Being Different Yet Feeling Similar: The Influence Of Demographic Composition And Organizational Culture On Work Processes And Outcomes

Drawing from self-categorization theory, we tested hypotheses on the effects of an organization's demographic composition and cultural emphasis on work processes and outcomes. Using an organizational simulation, we found that the extent to which an organization emphasized individualistic or collectivistic values interacted with demographic composition to influence social interaction, conflict, productivity, and perceptions of creativity among 258 MBA students. Our findings suggest that the purported benefits of demographic diversity are more likely to emerge in organizations that, through their culture, make organizational membership salient and encourage people to categorize one another as having the organization's interests in common, rather than those that emphasize individualism and distinctiveness among members.(.)Managemen

Yield and protein variation within a controlled traffic system

Controlled Traffic systems aim to minimise wheel traffic impact on the cropping system. In this study, on-farm research was employed to investigate the impact of several wheel tracks on grain yield and protein in a planter width within a 7-year-old Controlled Traffic Farming (CTF) system. This was achieved by using a plot harvester. Results from the study of grain sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) and maize (Zea mays) showed lower establishment rates adjacent to wheel tracks, resulting in lower yield and higher protein. Further studies investigating a change to a system with fewer wheel tracks show that reducing the number of wheel tracks appears to have led to increased grain yield

Investigating the influences on attendance and intention to rejoin with inaugural members of a new football team

This study investigated the effects of factors like member satisfaction and social rituals on desirable outcomes such as attendance, intention to rejoin and merchandise sales. This study focuses on the inaugural members of a new team in Australia&rsquo;s A-League to gain insight into how loyalty develops amongst fans of new sporting organisations. The results show the importance to sports marketers of satisfying members and building ritual behaviour, as both are correlated with all of the positive outcomes investigated here.<br /

Events, processes, and the time of a killing

The paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of the time of a killing (ToK), which persistently besets theories of act-individuation. The solution proposed claims to expose a crucial wrong-headed assumption in the debate, according to which ToK is essentially a problem of locating some event that corresponds to the killing. The alternative proposal put forward here turns on recognizing a separate category of dynamic occurents, viz. processes. The paper does not aim to mount a comprehensive defense of process ontology, relying instead on extant defenses. The primary aim is rather to put process ontology to work in diagnosing the current state of play over ToK, and indeed in solving it

Utilising family-based designs for detecting rare variant disease associations.

Rare genetic variants are thought to be important components in the causality of many diseases but discovering these associations is challenging. We demonstrate how best to use family-based designs to improve the power to detect rare variant disease associations. We show that using genetic data from enriched families (those pedigrees with greater than one affected member) increases the power and sensitivity of existing case-control rare variant tests. However, we show that transmission- (or within-family-) based tests do not benefit from this enrichment. This means that, in studies where a limited amount of genotyping is available, choosing a single case from each of many pedigrees has greater power than selecting multiple cases from fewer pedigrees. Finally, we show how a pseudo-case-control design allows a greater range of statistical tests to be applied to family data

Cross-cultural comparison of genetic and cultural transmission of smoking initiation using an extended twin kinship model

Background: Considerable evidence from twin and adoption studies indicates that genetic and shared environmental factors play a role in the initiation of smoking behavior. Although twin and adoption designs are powerful to detect genetic and environmental influences, they do not provide information on the processes of assortative mating and parent–offspring transmission and their contribution to the variability explained by genetic and/or environmental factors. Methods: We examined the role of genetic and environmental factors in individual differences for smoking initiation (SI) using an extended kinship design. This design allows the simultaneous testing of additive and non-additive genetic, shared and individual-specific environmental factors, as well as sex differences in the expression of genes and environment in the presence of assortative mating and combined genetic and cultural transmission, while also estimating the regression of the prevalence of SI on age. A dichotomous lifetime ‘ever’ smoking measure was obtained from twins and relatives in the ‘Virginia 30,000’ sample and the ‘Australian 25,000’. Results: Results demonstrate that both genetic and environmental factors play a significant role in the liability to SI. Major influences on individual differences appeared to be additive genetic and unique environmental effects, with smaller contributions from assortative mating, shared sibling environment, twin environment, cultural transmission, and resulting genotype-environment covariance. Age regression of the prevalence of SI was significant. The finding of negative cultural transmission without dominance led us to investigate more closely two possible mechanisms for the lower parent–offspring correlations compared to the sibling and DZ twin correlations in subsets of the data: (1) age × gene interaction, and (2) social homogamy. Neither of the mechanism provided a significantly better explanation of the data. Conclusions: This study showed significant heritability, partly due to assortment, and significant effects of primarily non-parental shared environment on liability to SI

Extended twin study of alcohol use in Virginia and Australia

Drinking alcohol is a normal behavior in many societies, and prior studies have demonstrated it has both genetic and environmental sources of variation. Using two very large samples of twins and their first-degree relatives (Australia ≈ 20,000 individuals from 8,019 families; Virginia ≈ 23,000 from 6,042 families), we examine whether there are differences: (1) in the genetic and environmental factors that influence four interrelated drinking behaviors (quantity, frequency, age of initiation, and number of drinks in the last week), (2) between the twin-only design and the extended twin design, and (3) the Australian and Virginia samples. We find that while drinking behaviors are interrelated, there are substantial differences in the genetic and environmental architectures across phenotypes. Specifically, drinking quantity, frequency, and number of drinks in the past week have large broad genetic variance components, and smaller but significant environmental variance components, while age of onset is driven exclusively by environmental factors. Further, the twin-only design and the extended twin design come to similar conclusions regarding broad-sense heritability and environmental transmission, but the extended twin models provide a more nuanced perspective. Finally, we find a high level of similarity between the Australian and Virginian samples, especially for the genetic factors. The observed differences, when present, tend to be at the environmental level. Implications for the extended twin model and future directions are discussed

Managing from a distance in international purchasing and supply

International purchasing and supply management (PSM) teams have long faced the visibility and understandability challenges of managing geographically dispersed and culturally distant suppliers. Problems arising from inadequate monitoring and control over suppliers can be attributed to geographical and cultural distance, capability gaps, weak institutions, and supply market dynamism. With transaction costs theory as our lens, we examine how international geographically and culturally distant purchasing and supply management (PSM) teams control emerging economy suppliers with formal management controls. We use interview survey data on 339 international customer-Chinese supplier relationships using supplier perceptions of the extent to which performance measurement and monitoring practices are used by their primary customer in the purchase reorder decision and control. The results demonstrate that the cultural and, to a lesser extent, geographical distance between the customer and the supplier is associated with more extensive use of formal management controls. Also, we find the relationship between geographical or cultural distance and the importance of performance measurement is strengthened for suppliers of complex components

A Spatially Distributed Water Balance Based on Physical, Isotropic and Airborne Remotely Sensed Data

Introduction: The objective of this research to develop a spatially distributed water balance model based on the integration of spatially distributed data. Progress this year has consisted of model development, instrument acquisition, installation and development of experimental procedures, and baseline data collection. The original research plan called for detailed observations related to the water balance over the year September 1991 to August 1992. The detailed measurements were to start with accumulation of the snowpack followed by melt and evapotranspiration measurements from March to August. The objective was to measure the energy balance parameters starting with the peak accumulation, through the melt and infiltration phases, the greenup of vegetation, the peak evapotranspiration period and the dry-down and senescence of grasses and other species in the upper Sheep Creek sub-basin of the Reynolds Creek Experimental Watershed. Groundwater depths as well as run-off in the stream were to be measured and samples of the snowpack water, soil water, groundwater and run-off water were to be taken for isotopic tracing. Unfortunately, average snow accumulation was well below average last winter. April 1st, snow course measurement indicated that the snowpack at the Reynolds mountain sub-basin was only 30% of normal. In the Upper Sheep Creek sub-basin, which usually has a 10-m high drift during this time of the year there was less than 0.5 m of snow. After consultation with the USDA scientists from the Northwest Watershed Research Center, we decided in February to postpone the field campaign for one year. In retrospect this was wise because there was no runoff reponse from Upper Sheep Creek (the basin where we plan to do our detailed model development) and few of the groundwater wells had measureable response, we would have had nothing to measure. The intensive field campaign will be conducted in Spring 1993. Although a repeat of last year\u27s condition is possible, the chances are very low and we are hopeful of better snowfall. A revised project time schedule is shown on the next page. This has us finished the field measurement in August 1993. Given this it is unlikely that all data reduction and modeling will be complete by August 15, 1993 so we will need until May 1993, a 9-month no-cost extention to complete the data analysis. In this report we describe our progress in terms of data base development, model development, and modeling based on data from earlier years. Some of this will be presented at the AGU Fall meeting in San Francisco in Devember (see abstract on page 3). We also developed snow-isotope fractionation studies, evapotranspiration model development, installation of soil moisture measurement equipment, and database development. Abstract: A distributed mass balance appraoch is being developed to model spatially variable hydrologic processes in an arid mountain watershed. The model will be applied to Upper Sheep Creek, a 26 ha catchment within the Reynolds Creek ARS Experimental Watershed, near Boise, ID. The model is based on a DEM representation of basin topography. A mass balance equation relating moisture inflow, outflow, and the change in storage is resolved to give the moisture defecit in each DEM cell. Moisture input is subsurface flow from up-gradient DEM cells and surface influx from rain or a spatially distributed energy-balance snowmelt model. Subsurface outlfow is determined from topographic slope and transmissivity, which is a function of moisture content. We illustrate the effects of topography on the areal distribution of soil moisture and the time variation of streamflow in Upper Sheep Creek and compare our results with field observations and streamflow measurements

The Genetic and Environmental Sources of Resemblance Between Normative Personality and Personality Disorder Traits

Recent work has suggested a high level of congruence between normative personality, most typically represented by the big five factors, and abnormal personality traits. In 2,293 Norwegian adult twins ascertained from a population-based registry, the authors evaluated the degree of sharing of genetic and environmental influences on normative personality, assessed by the Big Five Inventory (BFI), and personality disorder traits (PDTs), assessed by the Personality Inventory for DSM-S-Norwegian Brief Form (PID-5NBF). For four of the five BFI dimensions, the strongest genetic correlation was observed with the expected PID-5-NBF dimension (e.g., neuroticism with negative affectivity [+], conscientiousness with disinhibition [-]). However, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and agreeableness had substantial genetic correlations with other PID-S-NBF dimensions (e.g., neuroticism with compulsivity [+], agreeableness with detachment [-]). Openness had no substantial genetic correlations with any PID-5-NBF dimension. The proportion of genetic risk factors shared in aggregate between the BFI traits and the PID-5-NBF dimensions was quite high for conscientiousness and neuroticism, relatively robust for extraversion and agreeableness, but quite low for openness. Of the six PID-S-NBF dimensions, three (negative affectivity, detachment, and disinhibition) shared, in aggregate, most of their genetic risk factors with normative personality traits. Genetic factors underlying psychoticism, antagonism, and compulsivity were shared to a lesser extent, suggesting that they are influenced by etiological factors not well indexed by the BFI