Assessing the Conflict Resolution Profiles of Emerging Information Systems Professionals

Conflict among Information Systems (IS) employees, and between IS employees and others outside their group, has the potential to add significantly to the cost of doing business for U.S. firms. While some conflict may serve the purpose of crafting a more refined product, significant or unresolved conflict can effectively serve to delay or scuttle even the most well-planned or well-designed project. Information Systems educators are in a unique position to contribute to the effective management of conflict. By using assessment/measurement techniques such as those illustrated in this study, opportunities to understand and manage conflict in the classroom and in classroom projects may be enhanced. Further, conflict assessment techniques learned and utilized by students in classroom exercises may be carried forward by those students as they begin their professional careers, thereby possibly contributing to the more effective management of conflict by IS organizations. This study was designed to demonstrate how educators may objectively measure or assess the conflict resolution traits of students who in many cases represent prospective/emerging IS employees. Some 200+ college students, the majority of whom were Information Systems majors, were assessed regarding their tendency toward collaboration, cooperation, accommodation, compromise, competition, and conflict avoidance. Results of the study reinforce previous studies which support the reliability of such assessment techniques. Other findings indicate that overall group means for the students were quite comparable to industry norms but that differences in a number of aspects related to conflict resolution styles exist between males and females, traditional and non-traditional age students, and between those with and those without work experience. Participants scored highest on the compromising construct, followed in order by the modes of avoiding, accommodating, collaborating, and competing

Correlated Factors of Success: Personality, Creativity and Academic Achievement Among IS Students

Escalating demand for emerging IS personnel and a rapidly changing technological environment currently challenge many academic institutions attempting to attract, retain, and properly prepare the next generation of IS professionals. While in some instances attractive salaries and increased recruiting have attracted more students to the major, many academic programs still struggle with retaining and properly educating tomorrow’s IS employees. With that in mind, this study is designed to take a fresh look at today’s IS student in an attempt to identify some of the more significant factors related to success in the field. Specifically, factors related to personality, creativity, and other student attributes are studied to determine their relationship to a student’s success in the IS major. Results of the effort indicate that while personality type does play a role in the success of students, the aspects of creativity studied here are not significantly related to achievement. Additional analyses provide insight into other characteristics that are related to academic achievement or success in the study of information systems

Environmental Emission of Pharmaceuticals from Wastewater Treatment Plants in the USA

The residual drugs, drug bioconjugates, and their metabolites, mostly from human and veterinary usage, are routinely flushed down the drain, and enter wastewater treatment plants (WWTP). Increasing population, excessive use of allopathic medicine, continual introduction of novel drugs, and existing inefficient wastewater treatment processes result in the discharge of large volumes of pharmaceuticals and their metabolites from the WWTPs into the environment. The effluent from the WWTPs globally contaminate ~25% of rivers and the lakes. Pharmaceuticals in the environment, as contaminants of emerging concerns, behave as pseudo-persistent despite their relatively short environmental half-lives in the environment. Therefore, residual levels of pharmaceuticals in the environment not only pose a threat to the wildlife but also affect human health through contaminated food and drinking water. This chapter highlights WWTPs as point-sources of their environmental emissions and various effects on the aquatic and terrestrial ecosystem

Searching for a Common Ancestry: Linguistic and Biological Analogies in Comic Art

Sometimes comic book readers randomly encounter images in a comic that closely resemble images in other comics. This artwork could appear to the reader to have been copied, even directly 'lifted' from older or better-known comics. Sometimes, however, it does seem like any similarities have been generated independently, by chance or serendipity. In this note we draw on the work of Umberto Eco, William Lethaby, Walter Benjamin and Carl Jung to describe a multidisciplinary conceptual framework to analyse similar images using a heuristic approach involving two analogy concepts drawn from two different disciplines: linguistics and biology. When the origin of similarity between images is well documented, we propose the linguistic analogy approach can explain the phenomenon of recurrent images. When the similarity between two images appears to be unexplainable, or the result of mere chance, we propose that the concept of biological analogy can be helpful to explain the superficial resemblance of elements that have different origins

A comparative analysis of the emotional intelligence levels of American and Chinese business students

Emotional Intelligence (EI) is a characteristic of business students that has been the subject of significant research. This study was designed to extend that prior research by comparing the EI scores of American business students with those of Chinese business students. The study further focuses on those factors which may be related to ways in which the two groups of individuals differ in their levels of Emotional Intelligence. Specifically, a number of demographic characteristics were evaluated with regard to whether or not they were associated with differences in EI achievement scores between both the American and Chinese business students. Results indicate that students\u27 EI scores did significantly differ for the two groups when the factors of age, gender and grade point average were considered