Work Group Size Research Articles

How are organisational conditions related to illegitimate tasks among managers and their subordinates in the public sector? A Swedish study

ABSTRACT Illegitimate tasks violate the norms of what is considered part of the employee’s work role and have been found to harm individuals, groups and organisations. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between key organisational conditions – span of control, recruitment needs, administrative support and organisational changes – and the prevalence of unnecessary and unreasonable illegitimate tasks experienced by managers and their subordinates. Data were collected from a sample comprising 80 managers and 863 subordinates in a Swedish municipality using questionnaires to assess their perceptions of illegitimate tasks. Organisational conditions were collected from the human resources register in the municipality. Multilevel analysis results reveal a positive association between the size of workgroups and illegitimate tasks; the more subordinates per workgroup, the more unnecessary and unreasonable tasks managers reported and the more unreasonable tasks the subordinates reported. These findings hold practical implications for organisations because they indicate that illegitimate tasks can be reduced by decreasing the number of employees in larger workgroups.

The More the Merrier: How Psychological Standing and Work Group Size Explain Managers’ Willingness to Communicate About Unethical Conduct in Their Work Group

Business ethics research has long examined the dichotomy between remaining silent or reporting ethical misconduct to a third party. Little is known, however, about ethical conversations within a work group after observing misconduct. Specifically, we do not know how many members of their work group individuals choose to communicate with. These conversations could have important implications for creating an ethical workplace. We propose that psychological standing is an important driver of individuals’ decisions not to remain silent and to instead raise moral concerns with a greater number of others in their work group. In addition, integrating existing work on structural power, psychological standing, and the bystander effect, we develop a moderated mediation model with both structural power position and work group size as contextual drivers of psychological standing. Our model is supported across four studies using different designs and methodological approaches. Our results contribute to the understanding of when and why individuals raise moral concerns, and they provide insights into how an ethical context is created in organizations.

Investigating associations between nematode infection and three measures of sociality in Asian elephants

Frequent social interactions, proximity to conspecifics, and group density are main drivers of infections and parasite transmissions. However, recent theoretical and empirical studies suggest that the health benefits of sociality and group living can outweigh the costs of infection and help social individuals fight infections or increase their infection-related tolerance level. Here, we combine the advantage of studying artificially created social work groups with different demographic compositions with free-range feeding and social behaviours in semi-captive Asian elephants (Elephas maximus), employed in timber logging in Myanmar. We examine the link between gastro-intestinal nematode load (strongyles and Strongyloides spp.), estimated by faecal egg counts, and three different aspects of an elephant’s social world: individual solitary behaviour, work group size, and work group sex ratio. Controlling for sex, age, origin, time since last deworming treatment, year, human sampler bias, and individual identity, we found that infection by nematodes ranged from 0 to 2720 eggs/g between and within 26 male and 45 female elephants over the 4-year study period. However, such variation was not linked to any investigated measures of sociality in either males or females. Our findings highlight the need for finer-scale studies, establishing how sociality is limited by, mitigates, or protects against infection in different ecological contexts, to fully understand the mechanisms underlying these pathways.Significance statementBeing social involves not only benefits, such as improved health, but also costs, including increased risk of parasitism and infectious disease. We studied the relationship between and three different sociality measures—solitary behaviour, group size, and the proportion of females to males within a group—and infection by gut nematodes (roundworms), using a unique study system of semi-captive working Asian elephants. Our system allows for observing how infection is linked to sociality measures across different social frameworks. We found that none of our social measures was associated with nematode infection in the studied elephants. Our results therefore suggest that here infection is not a large cost to group living, that it can be alleviated by the benefits of increased sociality, or that there are weak infection–sociality associations present which could not be captured and thus require finer-scale measures than those studied here. Overall, more studies are needed from a diverse range of systems that investigate specific aspects of social infection dynamics.

Sex-specific links between the social landscape and faecal glucocorticoid metabolites in semi-captive Asian elephants

Although social behaviour is common in group-living mammals, our understanding of its mechanisms in long-lived animals is largely based on studies in human and non-human primates. There are health and fitness benefits associated with strong social ties, including increased life span, reproductive success, and lower disease risk, which are attributed to the proximate effects of lowered circulating glucocorticoid hormones. However, to deepen our understanding of health-social dynamics, we must explore species beyond the primate order. Here, using Asian elephants as a model species, we combine social data generated from semi-captive timber elephants in Myanmar with measurements of faecal glucocorticoid metabolite (FGM) concentrations. These data enable a “natural experiment” because individuals live in work groups with different demographic compositions. We examine sex-specific FGM concentrations for four different aspects of an individuals’ social world: general sociality, work group size, sex ratio and the presence of immatures (<5 years) within the work group. Males experienced lower FGM concentrations when engaged in more social behaviours and residing in female-biased work groups. Surprisingly, females only exhibited lower FGM concentrations when residing with calves. Together, our findings highlight the importance of sociality on individual physiological function among elephants, which may have broad implications for the benefits of social interactions among mammals.

A Post-occupancy Evaluation of Occupant Satisfaction in Green and Conventional Higher Educational Buildings

Post-occupancy evaluation (POE) is a method for measuring building performance in terms of meeting design intent, and identifying any gaps between actual and modelled performances in the of aspects indoor environmental quality (IEQ), occupant satisfaction, energy consumption, etc. In this paper, a structured POE assessment was conducted using the Building Use Survey (BUS) methodology in two higher educational buildings in the United Kingdom. This study aims to help close the building performance gap, optimize building operation systems, and improve occupants’ satisfaction levels. In this research, the questionnaire survey investigated the influences of environmental factors on user satisfaction from the main aspects of building overall design, thermal comfort, perceived control, indoor environment quality for noise, lighting, ventilation, and other non-environmental factors, such as the background information about age, gender, time in buildings, workgroup size, and so on. The results indicate that the occupant satisfaction with the main aspects of building overall design, indoor environment quality, and thermal comfort in summer and winter in both buildings is lower than the benchmark data. The feedback of this POE assessment has been reported to the building management team to allow managers to develop high-performance building operation guidelines to narrow down the performance gap and improve user satisfaction, comfort, and productivity.

Optimizing Ultra High-resolution Video Processing on Mobile Architecture with Massively Parallel Processing

This paper introduces an optimized video frame pre-processing scheme for UHD video with up to 8K resolution using OpenCL for mobile architectures, particularly for convolution. The introduced scheme can fully utilize the maximum computational resources of the mobile architecture, with an adaptive work-group size adjustment. As a prototype, a simple video player with a Sobel kernel was implemented as an example of a convolution kernel. The prototype implementation showed a better video frame processing time than the de-facto image-processing library, OpenCV. On the other hand, the decoding time of the video increased because the OpenCL kernel utilizes GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) resources to almost its maximum. In the future, the processing workload will be distributed between the CPU (Central Processing Unit) and GPU to achieve higher performance.

Office Distractions and the Productivity of Building Users: The Effect of Workgroup Sizes and Demographic Characteristics

Knowledge workers are experiencing ever-increasing distractions or unwanted interruptions at workplaces. We explored the effect of unwanted interruptions on an individual’s perceived productivity in various building types, user groups and workgroups. A case study of 68 buildings and their 5149 occupants using the Building Use Studies methodology was employed in this study. The database contains information on the occupants’ perceptions of physical and environmental parameters, including unmined data on the frequency of unwanted interruptions. Pearson’s correlation was used to test the correlation between the variables. In order to determine whether there are any statistically significant differences between the means of two or more independent (unrelated) groups, one-way ANOVA was employed to examine the significance of differences in mean scores between various user groups and workgroups. The evidence of clear correlations between the frequency of unwanted interruptions and perceived productivity is detailed in various user groups and in multiple building types. The Pearson correlation coefficients were −0.361 and −0.348 for sustainable and conventional buildings, respectively, demonstrating a lower sensitivity to unwanted interruptions in sustainable buildings. Females and older participants were more sensitive to unwanted interruptions and their productivity levels were reduced much more by unwanted interruptions. Comparing different sized workgroups, the highest sensitivity to unwanted interruptions for occupants in offices shared with more than 8 people was found. The findings of this study contribute to the understanding of different user needs and preferences in the design of workplaces.

Efficient Performance Estimation and Work-Group Size Pruning for OpenCL Kernels on GPUs

Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) play a vital role in state-of-the-art high-performance scientific computing realm and research work towards its performance analysis is crucial but nontrivial. Extant GPU performance models are far from practical use, while fine-grained GPU simulation requires a considerably large time cost. Moreover, massive amounts of designs with various program inputs and parameter settings pose a challenge for efficient performance estimation and tuning of parallel GPU applications. To this end, this article presents a hybrid framework for the efficient performance estimation and work-group size pruning of OpenCL workloads on GPUs. The framework contains a static module used to extract the kernel execution trace from the high-level source code and a dynamical module used to mimic the kernel execution flow to estimate the runtime performance. For the design space pruning, an extra analysis is performed to filter out the redundant work-group sizes with duplicated execution traces and inferior pipelines. The proposed framework does not require any program runs to estimate the performance and find the optimal or near-optimal designs. Experiments on four Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Nvidia GPUs show that the framework can predict the runtime performance with an average error of 17.04 percent and reduce the program design space by an average of 78.47 percent.

The influence of work group size and space sharing on the perceived productivity, overall comfort and health of occupants in commercial and academic buildings

The influence of work groups (the number of occupants sharing an office) on occupant satisfaction with workplace environments was compared between commercial buildings and academic buildings. Using the Building Use Studies (BUS) methodology, a sample of 5000 surveys was collected over a 12-year period from 67 buildings around the world. In both academic and commercial buildings, solo offices (single occupant) obtained the best scores regarding productivity, overall comfort and health. Academics most disliked middle-sized open-plan offices (shared by 6 to 9 occupants), while in commercial buildings, office occupants most disliked large open-plan offices (shared by over 9 occupants). Occupants had higher productivity and perceived health in commercial buildings than those in academic buildings in all work groups. Productivity decreased as the number of occupants in the office increased in both academic and commercial buildings for all work groups except for middle-sized open-plan offices. Age had a significant influence on occupant perception in different work groups, when comparing commercial and academic buildings. Trivial differences regarding the effect of gender on occupant perception in commercial and academic buildings were also identified. The findings of this study points to the significance of office sharing in influencing high-performance working environments, especially in relation to open-plan layouts.

Efficient and Portable Workgroup Size Tuning

The performance of an OpenCL program is strongly influenced by both hardware and software attributes. To achieve superior performance, developers may leverage automatic performance tuning techniques to determine the optimal parameters on the target device. Although existing approaches have shown promising tuning results in their target scenarios, other requirements such as efficiency, portability, and usability should also be considered because of the rapid growth of heterogeneous computing applications and platforms. In this paper, we re-examine the workgroup size tuning problem and propose a novel approach to meet the aforementioned requirements. We abstract the architectural details into a set of hardware parameters so that the proposed approach can be applied without the presence of target devices, which makes it more accessible to developers. The proposed approach is evaluated on 20 OpenCL kernels and six devices, including both CPUs and GPUs. Experimental results demonstrate that, with negligible overhead, our approach filters out 88.6 percent of the possible workgroup sizes on average. Among all the workgroup size candidates, the best- and worst-performing candidates can achieve average performance of 95.5 and 92.1 percent, respectively, compared with the optimal workgroup size.

Group size and composition of work groups as precursors of intragroup conflicts.

PurposeThis study explores the connections between formal quantitative group characteristics (such as group size, group composition by gender, age, and duration of group membership of individual workers, their average age, and duration of membership) with three levels of conflict (ie, interpersonal, individual–group, and individual–subgroup) of two types (ie, activity-oriented and subject-oriented).MethodForty-one work groups – small-size enterprises and basic-level teams and units in medium-size companies and large corporations, with the total sample of 334 individual workers – took part in the study. The study employed the questionnaire of interpersonal conflicts in a group and the questionnaire of individual–group and micro-group conflicts as assessment tools. Subsequent regression analyses explored the relationships between group size and composition on one hand and types and levels of conflict on the other.ResultsThe study established that group size is negatively associated with the individual–subgroup subject-oriented conflict. Also, group size moderates the connections between several formal group characteristics and conflict types and levels. These connections are detected in large-size groups but are nearly nonexistent in small-size groups. Group diversity by gender is negatively associated with the individual–group activity-oriented conflict (across all participating groups) and with the interpersonal and individual–group subject-oriented conflicts (in large-size groups only). Group composition by duration of group membership is negatively associated with the individual–subgroup subject-oriented conflict (across groups), participants’ average age and duration of group membership – with both types of the individual–subgroup conflict. Out of all group characteristics under consideration, only group composition by age was not associated with either of the conflict parameters.DiscussionThe paper makes a special point out of the fact that group characteristics served as much stronger predictors for conflict parameters in large-size groups than either in small-size groups or in the entire sample, indicating that the increase in group size strengthens the influence of group characteristics on conflict parameters.ConclusionThe research findings indicate that it is important, when studying connections between group composition and conflicts within the group, to take group size and its influence on types and levels of the intragroup conflict into account.

An Auto-Tuner for OpenCL Work-Group Size on GPUs

Tuning the kernel work-group size for GPUs is a challenging problem. In this paper, using the performance counters provided by GPUs, we characterize a large body of OpenCL kernels to identify the performance factors that affect the choice of a good work-group size. Based on the characterization, we realize that the most influential performance factors with regard to the work-group size include occupancy, coalesced global memory accesses, cache contention, and variation in the amount of workload in the kernel. By tackling the performance factors one by one, we propose auto-tuning techniques that selects the best work-group size and shape for GPU kernels. We show the effectiveness of our auto-tuner by evaluating it with a set of 54 OpenCL kernels on three different NVIDIA GPUs and one AMD GPU. On average, the auto-tuner needs to spend no more than 8 percent of the time required by an exhaustive search to find an optimal work-group size. The execution time of the selected sub-optimal work-group size is at most 1.14x slower than that of the optimal work-group size found by the exhaustive search, on average.

Comfort signatures: How long-term studies of occupant satisfaction in office buildings reveal on-going performance

Occupant surveys reveal how people in buildings perceive their internal environments. The Soft Landings extended handover process, which requires project teams to focus more on operational outcomes, has led to the use of occupant surveys during a three year Soft Landings aftercare period to provide a means of checking whether the desired outcomes have been met. However, little is known of the longitudinal perceptions of occupant satisfaction in buildings, and the relationships between those perceptions and the many environmental, seasonal and functional comfort variables that act upon occupant satisfaction. This paper reports the results of time-series surveys on two office buildings. Occupant satisfaction scores have been compared with the technical, organisational and functional contexts in the work environments, such as density, workgroup sizes, and cellular and open-plan layouts, to determine whether changes in these parameters have significantly altered levels of perceived occupant comfort and productivity. The research found stability in some contexts but statistical declines in others. Conclusions are made regarding the key operational factors that may contribute to changes in occupant satisfaction over time. Factors that might constitute limits to office carrying capacity are discussed. Practical application: The growing use of the Soft Landings approach to building procurement and handover, with greater emphasis on designing for improved operational outcomes, is creating a demand to understand more about occupant needs and expectations. The central government equivalent – Government Soft Landings – is similarly placing a requirement on public sector construction projects to deliver buildings with improved environmental and functional outcomes. Delivering these expectations requires construction professionals to develop skills in building performance evaluation, particularly in understanding the primary drivers that lead to high occupant perceptions of comfort, health, productivity and wellbeing. This research provides real-world evidence to clients and their design advisors on the key factors for ensuring long-term occupant satisfaction, while for building management professionals the research identifies some organisational risk factors that may lead to a fall in satisfaction during long-term operation.

Antecedents of a sport volunteer's sense of community

The decision to volunteer is influenced by expectations of positive emotions. Positive relationships underpin a sense of community. This study identifies antecedents to a sport events volunteer's sense of community. Previous research indicates that sense of community increases after the event, and that sense of community enhances volunteer's satisfaction and commitment. However, previous literature has not confidently identified the factors likely to lead to a sense of community within sport-event volunteers. A literature review identified six potential antecedents to sense of community: role clarity, goal clarity, length of volunteer's tenure, a leader's individualised consideration, workgroup size and sport involvement. Participants were recruited from the World Rowing Championships and the IPC Athletics World Championships. Structural equation modelling indicated that role and goal clarity were not distinct variables. The key finding is that clarity and individualised consideration both positively impact sense of community. Length of volunteer's tenure and workgroup size do not impact a volunteer's sense of community.

An Autotuning Engine for the 3D Fast Wavelet Transform on Clusters with Hybrid CPU + GPU Platforms

This work presents an optimization method to run the 3D-fast wavelet transform (3D-FWT) on a CPU + GPU system. The optimization engine detects the different computing components in the system, and executes the appropriate kernel implemented in both CUDA or OpenCL for GPUs, and programmed with pthreads for a CPU. This engine automatically selects parameters such as the block size, the work-group size or the number of threads to reduce the execution time, and sends proportionally different parts of a video sequence to run concurrently in all the computing components of the system. An analysis of the development and optimization of the 3D-FWT for a hybrid cluster of CPU + GPUs is also described. Different parallel programming paradigms (message passing, shared memory and GPU SIMD) are combined to fully exploit the computing capacity of the different computational elements of the cluster, so resulting in an efficient combination of basic codes developed previously for individual components (CPUs or GPUs) and an important reduction of the compression time of long video sequences.

Algorithmic GPGPU Memory Optimization

The performance of General-Purpose computation on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU) is heavily dependent on the memory access behavior. This sensitivity is due to a combination of the underlying Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) execution model present on GPUs and the lack of architectural support to handle irregular memory access patterns. Application performance can be significantly improved by applying memory-access-pattern-aware optimizations that can exploit knowledge of the characteristics of each access pattern. In this paper, we present an algorithmic methodology to semi-automatically find the best mapping of memory accesses present in serial loop nest to underlying data-parallel architectures based on a comprehensive static memory access pattern analysis. To that end we present a simple, yet powerful, mathematical model that captures all memory access pattern information present in serial data-parallel loop nests. We then show how this model is used in practice to select the most appropriate memory space for data and to search for an appropriate thread mapping and work group size from a large design space. To evaluate the effectiveness of our methodology, we report on execution speedup using selected benchmark kernels that cover a wide range of memory access patterns commonly found in GPGPU workloads. Our experimental results are reported using the industry standard heterogeneous programming language, OpenCL, targeting the NVIDIA GT200 architecture.

Accelerating Image Pyramid on GPUs

Image pyramid is an important and essential step in many digital image processing applications. In this paper, we demonstrate that modern GPUs can significantly accelerate image pyramid task by using texture memory and well configuring work group dimension and size. Our two pass method behaves faster when compared with OpenCV's image pyramid GPU implementation. Fast image pyramid on GPUs expects to enable real-time image processing.

Ephemeral work group formation of Jenu Kuruba honey collectors and late 19th Century Colorado silver prospectors

Humans frequently form short-lived cooperative groups to accomplish subsistence and economic tasks. We explore the ecological and cultural factors behind ephemeral work-group formation in two disparate cultural contexts: groups foraging for wild honey in present day South India and groups prospecting for silver ore in the Elk Mountain Mining District of Colorado in the late 19th century. Contrary to traditional economic foraging predictions, we find little evidence that per capita yields are the most important factor in determining size and composition of ephemeral work groups. We explore factors in each of these cultures that may be of importance for group formation such as kinship, reputation, and pleasure. Models that only incorporate economic parameters will make poor predictions of how humans interact with their environments.

Optimization Techniques for 3D-FWT on Systems with Manycore GPUs and Multicore CPUs

Programming manycore GPUs or multicore CPUs for high performance requires a careful balance of several hardware specific related factors, which is typically achieved by expert users through trial and error. To reduce the amount of hand-made optimization time required to achieve optimal performance, general guidelines can be followed or different metrics can be considered to predict performance, but ultimately a trial and error process is still prevalent. In this paper, we present an optimization method to run the 3D-Fast Wavelet Transform (3D-FWT) on hybrid systems. The optimization engine detects the different platforms found on a system, executing the appropriate kernel, implemented in both CUDA or OpenCL for GPUs, and programmed with pthreads for a CPU. Moreover, the proposed method selects automatically parameters such as the block size, the work-group size or the number of threads for reducing the execution time, obtaining the optimal performance in many cases. Finally, the optimization engine sends proportionally different parts of a video sequence to run concurrently in all platforms of the system. Speedups with respect to a normal user, who sends all frames to a GPU with a version of the 3D-FWT implemented in CUDA or OpenCL, presents an averaged gains of up to 7.93.

Nonresponse in Employee Attitude Surveys: A Group-Level Analysis

Given the common practice of using employee attitude surveys as a group-level intervention, this study used a group-level approach to examine the relationship between group satisfaction and group nonresponse. Samples from four large organizations enabled job satisfaction scores to be aggregated to the work group level and correlated with group-level response rates. Additional regression analysis was conducted to control for a number of confounding variables at the group level. Aggregate job satisfaction showed significant associations with group-level response rates across each of the samples examined. Work groups with higher aggregate job satisfaction had significantly higher response rates. Regression analyses showed that, in addition to job satisfaction, work group size, heterogeneity in tenure, and heterogeneity in gender composition all had significant effects on response rates. Social influence processes may operate at the group level to increase homogeneity of job-relevant attitudes and similarity in survey response behavior. Future research should be designed to investigate the effects of group-level variables on nonresponse. The current study adds to the literature by demonstrating that work group variables may play an important role in explaining nonresponse in employee attitude surveys. Because the processes underlying survey response are likely to be different at different levels of analysis, the investigation of nonresponse as a group-level phenomenon creates new opportunities for research and practice.