Suchergebnisse

AbstractWith 2.6 billion people without access to improved sanitation facilities and with a growing urban population globally, shared sanitation in the form of public or community latrines is a pragmatic way of increasing coverage, but it is currently not deemed 'improved'. This paper explores the variety of facilities that currently exist in order to identify what would enable some of these latrines to be classed as acceptable and to ensure that future shared sanitation facilities meet minimum standards. The categories mostly relate to issues of ownership, management, location and finance rather than technological considerations. An extensive literature review reveals that the users' perspective of acceptability is largely absent from current discussions.

It is proposed that shared leadership environments have an effect on six sigma team decision-making as well as the methods used to make decisions. It is also proposed that the consensus decision-making method is the technique that is the most effective and related to the fundamental conditions of a shared leadership environment. Furthermore, it is believed that a model of shared leadership decision-making can be developed from the results of these hypotheses. Research has found that a strong relationship exists between shared leadership and team decision-making principles and approaches. As a six sigma team becomes more involved in the shared leadership model, the methods utilized to make decisions change in such a way that the power is more distributed among members; the team moves from a single individual decision method, towards a shared decision method. Review of the relationship between shared leadership and team decision-making techniques has shown that the consensus approach is the most effective in satisfying the fundamental conditions and requirements of the shared leadership model. A model of decision-making in shared leadership environments is proposed for use by teams to determine the type of decision-making method that should be employed as a team's level of shared leadership increases.

Group task satisfaction has been conceptualized as the group-level counterpart to individual job satisfaction and represents the group's shared attitude toward its task and work environment. This study investigated whether group task satisfaction would explain incremental variance in organizational citizenship behaviors, group performance, and absenteeism norms, after the variance explained by aggregated individual job satisfaction and group affective tone was taken into account. Survey data were collected from 66 work groups and 51 supervisors. Measures of group task satisfaction explained unique variance in ratings of citizenship behavior and absenteeism norms but did not explain unique variance in ratings of group performance. Our findings support the validity and utility of group task satisfaction and illustrate the importance of assessing group-level constructs directly.

AbstractBargaining is a critical component to exercising shared lawmaking powers. Conventional wisdom holds that presidents are effective at personally persuading members of Congress to support favored legislation, but recent scholarship shows when and how they get involved matters. Yet, we know less about specifically how presidents bargain with members of Congress and which types of interpersonal presidential communication frames persuade members of Congress. Using unique data from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library concerning the White House's press for passage of the 1983 budget, this article addresses how presidents position their legislative pitches and to which members. While ideology matters most in predicting members supporting the White House's preferred legislation, we find a "compromise" pitch from the White House works better for bipartisan‐tagged legislation than appeals to "party unity." These findings provide a unique window into informal bargaining arrangements and allow us to understand how presidents influence members of Congress.

Using information from Swedish population registries, we attempt to decompose the shared environment (C) into four subcomponents: close family, family, household, and community. Among pairs differing in their genetic and geographical/household relationships, we examine three externalizing syndromes: drug abuse (DA), criminal behavior (CB), and alcohol use disorders (AUD). The best-fitting common pathway model suggested that total estimates for C were higher for DA (21% for males and 18% for females) than for AUD (16% and 14%) and CB (17% and 10%). Concerning syndrome-specific influences in males, close family effects were stronger for CB and AUD, while community effects were stronger for DA. The two C components in between community experiences and close family experiences (family and household) were estimated to almost entirely derive from the common latent factor. In females, among the four components of C, the community experiences were just slightly above zero, while the C components referred to as the household effect were almost zero. The total close family experiences were similar and most important across syndromes were also divided into common and specific components. For all syndromes, for both males and females, the effects of additive genetic factors were 2–4 times the size of the total effect of the shared environment. Applying standard methods to novel relationships, we expand our understanding of how the shared environment contributes to individual differences in three externalizing syndromes.

This study investigates how three-dimensional virtual environments (3DVEs) support shared understanding and group decision making. Based on media synchronicity theory, we pose that the shared environment and avatar-based interaction allowed by 3DVEs aid convergence processes in teams working on a decision-making task, leading to increased shared understanding between team members. This increases team performance. An experiment was conducted in which 70 teams of three participants had to decide on a spatial planning issue. The teams interacted using synchronous text-based chat, a 3D virtual decision room, or were present in the virtual environment (VE) mirroring the spatial planning task. Results revealed that in the virtual decision room and the VE, shared understanding was higher than in the text-based chat condition. This led to higher task performance in terms of consensus, satisfaction, and cohesion. Our results show that 3DVEs offer potential for team collaboration over more traditional text-based collaboration technologies.

Abstract
Drawing on recent phenomenological discussions of collective intentionality and existential phenomenological accounts of agency, this article proposes a novel interpretation of shared action. First, I argue that we should understand action on the basis of how an environment pre-reflectively solicits agents to behave based on (a) the affordances or goals inflected by their abilities and dispositions and (b) their self-referential commitment to a project that is furthered by these affordances. Second, I show that this definition of action is sufficiently flexible to account for not only individual action (in which both (a) and (b) refer only to an individual) but also several distinct subtypes of shared action. My thesis is that behaviour counts as shared action if and only if it is caused by a solicitation in which either (a) the goals, or (b) the commitments, or both (a) goals and (b) commitments are joint, i.e., depend on several individuals. We thereby get three distinct subtypes of shared actions: (i) jointly coordinated individually committed action, (ii) individually coordinated jointly committed action, and (iii) jointly coordinated jointly committed action.