What good leaders actually do: micro-level leadership behaviour,leader evaluations,and team decision quality

We supplement broad definitions of leadership behaviour with the concept of micro-level leadership behaviour, leaders’ verbal and non-verbal visible conduct and interaction. For the context of team decision-making, we identify two potentially beneficial micro-level leadership behaviours, question asking and behavioural mimicry. Specifically, we propose that under conditions of informational complexity and unshared information, participative leadership is most appropriate for team decision-making, that its effects are mediated by inquiring and empathy, and that question asking and mimicry are the behavioural micro-level manifestations of inquiring and empathy. We thus hypothesize that the effect of participative leadership on team decision quality and leader evaluation is mediated by question asking and mimicry. We conduct a laboratory experiment with student teams working on a hidden profile decision-making task and measure question asking through behavioural coding and mimicry with motion sensors. Results show that the effect of participative leadership on decision quality is mediated by question asking, and that the effect of participative leadership on leader evaluation as transformational is mediated by leaders’ behavioural mimicry and question asking. Under control of these micro-level behaviours, team decision quality and leader evaluations were unrelated.     

Challenges and Opportunities of Lifelog Technologies: A Literature Review and Critical Analysis

In a lifelog, data from various sources are combined to form a record from which one can retrieve information about oneself and the environment in which one is situated. It could be considered similar to an automated biography. Lifelog technology is still at an early stage of development. However, the history of lifelogs so far shows a clear academic, corporate and governmental interest. Therefore, a thorough inquiry into the ethical aspects of lifelogs could prove beneficial to the responsible development of this field. This article maps the main ethically relevant challenges and opportunities associated with the further development of lifelog technologies as discussed in the scholarly literature. By identifying challenges and opportunities in the current debate, we were able to identify other challenges and opportunities left unmentioned. Some of these challenges are partly explained by a blind spot in the current debate. Whilst the current debate focuses mainly on lifelogs held by individuals, lifelogs held by governmental institutions and corporations pose idiosyncratic ethical concerns as well. We have provided a brief taxonomy of lifelog technology to show the variety in uses for lifelogs. In addition, we provided a general approach to alleviate the ethical challenges identified in the critical analysis.     

“Making it explicit” makes a difference: Evidence for a dissociation of spontaneous and intentional level 1 perspective taking in high-functioning autism

The ability of perspective taking is a fundamental aspect of social cognition. The ability to decide, what another person can or cannot see is referred to as “level 1 perspective taking.” This is thought to be a process that we can make use of intentionally, but which also takes place spontaneously. Autism is characterized by impairments of social interaction, which are thought to be related to deficits in implicit rather than explicit perspective taking. In order to assess both levels of processing with regard to perspective taking, we employed an established task in patients and controls. Our results demonstrate that both groups engage in spontaneous level 1 perspective taking. In contrast to controls, however, patients reacted more slowly if they had to verify the other’s as compared to their own perspective, which shows that participants with high-functioning autism have selective difficulties in explicit, but not implicit, level 1 perspective taking. These findings demonstrate that while spontaneous level 1 perspective taking appears to be intact in autism, this ability is impaired in patients when used explicitly.     

Strengthening concept learning by repeated testing

The aim of this study was to examine whether repeated testing with feedback benefits learning compared to rereading of introductory psychology key‐concepts in an educational context. The testing effect was examined immediately after practice, after 18 days, and at a five‐week delay in a sample of undergraduate students (n = 83). The results revealed that repeated testing with feedback significantly enhanced learning compared to rereading at all delays, demonstrating that repeated retrieval enhances retention compared to repeated encoding in the short‐ and the long‐term. In addition, the effect of repeated testing was beneficial for students irrespectively of working memory capacity. It is argued that teaching methods involving repeated retrieval are important to consider by the educational system.     

How crucial is the response format for the testing effect?

Combining study and test trials during learning is more beneficial for long-term retention than repeated study without testing (i.e., the testing effect). Less is known about the relative efficacy of different response formats during testing. We tested the hypothesis that overt testing (typing responses on a keyboard) during a practice phase benefits later memory more than covert testing (only pressing a button to indicate successful retrieval). In Experiment 1, three groups learned 40 word pairs either by repeatedly studying them, by studying and overtly testing them, or by studying and covertly testing them. In Experiment 2, only the two testing conditions were manipulated in a within-subjects design. In both experiments, participants received cued recall tests after a short (~19 min) and a long (1 week) retention interval. In Experiment 1, all groups performed equally well at the short retention interval. The overt testing group reliably outperformed the repeated study group after 1 week, whereas the covert testing group performed insignificantly different from both these groups. Hence, the testing effect was demonstrated for overt, but failed to show for covert testing. In Experiment 2, overtly tested items were better and more quickly retrieved than those covertly tested. Further, this does not seem to be due to any differences in retrieval effort during learning. To conclude, overt testing was more beneficial for later retention than covert testing, but the effect size was small. Possible explanations are discussed.     

Methods for Practising Ethics in Research and Innovation: A Literature Review,Critical Analysis and Recommendations

This paper provides a systematic literature review, analysis and discussion of methods that are proposed to practise ethics in research and innovation (R&I). Ethical considerations concerning the impacts of R&I are increasingly important, due to the quickening pace of technological innovation and the ubiquitous use of the outcomes of R&I processes in society. For this reason, several methods for practising ethics have been developed in different fields of R&I. The paper first of all presents a systematic search of academic sources that present and discuss such methods. Secondly, it provides a categorisation of these methods according to three main kinds: (1) ex ante methods, dealing with emerging technologies, (2) intra methods, dealing with technology design, and (3) ex post methods, dealing with ethical analysis of existing technologies. Thirdly, it discusses the methods by considering problems in the way they deal with the uncertainty of technological change, ethical technology design, the identification, analysis and resolving of ethical impacts of technologies and stakeholder participation. The results and discussion of our literature review are valuable for gaining an overview of the state of the art and serve as an outline of a future research agenda of methods for practising ethics in R&I.     

Development of motor imagery ability in children with developmental coordination disorder – A goal-directed pointing task

Children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) have difficulties with the predictive control of movements. This was shown in studies that target motor imagery and motor planning, and appears to become particularly evident with increases in task complexity. In this study, we used a complex mental chronometry paradigm to examine the development of motor imagery ability in children with DCD, using a longitudinal design. Thirty children were included in the DCD group (aged 6–11 years) and age- and gender-matched to 30 controls. The DCD group had a Movement Assessment Battery for Children-2 score ≤16th percentile and the control group ≥25th percentile. Results of this study showed that children with DCD indeed had a significantly lower correlation between executed and imagined movements. Importantly, the increase in the correlation and linear fit during subsequent measurements was comparable for the DCD and control group. Together, these findings suggest a delayed developmental onset of motor imagery ability in DCD, but a similar rate of development over time compared to the control group. Based on these results, it seems likely that explicit motor imagery instructions can be used to improve predictive control in children with DCD.     

Inclusiveness of identification among farmers in The Netherlands and Galicia (Spain)

In this paper we discuss inclusiveness of identification among farmers in Galicia (Spain) and The Netherlands. Identification with three nested categories—farmers in the local community, farmers in the country, and farmers in Europe was assessed among 167 Dutch and 248 Galician farmers at three points in time: winter of 1993/94, winter 1995 and fall 1995. Our findings suggest that inclusiveness reduces the level of identification. However, the observed patterns of identification were more complex than inclusiveness per se can account for. Borrowing from the common ingroup‐identity model, functional and socialization models of identity formation, and a model of politicized collective identity we formulated hypotheses about patterns of identification that were to be expected. On the whole our findings supported our theoretical reasoning. Galician farmers appear to identify much less with farmers in their country and Europe than Dutch farmers do. Inclusiveness of identification appears to be linked to experience with national and supranational political institutions. More political knowledge and involvement appear to generate more inclusive patterns of identification. Among Galician farmers evaluation of the agricultural policy of the European Union is negatively related to identification with farmers in Europe, among Dutch farmers the two are positively related. Finally, more inclusive identities seem to be more politicized. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.