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This paper analyzes how two (or more) controllers can interact with just one controlled system. This is a basic situation in biology and sociology, but was practically never investigated. Control theory usually investigates only the interaction of one controller with one controlled system, i.e. how a goal‐orientated system can dominate a niche.

All factors determining the behavior of two feedback systems acting upon just one controlled system are analyzed systematically.

The analysis shows that there are just three possibilities of interaction, i.e. conflict, hierarchy or cooperation. With the well‐known domination of a niche, this gives just four modes of coexistence for goal‐orientated systems. It is shown how these modes of coexistence surface in psychology, group dynamics and politics, but has been studied so far under totally different headings.

Repeated patterns of shifts in power relations can be explained by distinguishing two power cycles. Both lead to hierarchies – either to forcefully end conflict or to peacefully ensure cooperation – which bear in them the source for future conflict. Additionally the investigation allows to identify unsolvable conflicts.

The paper shows how a cybernetic analysis of decision making allows to find a unifying approach to different concepts in psychology, group dynamics and politics. Such it provides elements for a cybernetic epistemology.

This chapter integrates the motivation phenomenon of goal hierarchy and equifinality into the employee resilience conceptualization to highlight adaptive manifestations of resilience to failure at work. Experienced failure offers an important context to consider adaptive resilience, as failure may offer feedback that pre-failure strategies will not lead to higher-level goal accomplishment; making lower-level goal changes critical for success. This chapter offers a fine-gained presentation of what employee resilience does (and does not entail), to address current concerns about: (a) a lack of agreement concerning what “positive adaptation” means; and (b) potential dangers in the unknowing encouragement of maladaptive resilience after failure (e.g., harms to employee well-being and success). Here, goal revision or abandonment at a lower-level of one’s goal hierarchy, as opposed to higher-level goal abandonment, is presented as a form of adaptive employee resilience. This change places the focus of employee resilience on perseverance toward big picture goals, rather than traits or outcomes associated with perseverance; which helps to further distinguish resilience from related concepts, antecedents, and outcomes. This conceptual clarity is useful in furthering the nomological network development of resilience, and better equips researchers and practitioners for assessing and promoting adaptive resilient responses to failure.

The paper seeks to put together cybernetics principles determining the possibilities of interaction between two or more goal‐oriented systems to show that they are determining the patterns of societal organization, too.

Goal‐orientation and decision‐rules, as found in simple feedback systems, and Ashby's Law of requisite variety are repeatedly applied to investigate the cybernetic possibilities for the interaction and organization of goal‐oriented systems.

The interaction of goal‐oriented systems can lead directly to conflict, cooperation or hierarchy. Out of conflict and cooperation there is a further tendency to develop hierarchies. And in a diversifying environment a hierarchical higher system can grow, get suppressive or perish. It is shown how all this abstract cybernetic reasoning applies to societal organization, too: laws follow the form of decision‐rules of feedback systems. Institutions making laws have to define the elements of such decision‐rules. And societal organization processes for solving conflicts face exactly the options derived from the interaction of goal‐oriented systems.

The goals and the goal‐oriented decisions pursued by a “system” like a person or an institution, are identified as the most important cybernetic determinants to explain seemingly complex phenomena like societal organization.

The paper shows that just a few cybernetics principles determining the possibilities of interaction between two or more goal‐oriented systems suffice to analyze and explain processes of societal differentiation and organization.

The purpose of this paper is to: (1) better understand the structure (hierarchy) of customer goals providing conceptual clarity; and (2) propose a hierarchy of customer goals conceptual framework that explicates how healthcare customer goals are linked to drivers and outcomes, thus building theory and informing practice.

The research draws on 21 in-depth interviews of patients with a chronic disease. Drawing principally on construal-level theory and using manual thematic analysis and Leximancer, this article provides new insights into customer goals.

In a first, the authors identify a two-dimensional structure for each of the three main goal types, which previously had been viewed as unidimensional. The authors develop a conceptual framework linking drivers of goal setting (promotion/prevention focus world view and perceived role) with goal type (life goals, focal goals and action plan goals and their respective subgoals) and outcomes (four forms of subjective well-being). Visual concept maps illustrate the relative importance of certain health-related goals over others.

The usefulness of the authors’ conceptual framework is demonstrated through the application of their framework to goal setting among healthcare customers, showing links between the structure of goals (life goals, focal goals and action plan goals) to drivers (promotion/prevention focus world view and perceived role) and outcomes (subjective well-being) and the framework's potential application to other service settings.

This study contributes to healthcare marketing and service management literature by providing new insights into goal setting and proposing a novel hierarchy of customer goals conceptual framework linking drivers, goal types and outcomes.

Introduced into the literature a decade ago, grit originally defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals has stimulated considerable research on positive effects primarily in the academic and military contexts, as well as attracted widespread media attention. Despite recent criticism regarding grit’s construct and criterion-related validity, research on grit has begun to spill over into the work context as well. In this chapter, the authors provide an overview of the initial theoretical foundations of grit as a motivational driver, and present newer conceptualizations on the mechanisms of grit’s positive effects rooted in goal-setting theory. Furthermore, the authors also draw attention to existing shortcomings of the current definition and measurement of grit, and their implications for its scientific and practical application. After establishing a theoretical understanding, the authors discuss the potential utility of grit for human resource management, related to staffing and recruitment, development and training, and performance management systems as well as performance evaluations. The authors conclude this chapter with a discussion of necessary and potential future research, and consider the practical implications of grit in its current state.

This study aims to investigate the extent to which franchisees are satisfied with the attainment of their personal goals in business. Although franchising continues to be exploited in the business sector, research and studies of franchising were scarcely mentioned in the organizational literature. Obviously, franchising as a body of knowledge has been studied mostly from the franchisor’s perspective than on franchisees. Within franchisee literature, studies on people’s motivation to become a franchisee have received some attention and provided little understanding, but no study has ever measured to what extent franchisees are satisfied with their personal goals in the business.

To investigate the hypotheses, a positivist approach is chosen as the philosophical foundation of this study, and all methodological aspects related with this approach are used in this study. A total of 204 franchisee entrepreneurs in Malaysia were surveyed and answered self-administered questionnaires.

In general, statistical analysis suggests franchisees were satisfied with their goals attainments. However, further analysis shows that franchisees were mostly satisfied with intrinsic rewards goals, followed by perceived autonomy goals and family concern goals. Surprisingly, franchisees have less satisfaction with economic gain goals comparatively with other goals. Moreover, based on the conceptual analysis and empirical evidence, hierarchy of economic goals and hierarchy of family goals are discovered. Besides, this study does suggest that franchisees’ sustainability in the business may be affected by attainment of their personal goals.

This paper studies franchising from a franchisee’s perspective and from a non-Western perspective. It investigates whether franchisee entrepreneurs share similar goals compared with other types of entrepreneurs and to what extent franchisees are satisfied with their personal goal attainment in the business.

From an administrative perspective, Canada as a nation has been generally in a “state of drift.” With the exception of the anti‐inflation program, efforts made by the government during recent years have provided little in the way of specific direction. For example, The Way Ahead, a discussion paper on the future of Canada, fails to outline clearly “the economic and social directions the government intends to take after controls end” or to provide definitive “principles and strategies.” Passing references are made to national unity, balanced growth without inflation, individual freedom and opportunity, and the government's commitment to its fundamental social goals. Implicitly, these “goals” are for “a society in which all Canadians can develop their potential to the fullest degree possible, a society in which justice, compassion, tolerance and understanding lead to a strong and united Canada, a society based upon individual initiative and marked by personal freedom.”

The purpose of the paper is to present Privacy Safeguard (PriS) a formal security requirements engineering methodology which, incorporates privacy requirements in the system design process and to demonstrate its applicability in an e‐voting case.

PriS provides a methodological framework for addressing privacy‐related issues during system development. It provides a set of concepts for formally expressing privacy requirements (authentication, authorisation, identification, data protection, anonymity, pseudonymity, unlinkability and unobservability) and a systematic way‐of‐working for translating these requirements into system models. The main activities of the PriS way‐of‐working are: elicit privacy‐related goals, analyse the impact of privacy goals on processes, model affected processes using privacy process patterns and identify the technique(s) that best support/implement the above‐process patterns.

Analysis of a number of well known privacy‐enhancing technologies, as well as of existing security requirement engineering methodologies, pinpoints the gap between system design methodologies and technological solutions. To this end, PriS provides an integrated approach for matching privacy‐related requirements to proper implementation techniques. Experimentation with the e‐voting case suggests that PriS has a high degree of applicability on internet systems that wish to provide services that ensure users privacy, such as anonymous browsing, untraceable transactions, etc.

The paper proposes a new methodology for addressing privacy requirements during the design process. Instead of prescribing a single solution, PriS guides developers to choose the most appropriate implementation techniques for realizing the identified privacy issues. In addition, due to its formal definition it facilitates control of the accuracy and precision of the results and enables the development of automated tools for assisting its application.

In recent years, it has become evident that self-regulation plays a central role in human functioning, including learning and achievement in school. Although there are different definitions of self-regulation, there is general consensus that it refers to a multi-component, iterative, self-steering process that targets one's own cognitions, feelings, and actions, as well as features of the environment for modulation in the service of one's own goals (Boekaerts, Maes, & Karoly, 2005). Educational psychologists agree that learning in the classroom involves cognitive and affective processing and is heavily influenced by social processes. This implies that students should be able and willing to regulate their cognitions, motivation, and emotions, as well as to adapt to the social context in order to facilitate their learning. Yet, there is at present neither a uniformly accepted definition of self-regulation nor that of self-regulated learning. Most theorists agree that self-regulation in the classroom is neither an all-or-none process nor a property of the learning system. Rather, it consists of multiple processes and components that interact in complex ways. Definitions have focused either on the structure of self-regulation, describing the different components of the self-regulation process, or on the processes that are involved.

Although existing research on cohesion provides a robust understanding of the emergent phenomenon in small groups and teams, our comprehension of cohesion at the multisystem (MTS) level is quite limited. The simultaneous within- and between-team functioning inherent in MTSs produces more intricate dynamics than those observed at the team level. This added layer of complexity requires that many familiar team constructs, including cohesion, be systematically re-conceptualized and empirically examined through the lens of MTS theory (DeChurch & Zaccaro, 2010; Hackman, 2003). The present research addresses this gap by extending the conceptualization of team cohesion to the interteam level, and empirically investigating how cohesion functions across levels in a collective network of teams. Results from preliminary research suggest that intrateam and interteam cohesion share a curvilinear relationship with one another, while simultaneously interacting to affect overall system-level outcomes. This research not only illuminates the complexities associated with emergent phenomena in MTSs, but also serves as a starting point for continued, systematic research of the multilevel cohesive bonds that characterize MTS functioning.