The Role of Awareness in Designing Human Resources Management Practices in Family Firms

The chapter aims to develop a theoretical configurational model of HRM practices for family firms based on the construct of awareness. The typology of ideal HRM practices configurations the authors developed grounds on are 1) two organizational factors (awareness of the internal and external environment and organizational awareness) and 2) two dimensions of organizational awareness (the need for explicit and implicit coordination mechanisms). The first dimension refers to the need for mechanisms explicitly adopted by a family firm to manage task or communication interdependencies. The second one relates to those requirements for mechanisms that are available to family firms from shared cognition, which enable them to explain and anticipate task statuses and individuals' collaborative behaviors, thus helping them in managing task interdependencies. The authors combined these results in four configurations of HRM practices (administrative, shared, professional, and integrated configurations) and developed seven propositions.

The Role of Awareness in Designing Human Resources Management Practices in Family Firms

The chapter aims to develop a theoretical configurational model of HRM practices for family firms based on the construct of awareness. The typology of ideal HRM practices configurations the authors developed grounds on are 1) two organizational factors (awareness of the internal and external environment and organizational awareness) and 2) two dimensions of organizational awareness (the need for explicit and implicit coordination mechanisms). The first dimension refers to the need for mechanisms explicitly adopted by a family firm to manage task or communication interdependencies. The second one relates to those requirements for mechanisms that are available to family firms from shared cognition, which enable them to explain and anticipate task statuses and individuals' collaborative behaviors, thus helping them in managing task interdependencies. The authors combined these results in four configurations of HRM practices (administrative, shared, professional, and integrated configurations) and developed seven propositions.

DEL-based Epistemic Planning for Human-Robot Collaboration: Theory and Implementation

Epistemic planning based on Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) allows agents to reason and plan from the perspective of other agents. The framework of DEL-based epistemic planning thereby has the potential to represent significant aspects of Theory of Mind in autonomous robots, and to provide a foundation for human-robot collaboration in which coordination is achieved implicitly through perspective shifts. In this paper, we build on previous work in epistemic planning with implicit coordination. We introduce a new notion of indistinguishability between epistemic states based on bisimulation, and provide a novel partition refinement algorithm for computing unique representatives of sets of indistinguishable states. We provide an algorithm for computing implicitly coordinated plans using these new constructs, embed it in a perceive-plan-act agent loop, and implement it on a robot. The planning algorithm is benchmarked against an existing epistemic planning algorithm, and the robotic implementation is demonstrated on human-robot collaboration scenarios requiring implicit coordination.

Implicit coordination for 3D underwater collective behaviors in a fish-inspired robot swarm

Many fish species gather by the thousands and swim in harmony with seemingly no effort. Large schools display a range of impressive collective behaviors, from simple shoaling to collective migration and from basic predator evasion to dynamic maneuvers such as bait balls and flash expansion. A wealth of experimental and theoretical work has shown that these complex three-dimensional (3D) behaviors can arise from visual observations of nearby neighbors, without explicit communication. By contrast, most underwater robot collectives rely on centralized, above-water, explicit communication and, as a result, exhibit limited coordination complexity. Here, we demonstrate 3D collective behaviors with a swarm of fish-inspired miniature underwater robots that use only implicit communication mediated through the production and sensing of blue light. We show that complex and dynamic 3D collective behaviors—synchrony, dispersion/aggregation, dynamic circle formation, and search-capture—can be achieved by sensing minimal, noisy impressions of neighbors, without any centralized intervention. Our results provide insights into the power of implicit coordination and are of interest for future underwater robots that display collective capabilities on par with fish schools for applications such as environmental monitoring and search in coral reefs and coastal environments.

A 3D underwater robotic collective called Blueswarm

A swarm of agile fish-robots uses vision-based implicit coordination to demonstrate self-organizing behaviors in a laboratory tank.

Activating the Benefit of Diversity Through Team Role Clarity and Implicit Coordination

Over the last several decades, studies on the relationship between task knowledge diversity and team performance have yielded mixed findings. Extending past studies, we propose that the impact of task knowledge diversity on team performance is dependent on the level of team role clarity and implicit coordination. This study, based on two-wave time-lagged data from 62 teams comprising 336 individuals, provided support for the proposed model and showed that team role clarity and implicit coordination moderate the relationship between task knowledge diversity and team performance. Overall, task knowledge diversity has a positive effect on team performance when either team role clarity or implicit coordination is high, and this effect is even stronger when both are high.