Scholars @Bentley (Bentley University)
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‘I’d a Set That Back at the Chocks’: The Personal Hypothetical “I Would” in Aviation Flight Instruction
Get PDFIn this paper we use conversation analysis to investigate instructional interactions that occur during inflight pilot training relative to instructors\u27 use of the formulation “I would”. The flight instructor\u27s role is multi-dimensional compared with a classroom instructor, as s/he is simultaneously a teacher, potential co-pilot, and safety monitor. The student is flying the plane while the instructor is giving directions, instruction, advice, corrections, or even physical interventions as warranted. We found instructors used the personal hypothetical “I would” to provide explanations, instructions, and corrections of a student\u27s actions and understandings while displaying an orientation to the student\u27s developing autonomy and professional competence. By accomplishing these tasks through a description of what the instructor would do, the “I would” formulations enable the instructor to serve as an expert role model, display how they use their professional vision to pay attention to relevant information, and help students develop their professional vision and situation awareness. We conclude that instructor\u27s “I would” formulations provide a mechanism for the performance of these overlapping roles and goals and facilitate teaching aeronautical decision-making
NIH funding for research underlying new cancer therapies
Get PDFContemporary discovery and development of cancer drugs are based on the model that investments in basic biomedical science will provide insights that can be translated into new cures. In the USA, basic research is primarily funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH),1 which allocates half of its research budget to basic science,2 with smaller amounts contributed by philanthropy, academics, or industry.1 Basic science is formally defined as the “systematic study directed toward fuller knowledge or understanding of the fundamental aspects of phenomena and observable facts without specific application towards processes or products in mind”.3 However, science is often useinspired,4 and much of the NIH funding for basic research comes from institutes with specific health missions.2,4 Is there a direct link between NIH funding for basic science and the emergence of new cancer therapies
Creating an infrastructure of good conflict
Get PDFFor some of us, the title of this paper may appear confusing. How can the words “good” and “conflict” appear together in the same title?
My experience as a mediator and an ombudsperson convinces me that the juxtaposition can indeed be justified. Not only do these two words have the potential to be used in the same sentence, I will go so far as to state that they should be in the same sentence.
Conflict in the workplace or almost anywhere is inevitable. We are human. We make mistakes. We annoy others. We offend others. We may be oblivious to how our behavior impacts others. We make assumptions. We are often not aware of someone’s “hot buttons,” and sometimes lack the necessary diplomacy to adequately address a challenging situation with others. We have feelings. We are emotional. We are insecure about certain matters. We often lack the confidence to address conflict, and we especially may lack the know-how to resolve conflict to a mutually beneficial result.
Yes, conflict has the potential to be disruptive; even destructive. It can easily demotivate, negatively impact the work environment, result in low morale and a toxic environment which can lead to lawsuits, all quite unwelcome outcomes. This paper focuses on how to best utilize conflict to our advantage. The paper provides some practical and easy to understand steps to increase our chances of benefitting from conflict.
This paper will also provide recommendations on how to handle as well as leverage the benefits of conflict using teams
Careers and Romantic Partnerships: Three Essays on Gender Differences in Role Centrality, Wage Gap, and Life Satisfaction in Dual-Career Couples
Get PDFThe purpose of this dissertation is to improve understanding of the dual-career couple phenomenon by exploring gender differences in levels of role centrality and partner support, life satisfaction, and the gender wage gap. I engage with these areas of inquiry through three research papers.
Paper 1 is motivated by the research question: Are there differences between female and male individuals in dual-career couples in levels of value placed on particular role centrality (i.e. family, career, others such as church/hobbies) or levels of perceived social support in their partnerships? This replication study investigates a series of hypotheses based on past research studies assessing these gender differences.
In Paper 2, I conduct an exploratory quantitative analysis to evaluate the research question: What variables influence overall life satisfaction for partners in dual-career couples, and how do these variables relate to one another? I utilize Classification and Regression Tree (CART) modeling, a method within machine learning, to uncover the variables with high impact in this context from among a much larger set of variables than could be assessed with more traditional statistical methods.
In Paper 3, I pursue the following research question: What portion of the unexplained gender wage gap can role centrality levels explain? I use variance decomposition to analyze the amount of the unexplained gender wage gap that can be accounted for with the role centrality psychological construct.
This dissertation will make several contributions. Theoretically, it advances academic inquiry of theories of economics and theories of gender applied to interactions of dual-career couples. It also explores meaningful variables for those in these relationships such as life satisfaction, role centrality/role salience, and relationship specific social support. Finally, it investigates how these variables and theories relate to the gender wage gap. Empirically, this dissertation engages in replication methods to extend and refine our understanding of the structures and mechanisms at play within dual-career couples. It also advances quantitative analysis of romantic partnership dynamics for working couples by applying machine learning methodology to develop a new empirical perspective that complements existing research. Finally, I uncover a meaningful connection between level of role centrality and income. For practitioners, this dissertation contributes by seeking better understanding of the impact variables organizations or couples may be able to alter to improve their partnerships, satisfaction, and income
Business Ethics
No full text“Business” has two meanings. A “business” is an entity that offers a good or service for sale, typically with the goal of making a profit. Wal-Mart and Toyota are businesses. “Business” can also mean the activity of exchange. An individual does business with Toyota when she exchanges some of her money for one of its cars. So “business ethics” includes the study of the ethics of the entities that offer (and often produce) goods and services for sale, as well as the ethics of exchange and activities connected with exchange (e.g., advertising). Philosophers have long been interested in these subjects. Aristotle worried about the effects of commerce on character, while Aquinas wrote on profit and prices. Smith and Marx thought deeply about the organization of the process of production. Business ethics in its current incarnation traces its roots to the 1970s and 1980s, when a group of moral philosophers applied ethical theories to business activity. A number of business ethics journals were created around this time, and business ethics became a familiar course in philosophy departments. Common topics of inquiry were and continue to be the purpose of the firm, corporate governance, corporate moral agency, rights and duties at work, fairness in pay and pricing, the limits of markets, marketing ethics, supply chain ethics, and corporate political activity. Not long after philosophers reinvigorated the field, social scientists entered it (and in fact had been working on related issues the whole time). They have increasingly pulled the field, and its academic courses, into business schools. This article concentrates on the philosophical or normative side of business ethics, but it also says something about the descriptive or social scientific side when they overlap
Exploring the Effects of Mindfulness in Marketing: Mindfulness, Ethics, Emotional Labor and Service Quality
Get PDFMindfulness, i.e., nonjudgmental, present-centered awareness and attention, finds its roots in ancient spiritual traditions, and is most systematically articulated and emphasized in Buddhism. Although arguably relevant to a variety of practices, mindfulness research is sparse in marketing literature. In particular, there is a shortage of empirical research on the application of mindfulness in marketing (Ndubisi, 2014). This dissertation follows a three-paper model to begin to address this shortage in marketing literature. Paper one uses the Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing and Moral Development Model as theoretical lens to discuss how mindfulness could be a viable approach to fostering ethical marketing behaviors. Paper two (co-authored with Pierre Berthon, Leyland Pitt and Ian P. McCarthy) explores mindfulness in service encounters. Specifically, it looks at the effect of mindfulness on the emotional labor of service workers. We propose that mindfulness can change surface acting into deep acting, thereby significantly improving the service encounter for both the consumer and provider. We also explore other effects of mindfulness such as adaptability, flexibility and creativity, and their applications to the service encounter. This paper was published in Business Horizons (Vol. 59, No. 6) in 2016. Building on the second paper, paper three (sole-authored) empirically tests the effects of state mindfulness on the quality of the service encounter, i.e. quality of the interaction between a customer and a service employee. A mixed design experiment was conducted in a New England university in October to December 2018. In the experiment, both state mindfulness and structure of the task were manipulated between subjects while the nature of the encounter (emotionally charged or not) was manipulated within subjects. Results of this experiment suggest that high mindfulness manipulation groups provided significantly higher service quality than low mindfulness manipulation groups. This pattern holds across the four dimensions of service quality: responsiveness, assurance, reliability and empathy. The structure (highly or less structured) and nature (emotionally-charged or non-emotionally charge) of service encounters do not alter this pattern. In less structured encounters, the two mindfulness manipulation groups did not experience significantly different emotional labor, with quite similar emotive dissonance and effort, from each other. However, in highly structured encounters, high mindfulness manipulation groups were more aware of their emotive dissonance, but they did not spend more emotive effort than their counterparts. The mediation effect of emotional labor was not found in this experiment. Taken together, the three papers bring the notion of mindfulness to the marketing domain, more specifically the service domain, through discussions of the impact of mindfulness on marketing ethics, emotional labor and service quality. This dissertation expands and deepens the research of mindfulness in the marketing field and identifies opportunities for marketing researchers and practitioners to utilize the practice of mindfulness in their discipline