, electronic dependence and cultural diversity hinder the information flow and task coordination in distributed teams, creating stress-evoking ambiguity and uncertainty for team members. Not only these job stressors but also some of the strategies used to cope with them contribute to overload and strain. In particular, certain team-level coping strategies, such as frequent traveling to face-to-face meetings, prolonged work hours due to synchronous computer-mediated communication, and email overload create secondary sources of work overload when people use them continuously to manage uncertainty and ambiguity in distributed collaboration. To cope with the team-level coping strategies, team members rely heavily on individual coping resources, because spatial and temporal distance hinder the mobilization of social resources related to emotional, instrumental and informational social support. This dissertation suggests that the team-level coping strategies that are effective in managing certain job demands may, however, create other stressors and overload for individuals. Experienced workers, who have good self-management skills, may succeed in coping with these secondary sources of strain by prioritizing and setting clear limits for workload. Less experienced workers may feel more overloaded and need more social support from their leaders and teammates. As a practical implication, this dissertation suggests that the self-management skills in coping, employees' efforts in setting clear limits and prioritizing tasks should be better supported by organizations

Building trust in cross-cultural relationships: Active trust through culture mobilisation in Finnish-Indian project teams

This thesis examines trust building in Finnish-Indian distributed teams engaged in knowledge-intensive project work. To understand how actors build trust in the context of cultural distance and virtual collaboration, dynamic approaches to trust building and culture were adopted. The data were collected through interviews and observations in both geographical locations. In distributed project teams, static and slowly evolving trust creation models are not sufficient in explaining the ways trust is built to meet the needs of temporal project teams working distantly in a cross-cultural environment. Thus, this study suggests active trust as a solution in this challenging context of trust creation and places the main emphasis on the role of an active trustor. In doing so, this research challenges the static and passive trust models where trust development is focused on the trustee and their trustworthiness. Moreover, the study challenges the static culture approaches and adopts a dynamic mosaic perspective to culture as a collection of various cultural identities and elements that are used as resources. This allows for the examination of the agentic view of culture mobilisation. The findings illustrate how trusting parties are capable of mobilising various cultural elements and engage in purposeful trust-building practices to lessen the vulnerability caused by the unfamiliarity due to cultural differences and virtual communication. The agency in constructing actions to build trust is a central feature of collaborators who are successful in active trust building. Furthermore, researching the mobilisation of cultural elements in trust building revealed that the collaborators were not only drawing on existing cultural similarities but also engaged in a process of adjusting and adopting new cultural elements. The co-created third culture acted as the strongest nominator for active trust development in Finnish-Indian project teams. This thesis contributes to business practitioners working in the context of global teams where practices of active trust are needed to allow collaboration on complex and novel tasks that require efficient knowledge transfer. The findings guide team members to actively invest in the co-creation of shared culture elements and proactively shape the conditions for trusting

Ethics and taxation : a cross-national comparison of UK and Turkish firms

This paper investigates responses to tax related ethical issues facing busines

Investigating the interplay between fundamentals of national research systems: performance, investments and international collaborations

We discuss, at the macro-level of nations, the contribution of research funding and rate of international collaboration to research performance, with important implications for the science of science policy. In particular, we cross-correlate suitable measures of these quantities with a scientometric-based assessment of scientific success, studying both the average performance of nations and their temporal dynamics in the space defined by these variables during the last decade. We find significant differences among nations in terms of efficiency in turning (financial) input into bibliometrically measurable output, and we confirm that growth of international collaboration positively correlate with scientific success, with significant benefits brought by EU integration policies. Various geo-cultural clusters of nations naturally emerge from our analysis. We critically discuss the possible factors that potentially determine the observed patterns

“Tutteli to Japan”: A case study of spontaneous collaboration in disaster response

“Tutteli to Japan” (TTJ) is a case study of ordinary people, a group of Japanese women living in Finland, trying to figure out how to help disaster-affected citizens from a distance in coordination with likeminded strangers on-the-ground to accomplish aid supply delivery. Unlike commonly seen in citizen response to disasters, this case did not start as an extension of pre-existing social group activities or an informal group of volunteers under the name of TTJ. Rather, the effort emerged from individual responses on the Internet to the 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami disasters in Japan, expressing their compassions and aspirations to do something for the disaster victims; some were on Twitter, some were on their blogs. As the devastation escalated, so did the people’s eagerness to do something about the inadequate distribution of resources, with a focus on the breastfeeding mothers in Japan who only had access to powder-based baby formula. Having this challenge left untouched by government or aid agencies, these concerned individuals, as novice learners of international aid work without a chain of command, continued seeking and sharing information in order to deliver the liquid baby formula regardless of informational, operational, and situational uncertainties surrounding them. Within the next forty days, these volunteer individuals were able to ship six times, a total of 12,000 cartons of formula, directly delivered and distributed to the hands of breastfeeding mothers in twelve different locations in the disaster-affected communities in Japan. In this dissertation, I study the entangled, mutually collaborative nature of finding a way to help processes within and between like-minded individuals and the broader context of people and information with emphasis on information needs and learning. Drawing on a dataset that encompasses a range of real-time social media data as well as interviews and documentation, this single-case study traces how ordinary citizens interacting online develop the idea for delivery of baby formula as emergency supplies and how these like-minded strangers collaboratively mobilized resources for the TTJ logistics and processes of packaging, dispatching and delivering large volumes of relief supply including: the fundraising volunteers in Finland, the drivers and distributors in Japan. This study aims to describe how such ordinary people’s information interactions shape spontaneous collaboration in disaster response. My findings suggest that independent public participation and collaborative efforts for disaster response perform as sources of tensions and various kinds of vagueness, but these are the functions that spontaneous volunteers can offer resourcefully. With learning by doing approaches, these compassionate individuals, both online and on-the-ground, muddled through unknown needs of unfamiliar activities in identifying, managing and processing different kinds of tasks, particularly by asking for information and acting on information received including uses of vague language and uncertain sources of information. This iteration of dual processes – searching for information to help and self-organizing under leaderless management – illuminates underlying processes of spontaneous collaboration. I argue that the TTJ illustrates the power of intention, which is the power of creativity among ordinary people acting on information processed through humane-driven technology use. These iterative information interactions can be best understood through a new concept articulated in this dissertation, shared uncertainty. This concept encompasses our understanding of independent public participation and collaboration and offers an interdisciplinary bridge between research in information behavior, computer-supported cooperative work, crisis informatics and disaster studies

PICES Press, Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 2014

FUTURE and the FUTURE Open Science Meeting— The future of FUTURE (pp. 1-2); 2014 Inter-sessional Science Board Meeting: A note (pp. 3-5); More attractive science ecosystem design for FUTURE and beyond: A personal view (pp. 6-8); OSM Session on “Identifying multiple pressures and system responses in North Pacific marine ecosystems” (pp. 9-10); OSM Session on “Regional climate modeling in the North Pacific” (pp. 11-11); OSM Session on “Challenges in communicating science and engaging the public” (pp. 12-15); OSM Sessions on “Ecosystem status, trends, and forecasts” and “Ecosystem resilience and vulnerability” (pp. 16-17); OSM Session on “Strategies for ecosystem management in a changing climate” (pp. 18-19); OSM Workshop on “Top predators as indicators of climate change” (pp. 20-23); OSM Workshop on “Bridging the divide between models and decision-making” (pp. 24-26); OSM Workshop on “Climate change and ecosystem-based management of living marine resources” (pp. 27-28); OSM Workshop on an “Ecosystem projection model inter-comparison and assessment of climate change impacts on global fish and fisheries” (29-34); ICES Symposium on the “Ecological basis of risk analysis for marine ecosystems” (pp. 35-38); Human dimensions in the Russian Federation (pp. 39-42); Microbial Culture Collection at the National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Japan (pp. 43-45); The Bering Sea: Current status and recent trends (pp. 46-48); The state of the western North Pacific in the second half of 2013 (pp. 49-50); Unusual warming in the Gulf of Alaska (pp. 51-52); Obituary – Dr. Toshiro Saino (pp. 53-55); Program of topic sessions and workshops at PICES-2014 (pp. 56-56); 3rd International Symposium on “Effects of climate change on the world’s oceans” (pp. 57-57); PICES Interns (pp. 58-58

A Framework to Analyze Knowledge Work in Distributed Teams

This article presents a framework to analyze knowledge work in the changing context of new ways of working. Knowledge work increasingly takes place as collaboration from different and changing workplaces due to mobility, multilocational, and geographical distribution of participants. We define the framework based on five key factors that pose challenges to the performance and productivity of knowledge work performed in distributed teams. The framework extends and integrates traditional performance models of task, team structure, and work process, with context factors like workplace, organization policy, and information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure. The framework is applied in a qualitative comparative cross-case analysis to eight globally distributed teams in two Fortune 100 high-tech companies. We conclude with a series of specific challenges for each factor when studying distributed knowledge work. It is shown that due to changing contexts knowledge workers, teams, and organizations need to constantly adapt, readjust, and realign according to the five factors

Chapter 1 The International Classroom Lexicon Project

The International Classroom Lexicon Project set out to document the professional vocabulary of middle-school mathematics teachers in ten communities from around the world. The construction of a national lexicon, which can be thought of as the characterisation of a very specific aspect of the culture of each participating country, was undertaken by research teams involving experienced teachers as genuine co-researchers. Each cultural artefact identified the words by which teachers name the classroom phenomena in their respective environment. These are the terms that are used for seeing, describing, and communicating about the world that is the middle-school mathematics classroom