Educating...for what?: Creativity and Resilience

Higgins School of the Humanities/Difficult Dialogues: Video Recording from 12/1/2011 event featuring Katja Esson, Li- Young Lee and Alison Granucci titled "Creativity and Resilience" Event Description: To be creative is one of life’s most engaging and satisfying experiences. Can we insure that students trust those capacities and processes in themselves, and develop reliable paths toward them? Can we encourage the cultivation of the imagination in our students, as well as the resilience to weather discouragement, whether in their creative search or other aspects of life? Our guests for a conversation on creativity and resilience are filmmaker Katja Esson, poet Li-Young Lee, and co-producer Alison Granucci. They are collaborators on the new film Poetry of Resilience.

Can outcome prediction data change patient outcomes and organizational outcomes?

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Intensive care medicine consumes a high share of healthcare costs, and there is growing pressure to use the scarce resources efficiently. Accordingly, organizational issues and quality management have become an important focus of interest in recent years. Here, we will review current concepts of how outcome data can be used to identify areas requiring action. RECENT FINDINGS: Using recently established models of outcome assessment, wide variability between individual ICUs is found, both with respect to outcome and resource use. Such variability implies that there are large differences in patient care processes not only within the ICU but also in pre-ICU and post-ICU care. Indeed, measures to improve the patient process in the ICU (including care of the critically ill, patient safety, and management of the ICU) have been presented in a number of recently published papers. SUMMARY: Outcome assessment models provide an important framework for benchmarking. They may help the individual ICU to spot appropriate fields of action, plan and initiate quality improvement projects, and monitor the consequences of such activity.

Knowledge Exchange in Intra-Organizational Innovation Communities: The Role of Cognitive and Affective States

Many aspects in the area of designing platforms for intra-organizational innovation communities are not well understood. In this article, we examine the impact of technologically induced psychological factors on knowledge exchange in such communities. Using two experimental pretest-posttest experiments, we find that the implementation of (i) technologically induced self-efficacy (expressed by a ‘hurray’ message) and (ii) technologically induced positive affect (expressed by playing some 30 seconds of rock-‘n’-roll music) in the design of the platform results in an influential increase of knowledge exchange. Importantly, the studies suggest that the integration of technologically induced self-efficacy leads to a higher extent of knowledge exchange than technologically induced positive affect. The implications of these results for future research and practice as well as for the design of a platform for such communities are discussed.

Faking or Convincing: Why Do Some Advertising Campaigns Win Creativity Awards?

Since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was passed in 2002, it has become commonplace in the advertising industry to use creativity-award-show prizes instead of gross income figures to attract new customers. Therefore, achieving a top creativity ranking and winning creativity awards have become high priorities in the advertising industry. Agencies and marketers have always wondered what elements in the advertising creation process would lead to the winning of creativity awards. Although this debate has been dominated by pure speculation about the success of different routines, approaches and strategies in winning creativity awards, for the first time our study delivers an empirical insight into the key drivers of creativity award success. We investigate what strategies and which elements of an advertising campaign are truly likely to lead to winning the maximum number of creativity awards. Using a sample of 108 campaigns, we identify factors that influence campaign success at international advertising award shows. We identify innovativeness and the integration of multiple channels as the key drivers of creativity award success. In contrast to industry beliefs, meaningful or personally connecting approaches do not seem to generate a significant benefit in terms of winning creativity awards. Finally, our data suggest that the use of so-called “fake campaigns” to win more creativity awards does not prove to be effective.

I shouldn't have to do this: Illegitimate tasks as a stressor in relation to organizational control and resource deficits

The performance of tasks that are perceived as unnecessary or unreasonable, illegitimate tasks, represents a new stressor concept that refers to assignments that violate the norms associated with the role requirements of professional work. Research has shown that illegitimate tasks are associated with stress and counterproductive work behaviour. The purpose of this study was to provide insight into the contribution of characteristics of the organization on the prevalence of illegitimate tasks in the work of frontline and middle managers. Using the Bern Illegitimate Task Scale (BITS) in a sample of 440 local government operations managers in 28 different organizations in Sweden, this study supports the theoretical assumptions that illegitimate tasks are positively related to stress and negatively related to satisfaction with work performance. Results further show that 10% of the variance in illegitimate tasks can be attributed to the organization where the managers work. Multilevel referential analysis showed that the more the organization was characterized by competition for resources between units, unfair and arbitrary resource allocation and obscure decisional structure, the more illegitimate tasks managers reported. These results should be valuable for strategic-level management since they indicate that illegitimate tasks can be counteracted by means of the organization of work.