4,030 research outputs found
More than a cognitive experience: unfamiliarity, invalidation, and emotion in organizational learning
Literature on organizational learning (OL) lacks an integrative framework that captures the emotions involved as OL proceeds. Drawing on personal construct theory, we suggest that organizations learn where their members reconstrue meaning around questions of strategic significance for the organization. In this 5-year study of an electronics company, we explore the way in which emotions change as members perceive progress or a lack of progress around strategic themes. Our framework also takes into account whether OL involves experiences that are familiar or unfamiliar and the implications for emotions. We detected similar patterns of emotion arising over time for three different themes in our data, thereby adding to OL perspectives that are predominantly cognitive in orientation
Psychological climates in action learning sets: A managerâs perspective
Action Learning (AL) is often viewed as a process that facilitates professional learning through the creation of a positive psychological climate (Marquart, 2000; Schein, 1979). An psychological climate that fosters an environment in which learning set members feel psychologically safe enough to reflect upon both the successes, and failures in their professional life without any form of repercussion. However, there has been little attention given to the ways that that psychological climate develops, and the differing facets that create that climate. In response to such deficit, this paper reports the outcomes of interviews with eleven managers, all of whom are former AL set members on their experiences of action learning set membership.
Drawing upon an interpretivist philosophy, the paper explores the key themes that emerged from the analysis of those interviews. The analysis serves to illustrate the differing facets that collectively contribute creation of a positive psychological climate that is conducive for learning.
Analysis points to the relative importance of such facets as: trust, honesty, vulnerability, reciprocity, confidentiality and personal disclosure, all of which have the capacity to lead to a positive psychological climate in action learning sets.
This paper is useful for developing an understanding of the differing facets in AL sets that create a psychological climate conducive for learning. As such, it has utility for action learning facilitators, set members, academics and educational consultants
Resist, comply or workaround? An examination of different facets of user engagement with information systems
This paper provides a summary of studies of user resistance to Information Technology (IT) and identifies workaround activity as an understudied and distinct, but related, phenomenon. Previous categorizations of resistance have largely failed to address the relationships between the motivations for divergences from procedure and the associated workaround activity. This paper develops a composite model of resistance/workaround derived from two case study sites. We find four key antecedent conditions derived from both positive and negative resistance rationales and identify associations and links to various resultant workaround behaviours and provide supporting Chains of Evidence from two case studies
Psychological Safety and Norm Clarity in Software Engineering Teams
In the software engineering industry today, companies primarily conduct their
work in teams. To increase organizational productivity, it is thus crucial to
know the factors that affect team effectiveness. Two team-related concepts that
have gained prominence lately are psychological safety and team norms. Still,
few studies exist that explore these in a software engineering context.
Therefore, with the aim of extending the knowledge of these concepts, we
examined if psychological safety and team norm clarity associate positively
with software developers' self-assessed team performance and job satisfaction,
two important elements of effectiveness.
We collected industry survey data from practitioners (N = 217) in 38
development teams working for five different organizations. The result of
multiple linear regression analyses indicates that both psychological safety
and team norm clarity predict team members' self-assessed performance and job
satisfaction. The findings also suggest that clarity of norms is a stronger
(30\% and 71\% stronger, respectively) predictor than psychological safety.
This research highlights the need to examine, in more detail, the
relationship between social norms and software development. The findings of
this study could serve as an empirical baseline for such, future work.Comment: Submitted to CHASE'201
The unseen and unacceptable face of digital libraries
The social and organizational aspects of digital libraries are often overlooked but this paper reviews how they can affect users' awareness and acceptance of digital libraries. An analysis of research conducted within two contrasting domains (Clinical and Academic) is presented which highlights issues of user interactions, work practices and the organizational social structures. The combined study comprises an analysis of 98 in-depth interviews and focus groups with lecturers, librarians and hospital clinicians. The importance of current and past roles of the library, and how users interacted with it, are revealed. Web-based digital libraries, while alleviating most library resource and interaction problems, require a change in librarians' and DL designers' roles and interaction patterns if they are to be implemented acceptably and effectively. Without this role change, users will at best be unaware of these digital resources and at worst feel threatened by them. The findings of this paper highlight the importance on DL design and implementation of the social context and supporting user communication (i.e. collaboration and consultation) in their information search and usage activities
Eating well in care homes:Testing the feasibility of a staff training programme aimed at improving social interaction and choice at mealtimes
Background: The health and well-being of care home residents are influenced by their experience of mealtimes, which provide an opportunity for residents to socialise and exercise control over their lives, as well as providing essential sustenance. Care home staff are pivotal to this experience, responsible for the provision of meals and eating assistance, but also for establishing a positive mealtime culture valued by residents. Despite this, mealtimes can be task-focussed, as the pressure on staff to perform multiple duties in limited time, or a lack of knowledge and awareness, means that resident needs and preferences risk being neglected. Methods: A staff-focussed training programme aimed at improving social interaction, and resident choice was developed and delivered in a workshop. Intervention feasibility was assessed using a qualitative survey and workshop observations. A combination of descriptive and content analyses was conducted on the data. Results: Thirteen women and one man took part in the workshops, representing multiple roles within two homes in the South West UK. The workshops were found to be deliverable and practicable. Participants responded positively to the workshops, anticipating that improvements to the mealtime experience would result from their workshop outputs. Conclusion: This study suggests that staff training workshops based on improving the mealtime experience are feasible to deliver within the day-to-day running of a care home and are acceptable to staff. Positive changes resulting from these workshops could improve the health and well-being of residents. Implications for practice: Mealtimes in care homes may be improved by increasing social interaction and by providing residents with greater choice. Management-faciltated staff training may be a useful tool to encourage staff to reflect on current practice and develop their own strategies to improve the mealtime experience for residents.</p
'Simultaneous Immersion' : How online postgraduate study contributes to the development of reflective practice among public service practitioners
This paper examines how the process of engaging simultaneously in study and work â through online distance-based study â affects studentsâ capacity to apply their learning in and for the workplace. The paper takes as its starting point the importance of extending notions of âeducational effectivenessâ beyond course-based attainment to encompass the impact of learning within the workplace. It explores the interface between study and work, focusing on the case of online postgraduate programmes in public management at the University of York. It finds that simultaneous immersion in study and work can create the conditions for âpublic reflectionâ that underpin work-based learning and that a key factor is the student-practitioner's ability to mobilise âepisodic power.â The paper suggests ways in which existing approaches to online postgraduate learning might be enhanced in order to capitalise on these conditions of simultaneous immersion
What factors influence training opportunities for older workers? Three factorial surveys exploring the attitudes of HR professionals
The core research questions addressed in this paper are: what factors influence HR professionals in deciding whether to approve training proposals for older workers? What kind of training are they more likely to recommend for older employees and in which organizational contexts? We administered three factorial surveys to 66 HR professionals in Italy. Participants made specific training decisions based on profiles of hypothetical older workers. Multilevel analyses indicated that access to training decreases strongly with age, while highly-skilled older employees with low absenteeism rates are more likely to enjoy training opportunities. In addition, older workers displaying positive performance are more likely to receive training than older workers who perform poorly, suggesting that training late in working life may serve as a reward for good performance rather than as a means of enhancing productivity. The older the HR professional evaluating training proposals, the higher the probability that older workers will be recommended for training.
keywords: training; older workers; HR professionals; factorial survey; multilevel model
Non-perturbative dynamics of hot non-Abelian gauge fields: beyond leading log approximation
Many aspects of high-temperature gauge theories, such as the electroweak
baryon number violation rate, color conductivity, and the hard gluon damping
rate, have previously been understood only at leading logarithmic order (that
is, neglecting effects suppressed only by an inverse logarithm of the gauge
coupling). We discuss how to systematically go beyond leading logarithmic order
in the analysis of physical quantities. Specifically, we extend to
next-to-leading-log order (NLLO) the simple leading-log effective theory due to
Bodeker that describes non-perturbative color physics in hot non-Abelian
plasmas. A suitable scaling analysis is used to show that no new operators
enter the effective theory at next-to-leading-log order. However, a NLLO
calculation of the color conductivity is required, and we report the resulting
value. Our NLLO result for the color conductivity can be trivially combined
with previous numerical work by G. Moore to yield a NLLO result for the hot
electroweak baryon number violation rate.Comment: 20 pages, 1 figur
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