Cooperative Work Environment Research Articles

Hybridizing the institutional logics of performance improvement and budgetary stewardship in English and Welsh local government

This article introduces and applies a three-stage process to show how advocates of the conflicting institutional logics of budgetary stewardship and performance improvement in English and Welsh local authorities created a hybrid logic. Drawing on interviews with officers in 25 councils, it demonstrates how cooperative working environments meant that hybridization proceeded largely ‘peacefully’, in contrast to previous studies of more competitive contexts that found it occurs on a ‘battlefield’. We argue that the nature of conflict within the hybridization process, along with the power dynamics between representatives of different logics, shapes the nature and sustainability of the resulting hybrid.

How Do Labor Market Institutions Influence the Preference to Work in Family Firms? A Multilevel Analysis Across 40 Countries

Family firms must attract talented employees to stay competitive. They have different employer characteristics than nonfamily firms. For example, although they generally offer lower wages, they also typically offer higher job security and a more cooperative and entrepreneurial work environment. However, drawing on occupational choice theory, we argue that the importance of these unique family firm characteristics depends on the national labor market context in which the family firm is embedded. A multilevel investigation of 12,746 individuals in 40 countries shows that individuals prefer to work in family firms in labor markets with flexible unregulated hiring and firing practices, centralized wage determination, and low labor–employer cooperation. A cross-level analysis further shows that the national labor market context moderates the effects of individual-level factors determining the preference to work in a family firm (e.g., entrepreneurship intention). Our article is the first to consider labor market institutions in research on family firms as employers. Practical implications exist for family firms regarding their employer branding and intrapreneurship strategies.

Perceptions of Followers About Ethical Leadership and Attendant Effects on Organizational Success

Attainment of goals without consideration for the needs of stakeholders remains the focus of leaders. Ethical leadership (EL) studies’ focus on leaders’ perspectives represented a research gap that necessitated this study. Followers are the least researched among stakeholders; thus, this study explored EL from their viewpoints. Stakeholder theory, social learning theory, eudaimonia, and utilitarianism were the conceptual frameworks that guided this study. Twenty participants drawn from followers in a public organization in New Jersey were questioned about their experiences and expectations of EL using open-ended interview questions. Participants with shared experiences were selected based on convenience, snowball, and criterion sampling strategies. With the use of the transcendental phenomenological design, the data collected were analyzed with the Stevick–Colaizzi–Keen method and the two-cycle analysis. Knowledge, exemplarity, and democratic decision making were themes of EL that are relevant to followers. Other themes found in this study, including communication, stakeholders’ well-being, impartiality, honesty, relationship building, responsibility, and humility, concur with extant literature and suggest consistency in the phenomenon. The potential social change implications of this study are an innovative and cooperative work environment, organizational success, and enhanced corporate social responsibility. Organizations and societies may benefit from the inculcation and development of EL in the family, society, tertiary institutions, and organizations through training, mentoring, and the development of an ethical culture.

Palestinian Arabs and Jews at Work: Workplace Encounters in a War-Torn Country and the Grassroots Strategy of ‘Split Ascription’

What are the workplace manifestations of ongoing ethno-national conflict? How do co-workers on rival sides in war-torn countries cope with these manifestations? Interviews with nurses, nursing assistants and physicians in a Palestinian-Arab hospital and in a Jewish retirement home reveal how the broader ethno-national conflict in Israel penetrates the workplace. Problems arise for them when violence related to the conflict erupts outside the workplace and when patients express racist views during interactions with medical staff. This study finds that staff members respond with ‘split ascription’, a grassroots coping strategy that differentiates between a cooperative work environment and discriminatory structural elements of the employing organization. Split ascription challenges existing theories of interethnic relations in the workplace, as it combines both interactional and structural elements within a single coping strategy.

Diversity of editors and teams versus quality of cooperative work: experiments on wikipedia

We study whether and how the diversity of editors and teams affects the quality of work in a virtual cooperative work environment on the Wikipedia example. We propose a measure of interests diversity of an editor and some measures of team diversity in terms of members’ interests and experience. Statistical and machine learning methods are used to investigate the dependency between diversity and work quality. The presented experimental results confirm our hypothesis that interest diversity of a single editors and team diversity are positively related to the quality of their work. Interestingly, some of our experiments also indicate that diversity may be more important than such attributes as productivity of an editor or size or experience of the team. Our experimental results demonstrate that it is possible to predict work quality based on diversity which is an additional statistical signal that diversity is correlated with work quality.

Designing Health Care Facilities to Maximize Productivity and Patient Outcomes

The built environment of health care systems plays a crucial role in factors such as patient safety, staff satisfaction, patient experience, and optimal health. As hospital centers are being renovated or expanded over the past decade or so, the clinical built environment of many of them have not been redesigned to align with today’s evolving clinical roles. Just as medicine has increasingly moved toward “evidence-based medicine,” where clinical choices are informed by research, healthcare design is increasingly guided by rigorous research linking the physical environment of hospitals to patients and staff outcomes and is moving toward “evidence-based design”. The goal of human simulations in the context of architectural builds is to present the workflow (both normal and emergent) in the design of the complex cooperative work environment. The results obtained can be used to change the design process by improving the built environment to support end users to provide optimal health, exceptional experience, and organizational vitality. These proceedings describe the process and provide an example of the evaluation of a future single patient neonatal intensive care unit room.

Practice and evaluation of creating magnetic nursing work environment in hospital

Objective To explore the moves that creating magnetic work environment in hospital, in order to improve the nurses job satisfaction and reduce the turnover rate then stable the nursing team. Methods Through a series of measures such as the establishment of scientific rational allocation of human resources, implementing fair performance evaluation and allocation mechanism, carrying out the nurse grading management system to create magnetic nursing work environment, the nurse job satisfaction and turnover rate were compared before and after the measures. Results In January 2014 a total of 520 questionnaireswere issued, 519 valid questionnaires, and the effective recovery rate was 99.81%(519/520); And 559 were valid of 577 issued questionnaires, which was 96.88%(559/577). The overall score of nurses' job satisfaction increased from(3.20±0.46)points in 2013 to(3.41±0.52)points in 2014(t = 9.40, P= 0.000); The nurse turnover rate fell to 1.97%(13/661)from 5.13%(30/585)(χ2= 10.27, P= 0.003). Conclusions That is very important for remain stable and high quality nursing team to carry out scientific and fine management according to the demand of nurses, so as to create a safe, harmonious, positive, cooperative magnetic nursing work environment which have development direction and space. Key words: Nursing care; Nurse's practice patterns; Work environment; Magnet

Towards structuring contextual information for workflow-driven surgical assistance functionalities

Abstract A workflow-driven cooperative working environment needs to be established in order to successfully unburden the surgeon and the OR staff from technical configuration and information-seeking tasks. An important prerequisite for autonomous situationaware adaptation of medical devices is a comprehensive representation of the operating context regarding the surgical process and situation. We propose a hierarchical structuring of process-related and situation-related information entities and include assessment scores that intraoperative workflow information systems may provide via OR networks. The conducted experiments on the proposed assessment scores included sixty recorded brain tumour removal procedures and considered 344 distinguishable surgical situations. A comprehensive modelling of surgical situations and process context will be a significant pre-requisite for reliable autonomous adaptation of medical devices and systems in digital operating rooms.

Analysis on the Load Carrying Mechanism Integrated as Heterogeneous Co-operative Manipulator in a Walking Wheelchair

After industrial robots came into existence during 1960, the technology of robotics with the design and analysis of robots in various forms in industries as well as in domestic applications were developed. Nowadays, along with the automotive sector the robots are producing a great impact in the form of quality and production rate to register their existence reliable in various other sectors also. Robotic technology has undergone various phase translations from being tortured as humanoids to the present day manipulators. Depending upon the various forms of its existence, robot manipulators are designed as serial manipulators and parallel manipulators. Individually both types can be proved effective though both have various drawbacks in design and the kinematic analysis. The versatility of robots can be increased by making them work in an environment where the same work volume is shared by more than one manipulator. This work volume can be identified as co-operative work volume of those manipulators. Here the interference of manipulators in the work volume of other manipulators is possible and is made obstacle free. The main advantage of co-operative manipulators is that when a number of independent manipulators are put together in a cooperative work envelope the efficiency and ability to perform tasks is greatly enhanced. The main disadvantage of the co-operative manipulators lies in the complication of its design even for a simple application, in almost all fields.In this paper, a cooperative design of robot manipulators to work in co-operative work environment is done and analysed for its efficacy. In the industrial applications when robotic manipulators are put together in more numbers, the trajectory planning becomes the tough task in the work cell. Proper design can remove the design defects of the cooperative manipulators and can be utilized in a more efficient way. In the proposed research paper an analysis is made on such a type of cooperative manipulator used for climbing stairs with three leg design and anlaysis were also done on the mechanism integrated to the system. Kinematics of the legs are analysed separately and the legs are designed to carry a maximum of 175kgs, which is sustained by the center leg and shared by the dual wing legs equally during the walking phase. In the proposed design, screwjack mechanism is used as the central leg to share the load and thus the analysis on the load sharing capability of the whole system is analysed and concluded in terms of failure modes.

System Design of E-Government Office Automation

Office automation is an important link in e-government. Under the new situation, facing a series of new challenges, such as higher requirement of electronic cooperative work environment, the office automation system needs new design. The hardware structure of the E-government office automation system should be divided into two parts of the LAN and the Internet. The overall system frame contains the hardware layer, the system software layer, data access layer, information exchange layer, and application layer and information layer.

Analysis on the Load Carrying Mechanism Integrated as a Heterogeneous Co-operative Manipulator in a Walking Wheelchair

Robotic technology has undergone various phase translations from being tortured as humanoids to the present day manipulators. Depending upon the various forms of its existence, robot manipulators are designed as serial manipulators and parallel manipulators. This work volume can be identified as co-operative work volume of those manipulators. Here the interference of manipulators in the work volume of other manipulators is possible and is ade obstacle free. In this paper, a cooperative design of robot manipulators to work in co-operative work environment is done and analysed for its efficacy. In the industrial applications when robotic manipulators are put together in more numbers, the trajectory planning becomes the tough task in the work cell. Proper design can remove the design defects of the cooperative manipulators and can be utilized in a more efficient way. In the proposed research paper an analysis is made on such a type of cooperative manipulator used for climbing stairs with three leg design and anlaysis were also done on the mechanism integrated to the system. Kinematics of the legs are analysed separately and the legs are designed to carry a maximum of 175kgs, which is sustained by the center leg and shared by the dual wing legs equally during the walking phase. In the proposed design, screwjack mechanism is used as the central leg to share the load and thus the analysis on the load sharing capability of the whole system is analysed and concluded in terms of failure modes.

Establishing midwifery in low-resource settings: Guidance from a mixed-methods evaluation of the Afghanistan midwifery education program

Backgroundthe shortage of skilled birth attendants has been a key factor in the high maternal and newborn mortality in Afghanistan. Efforts to strengthen pre-service midwifery education in Afghanistan have increased the number of midwives from 467 in 2002 to 2954 in 2010. Objectivewe analyzed the costs and graduate performance outcomes of the two types of pre-service midwifery education programs in Afghanistan that were either established or strengthened between 2002 and 2010 to guide future program implementation and share lessons learned. Designwe performed a mixed-methods evaluation of selected midwifery schools between June 2008 and November 2010. This paper focuses on the evaluation's quantitative methods, which included (a) an assessment of a sample of midwifery school graduates (n=138) to measure their competencies in six clinical skills; (b) prospective documentation of the actual clinical practices of a subsample of these graduates (n=26); and (c) a costing analysis to estimate the resources required to educate students enrolled in these programs. Settingfor the clinical competency assessment and clinical practices components, two Institutes for Health Sciences (IHS) schools and six Community Midwifery Education (CME) schools; for the costing analysis, a different set of nine schools (two IHS, seven CME), all of which were funded by the US Agency for International Development. Participantsmidwives who had graduated from either IHS or CME schools. FindingsCME graduates (n=101) achieved an overall mean competency score of 63.2% (59.9–66.6%) on the clinical competency assessment compared to 57.3% (49.9–64.7%) for IHS graduates (n=37). Reproductive health activities accounted for 76% of midwives' time over an average of three months. Approximately 1% of childbirths required referral or resulted in maternal death. On the basis of known costs for the programs, the estimated cost of graduating a class with 25 students averaged US$298,939, or US$10,784 per graduate. Key conclusionsthe pre-service midwifery education experience of Afghanistan can serve as a model to rapidly increase the number of skilled birth attendants. In such settings, it is important to ensure the provision of continued practice opportunities and refresher trainings after graduation to aid skill retention, a co-operative and supportive work environment that will use midwives for the reproductive health skills for which they were trained, and selection mechanisms that can identify the most promising students and post-graduation deployment options to maximise the return on the substantial educational investment.

Validation of a Framework for Enriching Human-Computer-Human Interaction with Awareness in a Seamless Way

Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) environments enable users to interact with each other by using computers to conveniently share relevant data across the user interface. Awareness is an essential requirement in CSCW to convey precise information about the context in which the work in group is taking place, contributing thus to collaboration between users. In this kind of environments, we need to go beyond traditional human–computer interaction to embrace human–computer–human interaction (HCHI). It is necessary to devise flexible mechanisms to support HCHI in dealing with the diversity of contexts and group concerns. Furthermore, these mechanisms should endeavor to provide a seamless integration with current development techniques. This work presents a multi-purpose framework to include group awareness in HCHI systems in a seamless way. Proposed framework is based on the Dichotomic View of Plasticity approach. An experiment was conducted with two different versions of a specific groupware platform: the original platform and a new version of it, extended by means of the proposed framework. The goal was twofold: (i) to verify the benefits of applying this framework and (ii) to validate, in terms of user satisfaction, the improvement regarding groupware features introduced in the extended version. The results of the experiment backed up our hypothesis by showing that proposed framework is able to add awareness support to existing human–computer–Human (HCH) interfaces in a seamless way. It is also showed that added awareness components effectively contributed to achieve a higher level of collaboration among users.

Web-Based Ontology Editor Enhanced by Property Value Extraction

Linked Open Data and its consuming services are increasing in the areas of electric government, bioscience researches and smart community projects . Therefore lightweight ontologies used for those areas are also becoming important. This paper proposesa web-based ontology editorthat is an ontology building service especially for the lightweight ontologies. It is designed not only for ontology experts, but also for users and/or developers ofconsumer services, that is, non-experts of the ontology. Thus we focused on ease of use, no installation, cooperative work environment, andalso provided sample applications to keep the users' motivation. Furthermore, it offers a function that extract pairs of belonging to a certain instance of a class. First, we introduce the design andthe implementation of our ontology editor, and then present the extraction mechanism of pairs and confirmsits accuracy in experimental evaluations.

Obstetric Float Nurse Role Redesign in a Small Rural Community Hospital

The purpose of this process improvement project in a rural community hospital with a small volume perinatal service was to foster a cooperative working environment between the obstetric and medical-surgical nursing teams and promote quality nursing care by evaluating, revising, and clearly defining the obstetric float nurse role. Members of the obstetric and medical-surgical nursing team were convened to evaluate the obstetric float nurse role and develop plans for improvement. Nurses from both units participated in a written survey before and after the project was completed. Based on issues identified from review of the surveys and group discussion, a guideline was developed that defined the expectations and responsibilities of the obstetric float nurse on the medical-surgical unit. The redesigned obstetric float nurse role helped nurses of both units understand the expectations and responsibilities of the obstetric float nurse and promoted better working relationships. An additional benefit was improved communication regarding care and needs of the medical-surgical patients. Clearly defined obstetric float nurse guidelines were successful in our small rural community hospital and may be of benefit to other similar volume perinatal units.

Development of a Document Management System for Private Cloud Environment

Organizations are increasingly interested in carefully managing their private information both to insure that it is properly handled, and also to make it more useful to their daily tasks. Meanwhile, the number and the variety of documents make management and efficient usage of the information more challenging. Therefore, how to achieve efficient management of documents becomes an emerging issue in today's information-rich society. In this paper, the design of a document management system for private cloud environment is introduced. The document management system aims to provide two major features. The first one is the capability for users to timely access to the latest information anytime, anywhere, and from any device. Due to the growing and the diversity of devices, corresponding document access and management mechanisms are provided without extra learning burdens and complex operations by users. The other one is the support for efficient document sharing and collaboration for the cooperative working environments. The objective of the document management system is to extend such sophisticate features and ease the complexities to organization users and applications. Finally, a case study is also given in this paper to describe the scenarios and the benefits of using the document management system in an academic environment.

Modeling Study of Drilling Engineering Cooperative Design Based on Workflow

Drilling construction quality is closely related with drilling engineering design level, however, drilling engineering design includes multi different professional fields such as geology, reservoir and drilling engineering and so on, and optimization design needs people’s cooperative work from different specialties and sections. Today drilling engineering design is usually completed by relevant staffs in isolation, and then drilling engineering planning report is generated by collection. In this process of design, there are lots of problems, such as lack of formation interaction, long design period, and inadequate capability to meet the high efficiency of optimization requirements. In this paper the model of drilling engineering cooperative design based on workflow is put forward, and by using computer workflow technology, planning automatic design workflow and providing cooperative work environment for people in different specialties and fields, it can satisfy the need for information sharing during design process, improve design efficiency, and provide support for drilling optimization design. The multi-user cooperative model and workflow management model of drilling engineering design is detailed in this paper.

Research on a multi-agent based group awareness model

Based on the research background of group awareness theory and the research achievement of agent technology, this paper applies multi-agent technology in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) environment and describes the group awareness in CSCW system with the multi-agent based group awareness model. It builds up the multi-agent based group awareness model and discusses its key problems with emphasis on how to achieve the collaboration awareness in the CSCW system through the cooperation and interaction among the three types of agents – management agent, interactive agent and function agent. These agents exchange information or invoke others in the CSCW system and the final of that is proved to be more accurate and flexible in describing the dynamic process and regularities of tasks, roles and actions in real life.

Study of Management and Environmental Factors Affecting Medical Expense Reduction

Abstract This study aimed to determine the management and environmental factors affecting medical expense reduction. For analysis, medical expenses were divided into hospitalization expenses and outpatient treatment expenses, and the rate of medical expense reduction was classified into initial and final reduction rates.Data were collected through a direct survey among 205 directors of independent health insurance review departments of hospital-level medical institutions in Korea. The results of the study are discussed below:In the analysis, differences in the initial and final reduction rates of hospitalization expenses and outpatient treatment expenses were compared. The results showed that, in hospitalization expenses, the initial and final reduction rates were both significantly affected by the following management factors: number of beds, number of departments, number of personnel reviewing health insurance cases, and total number of employees. Further, in outpatient treatment expenses, the initial and final reduction rates were both affected significantly by the following management factors: management of medical records, number of beds, number of departments, number of personnel reviewing health insurance, and total number of employees.The management factors significantly affecting both the initial and final reduction rates were higher number of beds for hospitalization expenses and electronic medical record management for outpatient treatment expenses.The environmental factors significantly affecting both the initial and final reduction rates of hospitalization expenses were a highly cooperative work environment, better implementation of indicator management systems, and overtime pay. Better implementation of indicator management system and a committee for handling medical expenses had significant effects on the initial reduction rate for outpatient treatment expenses. A highly cooperative work environment, better implementation of indicator management system, and overtime pay had significant effects on the final reduction rate for outpatient treatment expenses.

Research on Agent-based Human-Information System Trusted Interaction in Distributed Cooperative Work Environment

In order to solve the problem of untrustworthy interactive process in distributed cooperative work environment, this paper, firstly, proposes a notion of system trusted and provides the basic research framework. Secondly, this paper illustrates the meaning of this notion and studies the characteristics of the trustworthiness about the human-information system trusted interaction. Finally, we analyses the key factors influencing the human-information system trusted interaction and puts forward a three-layer trustworthy interactive model based on agent. A trustworthy interaction management layer is inserted between users and information system. The management layer includes 5 agents. The Interaction agent and negotiation agent track and collect data of interactive behavior; monitor agent maintains global clock to guaranty temporal consistency; assessment and analysis agents used for determining abnormal interactive behaviors; and feedback agent is used for giving user prompt and early warning. To use this model, we constructed a trustworthy interaction chain of human-information system. Due to the each link of the chain is monitored and managed by the management layer, the trustworthiness of interaction process is guaranteed.