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British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, recently introduced a “whole life order” sentence in response to sexually motivated or sadistic homicide offences (Gov.uk, 2023). Effectively, this condemns the recipient to the remainder of their life in incarceration and renders rehabilitative interventions redundant. The purpose of this paper is to explore the literature pertaining to public pedagogy, definitions and convictions, and rehabilitative interventions – all in relation to those considered to have committed sexuallymotivated or sadistic murders, with emphasis on the implications of such.

Through this commentary, this paper explores the following points in line with existing literature: (a) public knowledge of the criminal justice system and those who have committed homicide offences, (b) the manner of defining and convicting sexually motivated and sadistic murders and (c) current access to rehabilitation intervention programmes.

This paper closes by recommending future research initiatives to deliver forensic-specific education for the general public as well as qualitative studies into the discourse around retribution to enable a conjunction between public concern and academic underpinning. Wider implications concerning public understandings, convictions, rehabilitations and politics are discussed.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that explores the practical and theoretical implications of imposing a whole life order on those charged with sadistic or sexual-motivated murders.

The purpose of this paper is to test the conditional effect of team composition on team performance; specifically, how collective team orientation, group consensus, faultline configurations and trust among team members explain the objective performance of project teams in cross-cultural contexts.

Employing path analytical framework and bootstrap methods, the authors analyze data from a sample of 73 cross cultural project teams. Relying on ordinary least-squares regression, the authors estimate the direct and indirect effects of the moderated mediation model.

The findings demonstrate that the indirect effect of collective team orientation on performance through team trust is moderated by team member consensus, diversity heterogeneity and faultlines’ strength. By contrast, high dispersion among members, heterogeneous team configurations and strong team faultlines lead to low levels of trust and team performance.

The specific context of the study (cross-cultural students’ work projects) may influence external validity and limit the generalization of the findings as well as the different compositions of countries-of-origin.

From a practical standpoint, these results may help practitioners understand how the emergence of trust contributes to performance. It will also help them comprehend the importance of managing teams while bearing in mind the cross-cultural contexts in which they operate.

In order to foster team consensus and overcome the effects of group members’ cross-cultural dissimilarities as well as team faultlines, organizations should invest in improving members’ dedication, cooperation and trust before looking to achieve significant results, specially in heterogeneous teams and cross-cultural contexts.

The study advances organizational group research by showing the combined effect of team configurations and collective team orientation to overall team performance and by exploring significant constructs such as team consensus, team trust and diversity faultline strength to examine their possible moderated mediation role in the process.

Researchers explore the impact of an intelligent assistant in virtual teams by applying the theoretical lens of a transactive memory system (TMS) to understand the relationships between trust in a specific technology, knowledge sharing and knowledge application.

An online survey was administered to a Qualtrics-curated panel of individual, US-based virtual team members utilizing an intelligent assistant with team collaboration software. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was utilized to examine the hypothesized relationships of interest.

Results suggest that knowledge application is strongly influenced by trust in a specific technology and knowledge sharing. Additionally, a transactive memory system positively increases trust in the intelligent assistant, and similarly, trust in the intelligent assistant has a significant positive relationship with knowledge sharing.

The research model contributes to our understanding of the impact of an intelligent assistant in virtual teams. Although the transactive memory system construct has been explored in various contexts and models, few have explored the impact of an intelligent assistant and trust in a specific technology.