A (Blurry) Vision of the Future: How Leader Rhetoric About Ultimate Goals Influences Performance

One key responsibility of leaders involves crafting and communicating two types of messages—visions and values—that help followers understand the ultimate purpose of their work. Although scholars have long considered how leaders communicate visions and values to establish a sense of purpose, they have overlooked how these messages can be used to establish a shared sense of purpose, which is achieved when multiple employees possess the same understanding of the purpose of work. In this research, we move beyond the traditional focus on leader rhetoric and individual cognition to examine leader rhetoric and shared cognition. We suggest that a specific combination of messages—a large amount of vision imagery combined with a small number of values—will boost performance more than other combinations because it triggers a shared sense of the organization\u27s ultimate goal, and, in turn, enhances coordination. We found support for our predictions in an archival study of 151 hospitals and an experiment with 62 groups of full-time employees. In light of these findings, we conducted exploratory analyses and discovered two dysfunctional practices: leaders tend to (1) communicate visions without imagery and (2) over-utilize value-laden rhetoric

A Faultine-Based Model of Team Leadership

Modern work teams operate in environments where increasingly salient member differences lead to the emergence of subgroups. Building on findings from the faultline literature, we propose that team members typically organize into three types of subgorups—cliques, coalitions, and cohorts, and that different leader orientations are mandated by each subgroup type

A (Blurry) Vision of the Future: How Leader Rhetoric about Ultimate Goals Influences Performance

One key responsibility of leaders involves crafting and communicating two types of messages—visions and values—that help followers understand the ultimate purpose of their work. Although scholars have long considered how leaders communicate visions and values to establish a sense of purpose, they have overlooked how these messages can be used to establish a shared sense of purpose, which is achieved when multiple employees possess the same understanding of the purpose of work. In this research, we move beyond the traditional focus on leader rhetoric and individual cognition to examine leader rhetoric and shared cognition. We suggest that a specific combination of messages—a large amount of vision imagery combined with a small number of values—will boost performance more than other combinations because it triggers a shared sense of the organization’s ultimate goal, and, in turn, enhances coordination. We found support for our predictions in an archival study of 151 hospitals and an experiment with 62 groups of full-time employees. In light of these findings, we conducted exploratory analyses and discovered two dysfunctional practices: leaders tend to (1) communicate visions without imagery and (2) over-utilize value-laden rhetoric

Observational needs for improving ocean and coupled reanalysis, S2S prediction, and decadal prediction

Developments in observing system technologies and ocean data assimilation (DA) are symbiotic. New observation types lead to new DA methods and new DA methods, such as coupled DA, can change the value of existing observations or indicate where new observations can have greater utility for monitoring and prediction. Practitioners of DA are encouraged to make better use of observations that are already available, for example, taking advantage of strongly coupled DA so that ocean observations can be used to improve atmospheric analyses and vice versa. Ocean reanalyses are useful for the analysis of climate as well as the initialization of operational long-range prediction models. There are many remaining challenges for ocean reanalyses due to biases and abrupt changes in the ocean-observing system throughout its history, the presence of biases and drifts in models, and the simplifying assumptions made in DA solution methods. From a governance point of view, more support is needed to bring the ocean-observing and DA communities together. For prediction applications, there is wide agreement that protocols are needed for rapid communication of ocean-observing data on numerical weather prediction (NWP) timescales. There is potential for new observation types to enhance the observing system by supporting prediction on multiple timescales, ranging from the typical timescale of NWP, covering hours to weeks, out to multiple decades. Better communication between DA and observation communities is encouraged in order to allow operational prediction centers the ability to provide guidance for the design of a sustained and adaptive observing network

A decade of acoustic thermometry in the North Pacific Ocean

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/94643/1/jgrc11250.pd