Empowerment in the Public Sector: Testing the Influence of Goal Orientation

Empowerment has emerged as an important new issue in the public sector organization setting in the wake of mainstream new public management (NPM). Nevertheless, few studies in this frame have combined structural (managerial) and psychological (individual) approaches in an integrative study of empowerment. There is also a need to examine the moderating variables involved in this relationship, as well as to extend research on work motivation in public management. This study explores the effect of structural empowerment on psychological empowerment, and it also draws on goal orientation (GO) theory to examine the moderating role of employees’ GO in this link. The model is tested on a sample of 521 Spanish local authority employees. The results do not confirm the direct link between structural and psychological empowerment, but show that learning GO has considerable moderating power in this relationship, and its interaction with structural empowerment affects employees’ psychological empowerment levels

Comprehensive cardiovascular risk management – what does it mean in practice?

The continued movement away from the treatment of individual cardiovascular (CV) risk factors to managing overall and lifetime CV risk is likely to have a significant impact on slowing the rate of increase in cardiovascular disease (CVD). However, the management of CVD is currently far from optimal even in parts of the world with well-developed and well-funded healthcare systems. Effective implementation of the knowledge, treatment guidelines, diagnostic tools, therapeutic interventions, and management programs that exist for CVD continues to evade us. A thorough understanding of the multifactorial nature of CVD is essential to its effective management. Improvements continue to be made to management guidelines, risk assessment tools, treatments, and care programs pertaining to CVD. Ultimately, however, preventing the epidemic of CVD will require a combination of both medical and public health approaches. In addition to improvements in the “high-risk” strategy, management, an increase in the utilization of population-based management strategies needs to be made to attempt to reduce the number of patients falling within the “at-risk” stratum for CVD. This review outlines how a comprehensive approach to CVD management might be achieved

Incorporating poverty in society into strategic human resource management

In developed societies, the cultural value of social trust and cooperative behavior decreases when levels of poverty increase. Based on the contextual social exchange perspective, we argue that these societal traits can be transmitted to companies located within such societies, resulting in a reduction of human resource (HR) investment and a decrease in the effect of these HR investments on workforce performance. Therefore, poverty in society has a dual role in its connection with HR investment, acting both as an antecedent and as a moderator. The employment relationship is dependent on the deprivation and poor quality of life of people in the region. We arrive at this conclusion from a study conducted on a sample of 2192 companies during a period of six years and applying longitudinal structural equation modeling. Findings indicate the importance of placing HR practices within their socioeconomic environment, specifically living conditions, to understand their implementation and return over time

Use of a flor yeast strain for the second fermentation of sparkling wines: Effect of endogenous CO2 over-pressure on the volatilome

Saccharomyces cerevisiae flor yeast is used for the first time in sparkling wine-making. Twenty-six oenological variables and fifty-three volatile metabolites are quantified in the middle (P = 3 bar) and at the end (P = 6 bar) of the second fermentation, carried out in open and closed bottles. A heat-map of volatiles and the fingerprints obtained for ten chemical families and ten odorant series visualize the changes for each condition. Terpenes, fatty acids and volatile phenols increased their contents by pressure effect at the end of the study by 25.0, 7.8 and 2.2%, respectively. The remaining families decrease between 17.4% and 30.1% for furanic compounds and esters in the same stage. A Principal Component Analysis established that nine volatiles are mainly affected by pressure and five by fermentation stage. The use of ethanol-tolerant flor yeasts constitutes an innovative procedure for the enhancement of the sparkling wines diversification.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Structural empowerment and organisational performance: the mediating role of employees’ well-being in Spanish local governments

We extend the ‘black box’ picture of public management and the ‘balanced view’ of HRM literature to explore, in the public context, the impact of structural empowerment on organisational performance and the mediating role of three employee outcomes: job satisfaction and affective commitment as attitudinal variables related to eudaimonic well-being, and job anxiety as an employee health variable related to hedonic well-being. Using multilevel methodology on a sample of 103 local authorities, results show that structural empowerment is positively associated with organisational performance, both directly and indirectly, via employee health. This evidence supports the mutual gains perspective, but not as intensely as expected (empowerment does not affect attitudinal variables) and differently to the traditional perspective, since empowerment contributes to reduce job anxiety in Spanish local governments

La enseñanza de arquitecturas distribuidas en la universidad para satisfacer la demanda del internet de las cosas

Teaching of distributed architectures in the computer engineering degrees has traditionally been based on contents related to well-known established software paradigms and architectures. However, over the last few years, new solutions in the field of distributed architectures have emerged, especially within the field of the Internet of Things (IoT). In this article we tackle a methodology for teaching distributed architectures for the IoT from this new perspective. In this context, the description, implementation and testing of distributed architectures for IoT is therefore proposed. The methodology includes the development and testing of a case study relevant for the scope of IoT and smart cities using emerging technologies. In particular, in this paper we show the procedure followed to implement and test a case study related to traffic regulation and emergency vehicles movement, enabling such vehicles to reach their destination in the minimum amount of time.La enseñanza de las arquitecturas distribuidas en los estudios universitarios de ciencias de la computación o ingeniería informática se ha basado tradicionalmente en contenidos relacionados con paradigmas y arquitecturas de software bien conocidos y establecidos. Sin embargo, en los últimos años han surgido nuevas soluciones en el campo de las arquitecturas distribuidas, especialmente en el campo del Internet de las Cosas (IoT). En este artículo abordamos una metodología para enseñar arquitecturas distribuidas para el IoT desde esta nueva perspectiva. En este contexto, se propone, por tanto, la descripción, aplicación y prueba de arquitecturas distribuidas para el IoT. La metodología incluye el desarrollo y ensayo de un caso de estudio relevante en el ámbito del IoT y las ciudades inteligentes mediante el uso de tecnologías emergentes. En particular, en este artículo mostramos el procedimiento seguido para implementar y probar un caso de estudio relacionado con la regulación del tráfico y el desplazamiento de vehículos de emergencia, permitiendo que dichos vehículos lleguen a su destino en el menor tiempo posible

Factores a considerar en la elección del modo de entrada para la internacionalización de la industria hostelera andaluza

El turismo es uno de los principales sectores que sustenta la economía española, y en particular la andaluza. Dentro de éste, la industria hotelera tiene el mayor peso dentro del sector. Debido a una serie de motivos, se hace necesario que las cadenas hoteleras andaluzas deban emprender su proceso de internacionalización. En este trabajo, hacemos una radiografía de la situación actual de las cadenas hoteleras andaluzas. A partir de ahí, y tras un estudio analítico de la internacionalización de la industria hotelera describimos los distintos modos de entrada en el exterior utilizados en la internacionalización de esta industria en particular, y los distintos factores que hay que considerar para la correcta elección de la modalidad de penetración en otros mercados. Nuestro principal objetivo, por tanto, es definir, a partir de las explicaciones tradicionalmente utilizadas en la elección del modo de entrada, un conjunto de factores que han de tenerse en consideración para decidir entre las diferentes opciones de penetración en mercados exteriores. La evidencia empírica la realizamos a partir de una muestra de 122 establecimientos que las distintas cadenas hoteleras españolas tienen operando fuera de nuestro país. Con la aplicación de la Regresión Logística Ordinal (LOGIT model), y a partir del modelo de Contractor y Kundu (1998), pretendemos establecer qué factores inciden en la elección entre las distintas modalidades. Ésta vendrá determinada por variables relacionadas con el país de destino, variables específicas de la empresa, así como de una serie de factores relacionados con objetivos estratégicos

COLLECT: COLLaborativE ConText-aware service oriented architecture for intelligent decision-making in the Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) has radically transformed the world; currently, every device can be connected to the Internet and provide valuable information for decision-making. In spite of the fast evolution of technologies accompanying the grow of IoT, we are still faced with the challenge of providing a service oriented architecture, which facilitates the inclusion of data coming together from several IoT devices, data delivery among a system’s agents, real-time data processing and service provision to users. Furthermore, context-aware data processing and architectures still pose a challenge, in spite of being key requirements in order to get stronger IoT architectures. To face this challenge, we propose a COLLaborative ConText Aware Service Oriented Architecture (COLLECT), which facilitates both the integration of IoT heterogeneous domain context data — through the use of a light message broker — and easy data delivery among several agents and collaborative participants in the system — making use of an enterprise service bus —. In addition, this architecture provides real-time data processing thanks to the use of a complex event processing engine as well as services and intelligent decision-making procedures to users according to the needs of the domain in question. As a result, COLLECT has a great impact on context-aware decentralized and collaborative reasoning for IoT, promoting context-aware intelligent decision making in such scope. Since context-awareness is key for a wide range of recommender and intelligent systems, the presented novel solution improves decision making in a large number of fields where such systems require to promptly process a variety of ubiquitous collaborative and context-aware data

CARED-SOA: A Context-Aware Event-Driven Service-Oriented Architecture

Actualmente, la conciencia del contexto se ha vuelto esencial en las aplicaciones y servicios de software debido a la alta demanda de los usuarios, especialmente para las aplicaciones de computación móvil. Esta necesidad de proporcionar conciencia del contexto requiere una infraestructura de software no solo para recibir información de contexto, sino también para hacer uso de ella de manera que proporcione servicios ventajosos que se puedan personalizar según las necesidades del usuario. En este artículo, proporcionamos una arquitectura orientada a servicios impulsada por eventos respaldada por un bus de servicio empresarial, que facilitará la incorporación de datos de Internet de las Cosas y proporcionará servicios conscientes del contexto en tiempo real. El resultado, que ha sido validado a través de un estudio de caso del mundo real, es una arquitectura consciente del contexto escalable que se puede aplicar en un amplio espectro de dominios.Currently, context awareness has become essential in software applications and services owing to the high demand by users, especially for mobile computing applications. This need to provide context awareness requires a software infrastructure not only to receive context information but also to make use of it so that it provides advantageous services that may be customized according to user needs. In this paper, we provide an event-driven service-oriented architecture supported by an enterprise service bus, which will facilitate the incorporation of Internet of Things data and provide real-time context-aware services. The result, which has been validated through a real-world case study, is a scalable context-aware architecture which can be applied in a wide spectrum of domains"This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Union FEDER Funds under Project TIN2015-65845-C3-3-R and in part by the University of Cádiz under Project UCA PR2016-032