Employer-employee relationships in small firms : the role of personality and psychological contracts

This study examined the exchange relationship of small business owners and their employees. The primary purpose of this research was to consider how small business owners' personality and motivation, as seen through the Big Five model and self concordance theory respectively, affect their promises and commitments made to employees as well as their work attitudes. Data were collected from 50 small business owners and 253 of their employees in small organizations in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. To minimize common method bias, owners' promises to employees were assessed via self and employee reports. Overall, the results indicated that among the Big Five personality traits, Agreeableness was the best predictor of psychological contract orientations and owner attitudes, while Neuroticism and Extraversion were unrelated to any dimension of the psychological contract. On the other hand, Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience partly explained small business owners' contract orientations and work attitudes. Self-concordant goals were unrelated to both psychological contracts and small business owner attitudes. These findings suggest that small business owners should recognize the importance of their personality characteristics and their impact on establishing vital exchange relationships with their employees. Limitations are discussed in light of the unique context of the small business in which this study was conducted and directions for future research are provided

Motivating the citizens to transact with the government through a Gamified experience

The current paper explores the implementation of gamification in the government as a way to win back trust from the citizens. The motivation of the citizens to interact with the public authorities through e-government, requires a suitable gamification framework. Octalysis framework is chosen among the available gamification frameworks due to its motivation orientated nature. Octalyis is used a tool for a pilot study to gamify the Greek taxation information system TAXIS and reveals that TAXIS requires entertaining web aspects for its long term use by the citizens.peer-reviewe

Automatic stereoscopic video object-based watermarking using qualified significant wavelet trees

In this paper a fully automatic scheme for embedding visually recognizable watermark patterns to video objects is proposed. The architecture consists of 3 main modules. During the first module unsupervised video object extraction is performed, by analyzing stereoscopic pairs of frames. In the second module each video object is decomposed into three levels with ten subbands, using the Shape Adaptive Discrete Wavelet Transform (SA-DWT) and three pairs of subbands are formed (HL3 , HL2), (LH3, LH2) and (HH3, HH2). Next Qualified Significant Wavelet Trees (QSWTs) are estimated for the specific pair of subbands with the highest energy content. QSWTs are derived from the Embedded Zerotree Wavelet (EZW) algorithm and they are high-energy paths of wavelet coefficients. Finally during the third module, visually recognizable watermark patterns are redundantly embedded to the coefficients of the highest energy QSWTs and the inverse SA-DWT is applied to provide the watermarked video object. Performance of the proposed video object watermarking system is tested under various signal distortions such as JPEG lossy compression, sharpening, blurring and adding different types of noise. Furthermore the case of transmission losses for the watermarked video objects is also investigated. Experimental results on real life video objects indicate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed schemeFacultad de Informátic

The impact of Dr Barry Sears’ diet on employee stress: a preliminary study

Work stress can lead to health and performance problems for employees who are unable to cope with it. The main objective of this study was to investigate whether Dr Sears’ diet affects employees’ stress. Data was collected from a sample of 100 employees who were employed by different companies in the broader area of Attica, once a week for a period of three weeks. Of those who participated in the study 56% were male. The results showed that Dr Sears’diet had a beneficial effect on participants’ stress levels, which decreased from the first week of implementation and continued to decline during the second and third week. Future research should focus on long-term effects of this diet on employee behavior related to motivation and performance, to deepen our understanding of the significant role of nutrition at work