How employees’ personality traits affect the perceived psychological safety in the context of digital business transformation projects

This study explores how individual’s personality traits affect the perceptions psychological safety in a business transformation project context. The topic is motivated by the fact that roughly 70% of business transformation efforts fail to meet their desired targets and involvement characterizes successful transformation efforts. Both key concepts in the study, psychological safety and human personality, have an effect on various organizational success factors, including engagement and motivation, and this Thesis offers a novel insight to the interplay of these factors in the context of digital business transformation. The research questions addressed in this study are: 1) How do an individual's personality traits affect their perception of psychological safety in a changing work environment? 2) How can the acknowledgment of personality dimensions and their connection to psychological safety be incorporated into change management practices? Methods used in this research study are both qualitative and quantitative in nature: quantitative personality trait assessment of the big-five personality traits utilizing the mini-IPIP questionnaire and qualitative semi-structured interviews which are thematically analysed. Key findings of the study highlight the importance of two personality traits Agreeableness and Extraversion. Large-scale technology projects require adaptation within the complex socio- technical context, and the importance of employee voice behaviour emerged as a theme (associated with Extraversion) as a means for workers to keep up with the demanding and fast- paced work environment. Agreeableness trait was found to impact the perception of psychological safety via self-criticism. Across all traits one-to-one connection with both colleagues and managers was seen as the number one enabling factor for a psychologically safe team. With a few key insights found from the vast and complex relationship between organizational practices and psychological phenomena, this Thesis points a direction for future research to study further the connections between management practices, personality traits and perceptions of psychological safety

Analysis of a Modern Voice Morphing Approach using Gaussian Mixture Models for Laryngectomees

This paper proposes a voice morphing system for people suffering from Laryngectomy, which is the surgical removal of all or part of the larynx or the voice box, particularly performed in cases of laryngeal cancer. A primitive method of achieving voice morphing is by extracting the source's vocal coefficients and then converting them into the target speaker's vocal parameters. In this paper, we deploy Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) for mapping the coefficients from source to destination. However, the use of the traditional/conventional GMM-based mapping approach results in the problem of over-smoothening of the converted voice. Thus, we hereby propose a unique method to perform efficient voice morphing and conversion based on GMM,which overcomes the traditional-method effects of over-smoothening. It uses a technique of glottal waveform separation and prediction of excitations and hence the result shows that not only over-smoothening is eliminated but also the transformed vocal tract parameters match with the target. Moreover, the synthesized speech thus obtained is found to be of a sufficiently high quality. Thus, voice morphing based on a unique GMM approach has been proposed and also critically evaluated based on various subjective and objective evaluation parameters. Further, an application of voice morphing for Laryngectomees which deploys this unique approach has been recommended by this paper.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables; International Journal of Computer Applications Volume 49, Number 21, July 201

Cracking the social code of speech prosody using reverse correlation

Human listeners excel at forming high-level social representations about each other, even from the briefest of utterances. In particular, pitch is widely recognized as the auditory dimension that conveys most of the information about a speaker's traits, emotional states, and attitudes. While past research has primarily looked at the influence of mean pitch, almost nothing is known about how intonation patterns, i.e., finely tuned pitch trajectories around the mean, may determine social judgments in speech. Here, we introduce an experimental paradigm that combines state-of-the-art voice transformation algorithms with psychophysical reverse correlation and show that two of the most important dimensions of social judgments, a speaker's perceived dominance and trustworthiness, are driven by robust and distinguishing pitch trajectories in short utterances like the word "Hello," which remained remarkably stable whether male or female listeners judged male or female speakers. These findings reveal a unique communicative adaptation that enables listeners to infer social traits regardless of speakers' physical characteristics, such as sex and mean pitch. By characterizing how any given individual's mental representations may differ from this generic code, the method introduced here opens avenues to explore dysprosody and social-cognitive deficits in disorders like autism spectrum and schizophrenia. In addition, once derived experimentally, these prototypes can be applied to novel utterances, thus providing a principled way to modulate personality impressions in arbitrary speech signals

"Dance has connected me to my voice": the value of reflection in establishing effective dance pedagogy.

A variety of teaching pedagogies are used to teach dance which is now a compulsory core subject in the Arts and also taught in physical education. In this paper, I argue for the importance of a learner-centred pedagogy grounded in reflective practice. This forms a basis for developing a teaching approach that not only enriches students' artistic learning but develops their confidence as dancers and as people. Based on ongoing research with student dancers, I suggest that using reflective practice in teaching dance not only challenges dance educators to keep their pedagogy dynamic, but also creates a space in which teachers can respond more effectively to the needs of particular groups or individual students