Measuring Pension‐benefit Expectations Probabilistically

Abstract. Research aiming to understand the impact of public and private pension plans on individual decision making has been hampered by a dearth of empirical evidence on benefit expectations. We review the occasional national surveys that have sought to measure pension‐benefit expectations and describe our recent efforts to improve the measurement of US Social Security benefit expectations by elicitation of probabilistic expectations about well‐defined outcomes. We document striking uncertainty and heterogeneity of beliefs about the long‐term existence of the Social Security system and about the level of benefits should the system survive. In so doing, we highlight the additional information that is extracted using our probabilistic elicitation method as opposed to more traditional methods that only seek point forecasts.     

Voices and values: Linking values with participation in OR/MS in public policy making

It is now widely accepted that public policy development requires both an appreciation of public values and an ability to involve insights from local people. Operational research (OR) has made some contributions to public policy development, and there has been a call to use problem-structuring methods (PSM) in this environment. This growing need for greater use of OR/management science (MS) in policy making is due to its ability to work with insights that are sometimes hard to pin down. This paper presents some research about values and local people's voices in public policy making, which the authors believe present a challenge to OR/MS and to the use of PSM. The paper will describe a framework for understanding values and exploring insights into including local voices in policy making using PSMs. Key to the framework is in the emphasis on differences, rather than similarities, in value priorities. A case study in which local people as well as decisions makers and politicians were engaged in a process to decide the future of a local hospital will be described.     

The Effects of Health Insurance and Self‐Insurance on Retirement Behavior

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the effects of employer‐provided health insurance, Medicare, and Social Security on retirement behavior. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we estimate a dynamic programming model of retirement that accounts for both saving and uncertain medical expenses. Our results suggest that Medicare is important for understanding retirement behavior, and that uncertainty and saving are both important for understanding the labor supply responses to Medicare. Half the value placed by a typical worker on his employer‐provided health insurance is the value of reduced medical expense risk. Raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 leads individuals to work an additional 0.074 years over ages 60–69. In comparison, eliminating 2 years worth of Social Security benefits increases years of work by 0.076 years.     

Medicare's ESRD Program, Part 1: Dialysis.

The federal End State Renal Disease (ESRD) program was created by statute in 1972 as a general population entitlement to be administered by Medicare. The program extends all Medicare benefits to patients, regardless of age, who are diagnosed as having ESRD, as long as they are fully insured for old age and survivor insurance benefits (Social Security), are entitled to monthly insurance benefits under the Social Security Act, or are spouses or dependent children of individuals with the foregoing Social Security benefits. About 7 percent of all ESRD patients are excluded from this entitlement by these criteria. The two major therapies embraced by the ESRD program are renal dialysis and kidney transplantation. In this first part of a two-part article, dialysis is the focal point. Kidney transplants will be covered in the May-June issue of Physician Executive.     

Optimal Strategies for Traditional versus Roth IRA/401(k) Consumption During Retirement

We establish an algorithm that produces an optimal strategy for retirees to withdraw funds between their tax‐deferred accounts (TDAs), like traditional IRA/401(k) accounts, and their Roth IRA/401(k) accounts, in the context of a financial model based on American tax law. This optimal strategy follows a geometrically simple, intuitive approach that can be used to maximize the size of a retiree's bequest to an heir or, alternatively, to maximize a retiree's portfolio longevity. We give examples where retirees following the approach currently implemented by major investment firms, like Fidelity and Vanguard, will reduce their bequests by approximately 10% or lose 18 months of portfolio longevity compared to our optimal approach. Further, our strategy and algorithm can be extended to many cases where the retiree has additional, known yearly sources of money, such as income from part‐time work, taxable investment accounts, and Social Security.      

The dysfunctions of power in teams: A review and emergent conflict perspective

We review the new and growing body of work on power in teams and use this review to develop an emergent theory of how power impacts team outcomes. Our paper offers three primary contributions. First, our review highlights potentially incorrect assumptions that have arisen around the topic of power in teams and documents the areas and findings that appear most robust in explaining the effects of power on teams. Second, we contrast the findings of this review with what is known about the effects of power on individuals and highlight the directionally oppositional effects of power that emerge across different levels of analysis. Third, we integrate findings across levels of analysis into an emergent theory which explains why and when the benefits of power for individuals may paradoxically explain the potentially negative effects of power on team outcomes. We elaborate on how individual social comparisons within teams where at least one member has power increase intra-team power sensitivity, which we define as a state in which team members are excessively perceptive of, affected by, and responsive to resources. We theorize that when power-sensitized teams experience resource threats (either stemming from external threats or personal threats within the team), these threats will ignite internal power sensitivities and set into play performance-detracting intra-team power struggles. This conflict account of power in teams integrates and organizes past findings in this area to explain why and when power negatively affects team-level outcomes, and opens the door for future research to better understand why and when power may benefit team outcomes when power’s dark side for teams is removed.     

The forms and use of intuition in top management teams

Nascent research suggests that benefits of intuition use accrue not only to individuals but also to teams. These benefits may be especially important for top management teams (TMTs), who formulate strategic decisions for their firms. However, work on intuition use in strategic decision making (SDM) remains focused on the intuitions of chief executive officers (CEOs). Furthermore, the emerging literature on team intuition is very fragmented, leaving an unclear picture of how teams may develop and use intuition in their decision-making activities. To address these problems, we integrate team intuition and TMT research to propose four forms of TMT intuition, which differ based on the locus and integration of intuition. We describe the forms of TMT intuition, clarify the mechanisms that shape them, and discuss their relevance for TMTs' decision-making activities. Overall, we advocate for strategy research that focuses on the notion of “team” in team intuition.     

项目团队成员怠工行为修正的理论模型

项目团队并不总能实现预期目标,项目团队中存在的某些问题属于怠工行为的表现,项目团队中怠工行为修正亟待研究。采用定性研究方法,按照行为修正分析模式,以行为修正理论、态度改变理论、态度与行为理论、认知平衡理论等为理论基础,经理论与文献研究提出:项目团队成员怠工行为与项目团队绩效的关系、工作态度在工作情境认知与怠工行为之间中介作用关系、团队文化认知在工作情境认知与工作态度之间调节作用关系,从而构建起项目团队成员怠工行为修正的理论模型。     

Managing Nationality Diversity: The Interactive Effect of Leaders’ Cultural Intelligence and Task Interdependence

In light of the workforce's increasing nationality diversity, our study explores the antecedents for the successful management of nationality diversity as visualized in a favourable diversity climate and enhanced team performance. We propose a double‐contingency model in which we argue that the effects of nationality diversity will be dependent upon task interdependence and leaders’ cultural intelligence. We propose that nationality diversity will be more consequential in more interdependent teams, in which team interactions and processes are more salient. Moreover, team leaders with higher cultural intelligence will possess the skills to foster adequate team processes and thereby enhance diversity climate and performance of nationally diverse, more interdependent teams. We collected multi‐source data from 63 work teams (N = 410) and their supervisors at a German facility management company. Moderated regression analyses supported the hypothesized three‐way interaction between nationality diversity, task interdependence and leaders’ cultural intelligence. Additional simple slope analysis showed that nationality diversity is positively related to diversity climate and performance only when both team leaders’ cultural intelligence and task interdependence are high. Our study not only provides recommendations for successful nationality diversity management but also yields theoretical implications for diversity and cultural intelligence research.     

Reflections on operational research. A report from the Euro II Congress

The EURO II Congress at Stockholm contained a set of Invited Papers. The set included a group that appeared to be attempting a major review of the role of Operational Research (OR). We try here to give a short summary and a representative selection of extracts from these papers. This is done partly because the papers will not be easily available to all OR workers who are interested, but mainly because of the emphasis they place on the need for truly interdisciplinary OR which recognizes the complex and potentially partisan nature of what we do. Related work in the UK is noted in order to emphasise the beginning of a widespread concern over such issues. The remainder of the Congress demonstrated a distinctly different view of OR, which was characterized by a disregard for the nature of human behaviour and of power in organizations and society. We suggest that the reflections made by the Invited Speakers demonstrate again the need for a fundamental reorientation of OR.     

Do Immigrants Compete with Natives?

The paper analyses the impact of foreign workers on the Italian labour market. We address the issue of whether immigrants from less developed countries are complementary or substitutes to domestic workers. We construct a data set on immigrant workers from the Administrative Social Security Archive which starts in 1986, before the general amnesty of 1990–91, when a large share of illegal immigrants were granted working permits, and end in 1995. A two-stage procedure devised by Moulton is applied to yearly cross-sections of wages by industry and region. Our results show that the inflow of immigrants raises the wages of native manual workers (i.e. it has a complementary effect), and this effect is larger in small firms and in the north of the country. We postulate that the positive impact on native wages is due to the existence of labour constraints on the side of firms. Firms are unable to expand their output because they cannot find native workers who are willing to undertake certain (typically low-skilled) jobs. Immigrants help to fill this gap. This view is reinforced by the fact that over a ‘crucial threshold’ of the share of foreign work (7.7–12 percent) additional inflows in the labour market of foreign work have a negative effect on native wages (i.e. they compete with natives).     

On operations research and value conflicts

The paper addresses the question of how operations research (OR) ought to handle decision problems that involve value conflicts. First, we note that early OR was considered essentially value free within the OR community, with a mechanistic systems perspective, although some voiced concern that an analyst should not detach herself from the consequences of her work. Then we propose a value conflict scale, which we use to assess the conflict levels in a small sample of OR applications. We then turn to value identification. In practise, organizational value statements include many kinds of values, and we discuss how values can be sorted out according to ethical categories, which helps in identifying consequentialistic decision criteria. The next question is how values can be enacted in a decision process. We review findings in neuroscience, which indicate that intra-personal decision-making takes place in a field of tension between deliberation and affect. The implication is that low level conflicts may leave decision-makers too cold for values to be enacted and therefore want infusion of emotion. On the other hand, emotions in high-level conflicts may run too high to give reason a chance. Emotions, therefore, need to be tempered and this can be achieved through at least two strategies: a focus on consequences rather than virtues and rules and discourse ethics. These are the subjects of the two last parts of the paper. We conclude by proposing five ethical rules for OR analysis of value conflicts. An analyst should not regard herself as being detached from the decision that are made, should be conscious that good decision-making requires temperate emotions that balance affect and deliberation, should promote focus on consequences, should promote the view that stakeholders have intrinsic value; they should not be treated instrumentally and should encourage fair processes to identify stakeholder values.     

Leading teams in the digital age: Four perspectives on technology and what they mean for leading teams

Digital technologies are changing the nature of teamwork in ways that have important implications for leadership. Though conceptually rich and multi-disciplinary, much of the burgeoning work on technology has not been fully integrated into the leadership literature. To fill this gap, we organize existing work on leadership and technology, outlining four perspectives: (1) technology as context, (2) technology as sociomaterial, (3) technology as creation medium, and (4) technology as teammate. Each technology perspective makes assumptions about how technologies affect teams and the needs for team leadership. Within each perspective, we detail current work on leading teams. This section takes us from virtual teams to new vistas posed by leading online communities, crowds, peer production groups, flash teams, human-robot teams, and human-artificial intelligence teams. We identify 12 leadership implications arising from the ways digital technologies affect organizing. We then leverage our review to identify directions for future leadership research and practice.     

Team flexibility's relationship to staffing and performance in complex projects: An empirical analysis

We examine the role of flexibility in project team effectiveness. Specifically, we hypothesize that (1) it will mediate the relationship between staffing quality and effectiveness and (2) its relationship with team effectiveness will be moderated by project complexity, where more flexibility will be required when projects are complex. Hypotheses are tested using data collected from 60 cross-functional project teams. The results indicated that flexibility mediates the relationship between staffing quality and team performance (goal achievement and cohesion, but not project efficiency). Additionally, we find that two-dimensions of project complexity moderate the flexibility–performance relationship. Specifically, the more alternatives a team must consider, the stronger the negative relationship between flexibility and project efficiency is. The flexibility–cohesion relationship also was moderated, such that the relationship is more positive when the project is more ambiguous and more negative when the project team faces many alternatives. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

A Cross‐country Comparison of Attitudes Towards Mothers Working and their Actual Labor Market Experience

In this paper, we use data from the International Social Survey Project to present a cross‐country comparison of attitudes about the labor force participation of mothers. We also estimate earnings functions and probits for full‐time work and examine whether there is a link between attitudes and women’s actual labor market experience across countries. We find that while a woman’s own attitude about work does not directly influence her wage, it does influence the probability that she works full time.     

Mentalisierung in der Teamsupervision

The present article focuses on mentalization in the context of team supervision. First, we elaborate on mentalization “breakdown”. We describe the different prementalizing modes by referring to the example of a team supervision, and we explain when and how they are activated. Beyond the general, stress-related model of mentalization, we identify factors in the organizational context that may impact mentalization positively and negatively. Afterwards, we illustrate how mentalization can be used in (team) supervision and how the general approach of and interventions from mentalization-based therapy (MBT) may be translated in the context of team supervision.     

What happened, what next?

Many physicians and other health care professionals breathed a collective sigh of relief when the 103rd Congress adjourned without passing the Clinton Health Security Act or any other health care reform legilsation. The ambition of this brief paper is to describe why health care reform did not pass in 1994, the issues that need to be resolved if we are to pass legislation, the political forces that will need to be addressed before legislation is passed, and the type of struggles we can expect to see in the coming session of Congress.     

Operations research in the management of the airlines

This paper is intended to present an introduction to the use of operations research in the international airline industry, and to demonstrate the scope and significance of the airline OR activities. First, the special reasons for the viability and spread of airline OR are discussed. Then a functional framework for an airline is outlined, to be used in analyzing the problems of an airline and relating the OR work to it. Four major applications are described, corresponding to four major components of the framework. These applications are: schedule development, overbooking control, crew scheduling and engine management, respectively. In each case we describe the problem and its significance, indicate the types of solution techniques which have been developed, and assess the implemented solutions. The paper concludes with comments on the current state-of-the-art and the future of airline OR. A detailed bibliography is given.Both of the authors have been operations research directors in major airlines and more recently have focused their attention upon the industry as academic researchers. This background has provided us with an unusual opportunity to analyze the role of OR in the airlines, and our paper seeks to share with the reader some of the insights we have gained thereby.     

Work and the good life: How work contributes to meaning in life

Many people expect their work to provide meaning to their lives, yet the specific organizational factors that can promote meaning in life are not clearly delineated. Drawing on the basic science of meaning in life, in this paper we propose that work entails a host of experiences that foster meaning in life. We begin by defining meaning in life, noting its placement within the broader well-being literature and dispelling common myths about its rarity in people’s lives. After highlighting the myriad benefits of meaning for individuals and organizations, we describe several established sources of meaning in life and their relevance to work. We then examine how work orientations and social demographic factors influence the propensity to seek meaning through work. We conclude with a discussion of future research directions that can better illuminate the predictors and functions of meaningfulness at work.