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To obtain a general opinion concerning the implementation of quality management systems (QMS) of construction‐related firms in the USA and Hong Kong, and to determine whether construction‐related firms have ever made an effort to measure quality improvement.

Two questionnaire surveys, one in the USA and one in Hong Kong, were conducted by sending out questionnaires to construction‐related companies. The surveys were then followed by 15 in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews with top management and quality managers of construction‐related firms in both the USA and Hong Kong.

The results of the study indicate that different perceptions towards the implementation of formal quality management systems existed between the two places. Mainly due to the lack of initiative and promotion from both clients and governments, construction companies in the USA have failed to see the need to obtain the ISO 9000 certification. In Hong Kong, however, the government's initiatives have resulted in a high percentage of companies having certified to the ISO 9000 standards. The results of the study also indicate that, though most companies used different tools for quality measurements, such measurements were mainly for monitoring and for recording purposes.

This is the first time that such a rigorous comparative study of quality management systems in the construction companies of two different countries has been conducted. It provides useful and practical insights into the differences and similarities between US and Hong Kong construction industries. This paper should be extremely valuable to practitioners in both countries, particularly the USA.

Construction resources are often limited, and there is a need to ensure resources are carefully allocated to avoid resource wastage and/or project delay. While mathematical and heuristic models were developed to resolve the conflicts between activities, none of them has been proven to be totally satisfactory. The aim of this paper is to explore this.

In this paper, a novel heuristic method known as a pull‐driven approach (PDA) is proposed; and this approach encourages a lean consideration of resource supply and partnering between activities. Two case studies are presented to illustrate how PDA can be applied. A comparison with another heuristic approach, namely the ranked positional weight method is conducted to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.

Using the PDA approach, all the activities strive to find matching partners to pull resources to their sides. The resources are, therefore, no longer passively pushed to a single activity with high ranking but a combination of activities that can demonstrate their superiority in resource utilisation will actively win the necessary resources.

This approach has an ability to deal with intermittent activities and locate the lean (no‐waste) supply level of each resource.

Project managers work to ensure successful project completion within the shortest period and at the lowest cost. One of the main tasks of a project manager in the planning phase is to generate the project time–cost curve, and furthermore, to determine the most appropriate schedule for the construction process. Numerous existing time–cost tradeoff analysis models have focused on solving a simple project representation without regarding for typical activity and project characteristics. This study aims to present a novel approach called “multiple-objective social group optimization” (MOSGO) for optimizing time–cost decisions in generalized construction projects.

In this paper, a novel MOGSO to mimic the time–cost tradeoff problem in generalized construction projects is proposed. The MOSGO has slightly modified the mechanism operation from the original algorithm to be a free-parameter algorithm and to enhance the exploring and exploiting balance in an optimization algorithm. The evidential reasoning technique is used to rank the global optimal obtained non-dominated solutions to help decision makers reach a single compromise solution.

Two case studies of real construction projects were investigated and the performance of MOSGO was compared to those of widely considered multiple-objective evolutionary algorithms. The comparison results indicated that the MOSGO approach is a powerful, efficient and effective tool in finding the time–cost curve. In addition, the multi-criteria decision-making approaches were applied to identify the best schedule for project implementation.

Accordingly, the first major practical contribution of the present research is that it provides a tool for handling real-world construction projects by considering all types of construction project. The second important implication of this study derives from research finding on the hybridization multiple-objective and multi-criteria techniques to help project managers in facilitating the time–cost tradeoff (TCT) problems easily. The third implication stems from the wide-range application of the proposed model TCT.

The model can be used in early stages of the construction process to help project managers in selecting an appropriate plan for whole project lifecycle.

The proposal model can be applied to multi-objective contexts in diversified fields. Moreover, the model is also a useful reference for future research.

This paper makes contributions to extant literature by: introducing a method for making TCT models applicable to actual projects by considering general activity precedence relations; developing a novel MOSGO algorithm to solving TCT problems in multi-objective context by a single simulation; and facilitating the TCT problems to project managers by using multi-criteria decision-making approaches.

Past research has primarily focused on the negative impact of workplace mistreatment or aggression on the individuals involved, workgroups, and organizations. Certain circumstances, however, create paradoxical effects in which mistreatment positively relates to desirable workplace outcomes and characteristics at the individual and/or organizational level. Reviewing the theoretical and empirical evidence of beneficial outcomes provides researchers and practitioners with a more comprehensive understanding of the progression of workplace mistreatment, allowing them to target specific mechanisms to mitigate detrimental effects and potentially discover important avenues that lead to desired outcomes. A qualitative review of 13 articles demonstrated that different forms of aggression such as bullying, abusive supervision, incivility, and ostracism have positive relationships with paradoxical outcomes and characteristics such as resilience, prosocial behaviors, socially desirable behaviors, job performance, job satisfaction, and creativity. The authors caution against leveraging mistreatment as a method for producing these desired outcomes; instead, the authors encourage researchers and practitioners to utilize the information to further their understanding of the nomological network of workplace mistreatment and its underlying mechanisms, such as cognitive reappraisal and social learning.

Mindfulness-based interventions are on the rise in workplace settings to enhance Well-Being and address work stress. Their popularity is in part due to the fact that they are often assumed to have a net positive impact on both workers’ Well-Being and organizational functioning. However, the majority of workplace mindfulness practice and research focuses on individual-level mindfulness interventions and their associated outcomes, like reduced stress. However, the modern workplace is highly dependent on positive team functioning, and the impact of mindfulness in teams is lesser known. This review differentiates individual mindfulness from team mindfulness and explores how both individual and team mindfulness impact team functioning. The authors review mindfulness and teams’ literature to understand antecedents, correlated mediators, and consequences of mindfulness in team contexts, team processes, and the boundary conditions related to mindfulness outcomes. This review adds to the budding theoretical conversation regarding mindfulness at work and contributes valuable insight into the practical applications of mindfulness in teams.

Our theoretical understanding of subjective well-being in the workplace is incomplete without a dynamic understanding of antecedents and outcomes of subjective well-being. While between-person differences provide useful information about employee outcomes, these differences do not provide information about the relationships between subjective well-being and employee outcomes that evolve over time and across situations. In this paper, we discuss specific statistical methods within the nomothetic and idiographic perspectives that can support dynamic research on subjective well-being in the workplace and outline unanswered contemporary questions regarding structure, processes, and dynamics of subjective well-being that may be addressed with these methods reviewed; some of which were proposed in early research but progressed slowly due to a lack of adequate methods. This discussion highlights how idiographic methods from outside organizational psychology can be applied to the study of worker subjective well-being to strengthen this dynamic approach in a way that addresses limitations associated with reliance on between-person models.

Research focusing on psychological capital (PsyCap) has been mainly conducted at the individual level. However, recent research has expanded investigations to the collective level with a greater focus on team-level PsyCap. Although, as demonstrated by recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses, the relationships between individual-level PsyCap and the desirable/undesirable outcomes are fairly established in the literature, less is known about such relationships for team-level PsyCap. One of these important, yet least investigated, research areas is the research stream that focuses on the relationship between team-level PsyCap and the outcomes of health, Well-Being, and safety. This chapter aims to highlight the role of individual-level PsyCap as an important predictor of employees’ health, Well-Being, and safety outcomes, but also to go beyond that to provide insights into the potential role of team-level PsyCap in predicting such outcomes at both individual and team levels. To do so, the chapter first draws upon relevant theories to discuss the empirical research findings focusing on the relationship between individual-level PsyCap and the outcomes of health, Well-Being, and safety. It then focuses on team-level PsyCap from theoretical, conceptualization, and operationalization perspectives and provides insights into how team-level PsyCap might be related to health, Well-Being, and safety outcomes at both individual and team levels. Thus, this chapter proposes new research directions in an area of PsyCap that has been left unexplored.

Sayings like “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life” epitomize Western society’s emphasis on both the importance and assumed positive nature of passion for work. Although research has linked passion and increased well-being, growing anecdotal evidence suggests the potential for negative individual outcomes of work passion, including decreased well-being and increased stress and burnout. In the present chapter, the authors integrate the Dualistic Model of Passion (which consists of harmonious and obsessive passion), identity theory, and identity threat to describe the paradox of passion, in which individuals overidentify with the target of their passion (i.e., work), resulting in the “too much of a good thing” effect driven by excess passion of either type. The authors thus provide a novel theoretical lens through which to examine the different reactions that individuals may enact in response to threats to passion-related identities, including how these responses might differentially impact well-being, stress, and burnout. The authors conclude by offering future directions for research on the paradox of passion.

This chapter focuses on pedagogies of working with diversity centers on West-East reciprocal learning through a Reciprocal Learning Program in preservice teacher education between a Canadian university and a Chinese university. By presenting our initial analysis of fieldwork with our Teacher Education Reciprocal Learning Program participants through excerpts from newsletters, surveys, and interviews, we explore how participants from both China and Canada made sense of their learning from the other cultural and educational system through the Reciprocal Learning Program within broad educational, social, and cultural contexts. We argue that both global and multicultural dimensions are cultivated in reciprocal learning that infused the lived experiences of both Canadian and Chinese preservice teacher candidates. We discuss the pedagogic implications for working with diversity and believe that reciprocal learning can take place while working with people from different cultures with an attitude of mutual respect and appreciation and an appetite for learning in our increasingly interconnected world.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce error ellipse into the bootstrap method to improve the reliability of small samples and the credibility of the S-N curve.

Based on the bootstrap method and the reliability of the original samples, two error ellipse models are proposed. The error ellipse model reasonably predicts that the discrete law of expanded virtual samples obeys two-dimensional normal distribution.

By comparing parameters obtained by the bootstrap method, improved bootstrap method (normal distribution) and error ellipse methods, it is found that the error ellipse method achieves the expansion of sampling range and shortens the confidence interval, which improves the accuracy of the estimation of parameters with small samples. Through case analysis, it is proved that the tangent error ellipse method is feasible, and the series of S-N curves is reasonable by the tangent error ellipse method.

The error ellipse methods can lay a technical foundation for life prediction of products and have a progressive significance for the quality evaluation of products.