O processo de aprendizagem organizacional no âmbito de programas de qualidade

As constantes mudanças no ambiente exigem das empresas uma capacidade de adaptação para a sobrevivência, aliada à necessidade de expandir a capacidade criativa. Desta forma, existe a necessidade de identificar como as organizações aprendem e como é possível oportunizar essa aprendizagem. A presente dissertação tem por objetivo identificar e analisar se e como ocorrem os processos de Aprendizagem Organizacional no âmbito de programas de qualidade premiados pelo Programa Gaúcho de Qualidade e Produtividade (PGQP). Os elementos referenciais de Aprendizagem Organizacional (AO) identificados na literatura associados com o atendimento aos critérios exigidos pelo PGQP, permitiram esta análise. Foi realizada uma pesquisa em duas empresas que receberam o Troféu Prata nesse programa. A pesquisa caracterizou-se como um estudo de caso múltiplo, envolvendo na coleta de dados entrevistas e os relatórios do PGQP de 1999 até 2002. Foram realizadas entrevistas semiestruturadas com vinte e oito executivos das diversas áreas, coordenadores da qualidade e analistas envolvidos nos principais processos da empresa. O resultado dos levantamentos efetuados e a identificação de ocorrência de Aprendizagem Organizacional envolvem os critérios: liderança, planejamento estratégico, foco no cliente e no mercado, informação e análise, gestão de pessoas, gestão de processos, e resultados da organização. Constatou-se que existem diferentes processos de AO nas empresas que possuem programas de qualidade. Identificou-se que é fator relevante para a ocorrência de que as metodologias aplicadas provoquem o questionamento dos insights e que sejam sistemáticas e entendidas por toda a organização. Na maioria dos temas avaliados nos critérios do PGQP, o processo de aprendizagem pressupõe tempo para que seus resultados sejam identificados. As empresas que incentivam a troca de conhecimento e possuem pessoal qualificado tendem a assumir características de aprendizagem organizacional com maior facilidade. Assim, esse estudo contribui para a busca da eficácia no s processos de mudança das empresas, no caso, os programas de qualidade.

Processo de estratégia : um estudo de caso em uma empresa fabricante de equipamentos de telecomunicações

A pesquisa sobre o processo de estratégia busca responder questões complexas de como as estratégias são formadas, executadas e modificadas, capturando a complexa e dinâmica relação entre o conteúdo da estratégia e seu contexto de utilização. Apesar da vasta literatura existente, relativamente pouco se sabe sobre como os processos afetam de fato a estratégia, tornando o trabalho em processo de estratégia mais sobre processos que estratégia. Este trabalho visa contribuir no conhecimento da estratégia empresarial, utilizando a estratégia como prática como maneira de observar no campo o fenômeno do processo de estratégia e explorando as práticas de estratégia na organização. Esta pesquisa se baseia num estudo de caso único exploratório em uma empresa fabricante de equipamentos de telecomunicações, líder global em tecnologia nos segmentos onde atua, identificando as mudanças no processo de estratégia ocorridas após a troca de CEO e seus resultados observados nas práticas da estratégia. São investigadas algumas das mudanças estratégicas ocorridas: realinhamento das soluções para novos negócios, foco em conteúdo para as redes celulares para captura de valor e internacionalização. São utilizadas algumas informações de mercado de instituições internacionais relevantes sobre o crescimento da internet, infra-estrutura de comunicações e mobilidade. Da academia, foram aproveitados conceitos para ampliar o entendimento do contexto e análise do ambiente externo a organização: economia da informação, internet e custos de transação, cadeia de valor e teoria dos jogos e velocidade evolutiva da indústria; e ambiente interno: estratégia, sua formação e prática, planejamento estratégico, valor da inovação nos negócios, internacionalização e influência da estrutura. Analisando-se o conjunto acima, observou-se o aumento da importância do tema da estratégia e de sua complexidade nas indústrias relacionadas de alguma forma com a internet, sugerindo, por exemplo, interpretações alternativas no relacionamento entre a estratégia e a estrutura organizacional.

Essays on incentives, procurement and regulation

Esta tese é composta de três artigos. No primeiro artigo, "Simple Contracts under Simultaneous Adverse Selection and Moral Hazard", é considerado um problema de principal-agente sob a presença simultânea dos problemas de risco moral e seleção adversa, em que a dimensão de seleção adversa se dá sobre as distribuições de probabilidade condicionais as ações do agente. No segundo artigo, "Public-Private Partnerships in the Presence of Adverse Selection" é analisada a otimalidade de parcerias público-privadas sob a presença de seleção adversa. No terceiro artigo, "Regulation Under Stock Market Information Disclosure", por sua vez, é considerado o problema da regulação de firmas de capital aberto, onde as firmas possuem incentivos para mandar sinais opostos para o regulador e o mercado.

Can a great resume hurt? Gender and contrast effects on recruiting

Recruiters make many inferences about applicants' abilities and interpersonal attributes on the basis of applicants' resumes. For example, every once in a while, a good resume leaves a strong positive impression and the recruiter creates a high expectation for the selection interview. What if a disappointing interview follows? Will the great resume help or hurt the candidate? The purpose of this study is to assess the impact of a good resume on the recruiter’s evaluation of a candidate when a non-enthusiastic interview follows as well as the interacting role of gender. The results of two online experiments (n=454) where participants played the role of the recruiter, showed that, on average, a very good resume (vs. no resume) before a non-enthusiastic interview did not affect the recruiter’s evaluation of the candidate. However, when the recruiter’s and the candidate’s gender were taken into consideration, a different picture emerged. While no effect was found for male recruiters, the candidate’s resume had a clear significant impact on female recruiter’s evaluations: when the candidate was also a female, the good resume shown before the non-enthusiastic interview performance tended to help, whereas when the candidate was a male, the good resume had a significant negative effect on female recruiters’ evaluation of the candidate. In sum, in situations where the resume had a strong impact on the recruiter’s evaluation (female recruiters), the direction of the effect was moderated by the candidate’s gender. Gender differences in information processing as well as in-group/out-group biases due to gender matching are used to hypothesize and explain the main findings.

Overconfidence and confirmation bias: are future managers vulnerable?

Decision makers often use ‘rules of thumb’, or heuristics, to help them handling decision situations (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979b). Those cognitive shortcuts are taken by the brain to cope with complexity and time limitation of decisions, by reducing the burden of information processing (Hodgkinson et al, 1999; Newell and Simon, 1972). Although crucial for decision-making, heuristics come at the cost of occasionally sending us off course, that is, make us fall into judgment traps (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974). Over fifty years of psychological research has shown that heuristics can lead to systematic errors, or biases, in decision-making. This study focuses on two particularly impactful biases to decision-making – the overconfidence and confirmation biases. A specific group – top management school students and recent graduates - were subject to classic experiments to measure their level of susceptibility to those biases. This population is bound to take decision positions at companies, and eventually make decisions that will impact not only their companies but society at large. The results show that this population is strongly biased by overconfidence, but less so to the confirmation bias. No significant relationship between the level of susceptibility to the overconfidence and to the confirmation bias was found.

Neuronal Assembly Detection and Cell Membership Specification by Principal Component Analysis

LOPES-DOS-SANTOS, V. , CONDE-OCAZIONEZ, S. ; NICOLELIS, M. A. L. , RIBEIRO, S. T. , TORT, A. B. L. . Neuronal assembly detection and cell membership specification by principal component analysis. Plos One, v. 6, p. e20996, 2011.

Selective Coupling between Theta Phase and Neocortical Fast Gamma Oscillations during REM-Sleep in Mice

TORT, A. B. L. ; SCHEFFER-TEIXEIRA, R ; Souza, B.C. ; DRAGUHN, A. ; BRANKACK, J. . Theta-associated high-frequency oscillations (110-160 Hz) in the hippocampus and neocortex. Progress in Neurobiology , v. 100, p. 1-14, 2013.

Slow Oscillations in the Mouse Hippocampus Entrained by Nasal Respiration

Different types of network oscillations occur in different behavioral, cognitive, or vigilance states. The rodent hippocampus expresses prominentoscillations atfrequencies between 4 and 12Hz,which are superimposed by phase-coupledoscillations (30 –100Hz).These patterns entrain multineuronal activity over large distances and have been implicated in sensory information processing and memory formation. Here we report a new type of oscillation at near- frequencies (2– 4 Hz) in the hippocampus of urethane-anesthetized mice. The rhythm is highly coherent with nasal respiration and with rhythmic field potentials in the olfactory bulb: hence, we called it hippocampal respiration-induced oscillations. Despite the similarity in frequency range, several features distinguish this pattern from locally generatedoscillations: hippocampal respiration-induced oscillations have a unique laminar amplitude profile, are resistant to atropine, couple differentlytooscillations, and are abolished when nasal airflow is bypassed bytracheotomy. Hippocampal neurons are entrained by both the respiration-induced rhythm and concurrent oscillations, suggesting a direct interaction between endogenous activity in the hippocampus and nasal respiratory inputs. Our results demonstrate that nasal respiration strongly modulates hippocampal network activity in mice, providing a long-range synchronizing signal between olfactory and hippocampal networks.

Implementação e avaliação de máquinas de comitê em um ambiente com múltiplos processadores embarcados em um único chip

The number of applications based on embedded systems grows significantly every year, even with the fact that embedded systems have restrictions, and simple processing units, the performance of these has improved every day. However the complexity of applications also increase, a better performance will always be necessary. So even such advances, there are cases, which an embedded system with a single unit of processing is not sufficient to achieve the information processing in real time. To improve the performance of these systems, an implementation with parallel processing can be used in more complex applications that require high performance. The idea is to move beyond applications that already use embedded systems, exploring the use of a set of units processing working together to implement an intelligent algorithm. The number of existing works in the areas of parallel processing, systems intelligent and embedded systems is wide. However works that link these three areas to solve any problem are reduced. In this context, this work aimed to use tools available for FPGA architectures, to develop a platform with multiple processors to use in pattern classification with artificial neural networks

Escalabilidade Paralela de um Algoritmo de Migração Reversa no Tempo (RTM) Pré-empilhamento

The seismic method is of extreme importance in geophysics. Mainly associated with oil exploration, this line of research focuses most of all investment in this area. The acquisition, processing and interpretation of seismic data are the parts that instantiate a seismic study. Seismic processing in particular is focused on the imaging that represents the geological structures in subsurface. Seismic processing has evolved significantly in recent decades due to the demands of the oil industry, and also due to the technological advances of hardware that achieved higher storage and digital information processing capabilities, which enabled the development of more sophisticated processing algorithms such as the ones that use of parallel architectures. One of the most important steps in seismic processing is imaging. Migration of seismic data is one of the techniques used for imaging, with the goal of obtaining a seismic section image that represents the geological structures the most accurately and faithfully as possible. The result of migration is a 2D or 3D image which it is possible to identify faults and salt domes among other structures of interest, such as potential hydrocarbon reservoirs. However, a migration fulfilled with quality and accuracy may be a long time consuming process, due to the mathematical algorithm heuristics and the extensive amount of data inputs and outputs involved in this process, which may take days, weeks and even months of uninterrupted execution on the supercomputers, representing large computational and financial costs, that could derail the implementation of these methods. Aiming at performance improvement, this work conducted the core parallelization of a Reverse Time Migration (RTM) algorithm, using the parallel programming model Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP), due to the large computational effort required by this migration technique. Furthermore, analyzes such as speedup, efficiency were performed, and ultimately, the identification of the algorithmic scalability degree with respect to the technological advancement expected by future processors

Análise de escalabilidade de uma implementação paralela do simulated annealing acoplado

This paper analyzes the performance of a parallel implementation of Coupled Simulated Annealing (CSA) for the unconstrained optimization of continuous variables problems. Parallel processing is an efficient form of information processing with emphasis on exploration of simultaneous events in the execution of software. It arises primarily due to high computational performance demands, and the difficulty in increasing the speed of a single processing core. Despite multicore processors being easily found nowadays, several algorithms are not yet suitable for running on parallel architectures. The algorithm is characterized by a group of Simulated Annealing (SA) optimizers working together on refining the solution. Each SA optimizer runs on a single thread executed by different processors. In the analysis of parallel performance and scalability, these metrics were investigated: the execution time; the speedup of the algorithm with respect to increasing the number of processors; and the efficient use of processing elements with respect to the increasing size of the treated problem. Furthermore, the quality of the final solution was verified. For the study, this paper proposes a parallel version of CSA and its equivalent serial version. Both algorithms were analysed on 14 benchmark functions. For each of these functions, the CSA is evaluated using 2-24 optimizers. The results obtained are shown and discussed observing the analysis of the metrics. The conclusions of the paper characterize the CSA as a good parallel algorithm, both in the quality of the solutions and the parallel scalability and parallel efficiency