Coaching und Mentoring

The program “Mentoring for female junior executives at schools” in Hamburg has the goal of recruiting more female executives for schools in Hamburg. As a headmaster of a high school the author has attended this program as a mentor. She discusses the following questions: What are the differences between mentoring and coaching? Where are the limits of mentoring? When is coaching the better method? The main result is, that the mentor has to be very attentively of his position as a member of the organization. He has to decide, if he can advise the mentee for example in conflicts with superiors or if a coach could do a better job. A missing link in the mentoring program is the analysis of the culture of organizations, because this is an important factor for a successful start into the new function.     

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.     

Ex Ante Project Evaluation and the Complexity of Early Decision-Making

This paper looks beyond more traditional evaluation activities to focus primarily on evaluation up front. It suggests that the early appraisal of an investment case or a project should apply essentially the same evaluation criteria that will be used in ex post evaluation, and thus increase the likelihood of a successful project outcome. However, the initial plan might be altered as result of subsequent analysis, assessment, negotiation, positioning, and the exercise of power. The last part of this paper presents an empirical study of 23 projects, which examines the complexity of processes that occur in the idea- and decision phases.     

Determinants and effects of formal target agreements: an empirical investigation of German firms

We investigate organizational determinants and performance effects of formal target agreements for employees based on the IAB establishment panel, a representative panel of German establishments. The results show that establishments with a high employee turnover rate, a large proportion of temporary workers, and a highly qualified workforce are significantly more likely to implement target agreements. Also, establishments with works councils installed are more likely to do so, controlling, among others, for firm size. Concerning organizational performance, we apply a first-difference and a fixed effects approach and find that establishments that implement target agreements achieve around 5 % higher total sales compared to firms that did not introduce this practice. Hence, organizations seem to benefit from the implementation of formal target agreements for employees.     

An Alternative Model of the Formation of Political Coalitions

Most models of the formation of political coalitions use either Euclidean spaces or rely purely on game theory. This limits their applicability. In this article, a single model is presented which is more broadly applicable. In principle any kind of set can be used as a policy space. The model is also able to incorporate different kinds of party motivations: both rent-seeking and idealism. The model uses party preferences and power to identify stable coalitions and predict government policy as well as to indicate which member of the opposition will be able to break up the governing coalition if no stable coalition exists. In the latter case it will also indicate on which issue the government is likely to split. Parties may have preferences over issues such as the composition of cabinet and/or the governing coalition as well as the more traditional issues of government formation. The model also provides a rationale for log-rolling.     

A tractable method to measure utility and loss aversion under prospect theory

This paper provides an efficient method to measure utility under prospect theory. Our method minimizes both the number of elicitations required to measure utility and the cognitive burden for subjects, being based on the elicitation of certainty equivalents for two-outcome prospects. We applied our method in an experiment and were able to replicate the main findings on prospect theory, suggesting that our method measures what it is intended to. Our data confirmed empirically that risk seeking and concave utility can coincide under prospect theory. Utility did not depend on the probability used in the elicitation, which offers support for the validity of prospect theory.

The impossibility of unbiased judgment aggregation

Standard impossibility theorems on judgment aggregation over logically connected propositions either use a controversial systematicity condition or apply only to agendas of propositions with rich logical connections. Are there any serious impossibilities without these restrictions? We prove an impossibility theorem without requiring systematicity that applies to most standard agendas: Every judgment aggregation function (with rational inputs and outputs) satisfying a condition called unbiasedness is dictatorial (or effectively dictatorial if we remove one of the agenda conditions). Our agenda conditions are tight. When applied illustratively to (strict) preference aggregation represented in our model, the result implies that every unbiased social welfare function with universal domain is effectively dictatorial.     

Sports in School: Source of Amity or Antipathy?

Objectives . Previous research looks at the impact of school sports on participants' delinquency, but not at the impact on delinquency in schools; further, it does not control for school size or for unobserved school-level variables. This research fills that gap. It uses social capital theory to frame the impact of sports programs on both participants and nonparticipants. Social capital theory predicts that group cohesion will increase cooperative, pro-social behavior among those in the group; however, it can also increase uncooperative, antisocial behavior among those not in the group—particularly when in-group membership is seen as desirable. Social capital theory also predicts that larger schools will have more disturbances, but subgroups in large schools will reduce these adverse effects. Methods . The hypotheses were tested by looking at the relation between disturbances and interscholastic sports programs in Montgomery County, Maryland high schools. Using three years of data on each high school in the county, the study regresses disturbances on sports participation, holding constant demographic variables, school size, and a dummy variable for each school. Results . Larger schools have more disturbances, but bigger interscholastic sports programs mitigate these effects. Conclusions . The policy implications suggest that to foster cooperative behavior in high schools, it might be wise to limit school size, or to foster participation in varsity sports as school size increases.     

Does Society Matter? Life Satisfaction in the Enlarged Europe

Life satisfaction is quite heterogeneously distributed across countries of the enlarged European Union. Previous research has shown how living conditions within individual countries, such as access to material and emotional resources, are important for personal well-being, but it has been less successful in explaining differences between countries. This article investigates whether it matters in which political and economic circumstances people live, as well as whether their particular perception of the quality of their societal environment plays a role. People are well aware that the institutional and cultural settings in which their lives are embedded create opportunities and limitations: within individual countries, perceptions of society influence life satisfaction outcomes irrespective of access to resources. However, their importance for well-being differs across Europe: perceptions of societies are highly decisive in countries that provide only a minimum of social security and in which the reliability of political institutions is poor. In rich and stable countries, the impact is weaker and private social support becomes more important. In addition to these country-specific weights of life satisfaction determinants, life satisfaction variations between countries can be explained to a large extent by taking into consideration the economic performance, the social security level, and the political culture in a country—all in all, general conditions that enable people to live a respectable life.     

Bounded information dissemination in multi-channel wireless networks

More and more wireless networks and devices now operate on multiple channels, which poses the question: How to use multiple channels to speed up communication? In this paper, we answer this question for the case of wireless ad-hoc networks where information dissemination is a primitive operation. Specifically, we propose a randomized distributed algorithm for information dissemination that is very near the optimal. The general information dissemination problem is to deliver \(k\) information packets, stored initially in \(k\) different nodes (the packet holders), to all the nodes in the network, and the objective is to minimize the time needed. With an eye toward the reality, we assume a model where the packet holders are determined by an adversary, and neither the number \(k\) nor the identities of packet holders are known to the nodes in advance. Not knowing the value of \(k\) sets this problem apart from broadcasting and all-to-all communication (gossiping). We study the information dissemination problem in single-hop networks with bounded-size messages. We present a randomized algorithm which can disseminate all packets in \(O(k(\frac{1}{\mathcal {F}}+\frac{1}{\mathcal {P}})+\log ^2n)\) rounds with high probability, where \(\mathcal {F}\) is the number of available channels and \(\mathcal {P}\) is the bound on the number of packets a message can carry. Compared with the lower bound \(\varOmega (k(\frac{1}{\mathcal {F}}+\frac{1}{\mathcal {P}}))\), the given algorithm is very close to the asymptotical optimal except for an additive factor. Our result provides the first solid evidence that multiple channels can indeed substantially speed up information dissemination, which also breaks the \(\varOmega (k)\) lower bound that holds for single-channel networks (even if \(\mathcal {P}\) is infinity).