Wage Expectations for Higher Education Students in Spain

We assess students' ability to forecast future earnings by using data on expected wages self‐reported by college students with different graduation horizons. We find a significant gender gap, by which wage expectations are systematically lower for women than for men. However, women do not fully account for the gender gap in their future earnings. We also find that student performance, degree type, and graduation horizon play a relevant role in wage forecasts. In any case, students' expectations do not conform market wages but become more realistic as they approach graduation.     

Productivity improvement through reduced labour turnover

Labour turnover has both direct and hidden costs to the organization since it represents wastage of its human resources. Even in times of contraction, undue reliance on ‘natural wastage’ can lower morale, distort age profiles, and build up problems for the future. A strategic approach to its control must rest on an accurate diagnosis and must go beyond the improvement of particular personnel practices into a reappraisal of the company's total approach to its employees. It can provide the key to a new approach to planning and productivity.     

Behavioral Modeling of Adversaries with Multiple Objectives in Counterterrorism

Attacker/defender models have primarily assumed that each decisionmaker optimizes the cost of the damage inflicted and its economic repercussions from their own perspective. Two streams of recent research have sought to extend such models. One stream suggests that it is more realistic to consider attackers with multiple objectives, but this research has not included the adaption of the terrorist with multiple objectives to defender actions. The other stream builds off experimental studies that show that decisionmakers deviate from optimal rational behavior. In this article, we extend attacker/defender models to incorporate multiple objectives that a terrorist might consider in planning an attack. This includes the tradeoffs that a terrorist might consider and their adaption to defender actions. However, we must also consider experimental evidence of deviations from the rationality assumed in the commonly used expected utility model in determining such adaption. Thus, we model the attacker's behavior using multiattribute prospect theory to account for the attacker's multiple objectives and deviations from rationality. We evaluate our approach by considering an attacker with multiple objectives who wishes to smuggle radioactive material into the United States and a defender who has the option to implement a screening process to hinder the attacker. We discuss the problems with implementing such an approach, but argue that research in this area must continue to avoid misrepresenting terrorist behavior in determining optimal defensive actions.     

Three Lenses on Occupations and Professions in Organizations: Becoming,Doing, and Relating

Management and organizational scholarship is overdue for a reappraisal of occupations and professions as well as a critical review of past and current work on the topic. Indeed, the field has largely failed to keep pace with the rising salience of occupational and professional (as opposed to organizational) dynamics in work life. Moreover, not only is there a dearth of studies that explicitly take occupational or professional categories into account, but there is also an absence of a shared analytical framework for understanding what occupations and professions entail. Our goal is therefore two-fold: first, to offer guidance to scholars less familiar with this terrain who encounter occupational or professional dynamics in their own inquiries and, second, to introduce a three-part framework for conceptualizing occupations and professions to help guide future inquiries. We suggest that occupations and professions can be understood through lenses of “becoming”, “doing”, and “relating”. We develop this framework as we review past literature and discuss the implications of each approach for future research and, more broadly, for the field of management and organizational theory.     

Integrating Software into PRA: A Test-Based Approach

Probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) is a methodology to assess the probability of failure or success of a system's operation. PRA has been proved to be a systematic, logical, and comprehensive technique for risk assessment. Software plays an increasing role in modern safety critical systems. A significant number of failures can be attributed to software failures. Unfortunately, current probabilistic risk assessment concentrates on representing the behavior of hardware systems, humans, and their contributions (to a limited extent) to risk but neglects the contributions of software due to a lack of understanding of software failure phenomena. It is thus imperative to consider and model the impact of software to reflect the risk in current and future systems. The objective of our research is to develop a methodology to account for the impact of software on system failure that can be used in the classical PRA analysis process. A test-based approach for integrating software into PRA is discussed in this article. This approach includes identification of software functions to be modeled in the PRA, modeling of the software contributions in the ESD, and fault tree. The approach also introduces the concepts of input tree and output tree and proposes a quantification strategy that uses a software safety testing technique. The method is applied to an example system, PACS.     

Transition management—An analysis of strategic considerations for effective implementation

Today, organizations must deal with change on all fronts. The ability to deal with change may become the yardstick by which future managers are judged. But what do good managers need to know about managing the change process? Management literature contains hundreds of sources dealing with various aspects of change management and there are numerous books and case studies which discuss the complete process. After reviewing this material and testing it against interviews conducted with managers of companies that have undergone change programs, the authors have identified six guidelines to facilitate successful change. These six factors are: the need for a catalyst to initiate change; organizational goals must be set which take into account the impact of technical, political, and cultural factors; transition team is required to guide the change; top management must demonstrate commitment to the change as well as to act as change agents; utilizing employee participation and good communication can help overcome employee resistance; and finally, evaluating the change program is extremely important to the success of present and future change programs.     

A modelling system for local government resource planning

A major problem in local government is how to maximise the effectiveness of resource allocation. Senior officers and members concerned with corporate and strategic issues must take account of contemporary information of considerable variety and combine this with estimates of the future in their attempts to achieve rational resource allocation. This article describes the development of an experimental computer based corporate modelling system at Clwyd County Council which was designed to support allocation decisions pertaining to a 5 year planning period. It is concluded that a firm basis was achieved for progress towards a comprehensive operational system.     

Surgical scheduling under uncertainty by approximate dynamic programming

Surgical scheduling consists of selecting surgeries to be performed within a day, while jointly assigning operating rooms, starting times and the required resources. Patients can be elective or emergency/urgent. The scheduling of surgeries in an operating theatre with common resources to emergency or urgent and elective cases is highly subject to uncertainties not only on the duration of an intervention but mainly on the arrival of emergency or urgent cases. At the beginning of the day we are given a candidate set of elective surgeries with and an expected duration and a time window the surgery must start, but the expected duration and the time window of an emergency or urgent case become known when the surgery arrives. The day is divided into decision stages. Due to the dynamic nature of the problem, at the beginning of each stage the planner can make decisions taking into account the new information available. Decisions can be to schedule arriving surgeries, and to reschedule or cancel surgeries not started yet. The objective is to minimize the total expected cost composed of terms related to refusing arriving surgeries, to canceling scheduled surgeries, and to starting surgeries out of their time window. We address the problem with an approximate dynamic programming approach embedding an integer programming formulation to support decision making. We propose a dynamic model and an approximate policy iteration algorithm making use of basis functions to capture the impact of decisions to the future stages. Computational experiments have shown with statistical significance that the proposed algorithm outperforms a lookahead reoptimization approach.     

Forestry and long range planning

The traditional approach of foresters to the uncertainty endemic in an undertaking with a planning horizon which often must extend over several decades is summarized. The manner in which foresters have adapted more recently developed planning techniques to the requirements of forestry planning is then briefly described and it is concluded that however refined the techniques and however skilful their application, investment in tree growing must still imply a large measure of simple faith in the continuing utility of forest outputs to future generations.     

Key Characteristics of the Large Innovating Firm*

Large innovating firms are a major source of the world's technology, and in the 20th century have shown great resilience in absorbing successive waves of radical innovations. The key characteristics of these firms derive from the properties of their innovative activities. First, given the specific, differentiated and cumulative nature of technological development, the range of possible choices about both product and processed technologies open to the firm depends on its accumulated competence. Second, given functional and professional specialization, the implementation of technological choices requires organization and orchestration across disciplinary, functional and divisional boundaries. Third, given cumulative development and uncertainty, the improvement of these competences requires continuous and collective learning. Fourth, in the light of these characteristics, systems for allocating resources must take into account the benefits of learning by doing, as well as the benefits of outcomes. As a consequence, the technical function in large firms involves not just the implementation of innovations, but also the definition of appropriate divisional objectives and boundaries, the exploration of radical technologies, and the formation of technological expectations about the future.     

Districting for parcel delivery services – A two-Stage solution approach and a real-World case study

This paper studies a real-world problem arising in the context of parcel delivery. Given a heterogeneous set of resources, i.e., different drivers and different vehicles, the problem for each day consists of assigning a driver and a vehicle to each customer requiring service. Two conflicting aspects must be taken into account. On the one hand, service consistency is desirable, meaning that a customer should always be served by the same driver. On the other hand, daily demand fluctuations and tight resource constraints prohibit fixed resource assignments. With the aim of finding a reasonable compromise between these aspects, we propose a novel two-stage districting approach, which establishes delivery districts in the first stage and adapts them to the daily demand realizations in the second stage. For the first stage problem we propose three models that differ in the level of detail of their input data, their expected compliance with service consistency and the driver’s contractual working times, and their computational effort. Our two-stage approach merges the two dominant approaches in the literature, which either determine a priori routes and then adapt them on a daily basis, or derive fixed service regions for drivers. We present a case study based on a real-world data set. The results highlight the differences between the three first stage models and show that only few adaptations of the districts are necessary in the second stage to achieve feasible daily delivery tours along with a very good workload balance for drivers. We also analyze the effects of a homogeneous vs a heterogeneous fleet, of full time drivers vs full and part time drivers, and of the location of the depot and the length of the planning horizon.     

Competitive Goals and Plant Investment in Environment and Safety Practices: Moderating Effect of National Culture

Operations managers clearly play a critical role in targeting plant‐level investments toward environment and safety practices. In principle, a “rational” response would be to align this investment with senior management's competitive goals for operational performance. However, operations managers also are influenced by contingent factors, such as their national culture, thus creating potential tension that might bias investment away from a simple rational response. Using data from 1,453 plants in 24 countries, we test the moderating influence of seven of the national cultural characteristics on investment at the plant level in environment and safety practices. Four of the seven national cultural characteristics from GLOBE (i.e., uncertainty avoidance, in‐group collectivism, future orientation and performance orientation) shifted investment away from an expected “rational” response. Positive bias was evident when the national culture favored consistency and formalized procedures and rewarded performance improvement. In contrast, managers exhibited negative bias when familial groups and local coalitions were powerful, or future outcomes—rather than current actions—were more important. Overall, this study highlights the critical importance of moving beyond a naïve expectation that plant‐level investment will naturally align with corporate competitive goals for environment and safety. Instead, the national culture where the plant is located will influence these investments, and must be taken into account by senior management.     

Decision process of allocating projects to project managers

Allocating projects to project managers (PM) is a crucial decision in project management. Choosing the PM must be undertaken in a structured way, and thereby take into account the needs of the project and the PM’s competences and availability. The proposed model optimises the total time that PMs have available and takes into account the constraint of the switchover time loss within the mathematical programming. It model is part of a three-stage approach where: (1) projects are sorted using a multicriteria approach; (2) PMs are sorted using a multicriteria approach; and (3) the final allocation to intra-classes of projects is made using the optimisation model. This proposal contributes to aiding decision-makers involved in allocating projects: by respecting the limit of the time that PMs have available, or by extrapolating PMs’ available hours in which case overtime will have to be used. The model is applied in a Brazilian Energy Company.     

Corporate planning for an uncertain future

The increasing complexity of socio-economic systems has increased the need for planning while at the same time making planning more difficult. Planning in a changing environment for an uncertain future presents the planner with a dual challenge. He must not only identify the forces behind changing circumstances but must also help wean decision-makers from their dependence on single-line forecasts.     

The Effect of Competition on R&D Portfolio Investments

Although project portfolio management has been an active research area over the past 50 years, budget allocation models that consider competition are sparse. Faced with the competition, firms contemplating budget allocation for their project portfolio cannot limit their attention to the returns from their projects' target markets, as is the case for monopoly firms, but must also anticipate the competitive effects on these returns. Assuming firms allocate their budgets between projects offering incremental innovation targeting a mature market and projects offering radical innovation targeting an emerging market, we show that while the monopoly firm bases its budget allocation decision solely on the marginal returns of the markets, competing firms—as they take into account their counterparts' investment decisions—need to also consider the projects' average returns from their respective markets. This drives competing firms into incrementalism: faced with competition, firms invest larger portions of their budgets into projects targeting mature markets. This effect is amplified as the number of competing firms increases and firms allocate an even greater share of their budget into projects targeting a mature market. We further demonstrate the effects that changes to firms' individual budgets, as well as to market characteristics, have on firms' budget allocation decision.     

PSS business model conceptualization and application*

The discussion about business models has gained considerable attention in the last decade. Business model frameworks have been developed in the literature as management methods helping companies to comprehend and analyse their current business logic and guide the deployment of new strategies. In response to calls for a deeper understanding of the application of a business model approach to product-service systems (PSS), this study develops a two-level hierarchical framework that (i) includes a set of components with pertinent, second-order variables to take into account when undergoing the shift from products to solutions; (ii) supports industrial companies, especially SMEs, in designing their future business model and in consistently planning the actions needed to implement it. The framework was applied and refined within real-life settings. The application to KINE – a robot solutions supplier – shows how key challenges faced by servitization firms may be thoroughly addressed through the adoption of a business model perspective.     

Situation-based measurement of the full range of leadership model — Development and validation of a situational judgment test

In response to calls for context-specificity in leadership research, we developed and validated a Situational Judgment Test of the Full Range of Leadership Model (SJT-FRLM). Three consecutive studies were conducted following the typical steps of test development. Study 1 served measure development and pilot testing: item stems were generated empirically, item responses were developed with a theory-driven approach, and pilot testing was based on a leader sample. Study 2 served to analyze construct- and criterion-related validity of the instrument. Moreover, an empirical scoring key was developed that weights each item response according to its relation with leadership effectiveness in each situation. In Study 3, we demonstrated incremental validity and interrater agreement. The test fills an important gap in literature because it not only has predictive validity above and beyond established measures, but also takes into account the contextual element of leadership.     

Public Multichannel Management – an Integrated Framework of Off- and Online Multichannel Government Services

Government institutions have introduced multichannel environments over time following trends and technological innovations. These public multichannel environments often neglect specific channel characteristics and potentials and thus miss the opportunity to make full use of a strategic channel integration and combination with a focus on customer value creation. This study offers a systematic approach to establish an integrated public multichannel system not only taking into account user preferences, habits and their environment, but also the respective channel issuer and the characteristics of channels and public interfaces. Against this background, the study presents a systematic approach to expand services and channels according to their capacities, and provides academics and practitioners with a framework on public multichannel strategies.     

Structured Coupling of Probability Loss Distributions: Assessing Joint Flood Risk in Multiple River Basins

Losses due to natural hazard events can be extraordinarily high and difficult to cope with. Therefore, there is considerable interest to estimate the potential impact of current and future extreme events at all scales in as much detail as possible. As hazards typically spread over wider areas, risk assessment must take into account interrelations between regions. Neglecting such interdependencies can lead to a severe underestimation of potential losses, especially for extreme events. This underestimation of extreme risk can lead to the failure of riskmanagement strategies when they are most needed, namely, in times of unprecedented events. In this article, we suggest a methodology to incorporate such interdependencies in risk via the use of copulas. We demonstrate that by coupling losses, dependencies can be incorporated in risk analysis, avoiding the underestimation of risk. Based on maximum discharge data of river basins and stream networks, we present and discuss different ways to couple loss distributions of basins while explicitly incorporating tail dependencies. We distinguish between coupling methods that require river structure data for the analysis and those that do not. For the later approach we propose a minimax algorithm to choose coupled basin pairs so that the underestimation of risk is avoided and the use of river structure data is not needed. The proposed methodology is especially useful for large‐scale analysis and we motivate and apply our method using the case of Romania. The approach can be easily extended to other countries and natural hazards.