The effects of conflict in driving forward innovation in shared leadership management consultant teams

It is argued in this study that current investigations of the role of conflict in shared leadership teams and, thus, teams in which all members have the opportunity to participate in its decision-making process are insufficient as they have focused on the downsides of these conflicts. This study demonstrates that task conflict is beneficial in that it can have positive effects on innovation in teams. It shows that particularly in shared leadership management consultant teams task conflict can stimulate innovation. Therefore, this research investigates the relationships among shared leadership, conflict and innovation. The research develops and empirically tests a conceptual model which demonstrates the relationships between these concepts and for which the inclusion of multiple research methods was essential. The sequential explanatory approach included a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, the order of which can be adapted for other domains of application. The conceptual model was first tested with a sample of 329 management consultants. This was followed by 25, in-depth, face-to-face interviews conducted with individual survey respondents. In addition, weekly meetings of a management consultant team in action were video recorded over several months. This allowed for an in-depth explanation of the findings from the survey by providing an understanding of the underlying processes. The inclusion of observational methods provided a validating role and explained how and why conflicts contributed to the development of team innovation, through the analysis of subtleties and fleeting disagreements in a real-life management consultant team. The results deliver an assessment of the theoretical model and demonstrate that task conflict can allow for additional innovation in management consultant teams operating under a shared leadership structure. A practical model and guidelines for management consultant teams wanting to enhance their innovatory capacities are provided. In addition, a novel-user methodology which includes video observations is developed, with recommendations and steps aiding researchers aiming to employ a similar combination of methods. An original contribution to knowledge is made regarding the positive effects that task conflict can have towards innovation in shared leadership teams. Collaboration and trust are identified as important mediators between shared leadership and task conflict and significant regarding the development of innovation. The effectiveness of shared leadership in reducing negative relationship conflict and the benefits of both shared leadership and task conflict in enhancing innovation are demonstrated.

An ethnographic investigation into gender and language in the Northern Ireland Assembly

This paper investigates the extent to which the negative evaluation of one of the women Ministers in the Northern Ireland Assembly can be attributed to gender. Interviews with politicians as well as the Minister herself illuminate this discussion by identifying the ‘gendered discourses’ that are drawn upon when describing the Minister’s communicative style in debates. Close analyses of transcripts of debates offer a description of some elements of this style, and find that while the Minister is confrontational in debates and ‘stands her ground’, she does not take part in illegal interventions that disrupt the debate floor and are characteristic of the Assembly as a whole. Although the construction of the Minister’s unpopularity can be attributed to a complex interplay of factors, it can be concluded that it is partly the way she draws on gendered linguistic resources that leads her to be negatively judged by her peers.

A case study in identifying acceptable bitrates for human face recognition tasks

Face recognition from images or video footage requires a certain level of recorded image quality. This paper derives acceptable bitrates (relating to levels of compression and consequently quality) of footage with human faces, using an industry implementation of the standard H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and the Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) recording systems on London buses. The London buses application is utilized as a case study for setting up a methodology and implementing suitable data analysis for face recognition from recorded footage, which has been degraded by compression. The majority of CCTV recorders on buses use a proprietary format based on the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding standard, exploiting both spatial and temporal redundancy. Low bitrates are favored in the CCTV industry for saving storage and transmission bandwidth, but they compromise the image usefulness of the recorded imagery. In this context, usefulness is determined by the presence of enough facial information remaining in the compressed image to allow a specialist to recognize a person. The investigation includes four steps: (1) Development of a video dataset representative of typical CCTV bus scenarios. (2) Selection and grouping of video scenes based on local (facial) and global (entire scene) content properties. (3) Psychophysical investigations to identify the key scenes, which are most affected by compression, using an industry implementation of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. (4) Testing of CCTV recording systems on buses with the key scenes and further psychophysical investigations. The results showed a dependency upon scene content properties. Very dark scenes and scenes with high levels of spatial–temporal busyness were the most challenging to compress, requiring higher bitrates to maintain useful information.

Example-Based Face Shape Recovery Using the Zenith Angle of the Surface Normal

We present a method for recovering facial shape using an image of a face and a reference model. The zenith angle of the surface normal is recovered directly from the intensities of the image. The azimuth angle of the reference model is then combined with the calculated zenith angle in order to get a new field of surface normals. After integration of the needle map, the recovered surface has the effect of mapped facial features over the reference model. Experiments demonstrate that for the lambertian case, surface recovery is achieved with high accuracy. For non-Lambertian cases, experiments suggest potential for face recognition applications.

Small farmers and sustainability: institutional barriers to investment and innovation in the Malaysian palm oil industry in Sabah

The Malaysian palm oil industry is well known for the social, environmental and sustainability challenges associated with its rapid growth over the past ten years. Technologies exist to reduce the conflict between national development aims of economic uplift for the rural poor, on the one hand, and ecological conservation, on the other hand, by raising yields and incomes from areas already under cultivation. But the uptake of these technologies has been slow, particularly in the smallholder sector. In this paper we explore the societal and institutional challenges that influence the investment and innovation decisions of micro and small enterprise (MSE) palm oil smallholders in Sabah, Malaysia. Based on interviews with 38 smallholders, we identify a number of factors that reduce the smallholders' propensity to invest in more sustainable practices. We discuss why more effective practices and innovations are not being adopted using the concepts of, firstly, institutional logics to explore the internal dynamics of smallholder production systems, including attitudes to sustainability and innovation; and, secondly, institutional context to explore the pressures the smallholders face, including problems of access to land, labour, capital, knowledge and technical resources. These factors include limited access to global market information, corruption and uncertainties of legal title, weak economic status and social exclusion. In discussing these factors we seek to contribute to wider theoretical debates about the factors that block innovation and investment in business improvements in marginal regions and in marginalised groups.