Management Structure and Work Team Processes; Responsibilities and Responsiveness

This paper explores the management structure of the team-based organization. First it provides a theoretical model of structures and processes of work teams. The structure determines the team’s responsibilities in terms of authority and expertise about specific regulation tasks. The responsiveness of teams to these responsibilities are the processes of teamwork, in terms of three dimensions, indicating to what extent teams indeed use the space provided to them. The research question that this paper addresses is to what extent the position of responsibilities in the team-based organization affect team responsiveness. This is done by two hypotheses. First, the effect of the so-called proximity of regulation tasks is tested. It is expected that the responsibility for tasks positioned higher in the organization (i.e. further from the team) generally has a negative effect on team responsiveness, whereas tasks positioned lower in the organization (i.e. closer to the team) will have a positive effect on the way in which teams respond. Second, the relationship between the number of tasks for which the team is responsible with team responsiveness is tested. Theory suggests that teams being responsible for a larger number of tasks perform better, i.e. show higher responsiveness. These hypotheses are tested by a study of 109 production teams in the automotive industry. The results show that, as the theory predicts, increasing numbers of responsibilities have positive effects on team responsiveness. However, the delegation of expertise to teams seems to be the most important predictor of responsiveness. Also, not all regulation tasks show to have effects on team responsiveness. Most tasks do not show to have any significant effect at all. A number of tasks affects team responsiveness positively, when their responsibility is positioned lower in the organization, but also a number of tasks affects team responsiveness positively when located higher in the organization, i.e. further from the teams in the production. The results indicate that more attention can be paid to the distribution of responsibilities, in particular expertise, to teams. Indeed delegating more expertise improve team responsiveness, however some tasks might be located better at higher organizational levels, indicating that there are limitations to what responsibilities teams can handle.

Efeito de eventos naturais na qualidade do ar - avaliação dos métodos de identificação

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia do Ambiente - Sistemas Ambientais

Late Quaternary warm marine mollusks from Santa Maria (Azores); paleoecologic and paleobiogeographic considerations

The sub-fossil fauna from the Late Quaternary marine deposits of Santa Maria is made of more than 50 species of gastropods and bivalves, 19 of them collected recently and for the first time in the northern coast of the island (Lagoinhas Bay). The sub-fossil shells are found in deposits of beach sands, situated 2-3 meters above the present low tide. The carbonated sands from the basal part of the succession yield an autochthonous association of borers dominated by the bivalve Myoforceps aristata (Dillwin, 1817). Upwards, the marine sands contain concentrations of beach drift shells, including well-preserved supratidal and intertidal gastropods, among them a large number of Rissoidae. The bivalve fauna is dominated by disarticulated valves of Ervilia castanea (Montagu, 1803), a small infaunal coloniser of mobile sandy substrates. The composition of the fauna is made essentially of West European species, many of them common to the West Coast of Portugal. However, a few "warm guests" with West African or Caribbean affinities were also found, suggesting a close relation with some of the "Tyrrhenian" warm associations found in the Western Mediterranean.

Cravo de Pascal Taskin (1782): caracterização material da policromia exterior

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Conservação e Restauro, Especialização em Ciências da Conservação

The scramble for the seas : the ballad evidence of Sir Andrew Barton

The presence and importance of the sea as a factor that has helped shape the history of England since at least the Roman invasions of 55-54 BC (less successful, incidentally, than most of Caesar’s other military ventures ...) need no particular urging or demonstration. Nonetheless, a bird’s-eye view would necessarily survey the waves of invasions and settlements that, one after the other, came dashing over the centuries upon England’s shores; not to mention the requested invasion of 1688, Angles and Saxons, Scandinavians, Normans, they all crossed the whale’s path and cast anchor in England’s green and pleasant land. In the course of this retrospective voyage through the oceans of History, one would inevitably stop at the so-called ‘Discoveries’ of the 15th-16th centuries, meet their navigators, sailors and pirates extolled by Richard Hakluyt (1553?-1616), face an anonymous crowd of merchants and witness the huge expansion of trade, largely to the benefit of the ‘discovering’ countries as prescribed by the economic Gospel Adam Smith (1723-90) would later baptize as “mercantilism”.