Who’s in Charge Here? Whoever Needs To Be! A Study of Shared Leadership

Organizations depend on teams for their success, and as information technology (IT) capabilities have improved they have increased their use of virtual teams. Virtual teams allow organizations to dynamically adjust to changing needs, but present unique leadership challenges. There is currently little theory on how leadership works in virtual teams and few studies that provide empirical evidence for the ideas that have been advanced. This study reports results gleaned from a two-week collaboration project undertaken by a large team using an array of IT capabilities in a distributed virtual environment. It found support for key ideas espoused in models of shared leadership and captures lessons that could be useful to practitioners

Self-Reported Leadership Experiences in Relation to Inventoried Social and Emotional Intelligence

Leadership has both social and emotional components. Social intelligence appears to tap the social component found in leadership. Recently, emotional intelligence has surfaced as a stable individual difference variable and appears to tap the emotional component of leadership. Mayer and Salovey (1993) suggested that the emotional intelligence and social intelligence constructs overlap. This study examined the power of both emotional and social intelligence to account for variance in self-reported leadership experiences. One hundred ninety-two university students completed measures of social and emotional intelligence and a measure of leadership experiences. Regression analyses showed that both social intelligence and emotional intelligence accounted for variance in leadership experiences. Although emotional intelligence was found to account for variance in leadership, it did not add unique variance beyond social intelligence. Social intelligence appears to play a principal role in leadership

Introduction to the Special Issue: What We Can Learn from Large Scale Human Resources Initiatives in the Federal Government and Department of Defense

Arguably, the government has some of the most complex and sophisticated Human Resource (HR) initiatives of any organization in the country. This is due to at least three reasons. First, the sheer size of the government requires sophisticated HR systems to manage the huge number of HR decisions required. Second, the HR systems in the government must respond to much greater external (public) scrutiny than any other organization because it is funded by government money and must be responsive to taxpayers interests and concerns. As such, fairness and defensibility are far more important factors than in other organizations. Third, the government HR systems must comply with many more laws and regulations than other organizations, thus placing constraints on informal judgment and discretion and requiring sophisticated formal decision-making systems

Age and experience effects in spatial visualization

Three studies were conducted to investigate effects related to age and experience on measures of spatial visualization ability. All research participants were college-educated men; those in the experienced group were practicing or recently retired architects. The major results of the studies were (a) that increased age was found to be associated with lower levels of performance on several tests of spatial visualization and (b) that this was true both for unselected adults and for adults with extensive spatial visualization experience. These findings seem to suggest that age-related effects in some aspects of cognitive functioning may be independent of experiential influences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved

Development of leadership skills: Experience and timing

To develop organizational leaders we need to understand how requisite skills are acquired over the course of people\u27s careers. In this article, a cross-sectional design was used to assess differences in leadership skills across six grade levels of officers in the U.S. Army. Increased levels of knowledge, problem-solving skills, systems skills, and social skills were found at higher grade levels. Certain skills and experiences, however, were found to be particularly important at certain phases of leaders\u27 careers. These findings are used to propose an organization-based model of skill development. Implications of this model for leader development programs are discussed

Identification and characterization of a rich population of CD34mesenchymal stem/stromal cells in human parotid, sublingual and submandibular glands

Mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (MSCs) play crucial roles in maintaining tissue homeostasis during physiological turnovers and injuries. Very little is known about the phenotype, distribution and molecular nature of MSCs in freshly isolated human salivary glands (SGs) as most reports have focused on the analysis of cultured MSCs. Our results demonstrate that the cell adhesion molecule CD34 was widely expressed by the MSCs of human major SGs, namely parotid (PAG), sublingual (SLG) and submandibular (SMG) glands. Further, gene expression analysis of CD34+ cells derived from fetal SMGs showed significant upregulation of genes involved in cellular adhesion, proliferation, branching, extracellular matrix remodeling and organ development. Moreover, CD34+ SMG cells exhibited elevated expression of genes encoding extracellular matrix, basement membrane proteins, and members of ERK, FGF and PDGF signaling pathways, which play key roles in glandular development, branching and homeostasis. In vitro CD34+ cell derived SG-MSCs revealed multilineage differentiation potential. Intraglandular transplantation of cultured MSCs in immunodeficient mice led to their engraftment in the injected and uninjected contralateral and ipsilateral glands. Engrafted cells could be localized to the stroma surrounding acini and ducts. In summary, our data show that CD34+ derived SG-MSCs could be a promising cell source for adoptive cell-based SG therapies, and bioengineering of artificial SGs

Expression analysis of α-smooth muscle actin and tenascin-C in the periodontal ligament under orthodontic loading or in vitro culture

α-smooth muscle actin (α-SMA) and tenascin-C are stress-induced phenotypic features of myofibroblasts. The expression levels of these two proteins closely correlate with the extracellular mechanical microenvironment. We investigated how the expression of α-SMA and tenascin-C was altered in the periodontal ligament (PDL) under orthodontic loading to indirectly reveal the intrinsic mechanical microenvironment in the PDL. In this study, we demonstrated the synergistic effects of transforming growth factor-β1 (TGF-β1) and mechanical tensile or compressive stress on myofibroblast differentiation from human periodontal ligament cells (hPDLCs). The hPDLCs under higher tensile or compressive stress significantly increased their levels of α-SMA and tenascin-C compared with those under lower tensile or compressive stress. A similar trend was observed in the tension and compression areas of the PDL under continuous light or heavy orthodontic load in rats. During the time-course analysis of expression, we observed that an increase in α-SMA levels was matched by an increase in tenascin-C levels in the PDL under orthodontic load in vivo. The time-dependent variation of α-SMA and tenascin-C expression in the PDL may indicate the time-dependent variation of intrinsic stress under constant extrinsic loading