Systemic incongruity: Bringing Down the Risks of Conformity and Deviation Biases

Employees often have to decide whether to conform to or deviate from the status quo. Exhibiting consistent preferences for either preserving or maintaining the status quo (i.e., conformity biases) or for challenging or rejecting the status quo (i.e., deviation biases) can be costly. Conformity biases prevent employees from adapting to changing task demands and deviation biases hamper the predictability and reliability of decisions. It is therefore important for scholars and practitioners to understand how to engineer work environments that, to the degree possible, enable employees to bring down both types of risks. However, our understanding of this issue is limited because organizational behavior researchers to date have focused on reducing conformity biases but slighted the opposing risks of deviation biases. This dissertation is dedicated to filling this gap. Challenging research on the benefits of congruent work environments that send consistent normative signals, I demonstrate how congruity can push employees into stable patterns of conformity or deviation whereas incongruity can trigger more flexible thinking that enables employees to reduce both biases. Chapter 1 examines how incongruent combinations of distributive justice systems and cultural values--egalitarian-individualist and meritocratic-collectivist--tamp down both risks by encouraging employees to fluidly shift between loss-minimizing and gain-maximizing frames. Chapters 2 and 3 present two laboratory experiments that demonstrate how incongruent combinations of cultural values and accountability systems-- collectivist values / outcome systems and individualist values / process systems--can also control exposure to both risks by encouraging decision makers to iterate between the micro details and big picture. Finally, Chapter 4 investigates how blends of cultural values and accountability systems shape managerial tolerances for employees who exhibit conformity or deviation biases. In a field study of working supervisors, I show that managers in congruent combinations--collectivist values / process systems or individualist values / outcome systems--either prefer conforming employees or deviating employees, respectively, but managers in incongruent combinations have no discernible preference. Overall, this dissertation offers novel ways to offset the risks of various organizational systems and encourages the field to reassess the benefits of intrapsychic conflict in light of the clashing demands employees confront today

Being There: Work Engagement and Positive Organizational Scholarship

In this chapter, we examine the psychological state of employee work engagement. Our objective is to provide an overview of the engagement construct, clarify its definition, and discuss its behavioral outcomes. We discuss the development of the work engagement construct, which has led to many inconsistencies among scholars about its definition. We clarify that engagement captures employees’ strong focus of attention, intense absorption, and high energy toward their work-related tasks. Work engagement is important to the positive organizational scholarship (POS) field because engagement can lead to a number of positive outcomes, such as in-role and extra-role performance, client satisfaction, proactivity, adaptivity, and creativity. Managers, however, must ensure that employees have adequate resources and sufficient breaks, so that engagement does not lead to burnout or depletion. We encourage scholars interested in studying engagement in the future to investigate the contextual moderators that affect the relationship between engagement and employee behavior and examine the differential effects of the components of engagement—attention, absorption, and energy

Process Versus Outcome Accountability

Private- and public-sector managers face a recurring organizational-design dilemma: the relative emphasis to place on process-versus-outcome accountability in evaluating employee performance. This chapter reviews experimental-psychological research that emphasizes the benefits of process accountability and then notes blind spots in that literature, especially the insensitivity to the relational signals that accountability manipulations convey about how evaluators view the evaluated. The chapter also examines real-world ideologically-driven debates over accountability design in which partisans tend to favor no-excuses forms of outcome accountability for those deemed untrustworthy and uncertainty-buffering forms of process accountability for the trustworthy. Finally, an integrative framework is proposed that examines how managers can balance the inevitable tradeoffs between decision-making control enhanced under process accountability and innovation fostered under outcome accountability, and sheds light on how agent empowerment can compensate for the deficiencies of both systems

DS_10.1177_0001839218783988 – Supplemental material for “The Public Doesn’t Understand”: The Self-reinforcing Interplay of Image Discrepancies and Political Ideologies in Law Enforcement

<p>Supplemental material, DS_10.1177_0001839218783988 for “The Public Doesn’t Understand”: The Self-reinforcing Interplay of Image Discrepancies and Political Ideologies in Law Enforcement by Shefali V. Patil in Administrative Science Quarterly</p

Accountability and ideology: when left looks right and right looks left

Abstract Managers face hard choices between process and outcome systems of accountability in evaluating employees, but little is known about how managers resolve them. Building on the premise that political ideologies serve as uncertainty-reducing heuristics, two studies of working managers show that: (1) conservatives prefer outcome accountability and liberals prefer process accountability in an unspecified policy domain; (2) this split becomes more pronounced in a controversial domain (public schools) in which the foreground value is educational efficiency but reverses direction in a controversial domain (affirmative action) in which the foreground value is demographic equality; (3) managers who discover employees have subverted their preferred system favor tinkering over switching to an alternative system; (4) but bipartisan consensus arises when managers have clear evidence about employee trustworthiness and the tightness of the causal links between employee effort and success. These findings shed light on ideological and contextual factors that shape preferences for accountability systems

Proceedings of International Conference on Women Researchers in Electronics and Computing

This proceeding contains articles on the various research ideas of the academic community and practitioners presented at the international conference, “Women Researchers in Electronics and Computing” (WREC’2021). WREC'21 was organized in online mode by Dr. B R Ambedkar National Institute of Technology, Jalandhar (Punjab), INDIA during 22 – 24 April 2021. This conference was conceptualized with an objective to encourage and motivate women engineers and scientists to excel in science and technology and to be the role models for young girls to follow in their footsteps. With a view to inspire women engineers, pioneer and successful women achievers in the domains of VLSI design, wireless sensor networks, communication, image/ signal processing, machine learning, and emerging technologies were identified from across the globe and invited to present their work and address the participants in this women oriented conference. Conference Title: International Conference on Women Researchers in Electronics and ComputingConference Acronym: WREC'21Conference Date: 22–24 April 2021Conference Location: Online (Virtual Mode)Conference Organizers: Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar National Institute of Technology, Jalandhar, Punjab, INDI

Global Biobank Meta-analysis Initiative: Powering genetic discovery across human disease

Biobanks facilitate genome-wide association studies (GWASs), which have mapped genomic loci across a range of human diseases and traits. However, most biobanks are primarily composed of individuals of European ancestry. We introduce the Global Biobank Meta-analysis Initiative (GBMI)—a collaborative network of 23 biobanks from 4 continents representing more than 2.2 million consented individuals with genetic data linked to electronic health records. GBMI meta-analyzes summary statistics from GWASs generated using harmonized genotypes and phenotypes from member biobanks for 14 exemplar diseases and endpoints. This strategy validates that GWASs conducted in diverse biobanks can be integrated despite heterogeneity in case definitions, recruitment strategies, and baseline characteristics. This collaborative effort improves GWAS power for diseases, benefits understudied diseases, and improves risk prediction while also enabling the nomination of disease genes and drug candidates by incorporating gene and protein expression data and providing insight into the underlying biology of human diseases and traits.</p

Global Biobank Meta-analysis Initiative: Powering genetic discovery across human disease.

Funder: BiogenBiobanks facilitate genome-wide association studies (GWASs), which have mapped genomic loci across a range of human diseases and traits. However, most biobanks are primarily composed of individuals of European ancestry. We introduce the Global Biobank Meta-analysis Initiative (GBMI)-a collaborative network of 23 biobanks from 4 continents representing more than 2.2 million consented individuals with genetic data linked to electronic health records. GBMI meta-analyzes summary statistics from GWASs generated using harmonized genotypes and phenotypes from member biobanks for 14 exemplar diseases and endpoints. This strategy validates that GWASs conducted in diverse biobanks can be integrated despite heterogeneity in case definitions, recruitment strategies, and baseline characteristics. This collaborative effort improves GWAS power for diseases, benefits understudied diseases, and improves risk prediction while also enabling the nomination of disease genes and drug candidates by incorporating gene and protein expression data and providing insight into the underlying biology of human diseases and traits

International Nosocomial Infection Control Consortium report, data summary of 50 countries for 2010-2015: Device-associated module

•We report INICC device-associated module data of 50 countries from 2010-2015.•We collected prospective data from 861,284 patients in 703 ICUs for 3,506,562 days.•DA-HAI rates and bacterial resistance were higher in the INICC ICUs than in CDC-NHSN's.•Device utilization ratio in the INICC ICUs was similar to CDC-NHSN's. Background: We report the results of International Nosocomial Infection Control Consortium (INICC) surveillance study from January 2010-December 2015 in 703 intensive care units (ICUs) in Latin America, Europe, Eastern Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, and Western Pacific. Methods: During the 6-year study period, using Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Healthcare Safety Network (CDC-NHSN) definitions for device-associated health care-associated infection (DA-HAI), we collected prospective data from 861,284 patients hospitalized in INICC hospital ICUs for an aggregate of 3,506,562 days. Results: Although device use in INICC ICUs was similar to that reported from CDC-NHSN ICUs, DA-HAI rates were higher in the INICC ICUs: in the INICC medical-surgical ICUs, the pooled rate of central line-associated bloodstream infection, 4.1 per 1,000 central line-days, was nearly 5-fold higher than the 0.8 per 1,000 central line-days reported from comparable US ICUs, the overall rate of ventilator-associated pneumonia was also higher, 13.1 versus 0.9 per 1,000 ventilator-days, as was the rate of catheter-associated urinary tract infection, 5.07 versus 1.7 per 1,000 catheter-days. From blood cultures samples, frequencies of resistance of Pseudomonas isolates to amikacin (29.87% vs 10%) and to imipenem (44.3% vs 26.1%), and of Klebsiella pneumoniae isolates to ceftazidime (73.2% vs 28.8%) and to imipenem (43.27% vs 12.8%) were also higher in the INICC ICUs compared with CDC-NHSN ICUs. Conclusions: Although DA-HAIs in INICC ICU patients continue to be higher than the rates reported in CDC-NSHN ICUs representing the developed world, we have observed a significant trend toward the reduction of DA-HAI rates in INICC ICUs as shown in each international report. It is INICC's main goal to continue facilitating education, training, and basic and cost-effective tools and resources, such as standardized forms and an online platform, to tackle this problem effectively and systematically