Transferring Knowledge by Transferring Individuals: Innovative Technology Use and Organizational Performance in Multiunit Firms

Transferring individuals who possess relevant knowledge from one organizational unit to another—a form of resource redeployment—may help to overcome impediments to knowledge transfer. Despite the promise of this mechanism, which often occurs through intrafirm geographic mobility, relatively little research has examined how the knowledge and expertise of individuals interacts with the organizational resources of the units to which individuals move. This study examines whether intrafirm geographic mobility improves organizational performance by providing a conduit for the transfer of knowledge while accounting for the interaction between individual knowledge and factors at the organization-unit level of analysis. We analyze the performance effects of the transfer of engineers who have expertise in innovative process technologies. The results from a large multinational company show that the innovative process technology-related expertise of an individual engineer who moves to a new organizational unit is positively associated with the performance of that unit, suggesting that intrafirm geographic mobility improves organizational performance by providing a conduit for the transfer of knowledge. The results also show that the technology-related knowledge of engineers is a substitute for organization-level factors when a unit uses only technologies with which it is already familiar, whereas the technology-related knowledge of engineers is a complement to organization-level factors when units introduce new technologies. Thus, individuals who bring novel expertise to their organizational units through intrafirm mobility may be important vehicles for organizational learning and building new competences, helping to diffuse best practices.

EMPLOYMENT IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT SOCIAL WELFARE UNITS AS A SOCIAL WORKER AND MANAGERIAL OFFICIAL POSITIONS IN THESE UNITS

The possibility of internal promotion to the position of the head of a local government organizational unit of social assistance requires the interpretation of the following provisions: Act of 21 November 2008 on local government employees, in particular art. 20 internal promotion, the Act of 12 March 2004 on social assistance, in particular art. 122 sec. 1 requirements for persons managing social assistance organizational units and the Regulation of the Council of Ministers of May 15, 2018 on remuneration of local government employees. Each of the aforementioned legal acts regulates other obligatory requirements that must be met in connection with internal promotion. Therefore, under the applicable law, the following should be indicated: the correctness of the internal promotion procedure; compliance with the statutory requirements in the field of seniority: 5 years of professional experience, 3 years of professional experience in social assistance; meeting the qualification requirement: university education, completed specialization in the organization of social assistance.

How Managerial Openness to Voice Shapes Internal Attraction: Evidence from UNITED STATES School Systems

In this study, the authors explore a heretofore unappreciated benefit of managerial openness to employee voice: internal attraction. Previous work has shown that managers who are more open to listening to employees receive valuable information and their units have higher relative retention levels. The authors explain and empirically demonstrate that managers who are more open to employee voice also more effectively attract workers from other units in their organizations. They describe how and why managerial openness to voice likely shapes the information that employees in a focal organizational unit (“employee insiders”) share with employees in other units (“employee outsiders”). They find that units with managers who are perceived as more open to voice are viewed as more attractive places to work. Conducting two field studies in separate US school districts, the authors find that managerial openness to voice positively predicts a work unit’s attractiveness among employees who work in other areas of the organization. They discuss the implications of their findings for organizations in general and school districts specifically.

The Concept of Employer and the Extension of the Subjective (Ratione Personae) Scope of Collective Labour Law

In accordance with the changes in the provisions of the collective labour law in force since January 1, 2019, an employer within their meaning is also an organizational unit without civil law subjectivity, if it employs work contractors engaged in paid work engaged in paid work other than employees. This leads to the dualism of the notion and legal construction of the entity employing non-employee contractors on the basis of individual and collective relations. In individual legal relations, the entity employing contractors on the basis of civil law contracts may only be a civil law entity. On the other hand, in collective labour relations, organizational unit without civil law capacity may be regarded as their employer. The purpose of this study is to give the reasons for the thesis that such regulation leads to legal confusion, and the most appropriate way to remove it is to link the employer’s subjectivity with civil law subjectivity in individual and collective labour law.

Applicability of Organizational Performance Indicators

Today’s changing environmental challenges and accelerating technological advances over the past decade have presented companies with new challenges. There is an increasing emphasis on human resources, which can give companies a real competitive edge. At the same time, the focus is on the development of HR systems and their connection to other systems that determine how companies operate. Individual performance evaluation, in close connection with other HR functions, nowadays, in addition to evaluation, which may have a development or remuneration function, is linked to the performance of the organization. Accurately defining the latter and developing its measurement methodology, though not primarily as an HR function in most cases, is essential in the pursuit of effective operation. It is worth defining the indicators that may apply to a particular organizational unit and, at a higher level, to the whole company. The definition, implementation and measurement of indices and KPIs presupposes that the specified qualitative and quantitative indicators provide an appropriate framework for the evaluation of real performance. The performance of individuals determines the performance of an organizational unit, which in aggregate also predicts corporate-level performance.

The best task allocation process is to decide on one’s own: effects of the allocation agent in human–robot interaction on perceived work characteristics and satisfaction

New technologies are ever evolving and have the power to change human work for the better or the worse depending on the implementation. For human–robot interaction (HRI), it is decisive how humans and robots will share tasks and who will be in charge for decisions on task allocation. The aim of this online experiment was to examine the influence of different decision agents on the perception of a task allocation process in HRI. We assume that inclusion of the worker in the allocation will create more perceived work resources and will lead to more satisfaction with the allocation and the work results than a decision made by another agent. To test these hypotheses, we used a fictional production scenario where tasks were allocated to the participant and a robot. The allocation decision was either made by the robot, by an organizational unit, or by the participants themselves. We then looked for differences between those conditions. Our sample consisted of 151 people. In multiple ANOVAs, we could show that satisfaction with the allocation process, the solution, and with the result of the work process was higher in the condition where participants themselves were given agency in the allocation process compared to the other two. Those participants also experienced more task identity and autonomy. This has implications for the design of allocation processes: The inclusion of workers in task allocation can play a crucial role in leveraging the acceptance of HRI and in designing humane work systems in Industry 4.0.

The leadership of ICT coordinators: A distributed perspective

Educational leadership is essential to implement information and communications technologies in schools but the leadership practice of information and communications technologies coordinators, a position role that supports teachers to implement information and communications technologies, appears limited. The present study applies a distributed perspective to leadership and investigates aspects of information and communications technologies coordinator context that would facilitate leadership. Twenty-seven information and communications technologies coordinators were surveyed on their schools’ structures and mechanisms that mediate their leadership practice. Descriptive statistics show that a wide range of structures and mechanisms in different quantities and with different qualities can be available to coordinators. The majority of coordinators have neither additional position roles nor a teaching load, but the coordinators have organizational unit assignments and attend daily, routine interactions. A case study illustrates how specific structures and mechanisms would facilitate leadership for information and communications technologies implementation. It is recommended to design an information and communications technologies coordinator role as a formal position role, for a school to employ more than one information and communications technologies coordinator, and to develop an information and communications technologies coordinator’s teaching load, organizational unit assignments and routine interactions according to school needs. Several possible populations of information and communications technologies coordinators are identified for further research.

Big Fish, Big Pond? The Joint Effect of Formal and Informal Core/Periphery Positions on the Generation of Incremental Innovations

In this paper, we apply a core/periphery framework to an intraorganizational context to study the interplay between formal and informal core/periphery structures. Specifically, we consider how core positions occupied by inventors in the corporate research and development division of a large multinational high-tech company affect their ability to generate incremental innovations. We theorize and empirically observe that formal and informal core positions have positive and independent effects on the generation of incremental innovations. These effects have a multiplicative impact on innovative productivity when inventors who are core in the informal knowledge-sharing network are also affiliated with a core organizational unit. We also observe, however, that the positive effect of being located at the core of both the informal and formal structures is negatively moderated by individuals’ distribution of knowledge ties when these reach outside the core of their informal knowledge-sharing network.

Revisiting Collectivism and Rural Governance in China

Zhoujiazhuang is singular, being the only de facto people's commune in China today. At present, Zhoujiazhuang still maintains the political, economic, and social structure that has been essentially in place since 1956. For over sixty years—since ten years before the Cultural Revolution and thirty-eight years after the dismantling of almost all people's communes in 1982—Zhoujiazhuang has survived as an organizational unit over the same territory comprising the same six natural villages.

A Fully Collaborative, Noteless Electronic Medical Record Designed to Minimize Information Chaos: Software Design and Feasibility Study (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Clinicians spend large amounts of their workday using electronic medical records (EMRs). Poorly designed documentation systems contribute to the proliferation of out-of-date information, increased time spent on medical records, clinician burnout, and medical errors. Beyond software interfaces, examining the underlying paradigms and organizational structures for clinical information may provide insights into ways to improve documentation systems. In particular, our attachment to the <i>note</i> as the major organizational unit for storing unstructured medical data may be a cause of many of the problems with modern clinical documentation. Notes, as currently understood, systematically incentivize information duplication and information scattering, both within a single clinician’s notes over time and across multiple clinicians’ notes. Therefore, it is worthwhile to explore alternative paradigms for unstructured data organization. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study is to demonstrate the feasibility of building an EMR that does not use notes as the core organizational unit for unstructured data and which is designed specifically to disincentivize information duplication and information scattering. METHODS We used specific design principles to minimize the incentive for users to duplicate and scatter information. By default, the majority of a patient’s medical history remains the same over time, so users should not have to redocument that information. Clinicians on different teams or services mostly share the same medical information, so all data should be collaboratively shared across teams and services (while still allowing for disagreement and nuance). In all cases where a clinician must state that information has remained the same, they should be able to <i>attest</i> to the information without redocumenting it. We designed and built a web-based EMR based on these design principles. RESULTS We built a medical documentation system that does not use notes and instead treats the chart as a single, dynamically updating, and fully collaborative workspace. All information is organized by clinical topic or problem. Version history functionality is used to enable granular tracking of changes over time. Our system is highly customizable to individual workflows and enables each individual user to decide which data should be structured and which should be unstructured, enabling individuals to leverage the advantages of structured templating and clinical decision support as desired without requiring programming knowledge. The system is designed to facilitate real-time, fully collaborative documentation and communication among multiple clinicians. CONCLUSIONS We demonstrated the feasibility of building a non–note-based, fully collaborative EMR system. Our attachment to the <i>note</i> as the only possible atomic unit of unstructured medical data should be reevaluated, and alternative models should be considered.