Multiple Supervisors Research Articles

Developing a Compassion Focused Supervision Model for Senior Leaders in Education

This article describes the development and delivery of a novel model of supervision for senior teachers in schools, informed by Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT). It explores whether this model can be considered acceptable and valuable to senior teachers, and is able to be delivered by multiple supervisors using a manual. Surveys, interviews, and focus groups were used to gather feedback about the value and impact of the supervision. Data were gathered from 39 senior teachers across three phases to assess feedback over time, as new supervisors were trained to deliver supervision with the aid of a manual. The supervision model, called Compassion Focused Coaching (CFC) in Education, was found to be an acceptable and valuable model for senior teachers in schools, with benefits for compassion to self, students, and colleagues. The CFC Manual was found to be a useful guide for new supervisors, with no previous experience of CFT, to start delivering CFC sessions. Limitations of this study include the fact that there was no tool for assessing supervisor competence and adherence to the CFC supervision model, which is an area for future development. No standardised measures were used, and the results should therefore be considered in terms of feasibility, rather than evaluation. In conclusion, CFC is an acceptable and scalable model of supervision for senior leaders in schools. There are indications of this model having value and impact in a number of areas of school life, from staff wellbeing, to dealing with challenging situations and relationships. Formal evaluation of CFC is required in future research to understand the effectiveness of this model, compared to other models of supervision and peer support.

Collaboratively pursuing student uptake of feedback through storytelling: a conversation analytic study of interaction in team doctoral supervision

Abstract Team supervision has become prevalent in worldwide doctoral education programs in the past few decades. Research indicates that one area of challenges involves collaboration between supervisors. However, little is known about how supervisors collaborate in supervision meetings involving multiple supervisors as existing studies mostly draw on participant self-reports. Adopting conversation analysis, this study examines how supervisors can collaborate through storytelling drawing on the corpus of 34 storytelling sequences in 15 triadic supervision meetings. A major finding is that storytelling can be used as a resource for collaboratively pursuing student uptake of feedback. Specifically when a supervisor is providing feedback, and the other supervisor can tell stories in pursuit of student uptake. Another finding involves the production of second storytelling: when students do not show uptake at the completion of the first storytelling produced by one supervisor, the other supervisor may launch a second storytelling to pursue student uptake. In addition, supervisors can collaborate through co-production of storytelling: near the end of a story produced by one supervisor, the other supervisor can add increments, which shape student uptake of the feedback under delivery. These findings are potentially useful for the professional development of supervisors.

Trainee-supervisor collaboration, progress-visualisation, and coaching: a survey on challenges in assessment of ICU trainees.

Assessing trainees is crucial for development of their competence, yet it remains a challenging endeavour. Identifying contributing and influencing factors affecting this process is imperative for improvement. We surveyed residents, fellows, and intensivists working in an intensive care unit (ICU) at a large non-university hospital in Switzerland to investigate the challenges in assessing ICU trainees. Thematic analysis revealed three major themes. Among 45 physicians, 37(82%) responded. The first theme identified is trainee-intensivist collaboration discontinuity. The limited duration of trainees' ICU rotations, large team size operating in a discordant three-shift system, and busy and unpredictable day-planning hinder sustained collaboration. Potential solutions include a concise pre-collaboration briefing, shared bedside care, and post-collaboration debriefing involving formative assessment and reflection on collaboration. The second theme is the lack of trainees' progress visualisation, which is caused by unsatisfactory familiarisation with the trainees' development. The lack of an overview of a trainee's previous achievements, activities, strengths, weaknesses, and goals may result in inappropriate assessments. Participants suggested implementing digital assessment tools, a competence committee, and dashboards to facilitate progress visualisation. The third theme we identified is insufficient coaching and feedback. Factors like personality traits, hierarchy, and competing interests can impede coaching, while high-quality feedback is essential for correct assessment. Skilled coaches can define short-term goals and may optimise trainee assessment by seeking feedback from multiple supervisors and assisting in both formative and summative assessment. Based on these three themes and the suggested solutions, we developed the acronym "ICU-STAR" representing a potentially powerful framework to enhance short-term trainee-supervisor collaboration in the workplace and to co-scaffold the principles of adequate assessment. According to ICU physicians, trainee-supervisor collaboration discontinuity, the lack of visualisation of trainee's development, and insufficient coaching and feedback skills of supervisors are the major factors hampering trainees' assessment in the workplace. Based on suggestions by the survey participants, we propose the acronym "ICU-STAR" as a framework including briefing, shared bedside care, and debriefing of the trainee-supervisor collaboration at the workplace as its core components. With the attending intensivists acting as coaches, progress visualisation can be enhanced by actively collecting more data points. N/A.

Risk-Reward in Economics: Academic Career Genealogy

In academia, fostering innovation through interdisciplinary knowledge recombination is essential for growth. However, the balance between novelty and skepticism poses challenges, particularly for early-stage researchers lacking established social capital. While prior studies suggest diverse academic training enhances career prospects, this quantitative genealogical analysis challenges this notion. Drawing on the Family Tree of Trade Economists database, this study finds that having multiple supervisors and diverse academic ancestry doesn’t guarantee academic success. Surprisingly, the presence of academic siblings (shared supervisors) significantly increases the likelihood of securing a tenured position, whereas academic cousins (shared grand-supervisors) show no significant impact. This study, at the nexus of innovation and organizational management literature, informs doctoral students aiming for academic success by emphasizing the strategic choice of affiliations.

The Impact of Supervisor Relationships on Auditor Turnover Intentions Using Leader-Member Exchange Theory

ABSTRACT This study expands understanding of auditor relationships and turnover by introducing the measurement of Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) to an audit setting. LMX—which considers overall quality of subordinates’ relationships with their supervisor—is well established in the management literature but has previously only been referred to as a theoretical construct in the audit literature. Utilizing a well-validated scale, we measure LMX with 167 practicing auditors. We find LMX with a single supervisor significantly impacts retention via organizational commitment. This finding is novel in the LMX literature given the unique audit setting where subordinates have multiple supervisors and transitory teams. In an exploratory analysis, we also find female subordinates form lower-quality relationships with supervisors, regardless of supervisor sex, which in turn can influence the impact of LMX on organizational commitment. Results demonstrate the value of measuring LMX in audit research and practically highlight the importance of fostering positive, strong auditor-supervisor relationships. Data Availability: Contact the authors. JEL Classifications: L2; M40; M42; M50.

Securing Facial Bioinformation by Eliminating Adversarial Perturbations

Falsified faces generated by DeepFake are severe threats to our community. Many smart systems in industry 4.0, such as electronic payments and identity verification rely on bioinformation authentication. These applications may compromise with forgeries generated by DeepFake. Notwithstanding many promising results on DeepFake forensics have been reported recently, we are now facing new security challenges brought by anti-forensics attacks. With adversarial perturbations injected by anti-forensics algorithms, falsified faces could masquerade themselves to disrupt forensics detectors as well as industrial applications. Therefore, to secure biometric data, in particular facial information, we propose a countermeasure against the attacks of DeepFake anti-forensics. The proposed model features dual channels and multiple supervisors to capture biological attributes from manifold aspects. After training, the proposed method can purify anti-forensics images by eliminating adversarial perturbations. With experimental evaluations, we show that purified faces are highly distinguishable from real ones. The proposed method is justified as a reliable defense tool for protecting facial bioinformation against anti-forensics amid Industry 4.0.

You are in charge now: exploration of educational relationships between anaesthetic trainees and their supervising specialists

BackgroundMuch of the education during anaesthesia training occurs in the workplace where trainees work under the close supervision of a more senior anaesthetist. Trainee anaesthetists are exposed to multiple supervisors with whom they form educational and supervisory relationships over the course of their training. Surprisingly little research has been conducted to explore the factors behind the development and maintenance of these relationships. This study explores the process of how education occurs in the workplace by examining the relationship from the perspective of both trainees and specialists. MethodsThis is an exploratory qualitative study. Eight trainee and 10 specialist anaesthetists participated in an individual semi-structured interview. The data were analysed thematically by each of the authors to generate themes. ResultsSix themes were identified in the analysis: (1) sizing up; (2) negotiated autonomy; (3) working closely together; (4) workplace practices; (5) education being valued; and (6) gender. A conceptual model to illustrate the relationships between the six themes was developed. ConclusionsSupervisory relationships were viewed positively by participants despite impediments such as lack of continuity and busy clinical environments. But there were tensions, particularly in balancing trainee autonomy with patient safety. A nuanced ‘sizing up’ process, with negotiation of autonomy, was described by both supervisors and trainees. Our findings may support supervisory relationships to reach this ideal more effectively.

Digital feedback during clinical education in the emergency medical services: a qualitative study

BackgroundClinical education is essential for students’ progress towards becoming registered nurses (RN) in Sweden. Assessment of caring skills in the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) is complex due to the ever-changing scenarios and the fact that multiple supervisors are involved in the student’s education. Currently, assessments of student’s skills are summative and occur twice during the six weeks of clinical education. A digitalized assessment tool (DAT) with an adaptation for formative assessment is a new approach to assessment of nursing skills in the EMS. Since new technologies and changes in procedures are likely to affect both students and supervisors, our aim in this study is to describe students’ and clinical supervisors’ experience of formative assessments using DAT in the EMS.MethodThis study is qualitative, using semi-structured group interviews (N = 2) with students and semi-structured individual telephone interviews (N = 13) with supervisors. The data was analysed according to Graneheim and Landman’s method for content analysis. This analysis generated 221 codes organized into 10 categories within which three themes were identified. The students in this study were nursing students in their last semester and all supervisors were experienced RNs.ResultsThe results showed that students and supervisors had mainly positive views of the DAT and the formative assessment stating that the information they provided while using the DAT offered opportunities for reflection. The DAT supported the students’ learning by visualizing strengths and areas of improvement, as well as displaying progress using a Likert scale. The application improved communication, but additional features linking the assessment tool with the university were requested. The application contributed to transparency in the assessments and was seen as preferable to the traditional ‘pen and paper’ method.ConclusionA digital system was described in a positive manner, and the assessment using the DAT facilitated reflection and formative assessment. The use of a Likert scale was considered positive in order to demonstrate progression which with advantage could be demonstrated visually.

PhD students’ relatedness, motivation, and well-being with multiple supervisors

ABSTRACT While the quality and nature of a PhD students’ relationship with their supervisors is widely regarded as pivotal for successfully completing their studies, the increasing use of multiple supervisors may challenge this relationship. This is the first study to use interviews with students and supervisors to explore students’ motivation in such supervisory arrangements. Our study is framed by Self-Determination Theory (SDT) as a means for understanding factors that enable (or inhibit) individuals’ motivation to learn, and Social Penetration Theory (SPT) for its perspectives on the development of relationships. Findings show that students’ self-disclosure fosters relatedness and enhances autonomy and competence, with motivation and well-being as a function of their relational needs being satisfied. As such, complementarities between SDT and SPT provide more nuanced insights into the influence of relatedness on student motivation and well-being.

Privacy‐preserving blockchain‐based contract signing with multi‐party supervision

AbstractWith the advancement of information technology, electronic contracts are gradually replacing paper contracts. Blockchain can serve as a decentralized trusted third party to help signatories solve the fairness of electronic contract signing. However, most of the existing blockchain‐based contract signing protocols are only applicable to two‐party signing, and lack the supervision of the contract and the protection of its confidentiality under supervision. This article proposes a privacy‐preserving blockchain‐based contract signing system with multi‐party supervision (CSS), in which multiple supervisors are set up to supervise contracts by voting. Before supervision, an identity‐based multi‐receiver re‐encryption algorithm is used to encrypt the contract, which takes less computation and can control the access rights of different supervisors, thus ensuring the privacy of the contract. Security analysis shows that the proposed CSS system enjoys unforgeability, non‐repudiation and fairness of electronic contract signing, and realizes privacy protection and access control under multi‐party supervision. Performance analysis demonstrates the high efficiency of our construction.

Shadows of the Past: How Prior Experiences Shape Employees’ Reactions to Current Leadership

Although it is typical that employees encounter multiple supervisors during their careers, little is known about how employees’ experiences with prior supervisors shape their reactions to their current supervisor’s leadership. The present study examines how (in)congruences between current and prior supervisors’ task-oriented leadership as well as laissez-faire leadership relate to an employee’s trust in the current supervisor. Using polynomial regression and response surface analyses in a time-lagged sample of 159 employees, we find that incongruence between current and prior supervisors’ laissez-faire leadership reduces an employee’s trust in the current supervisor. This incongruence effect is particularly pronounced if the current supervisor exhibits laissez-faire leadership to a greater extent than the prior supervisor did, but it also holds if the current supervisor shows less laissez-faire leadership than the prior supervisor. For task-oriented leadership, by contrast, we do not find a similar pattern of incongruence effects; a current supervisor’s task-oriented leadership is positively associated with employees’ trust, regardless of the prior supervisor’s respective behavior. In sum, these findings provide new insights into how “shadows of the past” may shape an ongoing supervisor-employee relation.

Preparing students for the future of work: Lessons learned from telecommuting in public accounting

The COVID-19 pandemic required essentially all public accounting professionals to telecommute. However, alternative work arrangements (AWAs) such as telecommuting have long been offered by accounting firms to mitigate work-family conflict and other concerns inherent to the public accounting profession. Prior research has examined attitudes and perceptions about AWAs, but relatively little is known from the AWA adopters themselves and those who work directly with them. Given the heavy reliance on teamwork, multiple supervisors, and multiple clients in public accounting, it is not clear how telecommuting impacts critical relationship dynamics. Accounting students, though experienced with remote learning, can learn from pre-COVID telecommuters’ insights and experiences. In this paper, we interview telecommuters in public accounting as well as a non-telecommuting teammate (subordinate or superior) to develop rich insights about telecommuting’s impact from multiple perspectives. Our findings present best practices and challenges regarding telecommuting implementation within a team setting. Our results are useful to accounting educators as they advise and mentor today’s students, who are likely to enter a workforce with increasing prevalence of telecommuting post-COVID.

Strategies and Lessons Learned for Supporting and Supervising Peer Specialists.

As peer-delivered services are increasingly embedded within behavioral health organizations, a need has arisen to identify practices that facilitate supervision and support of peer providers. The authors present supervision strategies and lessons learned that emerged during a large pragmatic trial in three supportive housing agencies that examined a peer-delivered healthy lifestyle intervention for people with serious mental illness. Strategies included access to multiple supervisors, formal and informal support, acknowledgment of lack of role clarity, ongoing role negotiation, a collaborative approach to troubleshooting challenges, explicit emphasis on peer specialists' value, and linking peer specialists to opportunities for mutual support and professional development.

Getting good help: a guide for reflection, debriefing and feedback conversations about in-consultation supervision

ABSTRACT Timely supervisor input to the care of their trainees’ patients plays a key role in ensuring the safety of patients under the care of general practice trainees. Supervisor responses to trainee calls for assistance are also important for trainee learning and professional identity formation. The in-consultation supervisory encounter in general practice training is, however, a complex social space with multiple trainee, supervisor and patient agendas. Trainee requests for assistance during their consultations are known to present general practitioner supervisors with a number of challenges. From the trainee’s perspective, a safe learning environment is essential during these supervisory interactions. A number of factors may act as barriers to, or reduce the usefulness of, in-consultation assistance in particular, resulting in trainees being less likely to seek such assistance on future occasions. It is therefore important to improve both trainee and supervisor skills in safe, effective and efficient in-consultation supervision. Making time for trainee and supervisor conversations about their help-seeking and help provision may uncover opportunities for improving skills, aligning agendas and enhancing outcomes. Finding time for debriefing, reflection and effective feedback conversations may be challenging, however, and opportunities for trainees to provide feedback to their supervisors are known to be particularly limited. We introduce a Debriefing, Reflection and Feedback Guide which is designed to prompt reflection, and structure effective and efficient debriefing and reciprocal feedback conversations. We outline the evidence which informed the development of the Guides, and present some preliminary findings from a pilot in Australian general practice training.

Coaching Quality and Subordinate Work Attitudes in the Multiple Supervisor Audit Context

SYNOPSISAudit subordinates typically work with multiple supervisors who are likely to vary in their level of coaching quality (CQ). While prior research suggests a low CQ supervisor could negatively affect a subordinate's work attitudes, theory indicates that the presence of other positive coaching experiences may buffer against the negative influence of a low CQ supervisor. We investigate by asking participants to provide information on their coaching experiences with three supervisors. We then examine how perceptions of supervisors' CQ interact to affect subordinates' work attitudes. We find that the effect of a perceived low CQ supervisor on organizational commitment and turnover intention is mitigated when the CQ of another supervisor is high or when a relatively high CQ supervisor is also a mentor. Investigating factors that inhibit CQ, we find that supervisors' lack of capability explains variation in lower CQ supervisors, whereas lack of presence explains variation for higher CQ supervisors.Data Availability: Contact the authors.JEL Classifications: L2; M40; M42; M51; M53.

Reciprocity in Multiple Principals - Agent Interactions: Experimental Evidence

Agents frequently interact with multiple principals at the same time. An employee may have multiple supervisors, firms may engage in public-private partnerships or firms and individuals may borrow from multiple banks/peers. Digitalization further fuels the possibilities to simultaneously engage in economic transactions with multiple others around the globe (e.g., FinTechs offering financial advice or brokerage). This paper provides experimental evidence on reciprocity in interactions between multiple principals and one agent. In the experiments, one agent interacted with either one or multiple principals and needed to decide whether or not to reciprocate trust. An increase in the number of principals who trusted significantly undermined reciprocity. Principals, however, did not anticipate the decrease in reciprocity. Compared with bilateral principal - agent interactions, trust increased if principals had the possibility to pool risk. Observational field data from 113,000 loans funded by a varying number of investors on a crowdlending platform provides suggestive empirical evidence supporting the experimental results on reciprocity. The propensity of loan default is associated with the number of investors providing the credit. Situations in which multiple principals interact with a single agent may be considerably more risky compared to bilateral interactions. These findings have important implications for understanding, designing and structuring interactions in which multiple principals are involved.

A genealogical approach to academic success.

We analyse academic success using a genealogical approach to the careers of over 95,000 scientists in mathematics and associated fields in physics and chemistry. We look at the effect of Ph.D. supervisors (one’s mentors) on the number of Ph.D. students that one supervises later on (one’s mentees) as a measure of academic success. Supervisors generally provide important inputs in Ph.D. projects, which can have long-lasting effects on academic careers. Moreover, having multiple supervisors exposes one to a diversity of inputs. We show that Ph.D. students benefit from having multiple supervisors instead of a single one. The cognitive diversity of mentors has a subtler effect in that it increases both the likelihood of success (having many mentees later on) and failure (having no mentees at all later on). We understand the effect of diverse mentorship as a high-risk, high-gain strategy: the recombination of unrelated expertise often fails, but sometimes leads to true novelty.

Secure Recovery Procedure for Manufacturing Systems Using Synchronizing Automata and Supervisory Control Theory

Manufacturing systems may be subject to external attacks and failures, so it is important to deal with the recovery of the system after these situations. This paper deals with the problem of recovering a manufacturing system, modeled as a Discrete Event System (DES) using the Supervisory Control Theory (SCT), when the control structure, called supervisor, desynchronizes from the physical plant. The desynchronization may be seen as plant and supervisor being in uncorresponding states. The recovery of the system may be attained if there is a word, the synchronizing word, that regardless the state of each one of them, brings the system and supervisor back to a known state. The concepts of synchronizing automata are used to do so. In this paper we show under what conditions a set of synchronizing plants and specifications leads to a synchronizing supervisor obtained by the Supervisory Control Theory. The problem is extended to cope with multiple supervisors, proposing a local recovery when possible. We also present a simple way to model problems, composed of machines and buffers, as synchronizing automata such that it is always possible do restore synchronization between the control (supervisor) and the plant.

Novel Quantum Voting Protocol with Eight-Qubit Cluster Entangled State

Based on an eight-qubit cluster entangled state, a novel quantum voting protocol is put forward, where the voting message of any eligible voter Bob can be transferred to the teller David with the help of multiple supervisors Alicej(j = 3, 4, ∗). The anonymous authentication between voters and the vote management center (VMC) provides the anonymity of Bob’s identity and voting contents. The supervision in the whole voting process can avoid the teller David’s dishonest behaviour. The quantum one-time pad encryption and quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols are adopted to guarantee the unconditional security of our proposed voting protocol. Additionally, the teller Bob can successfully recover the voting message with probability 1 and our protocol only depends on Bell measurement and single particle measurement, which makes our quantum voting protocol more practical and easy to implement with currently available technology.

Bank globalization and efficiency: Host- and home-country effects

Analyzing 126 countries for 1995–2013, we investigate the link between bank globalization and efficiency from the perspective of both host and home countries. We find strong and consistent evidence that foreign bank entry is associated with lower efficiency in host countries (host-country effect), while foreign expansion in the banking sector improves the efficiency of banks at home (home-country effect). We further observe that the effect of bank globalization is dependent on the regulatory and institutional regimes of the respective host (home) countries. Specifically, stringent activity restrictions, tight supervision, fewer limitations on foreign banks, lower market entry barriers, and less government interference all help mitigate the efficiency loss from foreign bank entry. Less supervision power, multiple supervisors, more restrictions on foreign banks, and a competitive banking market are all conducive to the higher efficiency gain of incumbent domestic banks from the respective country’s outward investments in the banking sector. Moreover, we find that the adverse impact on efficiency from foreign bank presence is less pronounced for less risky, more profitable, and larger banks, while banks that are more efficient, more profitable, taking on more risk, and/or smaller gain more efficiency from their country’s foreign expansion.