3,746 research outputs found
More than a cognitive experience: unfamiliarity, invalidation, and emotion in organizational learning
Literature on organizational learning (OL) lacks an integrative framework that captures the emotions involved as OL proceeds. Drawing on personal construct theory, we suggest that organizations learn where their members reconstrue meaning around questions of strategic significance for the organization. In this 5-year study of an electronics company, we explore the way in which emotions change as members perceive progress or a lack of progress around strategic themes. Our framework also takes into account whether OL involves experiences that are familiar or unfamiliar and the implications for emotions. We detected similar patterns of emotion arising over time for three different themes in our data, thereby adding to OL perspectives that are predominantly cognitive in orientation
Psychological Safety and Norm Clarity in Software Engineering Teams
In the software engineering industry today, companies primarily conduct their
work in teams. To increase organizational productivity, it is thus crucial to
know the factors that affect team effectiveness. Two team-related concepts that
have gained prominence lately are psychological safety and team norms. Still,
few studies exist that explore these in a software engineering context.
Therefore, with the aim of extending the knowledge of these concepts, we
examined if psychological safety and team norm clarity associate positively
with software developers' self-assessed team performance and job satisfaction,
two important elements of effectiveness.
We collected industry survey data from practitioners (N = 217) in 38
development teams working for five different organizations. The result of
multiple linear regression analyses indicates that both psychological safety
and team norm clarity predict team members' self-assessed performance and job
satisfaction. The findings also suggest that clarity of norms is a stronger
(30\% and 71\% stronger, respectively) predictor than psychological safety.
This research highlights the need to examine, in more detail, the
relationship between social norms and software development. The findings of
this study could serve as an empirical baseline for such, future work.Comment: Submitted to CHASE'201
Temperature and Field Dependence of the Mobility in Liquid-Crystalline Conjugated Polymer Films
The transport properties of organic light-emitting diodes in which the
emissive layer is composed of conjugated polymers in the liquid-crystalline
phase have been investigated. We have performed simulations of the current
transient response to an illumination pulse via the Monte Carlo approach, and
from the transit times we have extracted the mobility of the charge carriers as
a function of both the electric field and the temperature. The transport
properties of such films are different from their disordered counterparts, with
charge carrier mobilities exhibiting only a weak dependence on both the
electric field and temperature. We show that for spatially ordered polymer
films, this weak dependence arises for thermal energy being comparable to the
energetic disorder, due to the combined effect of the electrostatic and thermal
energies. The inclusion of spatial disorder, on the other hand, does not alter
the qualitative behaviour of the mobility, but results in decreasing its
absolute value.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.
Eating well in care homes:Testing the feasibility of a staff training programme aimed at improving social interaction and choice at mealtimes
Background: The health and well-being of care home residents are influenced by their experience of mealtimes, which provide an opportunity for residents to socialise and exercise control over their lives, as well as providing essential sustenance. Care home staff are pivotal to this experience, responsible for the provision of meals and eating assistance, but also for establishing a positive mealtime culture valued by residents. Despite this, mealtimes can be task-focussed, as the pressure on staff to perform multiple duties in limited time, or a lack of knowledge and awareness, means that resident needs and preferences risk being neglected. Methods: A staff-focussed training programme aimed at improving social interaction, and resident choice was developed and delivered in a workshop. Intervention feasibility was assessed using a qualitative survey and workshop observations. A combination of descriptive and content analyses was conducted on the data. Results: Thirteen women and one man took part in the workshops, representing multiple roles within two homes in the South West UK. The workshops were found to be deliverable and practicable. Participants responded positively to the workshops, anticipating that improvements to the mealtime experience would result from their workshop outputs. Conclusion: This study suggests that staff training workshops based on improving the mealtime experience are feasible to deliver within the day-to-day running of a care home and are acceptable to staff. Positive changes resulting from these workshops could improve the health and well-being of residents. Implications for practice: Mealtimes in care homes may be improved by increasing social interaction and by providing residents with greater choice. Management-faciltated staff training may be a useful tool to encourage staff to reflect on current practice and develop their own strategies to improve the mealtime experience for residents.</p
'Simultaneous Immersion' : How online postgraduate study contributes to the development of reflective practice among public service practitioners
This paper examines how the process of engaging simultaneously in study and work â through online distance-based study â affects studentsâ capacity to apply their learning in and for the workplace. The paper takes as its starting point the importance of extending notions of âeducational effectivenessâ beyond course-based attainment to encompass the impact of learning within the workplace. It explores the interface between study and work, focusing on the case of online postgraduate programmes in public management at the University of York. It finds that simultaneous immersion in study and work can create the conditions for âpublic reflectionâ that underpin work-based learning and that a key factor is the student-practitioner's ability to mobilise âepisodic power.â The paper suggests ways in which existing approaches to online postgraduate learning might be enhanced in order to capitalise on these conditions of simultaneous immersion
Geometric Dilaton Coupling and Smooth Charged Wormholes
A particular type of coupling of the dilaton field to the metric is shown to
admit a simple geometric interpretation in terms of a volume element density
independent from the metric. For dimension n = 4 two families of either
magnetically or electrically charged static spherically symmetric solutions to
the Maxwell-Einstein-Dilaton field equations are derived. Whereas the metrics
of the "magnetic" spacetimes are smooth, geodesically complete and have the
topology of a wormhole, the "electric" metrics behave similarly as the singular
and geodesically incomplete classical Reissner-Nordstroem metrics. At the price
of losing the simple geometric interpretation, a closely related "alternative"
dilaton coupling can nevertheless be defined, admitting as solutions smooth
"electric" metrics.Comment: 23 pages, 1 table, 1 TeX-figure. Minor changes, to agree with with
paper accepted for publication by Phys. Rev.
Brans-Dicke wormholes in the Jordan and Einstein frames
We examine the possibility of static wormhole solutions in the vacuum
Brans-Dicke theory both in the original (Jordan) frame and in the conformally
rescaled (Einstein) frame. It turns out that, in the former frame, wormholes
exist only in a very narrow interval of the coupling parameter, viz.,
-3/2<omega<-4/3. It is shown that these wormholes are not traversable in
practice. In the latter frame, wormhole solutions do not exist at all unless
energy conditions are violated by hand.Comment: Minor errors corrected, uploaded for the benefit of the researcher
Non-perturbative dynamics of hot non-Abelian gauge fields: beyond leading log approximation
Many aspects of high-temperature gauge theories, such as the electroweak
baryon number violation rate, color conductivity, and the hard gluon damping
rate, have previously been understood only at leading logarithmic order (that
is, neglecting effects suppressed only by an inverse logarithm of the gauge
coupling). We discuss how to systematically go beyond leading logarithmic order
in the analysis of physical quantities. Specifically, we extend to
next-to-leading-log order (NLLO) the simple leading-log effective theory due to
Bodeker that describes non-perturbative color physics in hot non-Abelian
plasmas. A suitable scaling analysis is used to show that no new operators
enter the effective theory at next-to-leading-log order. However, a NLLO
calculation of the color conductivity is required, and we report the resulting
value. Our NLLO result for the color conductivity can be trivially combined
with previous numerical work by G. Moore to yield a NLLO result for the hot
electroweak baryon number violation rate.Comment: 20 pages, 1 figur
Gender, age and the MBA: An analysis of extrinsic and intrinsic career benefits
Against the background of an earlier UK study, this paper presents the findings of a Canadian based survey of career benefits from the MBA. Results indicate firstly that gender and age interact to influence perceptions of career outcomes (young men gain most in terms of extrinsic benefits of career change and pay), and secondly that both men and women gain intrinsic benefits from the MBA. However, intrinsic benefits vary by gender: men in the study were more likely to say they gained confidence from having a fuller skill set while women were more likely to say they gained confidence from feelings of self worth; men emphasised how they had learned to give up control while women argued that they had gained a âvoiceâ in the organization. The role of the MBA in career self- management and the acquisition of key skills are examined as well as the implications for the design of programmes in meeting the varied need of men and women in different age groups
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