When Does a Newcomer Contribute to a Better Performance? A Multi-Agent Study on Self-Organising Processes of Task Allocation

This paper describes how a work group and a newcomer mutually adapt. We study two types of simulated groups that need an extra worker, one group because a former employee had left the group and one group because of its workload. For both groups, we test three conditions, newcomers being specialists, newcomers being generalists, and a control condition with no newcomer. We hypothesise that the group that needs an extra worker because of its workload will perform the best with a newcomer being a generalist. The group that needs an extra worker because a former employee had left the group, will perform better with a specialist newcomer. We study the development of task allocation and performance, with expertise and motivation as process variables. We use two performance indicators, the performance time of the slowest agent that indicates the speed of the group and the sum of performance of all agents to indicate labour costs. Both are indicative for the potential benefit of the newcomer. Strictly spoken the results support our hypotheses although the differences between the groups with generalists and specialists are negligible. What really mattered was the possibility for a newcomer to fit in.Task Allocation, Group Processes, Psychological Theory, Small Groups, Self-Organisation

Simulating the Emergence of Task Rotation

In work groups, task rotation may decrease the negative consequences of boredom and lead to a better task performance. In this paper we use multi agent simulation to study several organisation types in which task rotation may or may not emerge. By looking at the development of expertise and motivation of the different agents and their performance as a function of self-organisation, boredom, and task rotation frequency, we describe the dynamics of task rotation. The results show that systems in which task rotation emerges perform better than systems in which the agents merely specialise in one skill. Furthermore, we found that under certain circumstances, a task that leads to a high degree of boredom was performed better than a task causing a low level of boredom.Organisation, Task Rotation, Work Groups, Psychological Theory, Multi Agent Simulation

Cultural Interoperability in Project Taurus

To support the process of integration of Netherlands (NLD) and German (DEU) units in the DEU1. Panzerdivision (“Project Taurus”), the Commando Landstrijdkrachten of the Netherlands and the Kommando Heer of Germany asked the University of Groningen to study the development of identity and culture in these units. A large-scale survey with three waves was executed by the university in 2017, 2018 and 2019 among soldiers in the staffs of the 1. Panzerdivision, Panzerlehrbrigade9 and 43Mechanised Brigade, as well as the entire Panzerbataillon414 and 45Armoured Infantry Battalion. In addition, the present findings draw on interviews conducted prior to and after the survey waves. The level of integration is a prominent factor in how soldiers perceive the integration. This relates to how many soldiers of the other nation operate in a unit, and consequently to the frequency of contact between soldiers of the two nations. Units with 10% or more soldiers of the other nation we call ‘Deeply Integrated’. Units with less soldiers of the other nation but still a binational command relationship, are called ‘Structurally Integrated’

Two sides to every coin:Assessing the effects of moving physicians to employment contracts

There is a growing trend of physicians becoming employees of hospital systems and employment is viewed as a mechanism to help achieve health system goals. Yet, the research is mixed on the effects of moving physicians to employment models. While the literature has traditionally placed such forms of employment relationships in opposition to professional autonomy, it has often overlooked the effects on other professional values and there is little empirical work that actually assesses how such a shift affects and is perceived by clinicians themselves. To address these gaps, we conducted a mixed method study at one hospital that recently moved all formerly selfemployed physicians to employment contracts. We interviewed physicians to understand how the shift into employment was perceived to influence their work in three domains: the patient domain, the individual domain and the organizational domain. We then conducted a follow-up survey across both formerly employed and selfemployed physicians to test our initial findings. We find both positive and negative effects in different domains, offering insights into the mixed results found in the current literature

The impact of leader-member exchange on follower performance in light of the larger social network

Relationships with leaders do not happen in isolation from the relationships one has with one's peers. Therefore, we examine the influence of leader-member exchange on follower job performance in light of the larger social networks in which followers are embedded. Testing multilevel models with data that were gathered using questionnaires from a sample of 240 nurses and 20 supervisors working at four Dutch hospitals revealed that a positive relationship exists between leader-member exchange and follower job performance when follower workflow network centrality and/or follower friendship network centrality are high but not when they are both low. The results of this study show how the different follower relationships with the supervisor and colleagues intertwine in explaining follower job performance and suggest that the larger network in which followers are embedded within their work teams is important for explaining variations in the results regarding the relationship between leader-member exchange and follower job performance. Our study indicates that leaders should have an eye for the network position of their followers when developing high quality leader-member exchange relationships. For followers, a good relationship with their leader is important, but its value depends on their relationships with colleagues

When Does a Newcomer Contribute to a Better Performance? a Multi-Agent Study on Self- Organising Processes of Task Allocation

Abstract This paper describes how a work group and a newcomer mutually adapt. We study two types of simulated groups that need an extra worker, one group because a former employee had left the group and one group because of its workload. For both groups, we test three conditions, newcomers being specialists, newcomers being generalists, and a control condition with no newcomer. We hypothesise that the group that needs an extra worker because of its workload will perform the best with a newcomer being a generalist. The group that needs an extra worker because a former employee had left the group, will perform better with a specialist newcomer. We study the development of task allocation and performance, with expertise and motivation as process variables. We use two performance indicators, the performance time of the slowest agent that indicates the speed of the group and the sum of performance of all agents to indicate labour costs. Both are indicative for the potential benefit of the newcomer. Strictly spoken the results support our hypotheses although the differences between the groups with generalists and specialists are negligible. What really mattered was the possibility for a newcomer to fit in

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe