1,721,384 research outputs found
Assessing and training leaders' emotional intelligence, and its influence on their employees.
No full textZammuner, V., Favaro, T., Gonella, F., & Prandi, K. (2016). Assessing and training leaders' emotional intelligence, and its influence on their employees. ICERI2016 Proceedings,.pp 5153-5162 (9th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation, Siviglia (E), 14-16 November, 2016). The importance and role of emotions in the work setting have received in recent years an increasing attention, as regards emotions experienced both by individuals, such as employees at the various organizational levels, and as a function of job or role characteristics, and emotions that are related to work-setting structural and dynamic issues, such as those that employees feel towards their leaders, and vice versa, according to leaders' emotional capabilities, and to leadership style. The study tested whether Self-reported leaders' emotional intelligence (EI) capabilities (LEI), are congruent with Other-reported LEI, and whether a brief self-administered online training program (Tremints) affects Self- and Other-reported LEI assessments at post-training, as well as leaders' and employees' emotion-related aspects of work- and general-well being (e.g., Job involvement, Life satisfaction, Health level, and Positive and Negative felt affect), as well leaders' self-perception of their own emotional abilities, including preferred strategies of emotion regulation, level of adhesion to display rules of emotion, and own job-related and general well being (e.g., Job involvement and satisfaction, Health, Affect).
Study design. The study employed an experimental pre-post design, with Time (T1 pre-test, and T2 post-test) as the within-subject factor, and Condition (Experimental vs. Control) as the between-subject factor; 25 leaders and their 77 employees formed the experimental group, 4 leaders and 12 employees formed the control group. Most participants were hospital employees working in various sanitary units. At T1, leaders self-rated various EI measures (e.g., ECI scales of EI), whereas employees rated their leader. Employees and leaders also self-rated aspects of their work-related and general wellbeing. At T2, i.e., after Experimental leaders underwent an EI training, leaders and employees again rated LEI, and evaluated their own well-being. Data were analyzed in terms of response frequencies, mean ratings, t-tests, and by means of correlational and MANOVA analyses comparing Experimental and Control leaders and employees at T1 and T2. The results overall showed that at T1 leaders of both groups overall judged themselves as more emotionally competent than their employees did, and enjoyed somewhat greater work-related well being than employees; leaders' EI self-ratings in either group were unrelated to their employees' well being. At T2, Control leaders self-rated their EI as being higher that an T1, contrary to their employees who rated them less positively than at T1. Experimental employees rated instead their leaders similarly to how they had rated them at T1, but their evalutations of their leaders were at T2 reflected in employees' well being; experimental leaders' EI self-ratings did not generally increase from T1 to T2. In sum, the results showed that most Time 2 measures differed significantly from Time 1 measures, but effects were markedly differed in the experimental and the control group and not easy to interpret. The results led to the hypothesis, to be further tested in future studies, that employees' initial assessment of their leaders' EI skills increases their awareness of LEI, so that their T2 ratings of their leaders are based on a greater attention paid to their leaders' EI and are more accurate
Using Stock-Flow Diagrams to Visualize Theranostic Approaches to Solid Tumors in Personalized Nanomedicine
Full text linkPersonalized nanomedicine has rapidly evolved over the past decade to tailor the diagnosis and treatment of several diseases to the individual characteristics of each patient. In oncology, iron oxide nano-biomaterials (NBMs) have become a promising biomedical product in targeted drug delivery as well as in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as a contrast agent and magnetic hyperthermia. The combination of diagnosis and therapy in a single nano-enabled product (so-called theranostic agent) in the personalized nanomedicine has been investigated so far mostly in terms of local events, causes-effects, and mutual relationships. However, this approach could fail in capturing the overall complexity of a system, whereas systemic approaches can be used to study the organization of phenomena in terms of dynamic configurations, independent of the nature, type, or spatial and temporal scale of the elements of the system. In medicine, complex descriptions of diseases and their evolution are daily assessed in clinical settings, which can be thus considered as complex systems exhibiting self-organizing and non-linear features, to be investigated through the identification of dynamic feedback-driven behaviors. In this study, a Systems Thinking (ST) approach is proposed to represent the complexity of the theranostic modalities in the context of the personalized nanomedicine through the setting up of a stock-flow diagram. Specifically, the interconnections between the administration of magnetite NBMs for diagnosis and therapy of tumors are fully identified, emphasizing the role of the feedback loops. The presented approach has revealed its suitability for further application in the medical field. In particular, the obtained stock-flow diagram can be adapted for improving the future knowledge of complex systems in personalized nanomedicine as well as in other nanosafety areas
Strategies of socio-ecological transition for a sustainable urban metabolism
Full text linkUrbanization plays a key role in the human activities causing and feeding climate change. At present, climate change and other environmental issues are directly or indirectly related to the metabolism of cities. However, cities may also play a central role in the fight against climate change. This is the reason why Urban Metabolism (UM) has become a powerful concept to account for and understand the way in which complex systems such as cities use and dispose of material resources, also suggesting measures to change their operational regimes. The rightsizing and optimization of UM is basically a matter of social innovation. It implies changes in the way a city collectively produces and reproduces its physical stocks and provides services to its inhabitants. This article aims at identifying strategies, scenarios, and pathways to slow down urban metabolic processes while improving their efficiency, thus managing a successful transition to an urban (more) circular economy, as well as decreasing the material intensity of the urban economy. The main objectives of the article are the following:
1. The development of a renewed approach for studying Urban Metabolism based on transdisciplinary approaches and methods aimed to model metabolic agents’ patterns of practices.
2. The definition of urban patterns of resource use of different agents shaping urban metabolism (households, corporate agents, communities, and public authorities).
3. The exploration of the main policies and administrative tools that cities use to manage environmental problems leading to different urban regulation regimes. 4. A tool for generating future scenarios and roadmaps to reach a low-carbon future. This tool is crucial for engaging experts, stakeholders and the public looking for new solutions
Three dimensions of biodiversity: New perspectives and methods
No full textAlthough the knowledge and understanding of biodiversity is rapidly increasing, very little of the total biodiversity is currently considered in applied conservation actions. In this sense, it is crucial to integrate independent fields of biodiversity models and perspectives with conservation issues, in particular, the views that address the links between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being, species interaction, and focal charismatic species. This study overcomes the lack of framework necessary for this integration, and proposes three perspectives and approaches to assess biodiversity. The first perspective is biodiversity potential. It considers the correlation between renewable resources in local ecosystems and biodiversity potential, in terms of the possibility of maintaining a high degree of biodiversity. The energy cost is evaluated using both static and dynamic methods, based on the measure of the emergy of local renewable resources and of the total emergy throughput needed by components in ecosystem food webs, respectively, also highlighting the link between biodiversity and ecosystem services, species interactions via energy transfer respectively. The second perspective considers the contribution of biodiversity to human well-being, such as domestication. In this approach, we assess the contribution of biodiversity to humans by calculating the emergy of non-renewable resources required to domesticate animals or plants into agricultural products. The third perspective highlights the significance of local focal charismatic species to global biodiversity conservation. Taking rare species as an example, the emergy required to maintain rare species per unit area is used as a quantitative indicator of the role of local rare species in maintaining global biodiversity. By measuring biodiversity from these three perspectives (potential, contribution and significance) simultaneously, biodiversity conservation strategies are addressed for different regions. Taking China as a case study, it shows that the provinces featuring high potential, low contribution and low significance can moderately increase biodiversity development. The provinces with high significance to global biodiversity should strengthen conservation to halt biodiversity loss. The areas exhibiting overexploitation of biodiversity should in turn restrict biodiversity exploitation. The general approaches proposed in this study could be applied to different cases, situations and species, promoting the integration to biodiversity conservation actions at different scales. © 2021 The Author(s
Systems Thinking: Adopting an Emergy Perspective as a Tool for Teaching Green Chemistry
No full textGreen chemistry is the name of a need, that of encompassing chemistry research and the environmental, safety, health, and societal issues that have been creating unprecedent concerns at a global level. Green chemistry is a modern concept, as the label that represents the entry of chemical sciences in the realm of integrated sustainability studies. To do green chemistry research, we need approaches that take into account the use and availability of resources, as well as the direct or indirect impacts of the applications of new chemistry. Systems thinking is a powerful mindset for addressing the complexity of the interconnections between the traditional and the new aspects of chemistry research. Systems thinking can provide suitable and appropriate conceptual tools for the research, requiring that chemistry teaching provides the necessary familiarity with systemic concepts and practices. In this paper, an emergy (spelled with “m”) perspective is presented as suitable to address the green chemistry didactics toward a systemic conceptual framework, which is now more and more mandatory
Implanted dielectrics: synchrotron radiation studies by absorption and diffraction techniques
No full textSequential ion implantation of two elements in dielectrics, followed by thermal annealing in controlled atmosphere, gives rise to a variety of different composite materials. The formation of either metal or semiconductor binary nanoclusters is studied by synchrotron radiation-based techniques. In particular, extended X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy and grazing incidence X-ray diffraction give information on the role of different driving forces in determining the final composite structure. Some case studies are presented in detail, in particular, the AuCu and AuAg systems, while for the semiconductor composites some results are presented on GaN and GaAs systems. All samples are obtained by sequential implantation and thermal annealing in either reducing or oxidizing atmosphere
Addressing COVID-19 Communication and Management by a Systems Thinking Approach
Full text linkA systemic stock-flow diagram is proposed for the communication and management of health services and strategies concerning the COVID-19 epidemic. The possible role of government interventions in activating systemic leverage points is also addressed. The presented approach, based on Systems Thinking, can create the basis for creating an analytical simulator of the disease spread, and at the same time the diagram can constitute a powerful tool for improving the quality of information for both policy-makers and the general public in situations of epidemics
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