Groupthink and Project Performance: The Influence of Personal Traits and Interpersonal Ties

This study explores whether the negative impact of “groupthink concurrence‐seeking behavior” (GTB) on business process reengineering (BPR) projects is affected by group members personal traits and interpersonal ties within the group. To this purpose we conduct and present the results of a longitudinal controlled field experiment over 18 BPR projects lasting 3 months and involving 18 teams comprising 71 first‐year MBA students. The main contribution of this study is twofold. First, we explicitly consider and measure the core construct of groupthink phenomenon: that is, GTB. Existing organizational behavior literature has, contrarily, considered only its causes, symptoms, and outcomes. Second, we show evidence that GTB does have a negative impact on group performance in BPR project settings. In this regards, results also indicate that while perceived control, conscientiousness and interpersonal evaluation mitigate the negative impact of GTB on group project performance, confidence, and previous relationships amplify this negative impact, even if they have a direct positive effect on performance. Thanks to the findings of this study, we are able to provide valuable suggestions to managers in charge of BPR projects for ensuring effective performance of project teams and controlling for potential obstacles due to GTB.     

Exploring the absolutist vs relativist perception of poverty using a cross-country questionnaire survey

Questionnaires eliciting the absolutist vs relativist perception of poverty are administered to 1941 undergraduate students in eight countries - Bolivia, Brazil, Italy, Kenya, Laos, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. We find that the perception of poverty expressed by a large fraction of respondents exhibits both absolutist and relativist concerns, with the former components prevailing over the latter. High-income countries exhibit a significantly more pronounced relativist attitude. Personal characteristics such as past experience of material hardship and relative standard of living play a germane role in shaping respondents’ views.     

The Role of Declarative Pointing in Developing a Theory of Mind

It has been suggested that the child's capacity to represent and influence another person's attentional state about an object or event in triadic interactions (declarative communication) is an early manifestation of social understanding in the second year of life. This study tested the following predictions: First, in typically developing children declarative pointing emerges later than imperative pointing. Second, the capacity to use declarative pointing is linked to the understanding of other's intentions (i.e., to the capacity to reproduce other's intended acts after seeing failed attempts to perform these acts). The study was conducted in 2 phases. In the first phase, the parents of 133 typically developing infants completed the Questionnaire on Pointing Gesture, which allowed the identification of babies able to use pointing in familiar contexts. Of these children, 40 participated in the experiment and were tested on 2 tasks: a new task designed to elicit production and comprehension of imperative and declarative pointing, and a modified version of Meltzoff's (1995) task designed to assess understanding of others' intentions. Tasks were administered to each participant in 2 sessions carried out at 3‐month intervals. Children were 12 months old on average at the 1st session and 15 months old on average at the 2nd session. Results showed that children produced and understood declarative pointing later than imperative pointing. Furthermore, production of declarative pointing was clearly linked to understanding of others' intentions. No relation was found between production and comprehension of imperative pointing and intention understanding. Implications from the association between declarative pointing and inferring other's intentions are discussed.     

Composite Indicator of Social Inclusion for European Countries

Social inclusion is one of the key challenges of the European Union (EU) Sustainable Development Strategy. We use four indicators from EU policies to measure social inclusion for the 27 member countries of Europe. In particular, we aggregate the four indicators in a multiplicative composite indicator via a DEA-BoD approach with weights determined endogenously with proportion constraints. We obtain a score of social inclusion that allows us to grade the 27 EU countries from 2006 to 2010. In this way, we highlight the specific role played by the four indicators in determining improvements and deteriorations of social inclusion during the European phase of the financial and economic crisis.     

Family Mapping: A Cumulative Measure of Family Structure and Instability

Family structure is an important area of study given the growing rates of family instability. The research, however, is limited due to broad definitions and measurement methods that only consider one time point. Using a sample of young adults (N = 398), our goal was to develop a user-friendly implementation procedure and coding system that efficiently captures a broad range of information. The coding system offered includes multiple levels of detail and hundreds of previously untapped variables. Examinations of standard methods versus the cumulative family mapping method revealed additional variance explained in measures of substance use, providing early indications of measurement utility.     

Companion animals in families of children with autism spectrum disorder: Lessons learned from caregivers.

Companion animals (i.e., pets) have been increasingly recognized for the roles they play in families, including those with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This cross-sectional study explored the unique functions of companion animals within families with a child with ASD. Phenomenology was used to analyze the responses of participants (N = 338) who responded to a survey offered through the Interactive Autism Network. The study initially focused on dogs; however, the analysis was forced to expand to other species due to the data provided by participants. Seven major themes emerged: bonding and benefits, learning opportunities, barriers, grief, fit (match of family characteristics with those of the companion animal), safety, and alternative animals. Successful fit between companion animals and families was often described as necessary for beneficial functions. Barriers included necessary cost and time, as well as required supervision of interactions to enhance safety of the children and animals.     

Telling the Collective Story? Moroccan-Dutch Young Adults’ Negotiation of a Collective Identity through Storytelling

Researchers taking a social constructionist perspective on identity agree that identities are constructed and negotiated in interaction. However, empirical studies in this field are often based on interviewer–interviewee interaction or focus on interactions with members of a socially dominant out-group. How identities are negotiated in interaction with in-group members remains understudied. In this article we use a narrative approach to study identity negotiation among Moroccan-Dutch young adults, who constitute both an ethnic and a religious (Muslim) minority in the Netherlands. Our analysis focuses on the topics that appear in focus group participants’ stories and on participants’ responses to each other’s stories. We find that Moroccan-Dutch young adults collectively narrate their experiences in Dutch society in terms of discrimination and injustice. Firmly grounded in media discourse and popular wisdom, a collective narrative of a disadvantaged minority identity emerges. However, we also find that this identity is not uncontested. We use the concept of second stories to explain how participants negotiate their collective identity by alternating stories in which the collective experience of deprivation is reaffirmed with stories in which challenging or new evaluations of the collective experience are offered. In particular, participants narrate their personal experiences to challenge recurring evaluations of discrimination and injustice. A new collective narrative emerges from this work of joint storytelling.     

Ambiguity in asset pricing and portfolio choice: a review of the literature

We survey the literature that has explored the implications of decision-making under ambiguity for financial market outcomes, such as portfolio choice and equilibrium asset prices. This ambiguity literature has led to a number of significant advances in our ability to rationalize empirical features of asset returns and portfolio decisions, such as the failure of the two-fund separation theorem in portfolio decisions, the modest exposure to risky securities observed for a majority of investors, the home equity preference in international portfolio diversification, the excess volatility of asset returns, the equity premium and the risk-free rate puzzles, and the occurrence of trading break-downs.