Enhancing volunteers capacity in all‐volunteer nonprofit organizations: The role of volunteer leaders' reliance on effective management processes and (de)motivating leadership

All‐volunteer nonprofit organizations rely solely on the commitment of volunteers to support their operations. As such, it is important that leaders of these organizations, even though they are volunteers themselves, rely on professional skills in order to optimize their organization's volunteers capacity. In the present study, we investigated how volunteer leaders' reliance on effective management processes and a (de)motivating leadership style related to volunteers capacity. To this end, we relied on the Competing Values Framework (CVF) and Self‐Determination Theory (SDT), respectively. Results revealed a positive (unique) association between (the sum score of) the management processes of the CVF models, as well as (the sum score of) the motivating leadership styles and volunteers capacity. Bivariate analyses indicated that the management processes of each CVF model (i.e., human relations model, internal process model, open system model, and rational goal model) and each motivating leadership style (i.e., an autonomy‐supportive and a structuring leadership style) related positively to volunteers capacity. These findings have important practical implications as they revealed that it is crucial for volunteer leaders to implement effective management processes, while adopting a motivating leadership style.     

On the predictive performance of a non-optimal action in hypothesis testing

Statistical Methods & Applications - In Bayesian decision theory, the performance of an action is measured by its posterior expected loss. In some cases it may be convenient/necessary to use a...     

The Role of Leadership in the Management of Conflict and Knowledge Sharing in the Research Groups of a Spanish Public University

Public Organization Review - This paper analyses how academics perceive their group leaders’ behaviour in managing the scientific activities of their research group and, particularly, how the...     

Dealing with the wicked issue of child poverty: Inter-organizational networks as forums for collective debate and reflection

In the international realm, inter-organizational networking is perceived as a highly relevant instrument in social policy that enables welfare organizations to deal with “wicked issues.” In this article, we discuss the central empirical findings acquired from a recent qualitative research project that focuses on inter-organizational networks that were formed at the local level to deal with the wicked issue of child poverty as a complex and multidimensional social problem. We explore how the network discussions about normative value orientations in four inter-organizational networks evolve, and identify three central fields of tension that illustrate the complexity for local welfare actors in and across networks to create network strategies in dealing with child poverty: (a) selective versus universal provision, (b) conditional versus unconditional strategies, and (c) instrumental versus lifeworld-oriented approaches. Our findings show that networks can function as valuable forums for collective debate and reflection, since different approaches and perspectives to tackle the problem of child poverty can be confronted with each other. Creating such a forum has the potential to challenge dominant conceptualizations and undesirable assumptions of complex social problems that are present in welfare practices and policies.     

Learning language regimes: Children's representations of minority language education

Minority language education initiatives often aim to resist dominant language regimes and to raise the social status of migrant or autochthonous minorities. We consider how participating children experience these alternative language regimes by analysing drawings made by children in two minority education settings—a Slovene‐German bilingual school in Austria and an Isthmus Zapotec (Indigenous) language and art workshop in Mexico. We examine how children's drawings represent language regimes in the social spaces they inhabit. Considering these drawings in relation to ethnographic observations and interviews with educators, we illustrate differences between how the social spaces are planned by educators and how they are represented and experienced by learners. Generally speaking, the children in our studies depict flexible, multilingual experiences and spaces, in contrast to the educators’ agendas of separating or emphasizing languages for pedagogical purposes. Mexican children's perception of themselves as participants in fluid language regimes, and Austrian children's increasing appropriation of multilingual space over time through both (school‐like) routines and (fun) exceptions can inform the efforts of minority language educators.     

On multivariate smoothed bootstrap consistency

This paper deals with the convergence in Mallows metric for classical multivariate kernel distribution function estimators. We prove the convergence in Mallows metric of a locally orientated kernel smooth estimator belonging to the class of sample smoothing estimators. The consistency follows for the smoothed bootstrap for regular functions of the marginal means. Two simple simulation studies show how the smoothed versions of the bootstrap give better results than the classical technique.     

Linear censored quantile regression: A novel minimum-distance approach

In this article, we investigate a new procedure for the estimation of a linear quantile regression with possibly right-censored responses. Contrary to the main literature on the subject, we propose in this context to circumvent the formulation of conditional quantiles through the so-called “check” loss function that stems from the influential work of Koenker and Bassett (1978). Instead, our suggestion is here to estimate the quantile coefficients by minimizing an alternative measure of distance. In fact, our approach could be qualified as a generalization in a parametric regression framework of the technique consisting in inverting the conditional distribution of the response given the covariates. This is motivated by the knowledge that the main literature for censored data already relies on some nonparametric conditional distribution estimation as well. The ideas of effective dimension reduction are then exploited in order to accommodate for higher dimensional settings as well in this context. Extensive numerical results then suggest that such an approach provides a strongly competitive procedure to the classical approaches based on the check function, in fact both for complete and censored observations. From a theoretical prospect, both consistency and asymptotic normality of the proposed estimator for linear regression are obtained under classical regularity conditions. As a by-product, several asymptotic results on some “double-kernel” version of the conditional Kaplan–Meier distribution estimator based on effective dimension reduction, and its corresponding density estimator, are also obtained and may be of interest on their own. A brief application of our procedure to quasar data then serves to further highlight the relevance of the latter for quantile regression estimation with censored data.     

基于DEA方法的中国商业银行综合效率的研究

根据数据包络方法(DEA)的非阿基米德模无穷小C2R模型,结合中国大陆商业银行的投入和产出的特点,建立了综合考虑银行盈利能力与风险控制能力的投入产出指标体系和中国商业银行综合效率的评价模型.基于4家国有独资银行样本、14家国有银行和股份制银行的混合样本两种情况,分别评测出了各家银行综合效率值.给出了低效率银行的人员数、固定资产净值、营业支出,所有者权益、机构个数等投入的冗余率和营业收入、新增存款总额、新增贷款总额、资本收益率、不良贷款率等指标的产出不足率.论文的创新和特色一是运用不良贷款率反映银行产出的质量,改变了现有研究忽略贷款质量差异的弊端.二是通过定量分析找出具体银行效率不高的真正原因,有针对性地提出了提高银行效率的宏观对策和具体对策.三把14家国有银行与股份制银行合并起来进行评价和比较,又显示出了两种银行组织方式下银行间的真实差距.     

IT企业技术员工离职意图路径模型实证研究

本文以来自西安15家IT公司的470名技术员工为样本,采用OLS回归分析对Price离职意图路径模型进行了实证研究。研究主要发现:该模型能够较好地解释本研究样本的离职意图;单调性对工作满意度的影响受到单调性相应价值观的调节作用,分配公平性和晋升机会对组织承诺度的影响受到这两个变量相应价值观的调节作用;组织承诺度、工作满意度、工作寻找行为、机会、工作投入度、期望匹配度、积极情感、职业成长度、晋升机会和工作单调性等十个变量被辨识为离职意图的主要决定量。