Organizational culture, leadership style and effectiveness: A case study of middle eastern construction clients

During the last few decades, organizational effectiveness has received a great deal of attention in many industrial sectors. As a result, a variety of models have been formulated which measure organizational performance. In the construction industry, two factors have subsequently captured the imagination and interest of researchers and practitioners alike: the culture of the organization and the leadership style of project managers. This focus places a requirement upon construction organizations to recognize and understand their organizational culture, and equally, to clearly communicate it to their employees as part of their capitalist drive of constantly improving performance, productivity and profit. Traditional ways of conducting construction business require a sound understanding of the technical and managerial demands of executing projects, which in turn, places an increased emphasis upon the management and leadership competencies of individual project managers. The purpose of the research is to explore the relationship between organizational culture, authentic leadership style and effectiveness within the context of a case study investigation centred on Middle Eastern construction clients and their project managers. The outcomes of the investigation, which include the presentation of an explanatory model, indicate that organizational culture is directly and positively related to performance and effectiveness, while project managers' leadership style has an indirect relationship to effectiveness. A strong organizational culture is therefore deemed critical to organizational performance

IMPROVE: collaborative design review in mobile mixed reality

In this paper we introduce an innovative application designed to make collaborative design review in the architectural and automotive domain more effective. For this purpose we present a system architecture which combines variety of visualization displays such as high resolution multi-tile displays, TabletPCs and head-mounted displays with innovative 2D and 3D Interaction Paradigms to better support collaborative mobile mixed reality design reviews. Our research and development is motivated by two use scenarios: automotive and architectural design review involving real users from Page\Park architects and FIAT Elasis. Our activities are supported by the EU IST project IMPROVE aimed at developing advanced display techniques, fostering activities in the areas of: optical see-through HMD development using unique OLED technology, marker-less optical tracking, mixed reality rendering, image calibration for large tiled displays, collaborative tablet-based and projection wall oriented interaction and stereoscopic video streaming for mobile users. The paper gives an overview of the hardware and software developments within IMPROVE and concludes with results from first user tests

Highly efficient, large area, roll coated flexible and rigid OPV modules with geometric fill factors up to 98.5% processed with commercially available materials

Highly efficient, large area OPV modules achieving full area efficiencies of up to 93% of the reference small area cells are reported. The way to a no-loss up-scaling process is highlighted: photoelectrical conversion efficiencies of 5.3% are achieved on rigid modules and of 4.2% on flexible, roll coated ones, employing a commercially available photoactive material. Exceptionally high geometric fill factors (98.5%), achieved via structuring by ultrashort laser pulses, with interconnection widths below 100 μm are demonstrated

Sequential Processing for Organic Photovoltaics: Design Rules for Morphology Control by Tailored Semi-Orthogonal Solvent Blends

© 2015 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim. Design rules are presented for significantly expanding sequential processing (SqP) into previously inaccessible polymer:fullerene systems by tailoring binary solvent blends for fullerene deposition. Starting with a base solvent that has high fullerene solubility, 2-chlorophenol (2-CP), ellipsometry-based swelling experiments are used to investigate different co-solvents for the fullerene-casting solution. By tuning the Flory-Huggins χ parameter of the 2-CP/co-solvent blend, it is possible to optimally swell the polymer of interest for fullerene interdiffusion without dissolution of the polymer underlayer. In this way solar cell power conversion efficiencies are obtained for the PTB7 (poly[(4,8-bis[(2-ethylhexyl)oxy]benzo[1,2-b:4,5-b']dithiophene-2,6-diyl)(3-fluoro-2-[(2-ethylhexyl)carbonyl]thieno[3,4-b]thiophenediyl)]) and PC61BM (phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester) materials combination that match those of blend-cast films. Both semicrystalline (e.g., P3HT (poly(3-hexylthiophene-2,5-diyl)) and entirely amorphous (e.g., PSDTTT (poly[(4,8-di(2-butyloxy)benzo[1,2-b:4,5-b']dithiophene-2,6-diyl)-alt-(2,5-bis(4,4'-bis(2-octyl)dithieno[3,2-b:2'3'-d]silole-2,6-diyl)thiazolo[5,4-d]thiazole)]) conjugated polymers can be processed into highly efficient photovoltaic devices using the solvent-blend SqP design rules. Grazing-incidence wide-angle x-ray diffraction experiments confirm that proper choice of the fullerene casting co-solvent yields well-ordered interdispersed bulk heterojunction (BHJ) morphologies without the need for subsequent thermal annealing or the use of trace solvent additives (e.g., diiodooctane). The results open SqP to polymer/fullerene systems that are currently incompatible with traditional methods of device fabrication, and make BHJ morphology control a more tractable problem

Scalable, ambient atmosphere roll-to-roll manufacture of encapsulated large area, flexible organic tandem solar cell modules

Inline printing and coating methods have been demonstrated to enable a high technical yield of fully roll-to-roll processed polymer tandem solar cell modules. We demonstrate generality by employing different material sets and also describe how the ink systems must be carefully co-developed in order to reach the ambitious objective of a fully printed and coated 14-layer flexible tandem solar cell stack. The roll-to-roll methodologies involved are flexographic printing, rotary screen printing, slot-die coating, X-ray scattering, electrical testing and UV-lamination. Their combination enables the manufacture of completely functional devices in exceptionally high yields. Critical to the ink and process development is a carefully chosen technology transfer to industry method where first a roll coater is employed enabling contactless stack build up, followed by a small roll-to-roll coater fitted to an X-ray machine enabling in situ studies of wet ink deposition and drying mechanisms, ultimately elucidating how a robust inline processed recombination layer is key to a high technical yield. Finally, the transfer to full roll-to-roll processing is demonstrated

Panchromatic Sequentially Cast Ternary Polymer Solar Cells

In this report, a high-performance all-polymer organic photodetector that is sensitive to linearly polarized light throughout the visible spectrum is demonstrated. The active layer is a bulk heterojunction composed of an electron donor polymer PBnDT-FTAZ and acceptor polymer P(NDI2OD-T2) that have complementary spectral absorption resulting in efficient detection from 350 to 800 nm. The blend film exhibits good ductility with the ability to accommodate large strains of over 60% without fracture. This allows the film to undergo large uniaxial strain resulting in in-plane alignment of both polymers making the film optically anisotropic and intrinsically polarization sensitive. The films are characterized by UV–vis spectroscopy and grazing incidence wide-angle X-ray scattering showing that both polymers have similar in-plane backbone alignment and maintain packing order after being strained. The films are integrated into devices and characterized under linear polarized light. The strain-oriented detectors have maximum photocurrent anisotropies of 1.4 under transverse polarized light while maintaining peak responsivities of 0.21 A W −1 and a 3 dB cutoff frequency of ≈1 kHz. The demonstrated performance is comparable to the current state of the art all-polymer photodetectors with the added capability of polarization sensitivity enabling new application opportunities

Simulation magnetostatique de tetes magnetiques en 3D par decomposition de domaine

SIGLECNRS T Bordereau / INIST-CNRS - Institut de l'Information Scientifique et TechniqueFRFranc