Transformational Leadership and Employees’ Creativity: A Multi-Mediation Model

This research aims to examine the relationship between transformational leadership and employees’ creativity through mediating role of trust and job autonomy. The study employed cross sectional survey method for the collection of data from 187 employees working in construction and banking sectors of Pakistan. The findings reveal that transformational leadership fosters employees’ creativity through trust and job autonomy. Both trust and job autonomy have statistically significant mediating effect. However, trust being the mediator, plays a more significant role in boosting up the transformational leadership and employees’ creativity relationship as compared to job autonomy. This research helps to know how transformational leadership enhances employees’ creativity by enlightening the mediating role of trust and job autonomy. Further, the findings of this research also help the managers to understand and create such environment which enhances employees’ creativity by focusing on the factors identified in this study. This research contributes to advance the literature on the mediating role of trust and job autonomy in describing the relationship of transformational leader and employee’s creativity and highlighting that trust plays a more important role to enhance creativity in contrast to job autonomy. Further, this is the first attempt to enhance the employee creativity through transformational leadership style and the mediating role of both trust and job autonomy in Pakistan

Transformational Leadership and Pro-Environmental Behavior of Employees: Mediating Role of Intrinsic Motivation

Current research study attempts to investigate the impact of transformational leadership on pro-environmental behaviors along with the mediation of intrinsic motivation. This model is tested on 150 professionals that include lecturers from four different universities of Pakistan. We find that transformational leader enhances the intrinsic motivation, which consecutively related to pro-environmental behaviors positively. Further, there is also a direct positive relationship of transformational leadership with pro-environmental behaviors. Precisely, our findings advocate that transformational leadership and intrinsic motivation is important in prompting pro-environmental behaviors of employees

Data Management for Structural Integrity Assessment of Offshore Wind Turbine Support Structures: Data Cleansing and Missing Data Imputation

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) and Condition Monitoring (CM) Systems are currently utilised to collect data from offshore wind turbines (OWTs), to enhance the accurate estimation of their operational performance. However, industry accepted practices for effectively managing the information that these systems provide have not been widely established yet. This paper presents a four-step methodological framework for the effective data management of SHM systems of OWTs and illustrates its applicability in real-time continuous data collected from three operational units, with the aim of utilising more complete and accurate datasets for fatigue life assessment of support structures. Firstly, a time-efficient synchronisation method that enables the continuous monitoring of these systems is presented, followed by a novel approach to noise cleansing and the posterior missing data imputation (MDI). By the implementation of these techniques those data-points containing excessive noise are removed from the dataset (Step 2), advanced numerical tools are employed to regenerate missing data (Step 3) and fatigue is estimated for the results of these two methodologies (Step 4). Results show that after cleansing, missing data can be imputed with an average absolute error of 2.1%, while this error is kept within the [+ 15.2%−11.0%] range in 95% of cases. Furthermore, only 0.15% of the imputed data fell outside the noise thresholds. Fatigue is found to be underestimated both, when data cleansing does not take place and when it takes place but MDI does not. This makes this novel methodology an enhancement to conventional structural integrity assessment techniques that do not employ continuous datasets in their analyses

Comparison between bulk and FDSOI POM flash cell: a multiscale simulation study

In this brief, we present a multiscale simulation study of a fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FDSOI) nonvolatile memory cell based on polyoxometalates (POMs) inorganic molecular clusters used as a storage media embedded in the gate dielectric of flash cells. In particular, we focus our discussion on the threshold voltage variability introduced by random discrete dopants (random dopant fluctuation) and by fluctuations in the distribution of the POM molecules in the storage media (POM fluctuation). To highlight the advantages of the FDSOI POM flash cell, we provide a comparison with an equivalent cell based on conventional (BULK) transistors. The presented simulation framework and methodology is transferrable to flash cells based on alternative molecules used as a storage media

A Qualitative exploration of the Relationship between Religion and Well-being in Young Muslim women in Greater Manchester.

Religion and wellbeing have been thoroughly researched especially in regards to an aging population and a non-Muslim population (Ferriss, 2002). However, the relationship between religion and wellbeing in Muslim women in particular has been under researched, therefore this study aimed to investigate the relationship in young Muslim women in Greater Manchester, primarily focussing on the underlying processes involved in this relationship. Six young Muslim women were recruited via snowball sampling and semi structured interviews were conducted to obtain data. The findings were analysed using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Three themes emerged from the research: purpose and meaning in life in relation to well-being, power of prayer in facilitating well- being and social wellbeing: a sense of unity and belongingness. The findings indicated that young Muslim women perceived their life to be meaningful and found religion to enhance their subjective, social and psychological well-being

Guidelines and Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Structural Health Monitoring Implementation in Offshore Wind Turbine Support Structures

This paper investigates how the implementation of Structural Health Monitoring Systems (SHMS) in the support structure (SS) of offshore wind turbines (OWT) affects capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX) of offshore wind farms (WF). In order to determine the added value of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), the balance between the reduction in OPEX and the increase in CAPEX is evaluated. In this paper, guidelines for SHM implementation in offshore WF are developed and applied to a baseline scenario. The application of these guidelines consist of a review of present regulations in the United Kingdom and Germany, the development of SHM strategy, where the first stage of the Statistical Pattern Recognition (SPR) paradigm is explored, failure modes that can be monitored are identified, and SHM technologies and sensor distributions within the turbines are described for a baseline scenario. Furthermore, an inspection strategy where the different structural inspections to be carried out above and below water is also developed, together with an inspection plan for the lifetime of the structures, for the aforementioned baseline scenario. Once the guidelines have been followed and the SHM and inspection strategies developed, a cost-benefit analysis is performed on the baseline case (10% instrumented assets) and three other scenarios with 20%, 30% and 50% of instrumented assets. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to evaluate the effects of SHM hardware cost and the time spent in completing the inspections on OPEX and CAPEX of the WF. The results show that SHM hardware cost increases CAPEX significantly, however this increase is much lower than the reduction in OPEX caused by SHM. The results also show that an increase in the percentage of instrumented assets will reduce OPEX and this reduction is considerably higher than the cost of SHM implementation

Estimating compressive strength of concrete containing untreated coal waste aggregates using ultrasonic pulse velocity

In recent years, the overuse and exploitation of coal resources as fuel in industry has caused many environmental problems as well as changes in the ecosystem. One way to address this issue is to recycle these materials as an alternative to aggregates in concrete. Recently, non-destructive tests have also been considered by the researchers in this field. As there is limited work on the evaluation of the compressive strength of concrete containing coal waste using non-destructive tests, the current study aims to estimate the compressive strength of concrete containing untreated coal waste aggregates using the ultrasonic pulse velocity (UPV) technique as a non-destructive testing approach. For this purpose, various concrete parameters such as the compressive strength and UPV were investigated at different ages of concrete with different volume replacements of coarse and fine aggregates with coal waste. The test results indicate that 5% volume replacement of natural aggregates with untreated coal waste improves the average compressive strength and UPV of the concrete mixes by 6 and 1.2%, respectively. However, these parameters are significantly reduced by increasing the coal waste replacement level up to 25%. Furthermore, a general exponential relationship was established between the compressive strength and the UPV associated with the entire tested concrete specimens with different volume replacement levels of coal waste at different ages. The proposed relationship demonstrates a good correlation with the experimental results

Migration and social networks: evidence from Bangladesh

Social networks play a key role in mitigating the risks of migration, with migrants typically making use of network and kinship capital in the decision of whether to migrate and to which destination. This paper adds to the empirical literature on the role of networks in migration decisions in Bangladesh using household survey data collected in Bangladesh in 2013. Our survey captures information on households and their migrant and resident members, migrant destinations and contacts at their destination. We distinguish between internal networks and international networks and analyse the importance of these in affecting the migration decision and destination choice. We also explore the gender dimensions of these decisions, finding that while male migration decisions are very sensitive to the existence and nature (internal or international), and even suggestive of a step-migration patterns of rural to urban to international destinations, women’s migration decisions are much more influenced by household characterises, such as household wealth