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Medical diagnosis and treatment processes exhibit a high degree of variability, as during the process execution, healthcare professionals can decide on additional steps, change the execution order or skip a task. Process models can help to document and to discuss such processes. However, depicting variability in graphical process models using standardized languages, such as Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), can lead to large and complicated diagrams that medical staff who do not have formal training in modeling languages have difficulty understanding. This study proposes a pattern-based process visualization that medical doctors can understand without extensive training. The process descriptions using this pattern-based visualization can later be transformed into formal business process models in languages such as BPMN.

The authors derived patterns for expressing variability in healthcare processes from the literature and medical guidelines. Then, the authors evaluated and revised these patterns based on interviews with physicians in a Danish hospital.

A set of business process variability patterns was proposed to express situations with variability in hospital treatment and diagnosis processes. The interviewed medical doctors could translate the patterns into their daily work practice, and the patterns were used to model a hospital process.

When communicating with medical personnel, the patterns can be used as building blocks for documenting and discussing variable processes.

The patterns can reduce complexity in process visualization. This study provides the first validation of these patterns in a hospital.

This paper aims to study the impact of intentionally developed communities of practice (CoPs) on knowledge sharing and practice improvement in an administrative public sector organisation (PSO).

A case study approach was used to analyse the impact of the CoPs intentionally developed by four different teams at a Danish PSO. The study applied a CoP development framework suggested by the literature to develop the CoPs.

Three out of the four CoPs were successfully developed, and they positively affected knowledge sharing and practice improvement. CoP participants engaged in conversations to explore individual ways of working, share knowledge and ultimately improve practice. Standardisation and boundary spanning were identified as contextual factors influencing the CoP activities.

The findings verify the framework and contribute to a better understanding of the factors affecting the development of CoPs that positively impact knowledge sharing and practice improvements in a PSO context.

The study provides operations managers in PSOs with a framework for developing CoPs to improve work performance through better knowledge sharing among employees.

The paper provides case study evidence for the relevance of CoPs in PSO settings and highlights the necessity of investing resources in employee knowledge-sharing interactions.

The aim of this paper is to explore how the involvement of workplace teams in experimenting with changes in their work practices through short, time-boxed, experiments (STBEs) can support organizational learning. It is explored how staffs’ experiences with experimental practices give rise to shared knowledge and how this is supported by the design of the STBE-procedure. Also explored is how the STBEs support knowledge retainment.

The study builds on the authors’ participation in a research and development project across seven financial enterprises in Denmark. Qualitative material was developed as part of the experiments. Theoretically emphasizing experience, knowledge creation through dialogue and knowledge retention, the material was analyzed, focusing on participants’ experiences and interactions, as well as on procedures.

The STBEs occasioned direct experience with new work practices for managers and employees. Supported by the STBE-procedure, these experiences generated new knowledge individually, collectively and on an organizational level. The procedure also created routines that can underpin the retainment of the new practices and knowledge related to incorporating it in the organization.

The study implicates experience with changes in work practices to be understood as predominantly mindful in opposition to simple, even when the changes appear to be simple.

The STBEs are applicable when working with organizational learning related to new work practices. Procedures supporting dialogue and mindful processes appear to be advantageous in relation to learning from experiments.

Based on an original research and development project and unique qualitative material, the study adds to discussions on how to best conduct and learn from experiments in organizations.

Most mass customization literature focuses on the move from mass production to mass customization. However, in some literature engineer‐to‐order (ETO) companies are also claiming to have become mass customizers, although it can be questioned if these companies conform to popular definitions of mass customizers. The purpose of this paper is to ask the question: under which conditions is it reasonable to label ETO companies as mass customizers?

First, definitions of mass customization are examined and related to ETO companies that move towards mass customization. Second, the individual transitions from mass production and ETO to mass customization are analyzed by: relating the transition to classifications from relevant literature; describing the motivations and risks associated with the transition; and defining some of the most important transition characteristics. Finally it is discussed if ETO companies can become mass customizers and under which conditions it would be reasonable to describe them as such.

The paper argues that from several angles it makes sense to label some ETO companies as mass customizers although the products are not at prices near mass produced ones.

To avoid dilution of the concept of mass customization, while not excluding ETO companies, it is suggested to start out with a broad definition of mass customization under which separate definitions of different kinds of mass customizers are created.

Although much has been written about mass customization, and ETO companies in much literature have been labeled as mass customizers, the essential discussion of under which conditions it is reasonable to label ETO companies as mass customizers has been missing.

After a thorough literature review on multinational learning, it is apparent organizations “learn” when they capitalize on expatriate management, a “learning strategy” (international work teams, employee involvement and other human resource policies), technology transfer and political environment and cross‐cultural adaptation. This suggests learning is possible when control mechanisms are relaxed or reduced, resulting in an ambiguous relationship between multinational learning and control. There has been no research on the relationship between learning and control largely due to this assumption of ambiguity and this paper attempts to overcome this gap by presenting a holistic approach to multinational learning and control. This paper posits that focusing on optimizing learning and control through flexible IHRM policies is a globally sustainable approach to MNE management. The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual framework designed to address two major issues in international management: organizational learning and managerial control.

Multinational organizations are often faced with a perceived ambiguous choice of promoting learning throughout the organization in a way that facilitates local adaptation of corporate knowledge, while maintaining control over subsidiary corporate culture (control). This paper presents a new model designed to facilitate a balanced approach to learning and control in the multinational enterprise.

The proposed model is one of sustainable management focusing on dynamic IHRM learning and control. The pillars of the proposed model thus include: National Culture, HRM policies and practices and IHRM strategies of the parent MNE; National Culture, locally developed HRM policies and practices, and transferred IHRM policies and practices in the affiliate unit; sharing of learning oriented IHRM policies and/or among MNE affiliates only; and global IHRM control and learning IHRM policies and practices (uniform across MNE units).

While the literature in this realm addresses these issues separately, managers are faced with a delicate balancing act of promoting learning among multinational units while maintaining corporate control over key aspects of the company's core competencies.

Bill Clinton is exemplary of a new conception of leadership appropriate for the 21st century. In spite of his sexual proclivities (for which he received harsh criticism and impeachment proceedings) Clinton’s physicality signals an end of a Gnostic view of leadership that separates the knowing head from the rest of the body. We propose that 20th century manifestations of leadership are no longer appropriate for this age, and we illustrate this idea with the ‘reality’ television series Undercover Boss. Further, by exploring artist Peter Robinson’s installation The End of the Twentieth Century we claim that Clinton’s call for inclusivity, a ‘both–and’ approach that characterizes his late- and post-Presidential rhetoric, opens possibilities for alternative constructs that place the body at the heart of leadership. Our exploration of Clinton’s physicality is through his speech to the APEC business leaders in 1999, his commentary on the movie documentary The Hunting of the President and his speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. In each of these he reaches out to his audiences through physical and verbal gestures. He pleads for tolerance and understanding so that people may find commonalities among their flaws and differences. Through enacting the physical ‘doing’ of leadership in these instances, Bill Clinton offers an exemplar of re-locating leadership within its physical context.

Incivility is widespread in the workplace and has been shown to have significant affective and behavioral consequences. However, the authors still have a limited understanding as to whether, how and when discrete incivility events impact team performance. Adopting a resource depletion perspective and focusing on the cognitive implications of such events, the authors introduce a multi-level model linking the adverse effects of such events on team members’ working memory – the “workbench” of the cognitive system where most planning, analyses, and management of goals occur – to team effectiveness. The model which the authors develop proposes that that uncivil interpersonal behavior in general, and rudeness – a central manifestation of incivility – in particular, may place a significant drain on individuals’ working memory capacity, affecting team effectiveness via its effects on individual performance and coordination-related team emergent states and action-phase processes. In the context of this model, the authors offer an overarching framework for making sense of disparate findings regarding how, why and when incivility affects performance outcomes at multiple levels. More specifically, the authors use this framework to: (a) suggest how individual-level cognitive impairment and weakened coordinative team processes may mediate these incivility-based effects, and (b) explain how event, context, and individual difference factors moderators may attenuate or exacerbate these cognition-mediated effects.

This study assessed the marital quality of older men and women in first marriages and remarriages, examining gender differences within first marriages and remarriages, and marriage order differences for men and women separately.

The study employed nationally representative survey data for 1,243 married adults, aged 62–91, from Wave II of the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), conducted in 2010–2011. Marital quality was assessed with six positive relationship dimensions and two negative ones.

Descriptive data revealed mean ratings above scale midpoints on all positive dimensions of marital quality, and mean ratings generally below the midpoints on the negative dimensions for men and women in both first marriages and remarriages. Multivariate analyses indicated an overall stronger influence of gender than marriage order on marital quality for this sample of older adults. In both first marriages and remarriages, men reported more favorable perceptions of marriage across several positive dimensions (e.g., emotional satisfaction, physical pleasure), though they also reported more spousal criticism than did women. Within gender groups, marriage order was not associated with any of the dimensions of marital quality that were assessed.

This study demonstrates that marriage order does not have a significant influence on the marital quality of older adults today, but that long-standing gender differences in marital quality hold across marriage order. These findings are critical given the increasingly diverse marital histories of individuals entering old age in the early 21st century, and the importance of a positive, supportive marriage for older adults’ well-being.