Can absent leadership be positive in team conflicts? An examination of leaders' avoidance behavior in China

Purpose – Although conflict avoidance is one of the most commonly used conflict resolution styles in China, there has surprisingly been no explicit investigation of the effects of leaders’ avoidance. This paper therefore examines how leaders’ avoidance influences followers’ attitudes and well-being in China. Design/methodology/approach – Data was collected from 245 subordinates in three large companies in the People’s Republic of China through an online survey. Multiple regression analysis was adopted to test three sets of competing hypotheses. Findings – Leaders’ avoidance behaviour is positively related to followers’ perception of justice, supervisory trust and emotional well-being in Chinese organizations. Originality/value - Our paper joins growing attempts to consider conflict management in the context of leadership. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine empirically the relationships between a team leader’s avoidance behaviour and his or her subordinates’ perceptions of justice, supervisory trust, and emotional well-being in a single study. The findings are provoking by illustrating positive effect of leader's conflict avoidance behaviour in China. Our paper supports that conflict avoidance could be a sustainable rather than one-off strategy by a leader, and that identifying conditions (e.g. culture) that affect the outcomes of conflict avoidance is important

Optimal Incentive Contract with Endogenous Monitoring Technology

Recent technology advances have enabled firms to flexibly process and analyze sophisticated employee performance data at a reduced and yet significant cost. We develop a theory of optimal incentive contracting where the monitoring technology that governs the above procedure is part of the designer's strategic planning. In otherwise standard principal-agent models with moral hazard, we allow the principal to partition agents' performance data into any finite categories and to pay for the amount of information the output signal carries. Through analysis of the trade-off between giving incentives to agents and saving the monitoring cost, we obtain characterizations of optimal monitoring technologies such as information aggregation, strict MLRP, likelihood ratio-convex performance classification, group evaluation in response to rising monitoring costs, and assessing multiple task performances according to agents' endogenous tendencies to shirk. We examine the implications of these results for workforce management and firms' internal organizations

Galactic Dark Matter in the Phantom Field

We investigate the possibility that the galactic dark matter exists in an scenario where the phantom field is responsible for the dark energy. We obtain the statically and spherically approximate solution for this kind of the galaxy system with a supermassive black hole at its center. The solution of the metric functions is satisfied with $g_{tt} = - g_{rr}^{-1}$. Constrained by the observation of the rotational stars moving in circular orbits with nearly constant tangential speed in a spiral galaxy, the background of the phantom field which is spatially inhomogeneous has an exponential potential. To avoid the well-known quantum instability of the vacuum at high frequencies, the phantom field defined in an effective theory is valid only at low energies. Under this assumption, we further investigate the following properties. The absorption cross section of the low-energy $S$-wave excitations of the phantom field into the central black hole is shown to be the horizontal area of the central black hole. Because the infalling phantom particles have a total negative energy, the accretion of the phantom energy is related to the decrease of the black hole mass which is estimated to be much less than a solar mass in the lifetime of the Universe. Using a simple model with the cold dark matter very weakly coupled to the "{\it low-frequency}" phantom particles which are generated from the background, we show that these two densities can be quasi-stable in the galaxy.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure, a new figure and 3 references added, version to appear in PR

Generative Face Completion

In this paper, we propose an effective face completion algorithm using a deep generative model. Different from well-studied background completion, the face completion task is more challenging as it often requires to generate semantically new pixels for the missing key components (e.g., eyes and mouths) that contain large appearance variations. Unlike existing nonparametric algorithms that search for patches to synthesize, our algorithm directly generates contents for missing regions based on a neural network. The model is trained with a combination of a reconstruction loss, two adversarial losses and a semantic parsing loss, which ensures pixel faithfulness and local-global contents consistency. With extensive experimental results, we demonstrate qualitatively and quantitatively that our model is able to deal with a large area of missing pixels in arbitrary shapes and generate realistic face completion results.Comment: Accepted by CVPR 201