Can a team have too much cohesion? The dark side to network density

The goal of most work teams is high performance. Prior studies suggest that performance within work groups is influenced by that group’s social network topology. Research has generally revealed to date that group cohesion (i.e., network density) is positively related to team performance under certain conditions. However, more recent research has indicated that this is not the full story. Recent research suggests that an inverse curvilinear relationship exists between social network measures (of which group cohesion is one) and team performance. In response to the need for understanding this relationship more fully, and leveraging the promising new insights that can be garnered with the use of social network analysis (SNA), this study employs SNA as a tool to explore the structural cohesiveness of teams of travel agents. This research extends our understanding of the relationship between intragroup social network relations and team performance by confirming an inverse curvilinear relationship exists between group cohesion and team performance. This paper leverages email communication to determine the social networks of each team, and then examines such in light of team performance. In total, an analysis of more than 7 million emails was undertaken. This study was conducted with work teams within a service organization. Each team in the study carries out the same tasks, i.e., identical task contingency, yet represents a distinct unit of analysis. The study confirms that social network topology is a valuable predictor of team performance and confirms that, like so many other social network measures, group cohesion and team performance share an inverse ‘U’ shaped relationship, not strictly a positive one as previously posited.     

Social media? It's serious! Understanding the dark side of social media

Research and practice have mostly focused on the “bright side” of social media, aiming to understand and help in leveraging the manifold opportunities afforded by this technology. However, it is increasingly observable that social media present enormous risks for individuals, communities, firms, and even for society as a whole. Examples for this “dark side” of social media include cyberbullying, addictive use, trolling, online witch hunts, fake news, and privacy abuse. In this article, we aim to illustrate the multidimensionality of the dark side of social media and describe the related various undesirable outcomes. To do this, we adapt the established social media honeycomb framework to explain the dark side implications of each of the seven functional building blocks: conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, groups, and identity. On the basis of these reflections, we present a number of avenues for future research, so as to facilitate a better understanding and use of social media.     

Lessons from the flipside: How do acquirers learn from divestitures to complete acquisitions?

We examine whether experience from prior divestitures is associated with higher completion likelihood in subsequent acquisitions. We argue that through divestitures, firms could extract meaningful knowledge that is helpful for completing their acquisitions, such as a general understanding of acquisition deal-making stages, and the stories and aims of the target in an M&A transaction. In addition, viewing divestitures as the flipside of acquisitions, we conjecture that the selling firm can observe how the divested component of their business is acquired, and vicariously learn from these observations. We also investigate the relative importance of learning from divestiture vis-à-vis acquisition experience in determining acquisition deal completion. Finally, we contend that the effect of learning from divestitures on acquisition deal completion depends on acquisition experience and deal value. We find evidence supporting our conjectures in a sample of 2164 M&A transactions from the worldwide computer and printing industries between 1991 and 2010.     

Can the patient be the focus of managed care?

If the question were simply put: "What is it that succeeds or fails to meet patients' needs in managed care?" Dr. John M Ludden would have a short answer. "It depends. Success depends on whether you are talking about individuals or about populations of patients. And it depends on whether you are talking about meeting patients' needs or their desires. It depends on whether you're talking about well patients or sick patients, young patients or older patients, new patients or established patients, rich patients or poor patients. And it depends on your ability to balance each of these qualities." This article explores how to translate high-quality care for a population to high-quality care for individuals.     

Does the Stock Market Gender Stereotype Corporate Boards? Evidence from the Market's Reaction to Directors' Trades

Attitudes towards male and female managers within organizations are well documented, but how the stock market perceives their relative capabilities is less studied. Recent evidence documents a negative short‐run market reaction to the appointment of female chief executive officers and suggests that female executives are less informed than their male counterparts about future corporate performance. These results appear to dispute the stock market value of having women on corporate boards. However, such short‐run market reactions may retain a ‘gender bias’, reflecting the prevalence of negative stereotypes, where the market reacts to ‘beliefs’ rather than ‘performance’. This study tests for such bias by examining the stock market reaction to directors' trades in their own companies' shares, by measuring both the short‐run and longer‐term returns after the directors' trades. Allowing for firm and trade effects, some evidence is found that, in the longer term, markets recognize that female executives' trades are informative about future corporate performance, although initially markets underestimate these effects. This has important implications for research that has attempted to assess the value of board diversity by examining only short‐run stock market responses.     

Health care technology--information technology/Part 4. Why will the Internet be important to clinicians?

As the popularity of the Internet's World Wide Web exploded in 1994 and 1995, corporations began adopting the browser software called Mosaic (and its derivatives) for their networks. Why? That same software can be used to "surf" the Internet. Since Intranets are easier to maintain and less expensive, they are replacing the more expensive "groupware" applications based on client-server architectures that corporations installed over the past five years. These Intranets are based on widely-available technologies designed for the Internet, not proprietary software designed for a relatively few customers. Organizations with communication networks integrated with their transaction systems and electronic medical records will be more effective in managing health care resources--and more attractive to employers and insurers for managed care contracting.     

Looming threats to the intimate bond in hospice care? Economic and organizational pressures in the case study of a hospice

Hospice organizations are assailed by stiff competition, ever-rising costs, limited funding, and policy changes. Do such pressures stifle the high quality of care these organizations strive to provide? As a case-in-point, we draw from the mid-1990s accounts of caregivers at a nonprofit hospice in a Midwestern city in the United States. We maintain that economic pressures drive organizational restructuring, which then weakens working conditions and, thereby, weakens the staff-client relationship. We discuss effects upon worker behaviors, the worker-client relationship, and client care. This ethnographic case study signals the need to closely examine the threats that current economic and organizational pressures in the United States may pose to the quality of hospice care.     

Biotechnology: will it break the health care bank?

Pharmaceuticals traditionally have been viewed as a cost-effective component in medicine's technological armamentarium. The use of pharmaceuticals has been estimated to account for 6-8 percent of the nation's total expenditures on health care. The first wave of pharmaceuticals/biologicals that has been produced by the biotechnology industry has offered therapies that can provide much benefit to patients, but it has also raised concern about the cost of these new recombinant drugs. In addition to pricing, methods of promotion and modifications in the FDA approval process have raised concerns.     

Research on Women Entrepreneurs: Challenges to (and from) the Broader Entrepreneurship Literature?

This paper has three overarching objectives. The first is to document the development of the body of work known as women's entrepreneurship research. The second is to assess the contributions of this work, specifically vis-à-vis the broader entrepreneurship literature. The third is to discuss how this broader literature poses challenges (both difficulties as well as opportunities) for scholarship on female entrepreneurs. We approach these objectives from the standpoint of informed pluralism, seeking to explore whether and how women's entrepreneurship research offers extensions to—and can be extended by—general research on entrepreneurs and their ventures.     

Is the American health care delivery system ready for change?

In October 1992, the American College of Physician Executives sponsored a study tour to Berlin, Germany, and Amsterdam, Holland. Meetings were held with government officials, third-party payers, and providers, and on-site visits were made at hospitals, clinics, and academic centers. The purpose was to study the health care delivery system in those countries and to share some insights with the countries' hosts on the U.S. system. In a series of reports that began in the July issue of the journal, 5 of the 10 study tour participants describe their impressions of the tour and of the health care systems in the countries that were visited. In this final report, the implications of the German and Dutch systems for reform of the U.S. health care system are discussed.     

Is tolerance to shiftwork predictable from individual difference measures?

Abstract

This study was aimed at evaluating the most important relations between individual characteristics of shiftworkers and their subjective health complaints, obtained by cross-sectional and longitudinal procedures. A total of 604 shiftworkers and 185 young subjects who were going to enter shiftwork were examined by means of individual difference and subjective health questionnaires. The questionnaires were administered concurrently to the group of workers already involved in shiftwork. In the other group studied, the questionnaires were administered before they entered shiftwork, and subjective health was re-examined after the first and third year of work on shifts. More health complaints were reported by the group of older workers and those with longer shiftwork experience, with higher scores of neuroticism, hard-driving and competitiveness, speed and impatience, and rigidity of sleeping habits, and lower scores on relaxedness, efficiency and vigorousness. However, the correlations between these dimensions, when taken before entering shiftwork, and subjective health complaints obtained after a few years working on shifts were small or absent, indicating low validity of the individual difference measures for predicting subsequent health problems in shiftworkers.     

Are Nuclear-Weapon States not Parties to the Non-proliferation Treaty Ready to Renounce to the Possession of Nuclear Weapons?

The situation of nuclear-weapon states not parties to the NPT is different from the situation of the nuclear-weapon states parties to that treaty. This last group of countries has signed and ratified a treaty that encourage them to begin negotiations in good faith for the discussion of concrete measures that lead them to nuclear disarmament, while the first group of states have made no commitment to do that. In other words, nuclear-weapon states not parties to the NPT have made no commitment to nuclear disarmament and are not obliged to report anything related to the possession of nuclear weapons to the any specific body or organ or to the international community. Taking into account the position of nuclear-weapon states parties to the NPT regarding the possession of nuclear weapons, there is no possibility to convince nuclear-weapon states not parties to this treaty to renounce to the possession of this type of weapons under the present circumstances.     

Managed care matures. What's behind the wave of anti-HMO legislation?

At first glance, it may appear as if managed care itself may be doomed. The avalanche of bills, measures, initiatives, Federal regulations, etc., seemed overwhelming in late 1996. Did this, in fact, portend a national shift away from managed care? What does the consumer protection and regulatory activity really mean? What directions for the future can be identified? This article seeks to answer those questions and highlights a case study of "reform gone awry" that may hold lessons for the national scene. The anti-HMO legislation activity does not represent a repudiation of managed care. Rather, it may be seen as a maturing of the entire process of redefining our medical delivery and financing system.     

Are We Adapting to Floods? Evidence from Global Flooding Fatalities

There has been a growing interest in understanding whether and how people adapt to extreme weather events in a changing climate. This article presents one of the first empirical analyses of adaptation to flooding on a global scale. Using a sample of 97 countries between 1985 and 2010, we investigate the extent and pattern of flood adaptation by estimating the effects of a country's climatological risk, recent flood experiences, and socioeconomic characteristics on its flood‐related fatalities. Our results provide mixed evidence on adaptation: countries facing greater long‐term climatological flooding risks do not necessarily adapt better and suffer fewer fatalities; however, after controlling for the cross‐country heterogeneity, we find that more recent flooding shocks have a significant and negative effect on fatalities from subsequent floods. These findings may suggest the short‐term learning dynamics of adaptation and potential inefficacy of earlier flood control measures, particularly those that promote increased exposure in floodplains. Our findings provide important implications for climate adaptation policy making and climate modeling.     

What can we learn from the history of technology?

This article focuses on exploring what technology scholars and students of management of technology stand to benefit most by foraging through the history of technology. In order to show how historical sensitivity could sharpen scholarship, three strategies for complicating the simple are drawn from the historian's toolkit. Implications for research in technology and innovation management are discussed.     

Why is the Return to Training So High?

Abstract. Cross‐sectional results show that training increases wages by 5 per cent. This return is on a par with the return to 1 year of education. Considering that the average duration of training is very short, this result is strange and needs further examination. After leaving out the importance of measurement error, we control for accumulated stock of firm‐specific skills, unobserved heterogeneity in wage levels, heterogeneity in training returns, and heterogeneity in wage growth. By this we manage to reduce the return considerably. Unobserved heterogeneity in wage levels is the most important contributor to the ‘too high’ returns to training.