Team ground rules: their nature and functions

Teams are complex relational systems. Effective team functioning depends on members willingness to coordinate and work together. Ground rules play a fundamental but frequently ignored role in this process. We define ground rules as the mutual agreements informally established by members to regulate team functioning. These agreements may subsequently be rendered formal or explicit. The nature and functions of ground rules (including as social-normative tools for handling paradoxes) are discussed, as well as the forms/types they assume. Rules for setting ground rules, as well as the role team leaders may play in facilitating the emergence of effective ground rules are also considered.N/

Understanding pragmatic paradoxes: when contradictions become paralyzing and what to do about it

Integration of paradoxes, comprising interdependent yet contradictory tensions such as those of stability and change, learning and performing, or the individual and the collective, have been recently recognized as sources of synergy and competitive advantage. When adequately navigated, paradoxes may promote innovation, favoring generative complementarities. Not all paradoxes, however, have such generative effects. Pragmatic paradoxes, or managerially imposed contradictory demands that must be disobeyed to be obeyed, tend create paralyzing catch-22 situations. Like weeds, pragmatic paradoxes may also grow alongside the generative type. We explore the conditions in which pragmatic paradoxes become invasive in organizations, identify their main characteristics and symptoms, discuss their roots, and recommend potential approaches for their eradication.N/

Three narratives

The relationship between business and society has been contested throughout history. This chapter explores the role of capitalistic organizations in society from ethical, empirical and prudential perspectives. The ethical analysis reviews a range of contested philosophical ideas related to what the relationship between entrepreneurship and society ought to be. The empirical analysis considers evidence of the dominant impacts of organizations on society. In contrast to ideological perspectives holding business organizations as automatically harmful or beneficial to social progress, an objective review of the evidence will indicate both beneficial and harmful effects. The prudential analysis therefore considers the importance of exercising judgement in pursuing practices that reduce harm and enhance positive potential. While we see cause for hope from an emerging range of practical business approaches emphasizing the pursuit of a social contribution over a narrow emphasis on profit maximization, we offer caution. In the greater scheme, movements promoting social and environmental awareness in business are in their infancy, in what remains a dominant neo-liberal environment with totalizing tendencies. Positive practices can even be adopted as a smoke screen by less scrupulous actors. We therefore see an ongoing need for oversight of business and of government by alert and informed citizens engaged in democratic processes. So long as there are informed citizens committed to the greater good, we see hope. In this we also see a place of responsibility for management and organizational scholars.authorsversionpublishe

Non-naïve organizational positivity through a generative paradox pedagogy

Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS), with positivity as a core conceptual component, is a major innovation in recent decades in management and organizational studies. Just as organization is an inherently paradox laden process, so too, we argue, is positivity. Yet in classrooms and in practice, POS is mostly taught in a manner that accepts only one side of the paradox, that which, at first glance, appears positive. Against such linear approaches we propose another possibility: teaching positivity through a pedagogy of generative paradoxes emergent from creatively harmonizing the energy of competing and interdependent positive and negative tensions. In the process we extend the notion of generative paradox as discussed in paradox literature by embracing the notion of generativity as discussed in POS theorizing where it is associated with organizational processes that facilitate outcomes of collective flourishing, abundance, wellbeing, and virtue. Our proposed three-part generative paradox pedagogy contributes to the literature on POS, organizational paradox, and management learning.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Speak! paradoxical effects of a managerial culture of ‘speaking up’

We explore the intrinsic ambiguity of speaking up in a multinational healthcare subsidiary A culture change initiative, emphasizing learning and agility through encouraging employees to speak up, gave rise to paradoxical effects. Some employees interpreted a managerial tool for improving effectiveness as an invitation to raise challenging points of difference rather than as something ‘beneficial for the organization’.We show that the process of introducing a culture that aims to encourage employees to speak up can produce tensions and contradictions that make various types of organizational paradoxes salient Telling people to ‘speak up!’ may render paradoxical tensions salient and even foster a sense of low PsySafe.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Pandemic, power and paradox: Improvising as the New Normal during the COVID-19 crisis

The global COVID-19 pandemic made salient various paradoxical tensions, such as the trade-offs between individual freedom and collective safety, between short term and long-term consequences of adaptation to the new conditions, the power implications of sameness (COVID-19 was non-discriminatory in that all were affected in one way or another) and difference (yet not all were affected equally due to social differences), whereas most businesses became poorer under lockdown, others flourished; while significant numbers of workers were confined to home, some could not return home; some thrived while working from home as others were challenged by the erosion of barriers between their private and working lives. Rapid improvisational responding and learning at all levels of society presented itself as a naturally occurring research opportunity for improvisation scholars. This improvisation saw the arrival of a ‘New Normal’, eventually defined as ‘learning to live with COVID-19’. The five articles in this special issue capture critical aspects of improvisation, paradoxes and power made salient by the COVID-19 pandemic in contexts ranging from higher-education, to leadership, to medical care and virtue ethics. In their own ways, each breaks new ground by contributing novel insights into improvisation scholarship.publishedVersio

Frontal lobe connectivity and network community characteristics are associated with the outcome of subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation in patients with Parkinson's disease

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) is nowadays an evidence-based state of the art therapy option for motor and non-motor symptoms in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). However, the exact anatomical regions of the cerebral network that are targeted by STN–DBS have not been precisely described and no definitive pre-intervention predictors of the clinical response exist. In this study, we test the hypothesis that the clinical effectiveness of STN–DBS depends on the connectivity profile of the targeted brain networks. Therefore, we used diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) and probabilistic tractography to reconstruct the anatomical networks and the graph theoretical framework to quantify the connectivity profile. DWI was obtained pre-operatively from 15 PD patients who underwent DBS (mean age = 67.87 ± 7.88, 11 males, H&Y score = 3.5 ± 0.8) using a 3T MRI scanner (Philips Achieva). The pre-operative connectivity properties of a network encompassing frontal, prefrontal cortex and cingulate gyrus were directly linked to the postoperative clinical outcome. Eccentricity as a topological-characteristic of the network defining how cerebral regions are embedded in relation to distant sites correlated inversely with the applied voltage at the active electrode for optimal clinical response. We found that network topology and pre-operative connectivity patterns have direct influence on the clinical response to DBS and may serve as important and independent predictors of the postoperative clinical outcome

Gait ataxia in essential tremor is differentially modulated by thalamic stimulation

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