Using Case Work as a Pretest to Measure Crisis Leadership Preparedness

Today’s leaders must thrive in a world of turbulence and constant change. Unstable conditions frequently generate crises, emphasizing the need for crisis leadership preparedness, which is missing from many business curricula. Thus, the purpose of this work was to develop a learning module in crisis leadership preparedness. As a baseline measure or pretest, 217 graduate students were asked to analyze two crisis leadership cases during the first week of an entry leadership class. Content analysis provided the method to identify where student analyses fell short. These gaps in learning then informed the creation of student learning objectives. Applying inquiry-based learning, I then suggest instructional methods that I incorporated into an active learning module to better prepare today’s leaders for crisis leadership

Perception is Reality: Change Leadership and Work Engagement

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how employee perceptions of change and leadership might impact work engagement following major organizational change. Design/methodology/approach Social media invited US workers recently experiencing major organizational change to anonymously complete a web-based survey requesting qualitative and quantitative responses. Values-based coding and thematic analysis were used to explore qualitative data. Hierarchical and linear regression, and bootstrapped mediation were used to analyze quantitative data. Findings Analysis of qualitative data identified employees’ perceptions of ideal change and ideal leadership were well supported in the change leadership literature. Analysis of quantitative data indicated that employee perceptions of leadership fully mediated the relationship between employee perceptions of change and work engagement. Practical implications Study findings imply that how employees perceive change is explained by how they perceive leadership during change, and that these perceptions impact work engagement. Although these findings appear commonsensical, the less than stellar statistics on major organizational change may encourage leaders to become more follower-focused throughout the change process. Originality/value The study makes a contribution to an understudied area of organizational research, specifically applied information processing theory. This is the first study that identifies employee perceptions of leadership as a mediator for perceptions of change and work engagement. From a value perspective, leaders as successful change agents recognize significant cost savings in dollars and human welfare by maintaining healthy workplaces with highly engaged workers

WAG Shares the DOPE: Tools for Effective Writing of Course Assignments International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference

We facilitated a three-hour workshop the afternoon of June 6, 2018. This workshop was an extension of work we have been doing in the College of Health and Human Services for the last 2 ½ years. This work was originally supported by an Assessment Fellows Grant and focused on addressing assessment at the college level. To do that, we needed to focus on an area of competence that was relevant to all programs in the college. After reviewing the key goals that the college set back in 2005, and listening to colleagues on the college assessment committee, we decided to focus on the assessment of writing in the College of Health and Human Services. From there, we led focus groups with faculty in the college, to discern what exactly they were looking for when it came to writing assignments in their courses. After all, we could not assess something if we did not first describe it

From WAG to FLAG: FLC for Supporting Writing Across WMU

FLAG grew out of the WAG workshops, as faculty wanted to continue the conversation and we sought a structure that would facilitate that process. After consulting with Milt Cox, WAG was seen as a quasi FLC, so we developed a full FLC to address faculty concerns related to student writing assignment

The dynamics of stratified horizontal shear flows at low Péclet number

We consider the dynamics of a vertically stratified, horizontally-forced Kolmogorov flow. Motivated by astrophysical systems where the Prandtl number is often asymptotically small, our focus is the little-studied limit of high Reynolds number but low P\'eclet number (which is defined to be the product of the Reynolds number and the Prandtl number). Through a linear stability analysis, we demonstrate that the stability of two-dimensional modes to infinitesimal perturbations is independent of the stratification, whilst three-dimensional modes are always unstable in the limit of strong stratification and strong thermal diffusion. The subsequent nonlinear evolution and transition to turbulence is studied numerically using direct numerical simulations. For sufficiently large Reynolds numbers, four distinct dynamical regimes naturally emerge, depending upon the strength of the background stratification. By considering dominant balances in the governing equations, we derive scaling laws for each regime which explain the numerical data

The Dimer Model for k-phase Organic Superconductors

We prove that the upper electronic bands of k-phase BEDT-TTF salts are adequately modeled by an half-filled tight-binding lattice with one site per cell. The band parameters are derived from recent ab-initio calculations, getting a very simple but extremely accurate one-electron picture. This picture allows us to solve the BCS gap equation adopting a real-space pairing potential. Comparison of the calculated superconducting properties with the experimental data points to isotropic s_0-pairing. Residual many-body or phonon-mediated interactions offer a plausible explanation of the large variety of physical properties observed in k-phase BEDT-TTF salts.Comment: 8 pages, 6 PostScript figures, uses RevTe

Revolution Resolution

Our submission started out as a simple class-activism project and turned into an ongoing quest for change. It is a resolution and response paper that we wrote proposing to change Fredonia\u27s legal name policy (the resolution is included in the response paper). As three transgender students, this topic is very personal and important to us. After extensive research we have found an impressive correlation between a trans-inclusive campus environment and the success rate and safety of students. Our resolution was presented to and endorsed by both the student association and university senates last semester, and we are currently serving on a task force commissioned by the president of our university and the chair of the faculty senate to change the current policy. Our end goal is to allow students to use a preferred name on their public identities (i.e. student I.D. cards, campus email, and class rosters

Modelling and Control of Complex Cyber-Physical Ecosystems

In this paper, we set up a mathematical framework for the modelling and control of complex cyber-physical ecosystems. In our setting, cyber-physical ecosystems (CPES) are cyber-physical systems of systems that are highly connected. CPES are understood as open and adaptive cyber-physical infrastructures. These networked systems combine cyber-physical systems with an interaction mechanism with other systems and the environment (ecosystem capability). The main focus will be on modelling cyber and physical interfaces that play an important role on the control of the emergent properties like safety and security