Maritime security cooperation within the ASEAN institutional framework: a gradual shift towards practical cooperation

How does ASEAN fare in addressing maritime security problems? This paper examines the shifting character of maritime security cooperation in Southeast Asia. In doing so, this paper looks at the outcomes of three maritime security-oriented fora that exist within the ASEAN regional framework: the ASEAN Regional Forum, the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting, and the ASEAN Maritime Forum. By compiling and analysing data on the forms and frequency of existing cooperative activities from 2003 gathered from publicly available sources, this paper finds that maritime security cooperation among ASEAN members continue to be largely dialogue-based, with few instances of practical cooperation. By comparing the three fora, this paper argues that the organisational design of these forums tends to affect the forms of cooperation. This paper concludes that despite ASEAN showing progress in adopting practical security cooperation, there remain hurdles in achieving regional maritime security.

Decision Support in Participatory Contexts

Organizing the participation of multiple stakeholders in decision processes is now a widespread request with a visible consequence being the expansion of the analyst's role from problem solver to facilitator of stakeholder interactions. Within this evolutionary movement, this article claims that an analyst creates the organisation through which the set of stakeholders involved in the decision process interact. This article also claims that the ability of this organisation to fit contextual requirements is of utmost importance for the success of an analyst's intervention. This article is organised to support these two claims. Firstly, it describes the terms of organisational design and the mechanisms through which it may influence the decision processes. Secondly, the authors review how these aspects are already discussed within OR/MS literature so as to highlight current limitations and future possibilities for greater investigation of the place and role of organizational design in OR/MS research and practice.

Structuring mental health support for frontline caregivers during COVID-19: lessons from organisational scholarship on unit-aligned support

BackgroundAlthough the COVID-19 pandemic exposes frontline caregivers to severe prolonged stresses and trauma, there has been little clarity on how healthcare organisations can structure support to address these mental health needs. This article translates organisational scholarship on professionals working in organisations to elucidate why traditional approaches to supporting employee mental health, which often ask employees to seek assistance from centralised resources that separate mental health personnel from frontline units, may be insufficient under crisis conditions. We identify a critical but often overlooked aspect of employee mental health support: how frontline professionals respond to mental health services. In high-risk, high-pressure fields, frontline professionals may perceive mental health support as coming at the expense of urgent frontline work goals (ie, patient care) and as clashing with their central professional identities (ie, as expert, self-reliant ironmen/women).FindingsTo address these pervasive goal and identity conflicts in professional organisations, we translate the results of a multiyear research study examining the US Army’s efforts to transform its mental health support during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We highlight parallels between providing support to frontline military units and frontline healthcare units during COVID-19 and surface implications for structuring mental health supports during a crisis. We describe how an intentional organisational design used by the US Army that assigned specific mental health personnel to frontline units helped to mitigate professional goal and identity conflicts by creating personalised relationships and contextualising mental health offerings.ConclusionAddressing frontline caregivers’ mental health needs is a vital part of health delivery organisations’ response to COVID-19, but without thoughtful organisational design, well-intentioned efforts may fall short. An approach that assigns individual mental health personnel to support specific frontline units may be particularly promising.

Organisational design and organisational effectiveness in Ecobank Nigeria Limited in Delta State

The study examines the organisational design and organisational effeciveness in Ecobank Nigeria Limited in Delta State. The instrument used for data collection wasorganisational design questionnaire and the data were analyzed using chi-square. The findings of the study revealed that there is a significant relationship betweenpoor technology, inappropriate organisational size and staff mix as well as poor responsive and adaptive organisational (internal) environment and organisational effectiveness in Ecobank Nigeria Limited in Delta state. The study recommended that organisation should increase the level of their technology, organisational size, staff mix as well as imbibing the culture and practice of anticipating, scanning, monitoring of internal and external environments with an eye to responding and adapting to appropriate changes and trends to actualize their organisationalset goals.