Managing organizational innovation through human resources, human capital and psychological capital

The article aims at making a series of considerations on the concepts of innovation and, more specifically, organizational innovation, in order to show what literature says about the role of human resources, human capital and psychological capital in the matter. Starting from some definitions of innovation given in the introduction, the paper goes on by dealing with organizational innovation and the role of human and psychological capital in the innovation processes. Although most of the consulting books underline the importance of people in the innovation process, little research on the implications on human and psychological resources has been carried out and research has not explored in an extensive way the human side of innovation. So, the final part of the article stresses the existing links between innovation and the so-called human factor and reports a summary table with the competences literature has identified so far which are useful to implement innovation

Rohlin Distance and the Evolution of Influenza A virus: Weak Attractors and Precursors

The evolution of the hemagglutinin amino acids sequences of Influenza A virus is studied by a method based on an informational metrics, originally introduced by Rohlin for partitions in abstract probability spaces. This metrics does not require any previous functional or syntactic knowledge about the sequences and it is sensitive to the correlated variations in the characters disposition. Its efficiency is improved by algorithmic tools, designed to enhance the detection of the novelty and to reduce the noise of useless mutations. We focus on the USA data from 1993/94 to 2010/2011 for A/H3N2 and on USA data from 2006/07 to 2010/2011 for A/H1N1 . We show that the clusterization of the distance matrix gives strong evidence to a structure of domains in the sequence space, acting as weak attractors for the evolution, in very good agreement with the epidemiological history of the virus. The structure proves very robust with respect to the variations of the clusterization parameters, and extremely coherent when restricting the observation window. The results suggest an efficient strategy in the vaccine forecast, based on the presence of "precursors" (or "buds") populating the most recent attractor.Comment: 13 pages, 5+4 figure

MANAGING ORGANIZATIONAL INNOVATION THROUGH HUMAN RESOURCES, HUMAN CAPITAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CAPITAL

The article aims at making a series of considerations on the concepts of innovation and, more specifically, organizational innovation, in order to show what literature says about the role of human resources, human capital and psychological capital in the matter. Starting from some definitions of innovation given in the introduction, the paper goes on by dealing with organizational innovation and the role of human and psychological capital in the innovation processes. Although most of the consulting books underline the importance of people in the innovation process, little research on the implications on human and psychological resources has been carried out and research has not explored in an extensive way the human side of innovation. So, the final part of the article stresses the existing links between innovation and the so-called human factor and reports a summary table with the competences literature has identified so far which are useful to implement innovation

Emotional intelligence and need for…

Il presente lavoro ha preso in oggetto i tre grandi fattori motivazionali proposti da D. McClelland nella sua Learned Needs Theory, ovvero: bisogno di successo (achievement), di affiliazione (affiliation) e di potere (power). Tali fattori non sono mutualmente esclusivi, ma possono presentarsi in un individuo in diversa misura. Primo scopo del presente lavoro è stato quindi quello di indagare le possibili interrelazioni esistenti fra questi tre fattori motivazionali al lavoro. Secondariamente, è stata esaminata la possibile relazione tra questi ultimi e l’intelligenza emotiva (EI) dei partecipanti. In particolare, si supponeva di poter riscontrare una correlazione positiva tra intelligenza emotiva e il bisogno di affiliazione, data la natura sociale insita in entrambi i costrutti.Per lo studio è stato utilizzato un questionario composto da tre parti. Nella prima parte è stata inserita la scala per la misurazione dell’indice globale dell’IE di tratto, seguendo la proposta teorica di K.V. Petrides (2010). La seconda parte è costituita invece da una scala di orientamento motivazionale sviluppata secondo la teoria dei bisogni proposta da McClelland, attraverso la quale è stato possibile ottenere un indice di misura che indicasse la forza di ciascun fattore motivazionale per ogni partecipante. Il questionario si concludeva con una serie di domande socio-demografiche generiche ed è stato somministrato ad un campione iniziale di 40 studenti dell’Università di Verona dei percorsi di laurea in Scienze della formazione nelle organizzazioni e in Scienze della comunicazione.Le analisi condotte hanno portato ad una matrice di correlazione nella quale le tre componenti appaiono tra loro collegate in modo significativo. Contrariamente all’idea iniziale, l’intelligenza emotiva di tratto ha mostrato una correlazione positiva significativa con il bisogno di successo, ma non con il bisogno di affiliazione. Sembra inoltre che l’essere un lavoratore attivo rafforzi il bisogno di potere. È stato infine approntato un MES per sintetizzare la relazione tra fattori motivazionali e intelligenza emotiva. Il lavoro si conclude quindi con una breve discussione del modello e dei limiti dello studio

Application of Psychological Theories in Agent-Based Modeling: The Case of the Theory of Planned Behavior

It is likely that computer simulations will assume a greater role in the next future to investigate and understand reality (Rand & Rust, 2011). Particularly, agent-based models (ABMs) represent a method of investigation of social phenomena that blend the knowledge of social sciences with the advantages of virtual simulations. Within this context, the development of algorithms able to recreate the reasoning engine of autonomous virtual agents represents one of the most fragile aspects and it is indeed crucial to establish such models on well-supported psychological theoretical frameworks. For this reason, the present work discusses the application case of the theory of planned behavior (TPB; Ajzen, 1991) in the context of agent-based modeling: It is argued that this framework might be helpful more than others to develop a valid representation of human behavior in computer simulations. Accordingly, the current contribution considers issues related with the application of the model proposed by the TPB inside computer simulations and suggests potential solutions with the hope to contribute to shorten the distance between the fields of psychology and computer science

Using a Multi-agent System to Simulate the Organizational Behaviour of Entrepreneurs and Managers

A Multi-agent System to Simulate the Organizational Behaviour of Entrepreneurs and Manager

Differences between entrepreneurs and managers in large organizations: An implementation of a theoretical Multi-Agent Model on overconfidence results

The well-known research carried out by Busenitz and Barney (1997) exploring differences in the decision-making processes between entrepreneurs and manag-ers in large organizations has been revisited and redesigned as a starting point to create a computational and theoretical Multi Agent Model (MAM) which shows differences in the decision-making processes. In the original study, researchers showed the presence of a different disposition in incurring in biases and in heu-ristics by entrepreneurs and managers. In particular, two interesting trend curves on the Overconfidence effect have been realized. Authors concluded by stating that the Overconfidence effect is significantly different in entrepreneurs and man-agers and helps distinguish between these two work categories. Starting from this conclusion and from their results, a computational and theoretical MAM has been designed, where, as suggested by the authors, different decision-maker agents can incur in the Overconfidence effect with different degrees