The Impact of Corporatisation and National Competition Policy: An Exploratory Study of Organisational Change and Leadership Style

Category Research Paper Purpose This study surveys managers of an Australian government owned enterprise undergoing organisational change as a result of public sector reform, specifically, National Competition Policy and Corporatisation. The purpose of the study is to examine the extent/type of organisational change and leadership style adopted to implement this change. Approach To understand the effect of reforms, the researcher explored the extent of change and leadership style through the use of an intraorganisational survey in a government owned Electricity Supply Corporation in Queensland, Australia. The instrument also included qualitatitive components to enable the researcher to qualify the statistical results. Findings Within the public sector, there is an uneasy tension between the need for a revolution of outdated bureaucracies in order to enhance flexibility and innovation on the one hand, and the desire to maintain the standards and procedures that are necessary for quality civic service for a broad range of stakeholders on the other. The results of this study indicate that there was significant organisational change and, according to responses, a change of leadership style indicative of this dilemma. Research limitations/implications The implications for reform setters, managers and politicians suggest the consideration of embedded factors whilst determining the processes and directions of change. Furthermore, it is necessary to choose a leadership style that is indicative of the type of change to be implemented. Additionally, greater participation by organisational members can increase the success of organisational change. The limitations of the study include the measurement of organisational change and leadership style. This instrument was originally used in structured interviews, however, measures were taken validate the instrument in its altered setting. Further, the study is confined to a single electricity organisation. Fertile fields for future research projects could include a larger quantitative study conducted with multiple States or nation wide electricity distribution companies. Originality/Value The study provides empirical evidence of the extent of change as a result of public sector reform. In doing so the study utilises organisational change and leadership style models within a public sector environment

Reducing employees' turnover in transactional services : a Lean Six Sigma case study

The case study aims to illustrate the application of Lean Six Sigma into the human resource (HR) function of a service industry corporation. The study draws on process information and primary data from a real project. The study describes improvements in the HR management attributable to Lean Six Sigma: decrease of employees' voluntary turnover and increase in employees' satisfaction. Although being extremely successful in the last two decades in the manufacturing sector, the application of Lean Six Sigma to the service industry in general, and HR management in particular, has been a controversial topic: this study illustrates how its application can reduce employees' voluntary turnover rate and increase their satisfaction, hence increasing the return on investment of human capital

Leadership in construction partnering projects

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the use of partnering in construction. Central to any successful partnering arrangement is the change in cultural and behavioural characteristics towards mutual trust and understanding. Leadership is originally the source of the beliefs and values which forms shared assumptions of organisational culture. This paper builds on the leadership literature which has so ably demonstrated the influence of powerful leaders. As Bueno and Bowditch states “the reality may be that managing will remain much more of an art than a science”. However true this statement may be, there is a number of things that management can do to further cultural integration and the success of construction partnering projects. This paper initially reviews the theory behind partnering, culture and leadership. It stages arguments and discussions over the importance of behavioural aspects of leadership and explores applicability of leadership styles to construction partnering projects. Further, this establishes the requirement of project leader to exhibit different leadership styles and modes of motivation to demonstrate a range of behaviours together with the combination of transformational and transactional, firelighter leadership style

Toward a Vision of Sexual and Economic Justice

This report is based on the Virginia C. Gildersleeve Lecture and colloquium at Barnard College, with keynote speakers Josephine Ho and Naomi Klein. The participants in the colloquium have all made significant contributions to our understandings of global justice as activists, artists, and scholars who have explored the meanings of economic justice and sexual justice and have worked to build links between these spheres. The aim of the workshop was to articulate connections between struggles for sexual justice and economic justice and to develop new visions of how different people and movements might come together in their efforts to create justice. This report provides a synthesis of the short thought papers the participants developed in preparation for the colloquium and their conversations during the worksho

Improving Reuse of Distributed Transaction Software with Transaction-Aware Aspects

Implementing crosscutting concerns for transactions is difficult, even using Aspect-Oriented Programming Languages (AOPLs) such as AspectJ. Many of these challenges arise because the context of a transaction-related crosscutting concern consists of loosely-coupled abstractions like dynamically-generated identifiers, timestamps, and tentative value sets of distributed resources. Current AOPLs do not provide joinpoints and pointcuts for weaving advice into high-level abstractions or contexts, like transaction contexts. Other challenges stem from the essential complexity in the nature of the data, operations on the data, or the volume of data, and accidental complexity comes from the way that the problem is being solved, even using common transaction frameworks. This dissertation describes an extension to AspectJ, called TransJ, with which developers can implement transaction-related crosscutting concerns in cohesive and loosely-coupled aspects. It also presents a preliminary experiment that provides evidence of improvement in reusability without sacrificing the performance of applications requiring essential transactions. This empirical study is conducted using the extended-quality model for transactional application to define measurements on the transaction software systems. This quality model defines three goals: the first relates to code quality (in terms of its reusability); the second to software performance; and the third concerns software development efficiency. Results from this study show that TransJ can improve the reusability while maintaining performance of TransJ applications requiring transaction for all eight areas addressed by the hypotheses: better encapsulation and separation of concern; loose Coupling, higher-cohesion and less tangling; improving obliviousness; preserving the software efficiency; improving extensibility; and hasten the development process

New Slant on the EPR-Bell Experiment

The best case for thinking that quantum mechanics is nonlocal rests on Bell’s Theorem, and later results of the same kind. However, the correlations characteristic of EPR-Bell (EPRB) experiments also arise in familiar cases elsewhere in QM, where the two measurements involved are timelike rather than spacelike separated; and in which the correlations are usually assumed to have a local causal explanation, requiring no action-at-a-distance. It is interesting to ask how this is possible, in the light of Bell’s Theorem. We investigate this question, and present two options. Either (i) the new cases are nonlocal, too, in which case action-at-a-distance is more widespread in QM than has previously been appreciated (and does not depend on entanglement, as usually construed); or (ii) the means of avoiding action-at-a-distance in the new cases extends in a natural way to EPRB, removing action-at-a-distance in these cases, too. There is a third option, viz., that the new cases are strongly disanalogous to EPRB. But this option requires an argument, so far missing, that the physical world breaks the symmetries which otherwise support the analogy. In the absence of such an argument, the orthodox combination of views – action-at-a-distance in EPRB, but local causality in its timelike analogue – is less well established than it is usually assumed to be