How Does Leadership Structure Affect the Bottom Line?

Key Findings Investment in High-commitment HR practices lead to key employee-based outcomes. When companies invest in employees with a system of high-commitment HR practices (see examples of these practices below) they are able to build a workforce with higher human capital and motivation to exert discretionary effort for the benefit of the organization. In particular, higher use of these high-commitment HR (HCHR) practices were significantly related to higher levels of employee education, company tenure/experience, collaboration, and helping behaviors. Higher employee human capital and motivation are resources that lead to competitive advantage. In return, these employee outcomes appear to be key organizational resources for driving competitive advantage. Specifically, higher levels of employee company tenure (i.e., firm-specific experience and knowledge), collaboration, and helping behaviors were all significantly related to higher company sales growth and perceived performance (performance relative to competitors as rated by the company CEO). Leaders make a diff in the extent to which these employee-based resources lead to competitive advantage. In general, these employee-based resources were related to higher performance, but CEOs with greater levels of human capital seemed to be able to leverage these resources for even greater performance. Compared to companies with CEOs with less experience, companies with CEOs with higher average industry and company experience and higher levels of employee human capital and motivation had significantly higher performance, suggesting that CEOs with higher experience seem to understand how to take advantage of the employee-based resources that have been built through the investment in HCHR practices

Clock Quantum Monte Carlo: an imaginary-time method for real-time quantum dynamics

In quantum information theory, there is an explicit mapping between general unitary dynamics and Hermitian ground state eigenvalue problems known as the Feynman-Kitaev Clock. A prominent family of methods for the study of quantum ground states are quantum Monte Carlo methods, and recently the full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo (FCIQMC) method has demonstrated great promise for practical systems. We combine the Feynman-Kitaev Clock with FCIQMC to formulate a new technique for the study of quantum dynamics problems. Numerical examples using quantum circuits are provided as well as a technique to further mitigate the sign problem through time-dependent basis rotations. Moreover, this method allows one to combine the parallelism of Monte Carlo techniques with the locality of time to yield an effective parallel-in-time simulation technique

The ECHR, the HRA and Protecting Human Rights in the UK: A view from international law

As a working paper, it reflects on the interplay between the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the Human Rights Act (HRA) as human rights laws protecting human rights in the UK. It is centred on the premise that the interplay is one of a relationship between international law and domestic law, specifically the implementation of international law via a domestic statut

Computer‐based teaching and evaluation of introductory statistics for health science students: Some lessons learned

In recent years, it has become possible to introduce health science students to statistical packages at an increasingly early stage in their undergraduate studies. This has enabled teaching to take place in a computer laboratory, using real data, and encouraging an exploratory and research‐oriented approach. This paper briefly describes a hypertext Computer Based Tutorial (CBT) concerned with descriptive statistics and introductory data analysis. The CBT has three primary objectives: the introduction of concepts, the facilitation of revision, and the acquisition of skills for project work. Objective testing is incorporated and used for both self‐assessment and formal examination. Evaluation was carried out with a large group of Health Science students, heterogeneous with regard to their IT skills and basic numeracy. The results of the evaluation contain valuable lessons

The Responsibility to Protect: A 'just' intervention?

This working paper examines the responsibility to protect from the perspective of the just war tradition

Whither history? : the emergence of a modern preservation movement in New South Wales

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.In the early twentieth century, modernisation was underway in Australia. The social and political ruptures characteristic of that process resulted in many feeling the need for continuity between the past and the present. In New South Wales the desire for stability and continuity was actively represented through efforts to prevent the demolition a variety of historic places that held communal memories. The preservation of historic buildings began with pressure from local groups maintaining a sense of place, but took on a nationalist cast, when, in a climate of rising nationalism, environmental development began to remove buildings significant to powerful social groups and to a wider range of communities. This thesis investigates the history of the practice of preserving historic buildings in New South Wales from 1900 to the 1950s. It particularly pays attention to the positioning of historians within the emerging building-preservation movement, and takes note of historic preservation’s relationship to the formation of national identities and to the diverse changes wrought by modernity on society and culture. From the early years of the twentieth century, amateur and then professional historians were positioned as experts and leaders in Australian history. The brief included active promotion of historic preservation. Thus began the transformation of buildings into historic monuments, that is, monuments not purpose-built, but chosen from existing building stock for those shared memories and historical associations, used to connect people to communal identities, including national identities. Monumentalisation, however, transforms old buildings into structures whose attachment to identity not only emerges from memorial associations but which is also substantially visual – that is, its role is to present as something of a spectacle. By the 1930s, at a time when modern visual technologies were producing a rising visual sensibility, many architects and artists were persuaded that some colonial buildings had aesthetic merit. Tensions arose between architectural factions on the question of preservation, as they also did within planning. Furthermore, unexplored differences between the communal meanings which architects assigned to historic buildings and those assumed by historians led to events that damaged the authority of the history profession over historic buildings. After World War II, artistic and aesthetic ideas came to dominate the emerging idea of heritage. The institutionalisation of the movement was overseen by amateur and professional groups favouring an aesthetic sensibility to the detriment of an historical approach. How and why this occurred is the subject of this work