The influence of internal communication on employee engagement: A pilot study

Internal communication is an important concept and integral to internal public relations with links to positive organizational and employee outcomes such as employee engagement. While scholars emphasize the importance of the relationship between internal communication and employee engagement, the association has not been empirically tested. Using surveys and regression analysis this study confirms that internal organizational communication and internal supervisor communication support workplace relationships based on meaning and worth, and have a significant part to play in developing and maintaining optimal employee engagement.

Religion and life satisfaction: Evidence from Germany

We examined the association between religious involvement and life satisfaction using data drawn from the 2003, 2007, and 2011 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel. Our study provides evidence of an association between attendance at religious services and life satisfaction for respondents residing in West Germany. While social networks partially mediate this relationship for West Germany, there appears to be a remaining direct impact of attendance on life satisfaction. On the contrary, we find no evidence of an association between attendance at religious services and life satisfaction for respondents residing in East Germany.

Supervised latent dirichlet allocation models for efficient activity representation

Local spatio-temporal features with a Bag-of-visual words model is a popular approach used in human action recognition. Bag-of-features methods suffer from several challenges such as extracting appropriate appearance and motion features from videos, converting extracted features appropriate for classification and designing a suitable classification framework. In this paper we address the problem of efficiently representing the extracted features for classification to improve the overall performance. We introduce two generative supervised topic models, maximum entropy discrimination LDA (MedLDA) and class- specific simplex LDA (css-LDA), to encode the raw features suitable for discriminative SVM based classification. Unsupervised LDA models disconnect topic discovery from the classification task, hence yield poor results compared to the baseline Bag-of-words framework. On the other hand supervised LDA techniques learn the topic structure by considering the class labels and improve the recognition accuracy significantly. MedLDA maximizes likelihood and within class margins using max-margin techniques and yields a sparse highly discriminative topic structure; while in css-LDA separate class specific topics are learned instead of common set of topics across the entire dataset. In our representation first topics are learned and then each video is represented as a topic proportion vector, i.e. it can be comparable to a histogram of topics. Finally SVM classification is done on the learned topic proportion vector. We demonstrate the efficiency of the above two representation techniques through the experiments carried out in two popular datasets. Experimental results demonstrate significantly improved performance compared to the baseline Bag-of-features framework which uses kmeans to construct histogram of words from the feature vectors.

Racism, Representation and Photography

Representation of Aborigines by Aborigines and non -Aborigines; articles by Andrew Dewdney, Mervyn Biship, Alana Harris, Sandy Edwards, Rea Saunders, Ricky Maynard , Brenda Croft, Ruth Braunstein, Michael Riley, Huw Davies, Penny Taylor, Darlene McKenzie, Kurt Brereton and Eric Michaels, annotated separately.

Achieving service quality through service innovation exploration-exploitation: The critical role of employee empowerment and slack resources

Purpose This study investigates the effects of service innovation exploration-exploitation on financial performance through the delivery of quality services. Additional emphasis is also given to examining the extent to which employee empowerment and slack resources enhance or suppress the performance benefits of service firms engaging in service innovation exploration versus exploitation. Design/methodology/approach Data were drawn from a multi-informant survey of service firms using a drop-and-collect approach. The survey gathered data from managers, customer service employees and customers to test the hypotheses. Findings The results show that excelling at both exploitative and exploratory innovation helps enhance the quality of services, which in turn yield superior financial performance. Further, empowering employees enhances the relationship between exploratory and exploitative service innovation and service quality. We also show that the extent managers’ perceived their market to be competitive influences in the pursuit of high levels of both service innovation exploration and exploitation and that this relationship is impacted by the extent they believe they have available slack resources. Practical implications The findings suggest that service firms need to pursue both exploitation and exploration at high levels simultaneously and empower their employees to stay ahead of competitors in delivering quality services, which ultimately contribute to the achievement of superior financial outcomes. Also, the findings highlight the importance of employee empowerment, market competitiveness and slack resources in the pursuit of high levels of both service innovation exploration and exploitation. Originality/value These findings and our theory indicate that this study is the first to empirically examine organizational ambidexterity in the context of service innovation exploration – exploitation adopting the principles of combined and balanced innovation. The study provides insights into the critical role of customers’ perceptions of service quality in contributing to firms’ financial performance. Our insights are unique in that the study incorporates managers, employees and customers in an integrated service innovation model.

Employee perceptions of alcohol and drug policy effectiveness: Policy features, concerns about drug testing, and the key role of preventative measures

As negative employee attitudes towards alcohol and other drug (AOD) policies may have serious consequences for organizations, the present study examined demographic and attitudinal dimensions leading to employees’ perceptions of AOD policy effectiveness. Survey responses were obtained from 147 employees in an Australian agricultural organization. Three dimensions of attitudes towards AOD policies were examined: knowledge of policy features, attitudes towards testing, and preventative measures such as job design and organizational involvement in community health. Demographic differences were identified, with males and blue-collar employees reporting significantly more negative attitudes towards the AOD policy. Attitude dimensions were stronger predictors of perceptions of policy effectiveness than demographics, and the strongest predictor was preventative measures. This suggests that organizations should do more than design adequate and fair AOD policies, and take a more holistic approach to AOD impairment by engaging in workplace design to reduce AOD use and promote a consistent health message to employees and the community.

Representation and authenticity of historic landscapes in Australia and China

Histories of past communities are embedded in landscapes around the world but many are suffering from material change or neglect of their fabric. This study was aimed at discovering and representing the authentic intangible experience of two historic landscapes for conservation purposes. A 2500 year old site in Yangzhou, China and a 2000 year old site on St Helena Island in Moreton Bay were found to be managed under two culturally different regimes of authenticity. This research has contributed to challenging the notion that there is only one way to conserve authenticity in historic landscapes of the Asia Pacific.

How does enterprise social media help retail employees innovate?

An increasing number of organizations have installed enterprise social media (ESM) platforms to allow employees to collaborate, work independently, and to innovate more easily. While research has started to explain how such technologies can lead to improved collaboration and productivity, their role in assisting employees in innovation processes remains unclear. In our research-in-progress we examine the case of a global retail organization that adopted ESM for all employees with the view to foster employee-driven innovation. We report on our on-going data collection and analysis, in which we focus on the salient mechanisms and contingency factors why ESM under some conditions facilitates employee-driven innovation and why under some conditions it does not. We report on on-going data collection, data analysis strategies and emergent findings, and conclude with a brief outlook on our future research strategies.

Fatal consequences: An analysis of the failed employee voice system at the Bundaberg Hospital

In this paper we discuss the failure of the employee voice system at the Bundaberg Base Hospital (BBH) in Australia. Surgeon Jayant Patel was arrested over the deaths of patients on whom he operated when he was the director of surgery at the hospital. Our interest is in the reasons the established employee voice mechanisms failed when employees attempted to bring serious issues to the attention of managers. Our data is based on an analysis of the sworn testimonies of participants who participated in two inquiries concerning these events. An analysis of the events with a particular focus on the failings of the voice system is presented. We ask the following: how and why did the voice systems in the case of the BBH fail?

External knowledge and query strategies in active learning: A study in clinical information extraction

This paper presents a new active learning query strategy for information extraction, called Domain Knowledge Informativeness (DKI). Active learning is often used to reduce the amount of annotation effort required to obtain training data for machine learning algorithms. A key component of an active learning approach is the query strategy, which is used to iteratively select samples for annotation. Knowledge resources have been used in information extraction as a means to derive additional features for sample representation. DKI is, however, the first query strategy that exploits such resources to inform sample selection. To evaluate the merits of DKI, in particular with respect to the reduction in annotation effort that the new query strategy allows to achieve, we conduct a comprehensive empirical comparison of active learning query strategies for information extraction within the clinical domain. The clinical domain was chosen for this work because of the availability of extensive structured knowledge resources which have often been exploited for feature generation. In addition, the clinical domain offers a compelling use case for active learning because of the necessary high costs and hurdles associated with obtaining annotations in this domain. Our experimental findings demonstrated that 1) amongst existing query strategies, the ones based on the classification model’s confidence are a better choice for clinical data as they perform equally well with a much lighter computational load, and 2) significant reductions in annotation effort are achievable by exploiting knowledge resources within active learning query strategies, with up to 14% less tokens and concepts to manually annotate than with state-of-the-art query strategies.

Mirror neurons, the representation of word meaning, and the foot of the third left frontal convolution

Previous neuroimaging research has attempted to demonstrate a preferential involvement of the human mirror neuron system (MNS) in the comprehension of effector-related action word (verb) meanings. These studies have assumed that Broca's area (or Brodmann's area 44) is the homologue of a monkey premotor area (F5) containing mouth and hand mirror neurons, and that action word meanings are shared with the mirror system due to a proposed link between speech and gestural communication. In an fMRI experiment, we investigated whether Broca's area shows mirror activity solely for effectors implicated in the MNS. Next, we examined the responses of empirically determined mirror areas during a language perception task comprising effector-specific action words, unrelated words and nonwords. We found overlapping activity for observation and execution of actions with all effectors studied, i.e., including the foot, despite there being no evidence of foot mirror neurons in the monkey or human brain. These "mirror" areas showed equivalent responses for action words, unrelated words and nonwords, with all of these stimuli showing increased responses relative to visual character strings. Our results support alternative explanations attributing mirror activity in Broca's area to covert verbalisation or hierarchical linearisation, and provide no evidence that the MNS makes a preferential contribution to comprehending action word meanings.

A longitudinal study of employee adaptation to organizational change: The role of change-related information and change-related self-efficacy

This study examined the role of information, efficacy, and 3 stressors in predicting adjustment to organizational change. Participants were 589 government employees undergoing an 18-month process of regionalization. To examine if the predictor variables had long-term effects on adjustment, the authors assessed psychological well-being, client engagement, and job satisfaction again at a 2-year follow-up. At Time 1, there was evidence to suggest that information was indirectly related to psychological well-being, client engagement, and job satisfaction, via its positive relationship to efficacy. There also was evidence to suggest that efficacy was related to reduced stress appraisals, thereby heightening client engagement. Last, there was consistent support for the stress-buffering role of Time 1 self-efficacy in the prediction of Time 2 job satisfaction.