Search results

To describe some research done, as part of an EPSRC funded project, to assist engineers working together on collaborative tasks.

Distributed finite state modelling and agent techniques are used successfully in a new hybrid self‐organising decision making system applied to collaborative work support. For the particular application, analysis of the tasks involved has been performed and these tasks are modelled. The system then employs a novel generic agent model, where task and domain knowledge are isolated from the support system, which provides relevant information to the engineers.

The method is applied in the despatch of transmission commands within the control room of The National Grid Company Plc (NGC) – tasks are completed significantly faster when the system is utilised.

The paper describes a generic approach and it would be interesting to investigate how well it works in other applications.

Although only one application has been studied, the methodology could equally be applied to a general class of cooperative work environments.

One key part of the work is the novel generic agent model that enables the task and domain knowledge, which are application specific, to be isolated from the support system, and hence allows the method to be applied in other domains.

Social support from fellow team members has been neglected as a unique source of process gains in teams. This paper seeks to introduce the Model of Social Support within Teams (MSST) that explicates testable hypotheses on effects of team partners' affective and task‐related support on team performance.

A theoretical model is proposed that specifies the psychological mechanisms by which affective and task‐related support from fellow team members evoke process gains in teams compared with individual work. Moreover, moderators and potential limits of these beneficial effects are described. The model integrates results from experimental research on behaviour in small groups with findings from field studies on organisational citizenship behaviour, team cognition, and efficacy beliefs at the individual and team level.

It is predicted that affective support predominantly increases individual members' motivation, while task‐related support predominantly improves coordination within teams. Moreover, various moderators (team members' dispositions, task design, team characteristics) are considered.

According to this analysis, social support can be an effective measure to trigger process gains in teams, and thus to increase team performance and organisational success. Concrete interventions to foster social support in teams are derived from the model, among them task design, consideration of social attitudes in selection and staffing, and team training.

This paper introduces a theoretical model explicating a previously neglected source of process gains in teams. In contrast with other sources of process gains, social support relates to the interaction among team members and integrates both motivation and coordination gains.

This paper examines the role of knowledge management and knowledge management systems for supporting knowledge work. In a work environment, knowledge is always situated in a specific context, so an organization benefits from a knowledge management system when such a system is focused on a specific task. Providing support for knowledge work at the task level complements the work practices of actors performing the task. The paper suggests that knowledge management systems can be implemented as intelligent decision support that establishes a joint cognitive process between the system and the actor performing the task. The proposed approach has been derived from our application of a knowledge management framework to a number of field studies. These applications come from various domains and highlight different aspects of the proposed framework. The focus on task performance, as a driving force for knowledge management, unifies these field studies. The paper identifies the issues that emerge from these studies and describes their contribution to the development of the framework. The paper concludes that by privileging knowledge work, task‐based knowledge management can be an effective knowledge management strategy.

The ubiquity of smartphones has changed how people communicate, work and entertain. In view of conservation of resources theory and the positive spillover effect, this study explores the effect of non-work-related instant messaging (IM) in the workplace on daily task performance.

The authors use the experience sampling method to collect day-level data from 75 employees over a period of 10 workdays. Multilevel path analysis is used to test the hypotheses.

Non-work-related IM exerts a significant negative indirect effect on daily task performance through diminished cognitive engagement. This negative indirect effect disappears when social support is high, thereby showing the function of social support as a neutralizer of the detriment of non-work-related IM on daily task performance.

The findings suggest that organizations can neutralize the harm of non-work-related IM in the workplace by promoting social support perceived by employees.

This study advances the technology and management literature by developing and testing a balanced perspective on the ambivalent effect of workplace smartphone use that considers social and cognitive resource implications.

This paper aims to investigate how to promote two types of knowledge contribution tasks. The authors focus on the role of supervisor and coworker support on motivation, and their effects on two different contribution tasks. Motivating employees to contribute knowledge is quite challenging. While previous studies have tried to understand how to promote knowledge contribution, few have differentiated between knowledge contribution tasks.

Information technology support was chosen as the context of this study, and data were collected from system administrators within a Fortune 500 company via a web-based survey.

Results show the differential effects of two forms of motivation on different contribution tasks, and supervisor support is positively associated with intrinsic motivation. Specifically, while intrinsic motivation is positively associated with challenging knowledge contribution, external motivation is positively related to mundane knowledge contribution and negatively related to challenging knowledge contribution.

This study contributes to the current literature by providing a deeper theoretical understanding of knowledge contribution tasks, and contributes to practice by offering suggestions on how to better motivate employees within organizations and promote different knowledge contribution tasks.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of an employee’s consideration of future consequences (CFCs) in predicting employee task performance and its situational contexts (i.e. organizational support and supervisor support) based on trait activation theory.

Using a cross-sectional field study design, data were collected from 189 employees and their immediate supervisors in South Korea.

Hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that employees’ CFC has a positive effect on their task performance. Furthermore, this study investigated whether this relationship would be varied by relevant situational factors. Consistent with the hypotheses, the relevance of CFC to employees’ task performance would be stronger when they perceive low levels of organizational support based on trait activation theory.

The findings suggest the importance of employees’ CFC on task performance. Also, organizations should pay more attention to the way of compensating for employees with low levels of CFC by fostering supportive environment.

Although researchers have been examined long-term perspectives in the business field, a few studies have examined its effect at the individual level. This paper identified not only the main effect of CFC on employee task performance but also the moderating role of organizational support on the aforementioned relationship.

This study aims to examine the moderating role played by leaders' task and relations support in the relationship between transformational leadership and followers' level of creativity.

A sample of 182 supervisor‐subordinate dyads was randomly collected and returned from a restaurant, hotel, retail store, bank, and travel agent of Hong Kong.

Results indicated that the positive relationship between transformational leadership and followers' creativity is stronger when there is a high degree of leaders' task and relations support.

This study extends the leadership literature to better understand the effects of transformational leadership on employees' level of creativity are contingent on the nature of leaders' support. Sample size is a possible limitation.

Intensive training can be provided to supervisors or personality test can be used to screen for selected individuals who are high caliber for being a potential transformational leader.

An empirical examination of how leaders' task and relations support can strengthen the positive link between transformational leadership and employees' level of creativity that previously have been overlooked.

This study aims to examine how changes in power disparity shape in-groups and upper-level management conflict are associated with intragroup relationship and task conflict variations. It also examines how workplace conflicts relate to focal employees’ perceptions of coworker support.

Data were collected from 3,343 respondents for nine years, comprising measurements taken on six occasions in 47 departments and stores of a Canadian retailer. The relationships between, within and across levels were tested using multilevel structural equation modeling.

The results showed that higher levels of power concentration vested by a few members or a single person are associated wih higher levels of intragroup conflict than usual. Furthermore, higher levels of task and relationship conflicts at upper management levels are associated with higher-than-usual task and relationship conflicts between nonhierarchical employees. Additionally, a higher-than-usual intragroup task conflict level was associated with lower-than-usual coworker support, supporting the proposed multilevel dynamic model.

An important limitation of this study is that all variables are self-reported despite using the six-wave repeated measurements, thereby increasing the possibility of inflating some observed relationships. Future research should examine the emergence of a larger spectrum of power dispersion configurations and their role on process conflict.

Retail managers should legitimize why a high-power concentration occurs when the equal distribution of power is not possible and find ways to minimize the trickle-down effects of conflicts at upper levels on their subordinates.

This study examines the effect of variability on power configurations and conflict in upper management ranks on conflict dynamic. The findings show that a high-power concentration elicits increasing conflicts, and that there is no empirical evidence that intragroup conflict is associated with positive outcomes.

International assignments are an effective tool to develop employees' cultural competencies, yet expatriate failure rates remain high. This paper aims to examine salient stakeholders' (i.e. organisations, host country nationals (HCNs) and spouses) support as antecedents of expatriates' work adjustment and task performance. It also explores work adjustment as a mediator between support and task performance.

Adopting the quantitative approach, survey data were collected from 112 expatriates who were married and based in organisations in Malaysia. Partial least squares-structural equation modelling was employed to analyse the data.

The findings validate the direct influences of perceived organisational support (POS) on work adjustment, HCN support on work adjustment, and spousal support on task performance. The indirect effect of HCN support on task performance through work adjustment was also established. When expatriates' work adjustment improves as a result of receiving HCN support, their task performance is enhanced.

This study evidences that expatriate-hiring firms should provide suitable support for expatriates when they work overseas. Local employees and spouses should likewise be tasked to help expatriates maximise their full potential in achieving successful performance in their assignments.

The contribution of this study is the exploration of the relationships between support, work adjustment and task performance among expatriates. It also adds to the limited knowledge on the role of specific stakeholders in the expatriate context.

This paper aims to provide evidence that online well-designed educational tasks can provide more relevant and richer active learning environment for business English learners. The benefits of online tasks, as an education tool, became more apparent and gained more importance during the events related to the Covid-19 pandemic. The task design is based on task-based interactions and in a sequence of tasks with the support of an online learning management system (LMS). The findings suggest that online task-based learning (and would-be blended learning in the future) enables meaningful and authentic activities promoting interactions and communicative competences to prepare for learners of business English to enter the workplace.

The overarching aim of the study is to explore how task-design-utilizing online LMS could contribute to enhancing the learning process and to the development of the learner's communicative competences. The study included two aspects, namely: (1) the design of online tasks and (2) pilot evaluation. The task design involved tasks that required interactions between the learners. The pilot evaluation relied on data collection via questionnaires.

Two aspects relating to the findings: (1) a description of the teaching initiatives which was designed to see how blended learning and online tasks can enhance learning and develop the skills of the learners: with questioning techniques targeting communication skills, simulated workplace situations and timely feedback and peer influence; (2) the findings of the pilot study evaluation to see the actual implementation of online tasks. The students' responses corroborate the teachers' comments. The findings of this research showed that LMS tasks, which were designed for this study, helped the learners to enhance their competence in business English. Such competences included communicative skills needed for learners to enter the workplace such as interpersonal skills, presentation skills and negotiation skills in contexts. These findings lead to significant recommendations regarding the way forward for developing active blended learning.

Firstly, teachers need to be trained and involved in designing such online tasks and materials to be used in active blended learning. More training in language teaching methodologies should be investigated to adapt the transition from a traditional to a computer-assisted language learning teacher. This helps teachers to design and implement online simulated workplace tasks. Secondly, time for the use of online tasks should be allocated satisfactorily. This can be achieved by building online learning sessions into class schedule or developing active blended courses. The time for the use of online simulated tasks should be allocated satisfactorily with lab or simulation room, in which students would be shown how to access the online tasks designed on the university LMS and the way to practice with different kinds of tasks.

In this study context, the online tasks design can initiate at activity-level blending to support face-to-face (F2F) activities, for example, online activities to support tasks for the topic Make a request or Offer for help. This can be extended to course-level blending when more online activities are designed to use with F2F activities such as online comparing and contrasting tasks to develop skills in connections with the awareness of cultures. The findings of the research suggest to develop and to implement online tasks alongside with classroom learning and teaching to enable the objectives of business English programme at university for preparing learners to enter the workplace. The recent pandemic highlighted the need for effective methodologies for active blended learning. It is now required that professionals in higher education to collect evidence base to inform future practice of such methodologies. Further significant research efforts should be directed towards collecting such evidence of the effectiveness and improvements of such methods. The support of higher education management professionals in securing funding for such research will be essential.