Work motivation as a determinant of organizational and professional commitment in case of temporary organizations : theoretical perspectives

The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical framework to investigate the relationship between work motivation, organizational commitment, and professional commitment in temporary organizations. Through a review of theory, we contend that work motivation has two major patterns- internal motivation (that includes intrinsic, need-based, and self-deterministic theories), and external motivation (that includes cognitive or process-based theories of motivation) through which it has been investigated. We also subsume the nature of employee commitment to be of three types- affective, continuance, and normative. This commitment may either be towards organization or profession. A literature review reveals that the characteristics of the temporary organization - specifically tenure, and task - regulate the relationship between work motivation, and organizational commitment, and professional commitment. Relevant propositions are presented.

Australian Learning and Teaching Council, Learning and Teaching Academic Standards Statement for Architecture

The development of the Learning and Teaching Academic Standards Statement for Architecture (the Statement) centred on requirements for the Master of Architecture and proceeded alongside similar developments in the building and construction discipline under the guidance and support of the Australian Deans of Built Environment and Design (ADBED). Through their representation of Australian architecture programs, ADBED have provided high-level leadership for the Learning and Teaching Academic Standards Project in Architecture (LTAS Architecture). The threshold learning outcomes (TLOs), the description of the nature and extent of the discipline, and accompanying notes were developed through wide consultation with the discipline and profession nationally. They have been considered and debated by ADBED on a number of occasions and have, in their fi nal form, been strongly endorsed by the Deans. ADBED formed the core of the Architecture Reference Group (chaired by an ADBED member) that drew together representatives of every peak organisation for the profession and discipline in Australia. The views of the architectural education community and profession have been provided both through individual submissions and the voices of a number of peak bodies. Over two hundred individuals from the practising profession, the academic workforce and the student cohort have worked together to build consensus about the capabilities expected of a graduate of an Australian Master of Architecture degree. It was critical from the outset that the Statement should embrace the wisdom of the greater ‘tribe’, should ensure that graduates of the Australian Master of Architecture were eligible for professional registration and, at the same time, should allow for scope and diversity in the shape of Australian architectural education. A consultation strategy adopted by the Discipline Scholar involved meetings and workshops in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane. Stakeholders from all jurisdictions and most universities participated in the early phases of consultation through a series of workshops that concluded late in October 2010. The Draft Architecture Standards Statement was formed from these early meetings and consultation in respect of that document continued through early 2011. This publication represents the outcomes of work to establish an agreed standards statement for the Master of Architecture. Significant further work remains to ensure the alignment of professional accreditation and recognition procedures with emerging regulatory frameworks cascading from the establishment of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA). The Australian architecture community hopes that mechanisms can be found to integrate TEQSA’s quality assurance purpose with well-established and understood systems of professional accreditation to ensure the good standing of Australian architectural education into the future. The work to build renewed and integrated quality assurance processes and to foster the interests of this project will continue, for at least the next eighteen months, under the auspices of Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC)-funded Architecture Discipline Network (ADN), led by ADBED and Queensland University of Technology. The Discipline Scholar gratefully acknowledges the generous contributions given by those in stakeholder communities to the formulation of the Statement. Professional and academic colleagues have travelled and gathered to shape the Standards Statement. Debate has been vigorous and spirited and the Statement is rich with the purpose, critical thinking and good judgement of the Australian architectural education community. The commitments made to the processes that have produced this Statement reflect a deep and abiding interest by the constituency in architectural education. This commitment bodes well for the vibrancy and productivity of the emergent Architecture Discipline Network (ADN). Endorsement, in writing, was received from the Australian Institute of Architects National Education Committee (AIA NEC): The National Education Committee (NEC) of the Australian Institute of Architects thank you for your work thus far in developing the Learning and Teaching Academic Standards for Architecture In particular, we acknowledge your close consultation with the NEC on the project along with a comprehensive cross-section of the professional and academic communities in architecture. The TLOs with the nuanced levels of capacities – to identify, develop, explain, demonstrate etc – are described at an appropriate level to be understood as minimum expectations for a Master of Architecture graduate. The Architects Accreditation Council of Australia (AACA) has noted: There is a clear correlation between the current processes for accreditation and what may be the procedures in the future following the current review. The requirement of the outcomes as outlined in the draft paper to demonstrate capability is an appropriate way of expressing the measure of whether the learning outcomes have been achieved. The measure of capability as described in the outcome statements is enhanced with explanatory descriptions in the accompanying notes.

School Leadership, Literacy and Social Justice : The Place of Local School Curriculum Planning and Reform

School reform is a matter of both redistributive social justice and recognitive social justice. Following Fraser (Justice interruptus: critical reflections on the “postsocialist” condition. Routledge, New York, 1997), we begin from a philosophical and political commitment to the more equitable redistribution of knowledge, credentials, competence, and capacity to children of low socioeconomic, cultural, and linguistic minority and Indigenous communities whose access, achievement, and participation historically have “lagged” behind system norms and benchmarks set by middle class and dominant culture communities. At the same time, we argue that the recognition of these students and their communities’ lifeworlds, knowledges, and experiences in the curriculum, in classroom teaching, and learning is both a means and an end: a means toward improved achievement measured conventionally and a goal for reform and alteration of mainstream curriculum knowledge and what is made to count in the school as valued cultural knowledge and practice. The work that we report here was based on an ongoing 4-year project where a team of university teacher educators/researchers have partnered with school leadership and staff to build relationships within community. The purpose has been to study whether and how engagement with new digital arts and multimodal literacies could have effects on students “conventional” print literacy achievement and, secondly, to study whether and how the overall performance of a school could be generated through a focus on professional conversations and partnerships in curriculum and instruction – rather than the top-down implementation of a predetermined pedagogical scheme, package, or approach.

An action research approach for the professional development of Vietnamese nurse educators

Nurse education in Viet Nam is undergoing substantial reform. In order to facilitate the change, in 2007 the Viet Nam Nurses Association formed a collaborative partnership with the School of Nursing and Midwifery at an Australia university. This collaboration gave rise to the Viet Nam Nursing Capacity Building Project under the leadership of Professor Genevieve Gray, funded by the Atlantic Philanthropies. The new four year competency based nursing curriculum frame is expected to be implemented in September 2011 following approval by the Viet Nam Ministry of Education. The focus of this paper is the Teaching Fellowships Program, an initiative of the Viet Nam Nursing Capacity Building Project, developed to help meet the challenges associated with leading and dealing with the curriculum change. The paper explores the development of the program and justifies an action research approach, illuminates key issues, and briefly refers to changes to the next fellowship program.

Leadership as dance : a consideration of the applicability of the ‘mother’ of all arts as the basis for establishing connoisseurship

This article follows the lead of several researchers who claim there is an urgent need to utilize insights from the arts, aesthetics and the humanities to expand our understanding of leadership. It endeavours to do this by exploring the metaphor of dance. It begins by critiquing current policy metaphors used in the leadership literature that present a narrow and functional view of leadership. It presents and discusses a conceptual model of leadership as dance that incorporates key dimensions such as context, dance and music and includes Polyani’s concept of connoisseurship. This article identifies some of the tensions that are inherent in both notions of dance and leadership. The final part of the article discusses the implications the model raises for broadening our understanding of leadership and school leadership preparation programmes. Three core implications raised here are (i) making space for alternative metaphors in leadership preparation programmes; (ii) providing opportunities to students of leadership to understand through alternative learning approaches and (iii) providing opportunities for engagement in alternative research agendas.

Regional and remote airports under stress in Australia

Australia's airline industry was born on connecting regional communities to major cities, but almost a century later, many regional and remote communities are facing the prospect of losing their air transport services. The focus of this paper is to highlight key issues and concerns surrounding remote, rural and regional airports in Australia using a network governance framework. Contributions are focused towards regional and remote airport managers, decision makers, and policy makers to stimulate further discussion towards retaining regional and remote services to communities.

New organisational leadership capabilities : transitional engineer the new designer?

Traditionally, design has been centred within the manufacturing and production areas of companies and or as a styling afterthought. Increasingly, design is viewed as a vital and important strategic business resource (Dell’Era, Marchesi & Verganti, 2010) and consequently companies worldwide look to design to help them innovate, differentiate and compete in the global marketplace. The role of the professional designer is evolving to a point where they are needed to work beyond being a specialist in the manufacturing and aesthetics of an artefact (Wrigley & Bucolo, 2011). This paper challenges the values held by academics and industry regarding the traditional role of designers in business. It investigates the emerging transitional engineering framework and puts forward a proposal for the next generation designer in the future era of design. Questions surrounding how designers will develop these new skills and how the Authors’ new framework of design led innovation can contribute to the future of design will be presented. This research is needed to better equip future designers to have a more central role in business.

Gaps in organizational leadership : linking strategic and operational activities through design-led propositions

The relationship between design process and business systems has been of interest to both practitioners and researchers exploring the numerous opportunities and challenges of this unlikely relationship. Often the relationship is presented as building design thinking capability within an organization, which can be broadly described as the union of design and strategy. Brown (2008) notes that design thinking is ‘‘a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technically feasible and what business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunities’’ (p. 1). The value that design thinking brings to an organization is a different way of framing situations and possibilities, doing things, and tackling problems: essentially a cultural transformation of the way it undertakes its business. The work of Martin (2009) has clearly shown the generalized differences between design thinking and business thinking, highlighting many instances in which these differences have been overcome, but also noting the many obstacles of trying to unify both approaches within an organization. Liedtka (2010) encourages firms to try and persist in overcoming these barriers, as she has noted that ‘‘business strategy desperately needs design ... because design is all about action and business strategy too often turns out to be only about talk ... fewer than 10 percent of new strategies are ever fully executed’’ (p. 9).

An integrated approach to professional development in secondary schools

Following the implementation of the National Professional Standards for Teachers, all teachers in Australia will be required to undertake 30 hours per year of professional development (PD) to maintain their registration. However, defining what constitutes effective PD is complex and often contested. This paper looks at a case study in Queensland, Australia, where a high school worked collaboratively with a university lecturer to deliver effective whole-school professional development. The lecturer acted as an external change agent, working closely with the principal and staff to build a relationship of trust and to develop a strategy for the delivery of PD on-site. This case highlights how partnerships between teachers and teacher educators combined with a willing school leader can provide positive opportunities for collaborative, sustainable, professional growth and learning.

The standard bearers : Governing teachers through professional standards

Teacher professional standards have become a key policy mechanism for the reform of teaching and education in recent years. While standards policies claim to improve the quality of teaching and learning in schools today, this paper argues that a disjunction exists between the stated intentions of such programmes and the intelligibility of the practices of government in which they are invested. To this effect, the paper conducts an analytics of government of the recently released National Professional Standards for Teachers (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2011) arguing that the explicit, calculated rationality of the programme exists within a wider field of effects. Such analysis has the critical consequence of calling into question the claims of the programmers themselves thus breaching the self-evidence on which the standards rest.

Development and testing of an iPad application for teaching self-management to heart failure patients. (Nursing/Allied Health Professional Investigator Award)- Abstract

Purpose: Heart failure (HF) is the leading cause of hospitalization and significant burden to the health care system in Australia. To reduce hospitalizations, multidisciplinary approaches and enhance self-management programs have been strongly advocated for HF patients globally. HF patients who can effectively manage their symptoms and adhere to complex medicine regimes will experience fewer hospitalizations. Research indicates that information technologies (IT) have a significant role in providing support to promote patients' self-management skills. The iPad utilizes user-friendly interfaces and to date an application for HF patient education has not been developed. This project aimed to develop the HF iPad teaching application in the way that would be engaging, interactive and simple to follow and usable for patients' carers and health care workers within both the hospital and community setting. Methods: The design for the development and evaluation of the application consisted of two action research cycles. Each cycle included 3 phases of testing and feedback from three groups comprising IT team, HF experts and patients. All patient education materials of the application were derived from national and international evidence based practice guidelines and patient self-care recommendations. Results: The iPad application has animated anatomy and physiology that simply and clearly teaches the concepts of the normal heart and the heart in failure. Patient Avatars throughout the application can be changed to reflect the sex and culture of the patient. There is voice-over presenting a script developed by the heart failure expert panel. Additional engagement processes included points of interaction throughout the application with touch screen responses and the ability of the patient to enter their weight and this data is secured and transferred to the clinic nurse and/or research data set. The application has been used independently, for instance, at home or using headphones in a clinic waiting room or most commonly to aid a nurse-led HF consultation. Conclusion: This project utilized iPad as an educational tool to standardize HF education from nurses who are not always heart failure specialists. Furthermore, study is currently ongoing to evaluate of the effectiveness of this tool on patient outcomes and to develop several specifically designed cultural adaptations [Hispanic (USA), Aboriginal (Australia), and Maori (New Zealand)].

From homepages to network profiles : balancing personal and social identity

The World Wide Web constitutes one of the most important inventions of the late 20th century: it has changed culture, society, business, communication, politics, and many other fields of human endeavour, not least also by providing a more user-friendly pathway of access to its major underlying technology, the Internet itself. Key phases in its development can be charted, especially by how it has been used to present and share information – and here, the personal or professional, private or official homepage stands in as a useful representation of wider Web trends overall. From hand-coded beginnings through several successive stages of experimentation and standardisation, to the shifting balance between personal sites and social networks, the homepage demonstrates how the Web itself, and its place in our lives, have changed.

Developing authentic professional knowledge through transformative community engagement in an interdisciplinary service learning project

This showcase presents a preliminary analysis of a community service learning project designed to align more authentically with contemporary society and emerging constructs of professional knowledge. As described in the paper, the project involves a multidisciplinary group of students working collaboratively with a community organisation to find creative presponses to challenging issues concerning the organisation's identity, how it interfaces with stakeholders, and how it evidences its inclusive practice. Of particular interest is how the interdisciplinary practice of the students within a service learning context encouraged reconsideration of their world0view and their rols as future professionals. Also highlighted is the need for greater congruence between the goals of the project and the structural elements of the curriculum.

Narcissistic and service-oriented leadership : contrasting perspectives

Leadership writing has tended to present a positive picture about leadership practice yet, in recent times, researchers have highlighted the ‘dark side’ of leadership. In this exploratory conceptual paper, we juxtapose two contrasting forms of leadership: narcissistic leadership and service-oriented leadership (that draws heavily upon servant leadership) in order to provide a better understanding of both of these forms. In particular, we explore four core constructs of leadership: service, power, role of followers, and morality, to provide a constrast. Given that little empirical works exists on narcissistic and servant leadership in educational contexts, the paper concludes by arguing for further research in the field.

Learning about being effective mentors : professional learning communities and mentoring

This study aimed to explore experienced mentors’ understandings about professional learning communities (PLCs), mentoring and leadership. This research analyses audio-taped transcripts and written responses from 27 experienced mentors who operate in varied roles (e.g., university academics, school executives, teachers, learning support personnel). Findings indicated that PLCs can provide professional renewal for existing teachers and that mentoring within PLCs can further advance knowledge about effective practices. PLCs can include other staff members and key stakeholders (e.g., preservice teachers, teacher aides) who can contribute to the learning within the group. Mentoring and PLCs can be cost-effective strategic levers for advancing professional knowledge.