Empowerment in the Public Sector: Testing the Influence of Goal Orientation

Empowerment has emerged as an important new issue in the public sector organization setting in the wake of mainstream new public management (NPM). Nevertheless, few studies in this frame have combined structural (managerial) and psychological (individual) approaches in an integrative study of empowerment. There is also a need to examine the moderating variables involved in this relationship, as well as to extend research on work motivation in public management. This study explores the effect of structural empowerment on psychological empowerment, and it also draws on goal orientation (GO) theory to examine the moderating role of employees’ GO in this link. The model is tested on a sample of 521 Spanish local authority employees. The results do not confirm the direct link between structural and psychological empowerment, but show that learning GO has considerable moderating power in this relationship, and its interaction with structural empowerment affects employees’ psychological empowerment levels

Greening Investor-State Dispute Settlement

Climate change poses serious threats to human society. Climate change is already affecting our environment and thus, many aspects of human and economic activity. Among the challenges ahead, governments will need to more actively adopt regulatory policies given the international obligations in this area, such as the Paris Agreement, as well as promote green private investment as a means toward unlocking sustainable growth. How can international investment law be adapted and modernized to respond to these challenges? In this Essay, we summarize a comprehensive set of innovations that could be included in International Investment Agreements to address international obligations regarding climate change. Our discussion, based on a Green Treaty Model, first stresses the role of balanced obligations for investors and host countries, and then focuses on dispute settlement. We conclude by explaining how the current process of reform under the auspices of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law can be used for a more ambitious transformation of international investment; a transformation in which investment treaties can act as catalysts for green foreign direct investment necessary to reverse the momentum for climate change already built into the atmosphere

Lectura crítica, una herramienta para mejorar el aprendizaje de las Ciencias

El pensamiento crítico es un aspecto crucial que todo ciudadano necesita para poder participar en una sociedad democrática y plural. La lectura, a clase de ciencias de artículos y textos de diferentes fuentes, así como su comprensión crítica, puede ayudar a los estudiantes a desarrollar esta capacidad y potenciar la participación en el discurso social en relación a temáticas científicas que los afectan directamente. Nuestro estudio, que se enmarca dentro del grupo de investigación de la UAB LIEC, se centra en promover la lectura crítica de textos de contenido científico de diferentes fuentes, y analizar como esta lectura favorece un aprendizaje de las ciencias relevante socialmente. En esta comunicación se presenta los resultados de aplicar una de estas actividades realizada a partir de la lectura crítica de un artículo de prensa sobre grafitis

Bernoulli free boundary problems under uncertainty: the convex case

The present article is concerned with solving Bernoulli's exterior free boundary problem in case of an interior boundary which is random. We provide a new regularity result on the map that sends a parametrization of the inner boundary to a parametrization of the outer boundary. Moreover, by assuming that the interior boundary is convex, also the exterior boundary is convex, which enables to identify the boundaries with support functions and to determine their expectations. We in particular construct a confidence region for the outer boundary based on Aumann's expectation and provide a numerical method to compute it

Examining nonlinear relationships between quality management and financial performance

Purpose A thorough analysis of nonlinear relationships between quality management (QM) and organizational outcomes has largely been ignored in the current empirical QM literature, which can have profound theoretical and managerial implications. The existence of nonlinear relationships implies taking a contingent view in that QM practices are more effective depending on their level of implementation in an organization. The purpose of this paper is to focus on this possibility and undertake an in-depth study of the sparse nonlinear relationship suggested by the literature. Design/methodology/approach The authors introduce an empirical study carried out on a sample of 168 service firms belonging to sectors experienced in QM and, through polynomial regression analysis, identify the nature of the relationship between QM and financial performance (return on assets). Findings The results, by showing an S-shaped curve, support a nonlinear association between these two variables. The presence of this functional form provides a satisfactory solution to the growing debate among researchers who, from a linear perspective, defend the positive effects of QM on organizational outcomes, those who find no significant effect, and still others who claim that QM has a negative effect. Originality/value The results show that in organizations with a low level of QM implementation, managers should increase investment in QM, even though this increase will not be correspondingly beneficial in the same proportion. In contrast, in organizations with a high level of QM implementation, managers are advised to reflect on undertaking projects that represent an additional investment in QM, with the aim of finding their optimal level

Time-Coordination Strategies and Control Laws for Multi-Agent Unmanned Systems

Time-critical coordination tools for unmanned systems can be employed to enforce the type of temporal constraints required in terminal control areas, ensure minimum distance requirements among vehicles are satisfied, and successfully perform coordinated missions. In comparison with previous literature, this paper presents an ampler spectrum of coordination and temporal specifications for unmanned systems, and proposes a general control law that can enforce this range of constraints. The constraint classification presented con- siders the nature of the desired arrival window and the permissible coordination errors to define six different types of time-coordination strategies. The resulting decentralized coordination control law allows the vehicles to negotiate their speeds along their paths in response to information exchanged over the communication network. This control law organizes the different members in the fleet hierarchically per their behavior and informational needs as reference agent, leaders, and followers. Examples and simulation results for all the coordination strategies presented demonstrate the applicability and efficacy of the coordination control law for multiple unmanned systems

Descent of Equivalences and Character Bijections

Categorical equivalences between block algebras of finite groups—such as Morita and derived equivalences—are well known to induce character bijections which commute with the Galois groups of field extensions. This is the motivation for attempting to realise known Morita and derived equivalences over non-splitting fields. This article presents various results on the theme of descent to appropriate subfields and subrings. We start with the observation that perfect isometries induced by a virtual Morita equivalence induce isomorphisms of centres in non-split situations and explain connections with Navarro’s generalisation of the Alperin–McKay conjecture. We show that Rouquier’s splendid Rickard complex for blocks with cyclic defect groups descends to the non-split case. We also prove a descent theorem for Morita equivalences with endopermutation source

Structural empowerment and organisational performance: the mediating role of employees’ well-being in Spanish local governments

We extend the ‘black box’ picture of public management and the ‘balanced view’ of HRM literature to explore, in the public context, the impact of structural empowerment on organisational performance and the mediating role of three employee outcomes: job satisfaction and affective commitment as attitudinal variables related to eudaimonic well-being, and job anxiety as an employee health variable related to hedonic well-being. Using multilevel methodology on a sample of 103 local authorities, results show that structural empowerment is positively associated with organisational performance, both directly and indirectly, via employee health. This evidence supports the mutual gains perspective, but not as intensely as expected (empowerment does not affect attitudinal variables) and differently to the traditional perspective, since empowerment contributes to reduce job anxiety in Spanish local governments