An Exploration of Commitment in Walk-on Athletes

The purpose of this study was to examine two types of commitment with intercollegiate athletes as well as differences between walk-on (non-scholarship) athletes and scholarship athletes (partial/full) using the sport commitment model (SCM; Scanlan et al., 2016). Participants included 153 Division I athletes (54 males, 98 females, & 1 nonbinary) from 12 different intercollegiate sports at the University of Northern Iowa. These participants were between the ages of 18 and 24 years of age (M = 20.26 years, SD = 1.31). Approximately 35% of the participants were on a full scholarship, 41.8% were on partial scholarship, and 22.9% of the participants did not receive any form of athletic aid (i.e., scholarship) for participating in their sport. Enthusiastic commitment was predicted by higher sport enjoyment, valuable opportunities, personal investments (amount), social constraints, perceived competence, informational social support, desire to master skills, athletic identity, and lower emotional social support. For constrained commitment, higher sense of loss of personal investments, higher social constraints, other priorities, perceived costs, and lower sport enjoyment, valuable opportunities, perceived competence, informational social support, and desire to master skills were the significant predictors. Scholarship athletes were found to have higher amounts of personal investments, desire to win (desire to excel-social), and athletic identity than walk-on athletes. Findings suggest predictors of enthusiastic and constrained commitment may be beneficial to understand in efforts to enhance the overall experience of intercollegiate athletes. Further research is needed to identify differences between walk-ons and scholarship athletes in terms of variables that may be most beneficial to focus on to increase their commitment

Beyond the line: exploring the HRM responsibilities of line managers, project managers and the HRM department in four project-oriented companies in the Netherlands, Austria, the UK and the USA

The topic of what HRM (Human Resource Management) responsibilities are devolved from the HRM department to line managers has attracted much interest in recent years. We report findings from a study on the devolution of HRM practices in four POCs (Project-Oriented Companies) and argue that although HRM practices are carried out beyond the HRM department, they are also carried out beyond the line. While the literature on devolving HRM responsibilities to line management is burgeoning, the HRM responsibilities of managers beyond the line organization are neglected. We make two contributions to the literature. Firstly, our study reveals that some HRM practices are the domain of the project manager rather than either the line manager or the HRM department. The complex interplay of the roles of the HRM department, line management and project management creates challenges and pitfalls where people are managed across the boundaries of the permanent and temporary organization. We identify a potentially powerful role for the HRM department in both monitoring and guiding the different players from the line and project organizations, and in protecting the well-being of employees whose work traverses these organizational boundaries. Our second contribution is that we map the diversity of practices in different POCs for managing the interplay between the three main parties delivering HRM practices and offer project-orientation as a contextual indicator that contributes to diversity in HRM practices

Crafting project managers’ careers:Integrating the fields of careers and project management

Project managers experience unique careers that are not yet sufficiently understood, and more people than ever before are pursuing such careers. The research on project management and careers is therefore urgently needed in order to better understand the processes and systems shaping the careers of project managers. We address this gap by reviewing several key career theories and constructs and examining how these are mobilized to understand project managers’ careers in existing research. Our main conclusion is that boundaryless career theory has been the dominant career perspective in project management research, whereas other career theories—specifically protean career theory, social cognitive career theory, career construction theory, and sustainable career theory—are far less often mobilized as a basis for studies. We also find that some of the most popular constructs in careers research, such as career success and employability, have been used in recent project management research. However, their use in these studies is often implicit and does not necessarily leverage existing work from the careers field. We argue that there is strong potential for further and more systematic integration between project management and careers research in order to enrich both fields, and we offer a research agenda as a starting point

ConTEXTual Net: A Multimodal Vision-Language Model for Segmentation of Pneumothorax

Radiology narrative reports often describe characteristics of a patient's disease, including its location, size, and shape. Motivated by the recent success of multimodal learning, we hypothesized that this descriptive text could guide medical image analysis algorithms. We proposed a novel vision-language model, ConTEXTual Net, for the task of pneumothorax segmentation on chest radiographs. ConTEXTual Net utilizes language features extracted from corresponding free-form radiology reports using a pre-trained language model. Cross-attention modules are designed to combine the intermediate output of each vision encoder layer and the text embeddings generated by the language model. ConTEXTual Net was trained on the CANDID-PTX dataset consisting of 3,196 positive cases of pneumothorax with segmentation annotations from 6 different physicians as well as clinical radiology reports. Using cross-validation, ConTEXTual Net achieved a Dice score of 0.716$\pm$0.016, which was similar to the degree of inter-reader variability (0.712$\pm$0.044) computed on a subset of the data. It outperformed both vision-only models (ResNet50 U-Net: 0.677$\pm$0.015 and GLoRIA: 0.686$\pm$0.014) and a competing vision-language model (LAVT: 0.706$\pm$0.009). Ablation studies confirmed that it was the text information that led to the performance gains. Additionally, we show that certain augmentation methods degraded ConTEXTual Net's segmentation performance by breaking the image-text concordance. We also evaluated the effects of using different language models and activation functions in the cross-attention module, highlighting the efficacy of our chosen architectural design

Editorial: Developing new knowledge: A virtual collection of project management review articles

publishedVersionNon peer reviewe

A Manifesto for project management research

Project management research has evolved over the past five decades and is now a mature disciplinary field investigating phenomena of interest to academics, practitioners and policymakers. Studies of projects and project management practices are theoretically rich and scientifically rigorous. They are practically relevant and impactful when addressing the pursuit of operational, tactical and strategic advancements in the world of organisations. We want to broaden the conversation between project management scholars and other scholars from cognate disciplines, particularly business and management, in a true scholarship of integration and cross-fertilisation. This Manifesto invites the latter scholars to join efforts providing a foundation for further creative, theoretical and empirical contributions, including but not limited to tackling grand challenges such as climate change, pandemics, and global poverty. To this end, we identify five theses: Projects are often ‘agents of change’ and hence fundamental to driving the innovation and change required to tackle grand challenges. Much project management research leverages and challenges theories across disciplines, including business, organisation and management studies, contributing to developing new theories, including those specific to projects and temporary organisations. ‘Projects’ are useful units of analysis, project management research is ideal for scientific cross-fertilisation and project management scholars welcome academics from other communities to engage in fruitful conversations. As in many other fields of knowledge, the project management research community embraces diversity, welcoming researchers of different genders and various scientific and social backgrounds. Historically rooted in ‘problem-solving’ and normative studies, project management research has become open to interpretative and emancipatory research, providing opportunities for other business, management and organisational scholars to advance their knowledge communities

Für eine breitere Perspektive auf Projekte

Im Projektmanagement hat bisher keine substantielle Auseinandersetzung mit den Prinzipien nachhaltiger Entwicklung stattgefunden. Derzeit arbeiten Expert(inn)en aus Nachhaltigkeitsforschung und Projektmanagement gemeinsam an einem konzeptionellen Rahmen, neuen Instrumenten und ersten Fallstudien

Nachhaltigkeit und Projektmanagement: Für eine breitere Perspektive auf Projekte

Im Projektmanagement hat bisher keine substantielle Auseinandersetzung mit den Prinzipien nachhaltiger Entwicklung stattgefunden. Derzeit arbeiten Expert(inn)en aus Nachhaltigkeitsforschung und Projektmanagement gemeinsam an einem konzeptionellen Rahmen, neuen Instrumenten und ersten Fallstudien