Team Familiarity and Task Interdependence: A New Perspective on Dynamic Team Composition

Teams have become an integral part of today’s workforce, allowing organizations to accomplish more than any one individual could do alone. Given their relevance to organizations, a plethora of research has been conducted to enhance team effectiveness and inform staffing procedures. However, most of these studies ignore the temporal dynamics inherent to team functioning, assuming that teams are comprised of the same members over time and that all members share the same level of interdependence. In reality, teams, such as those found in healthcare, are much more fluid, with members continually joining and leaving, thus highlighting the need for research regarding the composition of dynamic teams. To bridge this gap, the present study examines the role of team familiarity, or shared team task experiences, in surgical teams, which follow crew-based staffing procedures. Results indicate that team efficiency is positively related to team minimum task experience, while controlling for the urgency of the case and the patient’s American Society of Anesthesiologists physical status. However, there was not a significant relationship between team familiarity and team efficiency for either the interdependent or noninterdependent dyads, as there were no main effects or interactions found between familiarity and team efficiency. Although team familiarity was not related to efficiency, the results of this study still advance our understanding of team composition from both a theoretical and practical perspective. By leveraging a compilational approach, this study advances our understanding of dynamic team composition and illustrates the negative implications that one novice team member may have on subsequent team outcomes, which could inform future staffing protocols

Teams in Small Organizations: Conceptual, Methodological, and Practical Considerations

Research on teams and teamwork has flourished in the last few decades. Much of what we know about teams and teamwork comes from research using short-term student teams in the lab, teams in larger organizations, and, more recently, teams in rather unique and extreme environments. The context in which teams operate influences team composition, processes, and effectiveness. Small organizations are an understudied and often overlooked context that presents a rich opportunity to augment our understanding of teams and team dynamics. In this paper, we discuss how teams and multi-team systems in small organizations may differ from those found in larger organizations. Many of these differences present both methodological and practical challenges to studying team composition and processes in small complex organizational settings. We advocate for applying and accepting new and less widely used methodological approaches to advance our understanding of the science of teams and teamwork in such contexts

Active and Assisted Living, a Practice for the Ageing Population and People with Cognitive Disabilities: An Architectural Perspective.

The current digital revolution is causing a paradigm shift encompassing all environments in which human beings conduct their daily activities. Technology is starting to govern the world, gradually modifying not only individual and social behaviour, but also ways of living. The necessary adaptation to new information and communication technologies forces societies to rethink both public and private spaces, in which evolution is slower than rapid social transformation. As part of this change, the concept of Active Assisted Living (AAL) has developed. Assisted spaces can be designed to provide older adults, carers, or people who have cognitive disabilities, such as Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias, with a healthier, safer, and more comfortable life, while also affording them greater personal autonomy. AAL aims to improve people’s quality of life and allow them to remain in their own homes for as long as possible, not in residences. This study conducted a critical review about AAL from an architectural point of view. The research adopted a qualitative approach in which we collected the studies during the last twenty years, then used descriptive, narrative and critical analysis methods. Based on these, this paper aims to explain this new technological paradigm, its characteristics, its main development trends, and its implementation limitations. The results obtained show how the development of AAL will be in the next ten years, and how this concept, and its application, can influence architecture and provide the bases for further research into the design of buildings and citiesPartial funding for open access charge: Universidad de Málag

Effectiveness of the Travelers Summer Research Fellowship Program in Preparing Premedical Students for a Career in Medicine

This study measured the effectiveness of the Travelers Summer Research Fellowship (T-SRF) Program for Premedical Students. No in-depth study has been conducted on the impact of its activities. A program-oriented qualitative summative evaluation approach and a logic model design were used to analyze survey responses for participants from four program years randomly chosen from 2000 to 2015, medical school enrollment records for participants from 1969 to 2015, physician practice locations for participants from 1969 to 2009, and interviews with a purposeful random sample of 10 physicians who were program participants from 2004 to 2008. Narrative inquiry consisted of audio recording, transcription, and analysis of individual accounts and participant experiences. The study revealed that participants valued interactions with physicians from backgrounds underrepresented in medicine. Talks on careers in medicine increased participants’ knowledge, and research projects helped develop skills. Cardiovascular physiology lectures introduced participants to the medical school learning experience and increased their confidence to apply to medical school successfully. T-SRF enhanced participants’ medical school applications and sharpened interviewing skills; 83% matriculated into medical school, 90% graduated, and 45% practice in HPSAs, MUAs/Ps, and rural areas. Recommendations included improving program orientation, making the cardiovascular physiology lectures and examinations more valuable experiences, re-evaluating the study skills curriculum, providing more clinical experiences, increasing the weekly stipend, improving maintenance of the alumni database, formally partnering admissions with the T-SRF program, helping alumni return to Weill Cornell as residents or fellows, and considering other ways to measure social concern. Further studies of T-SRF should be undertaken

Mainstreaming the Radical Right

Radical right parties are on the rise. The once despised pariahs of the political world now emerge as policy makers in governing coalitions across Europe: from the volatile democracies of Eastern Europe to the well-established Nordic welfare states. Despite an impressive collection of theoretical and empirical studies explaining the rise of the radical right, this literature has largely overlooked the variation in government participation of these parties. This leaves several important questions unanswered: why do well established mainstream parties accept radical right parties that often promote extreme anti-liberal and anti-democratic platforms as coalition partners in some countries but not in others? how long do the coalitions that contain radical right parties last? what kind of ministerial portfolios are the radical right parties allocated once the enter governing coalitions? In my dissertation, I argue that the probability of radical right parties getting into government, securing cabinet portfolios and remaining part of the coalition, all depend on their ideological position on the economic dimension and is not hampered by their extremism on the socio-cultural dimension. The reason being that radical right parties place high importance on the socio-cultural dimension and low value on the economic dimension, which is orthogonal to dimension saliencies of mainstream parties. This allows radical right parties to be more flexible in finding compromise with the rest of the coalition partners. I show that while all radical right parties maintain extreme positions on the socio-cultural dimension, they display a great deal of variation on the economic dimension. While some espouse ultra-neoliberal economic programs, others champion protectionism, welfare chauvinism, and openly reject capitalism. Radical right parties that position themselves close to the rest of the coalition\u27s ideal point on the economic dimension are able to oer its coalition partners valuable policy compromises. I employ a multi-method approach that includes both large N analyses as well as case studies to test my theory in a series of three articles. In the first article, I test how the probability of the radical right parties entering cabinet depends on their ideological positioning on different dimensions. In the second article, I argue that radical right parties are often over-compensated with portfolios due to coalition stability considerations and lower costs of some portfolios. The lower costs are the direct result of dimension orthogonality and party position\u27s on the economic dimension. Finally, in the third article, I extend my argument to show that the distance on the economic dimension between the formateur and the radical right party is an important factor that affects durability of such coalitions: the smaller the distance, the longer the coalition is likely to survive. I also find that coalitions containing a radical right party with a moderate economic platform are not any more volatile than the more traditional coalitions that only consist of mainstream parties. This work contributes to the literature on radical right parties that is predominantly focused on explaining why these parties succeed or fail on the electoral arena but does not address what happens after radical right parties get elected. In addition, I make a contribution to the broader coalition literature by proposing a more nuanced view for the role of ideology in coalition politics

The state of adoption and the challenges of systematic variability management in industry

Handling large-scale software variability is still a challenge for many organizations. After decades of research on variability management concepts, many industrial organizations have introduced techniques known from research, but still lament that pure textbook approaches are not applicable or efficient. For instance, software product line engineering—an approach to systematically develop portfolios of products—is difficult to adopt given the high upfront investments; and even when adopted, organizations are challenged by evolving their complex product lines. Consequently, the research community now mainly focuses on re-engineering and evolution techniques for product lines; yet, understanding the current state of adoption and the industrial challenges for organizations is necessary to conceive effective techniques. In this multiple-case study, we analyze the current adoption of variability management techniques in twelve medium- to large-scale industrial cases in domains such as automotive, aerospace or railway systems. We identify the current state of variability management, emphasizing the techniques and concepts they adopted. We elicit the needs and challenges expressed for these cases, triangulated with results from a literature review. We believe our results help to understand the current state of adoption and shed light on gaps to address in industrial practice.This work is supported by Vinnova Sweden, Fond Unique Interminist´eriel (FUI) France, and the Swedish Research Council. Open access funding provided by University of Gothenbur