The Resilient Organization: A Meta-Analysis of the Effect of Communication on Team Diversity and Team Performance

The Input-Process-Output framework is adopted to examine the impact of diversity attributes (the input) on communication (the process) and their influence on performance (the output), to understand the internal group/team working mechanisms of organizational resilience. A meta-analysis of 174 correlations from 35 empirical studies undertaken over 35 years (1982-2017) showed that members of a team who have different experiences are more likely to share information and communicate openly when they deal with a task that requires collaboration outside the team. This supports the view that organizations are more resilient by being more closely connected with the external environment. Differences in social categories tend to favor openness of communication, especially in the case of age diversity and race/ethnicity diversity. An increase in openness of communication is likely to enhance team performance, particularly for small and medium sized teams operating in manufacturing industries, while frequency of communication can be beneficial for both large and medium sized teams working in the high technology industry. The positive workings of these associations form the resilient organization

Efficacy and safety of the anti-IL-12/23 p40 monoclonal antibody, ustekinumab, in patients with active psoriatic arthritis despite conventional non-biological and biological anti-tumour necrosis factor therapy: 6-month and 1-year results of the phase 3, multicentre, double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomised PSUMMIT 2 trial

Objective: Assess ustekinumab efficacy (week 24/week 52) and safety (week 16/week 24/week 60) in patients with active psoriatic arthritis (PsA) despite treatment with conventional and/or biological anti-tumour necrosis factor (TNF) agents. Methods: In this phase 3, multicentre, placebo-controlled trial, 312 adults with active PsA were randomised (stratified by site, weight (≤100 kg/>100 kg), methotrexate use) to ustekinumab 45 mg or 90 mg at week 0, week 4, q12 weeks or placebo at week 0, week 4, week 16 and crossover to ustekinumab 45 mg at week 24, week 28 and week 40. At week 16, patients with <5% improvement in tender/swollen joint counts entered blinded early escape (placebo→45 mg, 45 mg→90 mg, 90 mg→90 mg). The primary endpoint was ≥20% improvement in American College of Rheumatology (ACR20) criteria at week 24. Secondary endpoints included week 24 Health Assessment Questionnaire-Disability Index (HAQ-DI) improvement, ACR50, ACR70 and ≥75% improvement in Psoriasis Area and Severity Index (PASI75). Efficacy was assessed in all patients, anti-TNF-naïve (n=132) patients and anti-TNF-experienced (n=180) patients. Results: More ustekinumab-treated (43.8% combined) than placebo-treated (20.2%) patients achieved ACR20 at week 24 (p<0.001). Significant treatment differences were observed for week 24 HAQ-DI improvement (p<0.001), ACR50 (p≤0.05) and PASI75 (p<0.001); all benefits were sustained through week 52. Among patients previously treated with ≥1 TNF inhibitor, sustained ustekinumab efficacy was also observed (week 24 combined vs placebo: ACR20 35.6% vs 14.5%, PASI75 47.1% vs 2.0%, median HAQ-DI change −0.13 vs 0.0; week 52 ustekinumab-treated: ACR20 38.9%, PASI75 43.4%, median HAQ-DI change −0.13). No unexpected adverse events were observed through week 60. Conclusions: The interleukin-12/23 inhibitor ustekinumab (45/90 mg q12 weeks) yielded significant and sustained improvements in PsA signs/symptoms in a diverse population of patients with active PsA, including anti-TNF-experienced PsA patients

THE ROLE OF INTERDEPENDENCE IN THE MICRO-FOUNDATIONS OF ORGANIZATION DESIGN: TASK, GOAL, AND KNOWLEDGE INTERDEPENDENCE

Interdependence is a core concept in organization design, yet one that has remained consistently understudied. Current notions of interdependence remain rooted in seminal works, produced at a time when managers’ near-perfect understanding of the task at hand drove the organization design process. In this context, task interdependence was rightly assumed to be exogenously determined by characteristics of the work and the technology. We no longer live in that world, yet our view of interdependence has remained exceedingly task-centric and our treatment of interdependence overly deterministic. As organizations face increasingly unpredictable workstreams and workers co-design the organization alongside managers, our field requires a more comprehensive toolbox that incorporates aspects of agent-based interdependence. In this paper, we synthesize research in organization design, organizational behavior, and other related literatures to examine three types of interdependence that characterize organizations’ workflows: task, goal, and knowledge interdependence. We offer clear definitions for each construct, analyze how each arises endogenously in the design process, explore their interrelations, and pose questions to guide future research

Chronic paroxysmal hemicrania in paediatric age: report of two cases

Chronic paroxysmal hemicrania (CPH) is a rare primary headache syndrome, which is classified along with hemicrania continua and short-lasting unilateral neuralgiform headache attacks with conjunctival injection and tearing (SUNCT) as trigeminal autonomic cephalalgia (TACs). CPH is characterised by short-lasting (2–30 min), severe and multiple (more than 5/day) pain attacks. Headache is unilateral, and fronto-orbital-temporal pain is combined with cranial autonomic symptoms. According to the International Classification of Headache Disorders, 2nd edition, the attacks are absolutely responsive to indomethacin. CPH has been only rarely and incompletely described in the developmental age. Here, we describe two cases concerning a 7-year-old boy and a 11-year-old boy with short-lasting, recurrent headache combined with cranial autonomic features. Pain was described as excruciating, and was non-responsive to most traditional analgesic drugs. The clinical features of our children’s headache and the positive response to indomethacin led us to propose the diagnosis of CPH. Therefore, our children can be included amongst the very few cases of this trigeminal autonomic cephalgia described in the paediatric age

Efficient ancestry and mutation simulation with msprime 1.0

Stochastic simulation is a key tool in population genetics, since the models involved are often analytically intractable and simulation is usually the only way of obtaining ground-truth data to evaluate inferences. Because of this, a large number of specialized simulation programs have been developed, each filling a particular niche, but with largely overlapping functionality and a substantial duplication of effort. Here, we introduce msprime version 1.0, which efficiently implements ancestry and mutation simulations based on the succinct tree sequence data structure and the tskit library. We summarize msprime’s many features, and show that its performance is excellent, often many times faster and more memory efficient than specialized alternatives. These high-performance features have been thoroughly tested and validated, and built using a collaborative, open source development model, which reduces duplication of effort and promotes software quality via community engagement

A community-maintained standard library of population genetic models

The explosion in population genomic data demands ever more complex modes of analysis, and increasingly, these analyses depend on sophisticated simulations. Recent advances in population genetic simulation have made it possible to simulate large and complex models, but specifying such models for a particular simulation engine remains a difficult and error-prone task. Computational genetics researchers currently re-implement simulation models independently, leading to inconsistency and duplication of effort. This situation presents a major barrier to empirical researchers seeking to use simulations for power analyses of upcoming studies or sanity checks on existing genomic data. Population genetics, as a field, also lacks standard benchmarks by which new tools for inference might be measured. Here, we describe a new resource, stdpopsim, that attempts to rectify this situation. Stdpopsim is a community-driven open source project, which provides easy access to a growing catalog of published simulation models from a range of organisms and supports multiple simulation engine backends. This resource is available as a well-documented python library with a simple command-line interface. We share some examples demonstrating how stdpopsim can be used to systematically compare demographic inference methods, and we encourage a broader community of developers to contribute to this growing resource.Open access journalThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Evaluation of the impact of interdisciplinarity in cancer care

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Teamwork is a key component of the health care renewal strategy emphasized in Quebec, elsewhere in Canada and in other countries to enhance the quality of oncology services. While this innovation would appear beneficial in theory, empirical evidences of its impact are limited. Current efforts in Quebec to encourage the development of local interdisciplinary teams in all hospitals offer a unique opportunity to assess the anticipated benefits. These teams working in hospital outpatient clinics are responsible for treatment, follow-up and patient support. The study objective is to assess the impact of interdisciplinarity on cancer patients and health professionals.</p> <p>Methods/Design</p> <p>This is a quasi-experimental study with three comparison groups distinguished by intensity of interdisciplinarity: strong, moderate and weak. The study will use a random sample of 12 local teams in Quebec, stratified by intensity of interdisciplinarity. The instrument to measure the intensity of the interdisciplinarity, developed in collaboration with experts, encompasses five dimensions referring to aspects of team structure and process. Self-administered questionnaires will be used to measure the impact of interdisciplinarity on patients (health care utilization, continuity of care and cancer services responsiveness) and on professionals (professional well-being, assessment of teamwork and perception of teamwork climate). Approximately 100 health professionals working on the selected teams and 2000 patients will be recruited. Statistical analyses will include descriptive statistics and comparative analysis of the impact observed according to the strata of interdisciplinarity. Fixed and random multivariate statistical models (multilevel analyses) will also be used.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>This study will pinpoint to what extent interdisciplinarity is linked to quality of care and meets the complex and varied needs of cancer patients. It will ascertain to what extent interdisciplinary teamwork facilitated the work of professionals. Such findings are important given the growing prevalence of cancer and the importance of attracting and retaining health professionals to work with cancer patients.</p

Optimized ancestral state reconstruction using Sankoff parsimony

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Parsimony methods are widely used in molecular evolution to estimate the most plausible phylogeny for a set of characters. Sankoff parsimony determines the minimum number of changes required in a given phylogeny when a cost is associated to transitions between character states. Although optimizations exist to reduce the computations in the number of taxa, the original algorithm takes time <it>O</it>(<it>n</it>²) in the number of states, making it impractical for large values of <it>n</it>.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this study we introduce an optimization of Sankoff parsimony for the reconstruction of ancestral states when ultrametric or additive cost matrices are used. We analyzed its performance for randomly generated matrices, Jukes-Cantor and Kimura's two-parameter models of DNA evolution, and in the reconstruction of elongation factor-1<it>α </it>and ancestral metabolic states of a group of eukaryotes, showing that in all cases the execution time is significantly less than with the original implementation.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The algorithms here presented provide a fast computation of Sankoff parsimony for a given phylogeny. Problems where the number of states is large, such as reconstruction of ancestral metabolism, are particularly adequate for this optimization. Since we are reducing the computations required to calculate the parsimony cost of a single tree, our method can be combined with optimizations in the number of taxa that aim at finding the most parsimonious tree.</p

Expanding the stdpopsim species catalog, and lessons learned for realistic genome simulations

Simulation is a key tool in population genetics for both methods development and empirical research, but producing simulations that recapitulate the main features of genomic datasets remains a major obstacle. Today, more realistic simulations are possible thanks to large increases in the quantity and quality of available genetic data, and the sophistication of inference and simulation software. However, implementing these simulations still requires substantial time and specialized knowledge. These challenges are especially pronounced for simulating genomes for species that are not well-studied, since it is not always clear what information is required to produce simulations with a level of realism sufficient to confidently answer a given question. The community-developed framework stdpopsim seeks to lower this barrier by facilitating the simulation of complex population genetic models using up-to-date information. The initial version of stdpopsim focused on establishing this framework using six well-characterized model species (Adrion et al., 2020). Here, we report on major improvements made in the new release of stdpopsim (version 0.2), which includes a significant expansion of the species catalog and substantial additions to simulation capabilities. Features added to improve the realism of the simulated genomes include non-crossover recombination and provision of species-specific genomic annotations. Through community-driven efforts, we expanded the number of species in the catalog more than threefold and broadened coverage across the tree of life. During the process of expanding the catalog, we have identified common sticking points and developed the best practices for setting up genome-scale simulations. We describe the input data required for generating a realistic simulation, suggest good practices for obtaining the relevant information from the literature, and discuss common pitfalls and major considerations. These improvements to stdpopsim aim to further promote the use of realistic whole-genome population genetic simulations, especially in non-model organisms, making them available, transparent, and accessible to everyone