Search results

The purpose of this paper is to investigate National Hockey League (NHL) expansion draft decisions to measure divestment aversion and endowment effects, and analyze bias and its affect on presumed rational analytic decision making.

A natural experiment with three variables (age, minutes played and presence of a prior relationship with a team’s management), filtered athletes that were exposed or protected to selection. A machine learning algorithm trained on a group of 17 teams was applied to the remaining 13 teams.

Athletes with pre-existing management relationships were 1.7 times more likely to be protected. Athletes playing fewer relative position minutes were less likely to be protected, as were older athletes. Athlete selection was predominantly determined by time on ice.

This represents a single set of independent decisions using publicly available data absent of context. The results may not be generalizable beyond the NHL or sport.

The research confirms the affect of prior relationships on decision making and provides further evidence of measurable sub-optimal decision making.

Decision making has implications throughout human resources and impacts competitiveness and productivity. This adds to the need for managers to recognize and implement de-biasing in areas such as hiring, performance appraisal and downsizing.

This natural experiment involving high-stakes decision makers confirms bias in a setting that has been dominated by students, low stakes or artificial settings.

The ubiquity of the Internet and e‐mail has resulted in a burgeoning interest in their potential for academic research. This paper summarizes the existing practices of Internet research and suggests extensions to them based on the design and administration of a large‐scale, national Web survey. These extensions include consideration of new capabilities such as adaptive questions and higher levels of flexibility and control. Lessons learned include the use of a modular design, management of Web traffic, and the higher level of communication with respondents.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of order on the quality of outcomes when making sequential decisions and test the widely‐held belief that choosing earlier is preferable and results in better outcomes than choosing later.

Quantitative performance from the sequence of athletic decisions made by the teams of the National Hockey League (NHL) at the annual amateur entry draft is longitudinally analyzed using a participation threshold of 160 games.

Analysis indicates that earlier choice does result in outcomes that are significantly and substantially better but that this effect is muted beyond approximately the first 100 decisions, after which there is no discernable advantage.

The dichotomous performance measure excludes more qualitative or stratified assessments of performance and does not include context of the individual decision choices. The results may not generalize beyond the National Hockey League or other human resource situations.

The research suggests that sequential decision processes are suboptimal in the presence of large amounts of information and choice. Recommendations include reallocating the amount of confirmatory attention spent on highly‐ranked candidates.

The paper exposes limitations to the widely‐held belief that choosing earlier is preferable to choosing later.

There is a growing evidence base for cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) as a treatment for psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES) in the general population. Despite the relatively high proportion of individuals with PNES who have an intellectual disability (ID) there is a paucity of literature on the use of CBT for PNES in this population. The purpose of this paper is to describe the use of an adapted CBT approach to treat PNES in a woman with mild ID.

The intervention used a CBT approach that included both the client and her mother, her primary care giver, throughout the therapy sessions. It involved 13 1-hour sessions over 20 weeks.

Over the course of the intervention the client experienced a reduction in seizure activity. Both the client and her mother reported increases in her perceived ability to cope with the seizures.

This report describes an adapted CBT-based intervention for individuals with PNES in the context of ID. It is the first report to include the involvement of a care-giver in adapting this approach for individuals with ID.

Every organisation has an existing set of values, an “organisational culture”. Could a richer set of values improve the organisation? If so, how is the organisation better. What are some ways of enriching the existing values, and who can do it? These issues are examined and their application is explored through examples.

Moral exemplarity is a desirable but complex achievement. The chapter discusses the meaning of moral exemplarity and examines how the self, as a psychological and spiritual centre within a Jungian perspective, contributes to fostering moral commitment.

A narrative study was conducted amongst ten spiritual healers in New Zealand and France. Stories were collected and analysed interpretively to uncover meaningful patterns about spiritual healers’ moral stance and apprehension of the self.

Spiritual healers demonstrated a deep commitment to the self which clearly sustained a commitment to serve or help others. Commitment to the self was articulated around five core values: self-work, self-reflection, humility, self-integrity and love.

The chapter highlights the moral value of inner work. The self, in its archetypal sense, carries as potential an ‘innate morality’ that resonates in the heart and nurtures integrity and authenticity. To commit to the self requires undertaking a long and painful exploration of the psyche and integrating unconscious material into ego-consciousness. The participating spiritual healers, who had committed to their self and were well advanced on their psychological exploration journey, displayed moral qualities akin to exemplarity.

Pre‐employment medical examinations with appropriate testing are required in many industries—a basic tenet of Occupational Medicine—and it has long been a recommendation of many in community medicine and environmental health for those food handlers whose close contact with open food, aspects of its preparation, processing, sale, exposure for sale, make their personal health important and in prevention of diseases and may constitute a health hazard to food consumers. Epidemiological studies have revealed too many instances of a human source of disease, especially in milk and water, for this to be denied or under‐estimated. Food poisioning outbreaks caused by a carrier, of chronic or limited duration, enable those investigating such outbreaks to see there could be advantages in medical screening of certain employees especially in certain areas of food trades. The main problem is to decide the extent of the discipline and who should be subject to it. The fact that by far the majority of the examinations and tests will prove negative should not be seen as removing the need for the service. After all, there are a number of similar circumstances in public health. Meat inspection, for example, in which a 100% inspection of all food animals slaughtered for human food is now fully established, it is not suggested that inspections should in any way be reduced despite the fact that a number of the diseases, eg., tuberculosis, no longer occurs as it once did, which was the prime cause of meat inspection being brought into being. Other areas where routine medical examinations reveal satisfactory health with only a few isolated cases requiring attention, is the school medical service. Here, the “de‐bunkers” have had some success, but if children are not regularly examined at vulnerable age levels and especially in between where the occasion demands, there is no question that much will be missed and ill‐health progress to a chronic state.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that there is a degree of nonsense in the idea that that an organisation has a strategy, since firms have no mind, heart or soul they cannot have a sense of purpose about themselves and their futures. The lecture considers the ways that those working in organisations, and those responsible for strategy, deflect their thoughts from this idea and the nonsense that results from it.

The paper recasts Whittington’s Schools of Strategy as deflection strategies, arguing that they are coherent means of displacing attention from the absurdities that result from attributing strategies to organisations rather than people. The key points are illustrated by quotes from Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, as the leader of the heroic band faces and overcomes most of the key strategizing problem experience in business strategy.

Important issues such rationality, benchmarking, learning, leadership, followership and corporate social responsibility crumble into nonsense when it is recalled that these are all human, rather than organisational qualities.

Most strategies do not succeed and most management of change seldom achieves the changes desired. The paper argues that this is chiefly because pragmatic stratagems are frequently idealised into truth claims and prescriptions of doubtful provenance. Scholars of management must bear some responsibility for the resulting nonsense.

The paper argues that it is not possible to do strategy and change without invoking nonsense. Yet, this is a remarkable achievement, nonetheless, for a creature that evolved to chase small game across a savannah.

The paper raises important ontological and epidemiological issues of strategy and change in ways that neither create impenetrable language barriers nor require a philosophical background to grasp.

HAS BRITAIN really lost its sense of purpose? Has it no noticeable industrial policy?