Strukturelle Kränkungen als Thema im Coaching

In this article hurts in the workplace are discussed, which are not aggressions of one person against another person. Rather they are effects of structural conditions in organizations or effects of legal processes in societies. The author presents three case studies with examples of such hurts and she postulates, that the Coach has to reflect political conditions in his work.     

Einstellungen gegenüber ?lteren Besch?ftigten

The ??Beliefs About Older Workers Questionnaire?? (Hassell und Perrewe, Journal of Organizational Behavior 16(5):457?C468, 1995) was developed to analyze beliefs about older workers and comprises 27 questions. In this article we present a German version of the ??Beliefs About Older Workers Questionnaire??. We design two versions of the questionnaire, one for beliefs about older female and one for beliefs about older male workers. We report results of a study in which the German questionnaires for male and female workers were administered and tested for the first time. We observed neutral to slightly negative beliefs about older workers. The study identified impacts of the gender of subjects and objects on beliefs about older workers. However, these were rather small. Organizations could profit from instruments like the presented questionnaire to identify age stereotypes and the need for accordant measures. Repeated application of the questionnaire or simultaneous application in other organizational units or organizations would enable organizations to evaluate applied measures or to learn from good practice in other organizational units or organizations.     

Warum und wodurch Coaching wirkt

The contribution reviews the state oft the art of the research on general success factors in the coaching process. Research in the field of psychotherapy on basic variables of client centered counseling and general therapeutic change mechanisms set an example. Results of first studies on these and modified factors show that the coaching outcome depends on observed esteem and emotional support by the coach, resource activation and support of transfer into practice. Process analysis of nonverbal interactions between coach and client demonstrate that goal attainment influence goal attainment. Finally, the paper focuses on limitations, of the studies, scientific and practical conclusions as well as future perspectives.     

Split Hamiltonian Monte Carlo

We show how the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithm can sometimes be speeded up by “splitting” the Hamiltonian in a way that allows much of the movement around the state space to be done at low computational cost. One context where this is possible is when the log density of the distribution of interest (the potential energy function) can be written as the log of a Gaussian density, which is a quadratic function, plus a slowly-varying function. Hamiltonian dynamics for quadratic energy functions can be analytically solved. With the splitting technique, only the slowly-varying part of the energy needs to be handled numerically, and this can be done with a larger stepsize (and hence fewer steps) than would be necessary with a direct simulation of the dynamics. Another context where splitting helps is when the most important terms of the potential energy function and its gradient can be evaluated quickly, with only a slowly-varying part requiring costly computations. With splitting, the quick portion can be handled with a small stepsize, while the costly portion uses a larger stepsize. We show that both of these splitting approaches can reduce the computational cost of sampling from the posterior distribution for a logistic regression model, using either a Gaussian approximation centered on the posterior mode, or a Hamiltonian split into a term that depends on only a small number of critical cases, and another term that involves the larger number of cases whose influence on the posterior distribution is small.     

Technische Softwaredokumentation unter ?konomischen Gesichtspunkten – Ein formal-deduktiver Ansatz

Only a very low priority seems to be given to software documentation. For example, about 80% of the software systems in production worldwide are badly documented. In contrast empirical studies confirm that an adequate technical documentation reduces the error rate of subsequent changes during software maintenance. This leads to the question about the optimal scale of investment in technical documentation in any software project. In research, this decision problem has been largely neglected. Since underlying cause-effect relationships may be empirically hard to detect, this paper proposes a new deductive approach, which compares the present value of payments for the documentation and bug fixing. The basis of this model is the phenomenon of error propagation from one component to adjacent components through its dependencies. As a result the following hypothesis can be inferred: It is always beneficial to document too much rather than comparatively too little even for an arbitrarily low quality of documentation and for any required rate of interest. This hypothesis shows robustness even against some changes in assumptions.     

The effects of state-dependent human behavior on the design of a serial line

Most research on line design assumes that human operators perform independently from the status of the line. Recent empirical evidence is contradictory. Humans are likely to change their working speed if they might otherwise cause idle time (Schultz et al., Manage Sci 44(12):1595–1607, 1998). This peculiarity of worker behavior is observed in a variety of settings but little is still known about optimal line design that accounts for this more realistic modeling of worker behavior. Therefore, we analyze work allocation in a serial line with limited buffer capacity and adaptive human behavior. An extensive simulation study reveals that optimal work allocation in state-dependent models is different from classical state-independent models. A bowl-shaped work allocation might be suboptimal and design guidelines are more complicated. Depending on the extent of human reactions, a bowl-shaped, balanced, or reversed-bowl work allocation can be preferable.