Quality and Individualization in Wraparound Team Planning

In children’s mental health, collaborative, team-based individualized service planning is most commonly known as wraparound, and has become one of the primary strategies for improving services and outcomes for children with the highest levels of need. We report on analyses of data gathered at 72 wraparound team meetings from communities around the United States. We describe the composition of the teams and the quality of the planning process they engaged in, and explore the extent to which these factors were associated with team member satisfaction and the individualization of plans. Teams in our study were numerically dominated by professionals. Parents attended a large majority of meetings, participation by youth and family advocates was frequent, participation by other family members infrequent, and participation by other members of the family’s informal or natural support networks rare. Observed teams varied considerably in the quality of their planning process and the degree of individualization of plans. Higher-quality planning was significantly associated with increased individualization of plans and with team member satisfaction with meeting productivity.     

Crews: A Distinct Type of Work Team

Distinctions among different types of work teams have been emerging in the theoretical literature as a key to understanding important work team processes. This has been precipitated by an increased appreciation of the importance of a work team's operating environment on such processes. Moreover, such distinctions are felt to be useful to practice in such areas as team staffing, training, and establishing leadership requirements. The present study investigates the concept of crews and contrasts it with other types of work teams by empirically assessing crewness, the extent to which a work team can be classified as a crew. A new scale of crewness was developed and administered to various collectives of workers including fire fighter crew members and project team members in order to establish the unique qualities of crews to show that they are a distinct type of work team. Construct and discriminant validity evidence is offered in support of the crewness scale. Approaches for further investigation of this distinction are also provided in order to guide both research and practice in this area.     

A Systems/Dialectical Model of Supervision: A Symbolic Process

Although there has been a proliferation of models of supervision in the marriage and family therapy literature recently, most tend to focus on methods rather than on the process of supervision. The model presented here is grounded in developmental concepts and focuses on student learning through a dialectical process of cognitive and emotional growth and incorporates three stages: 1) developing relationships; 2) breaking impasses, and 3) orchestrating changes. Students discover that supervision becomes isomorphic with relationship issues that arise in their therapy sessions. Dialectical in nature in that each stage is characterized by the resolution of contradictory emotions, the supervision process helps supervisees experience emotional shifts in their interactions with others, referred to as emotional restructuring.     

创新氛围、创新效能感与团队创新：团队领导的调节作用

在团队层次探讨创新氛围、创新效能感以及团队领导对团队创新绩效的影响。对51个工作团队的研究结果表明, 团队创新氛围与团队创新绩效有显著的正向关系, 而团队创新效能感在这一关系中起到中介作用。同时, 引领创新的团队领导调节了创新效能感与团队创新绩效之间的关系, 团队领导越倾向于引领创新, 创新效能感与创新绩效之间的关系就越强, 经由创新效能感传导的创新氛围对创新绩效的效应也就越大。研究结果深刻揭示了创新氛围、创新效能感、创新领导和团队创新之间的关系。     

Behavior analysis and revaluation

Revaluation refers to phenomena in which the strength of an operant is altered by reinforcer-related manipulations that take place outside the conditioning situation in which the operant was selected. As an example, if lever pressing is acquired using food as a reinforcer and food is later paired with an aversive stimulus, the frequency of lever pressing decreases when subsequently tested. Associationist psychology infers from such findings that conditioning produces a response-outcome (i.e., reinforcer) association and that the operant decreased in strength because pairing the reinforcer with the aversive stimulus changed the value of the outcome. Here, we present an approach to the interpretation of these and related findings that employs neural network simulations grounded in the experimental analysis of behavior and neuroscience. In so doing, we address some general issues regarding the relations among behavior analysis, neuroscience, and associationism.     

Bouncing Back from Setbacks: On the Mediating Role of Team Resilience in the Relationship Between Transformational Leadership and Team Effectiveness

The purpose of this study was to clarify the role of team resilience on different facets of effectiveness (team viability and quality of the group experience). Moreover, given the importance of team resilience for the organizational context, it was also our aim to contribute to the study of the conditions that promote team resilience, analyzing the role of transformational leadership. Finally, we examined whether the relationship between transformational leadership and team resilience stimulates positive team outcomes. Ninety teams (445 employees from 40 companies) were surveyed and path analysis was used in the test of the hypotheses. The results showed a positive direct effect of team resilience on both team viability and the quality of the group experience. Moreover, a positive relationship was also identified between transformational leadership and team resilience. Finally, support was found for the mediated effect of team resilience on the relationship between transformational leadership and the dimensions of team effectiveness considered. The findings of this study highlight the role of team resilience as an intervening process between transformational leadership and team effectiveness. Supervisors should promote team resilience, adopting transformational leadership behaviors, in order to contribute to increase team viability and the quality of the group experience.     

Learning to Make Selection and Detection Decisions: The Roles of Base Rate and Feedback

The effects of type of feedback and base rate on threshold learning in a multiple‐cue decision task were examined. In most such decision experiments, participants receive feedback after every trial (full feedback), and a single base rate (usually 0.5) is used. Our experiment explored conditional feedback (feedback only after positive decisions) representing common selection and detection tasks (such as hiring), where the decision maker receives no feedback unless the decision is positive (e.g., hire the applicant). We used three base rates (0.2, 0.5, and 0.8). As expected, performance was best in full feedback, but after 300 learning trials, the difference was small. Conditional feedback generally resulted in fewer positive decisions than full feedback, but this difference was not found in the low (0.2) base rate condition. There were interactions between base rates and types of feedback. Results provide partial support for the constructivist encoding hypothesis of Elwin and colleagues. Simulation results suggest that our results may reflect overconfidence when feedback is not given. With respect to rate of learning, when the base rate was 0.2, conditional feedback participants reached approximately the same selection rate but did so more slowly than the full feedback participants. Partial feedback participants learned slower and appeared to be still learning after 500 trials. When the base rate was 0.5 or 0.8, partial feedback was nearly as good as full feedback, but conditional feedback resulted in a systematically lower rate of positive decisions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

组织变革背景下团队主动性的结构与测量

旨在探索组织变革背景下团队主动性行为的结构,并开发出相应的测量工具。首先对20家企业的27位高管进行了深度访谈,然后按照扎根理论思路对获取资料进行细致分析,探索团队主动性的结构,再按照严格的心理测量学程序开发团队主动性的测量问卷,并以来自60家企业的70个团队（共292位成员）为对象进行了测验。研究发现：团队主动性的主要维度包括群策、协作和适应。经过探索性因素分析和验证性因素分析,结果表明测量工具有着良好的信度和构思效度。     

Interactions Between Tactile and Proprioceptive Representations in Haptics

ABSTRACT

Neuroprosthetic limbs, regardless of their sophisticated motor control, require sensory feedback to viably interact with the environment. Toward that aim, the authors examined interrelationships between tactile and proprioceptive sensations. Through human psychophysics experiments, they evaluated error patterns of subjects estimating hand location in a horizontal 2-dimensional workspace under 3 tactile conditions. While tactile cues did not significantly affect the structure of the pattern of errors, touching the workspace reduced estimation errors. During neurophysiological experiments, a macaque grasped textured objects using 2 hand postures. Sensory coding showed dependence on both roughness of the manipulandum and posture. In summary, the authors suggest that tactile sensations underlying haptics are processed in a stable spatial reference frame provided by a proprioceptive system, and that tactile and proprioceptive inputs can be encoded simultaneously by individual cells. Such insights will be useful for providing stable, adaptive sensory feedback for neuroprosthetics.     

An Integrative Model Linking Feedback Environment and Organizational Citizenship Behavior

ABSTRACT

Past empirical evidence has suggested that a positive supervisor feedback environment may enhance employees' organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). In this study, we aim to extend previous research by proposing and testing an integrative model that examines the mediating processes underlying the relationship between supervisor feedback environment and employee OCB. Data were collected from 259 subordinate-supervisor dyads across a variety of organizations in Taiwan. We used structural equation modeling to test our hypotheses. The results demonstrated that supervisor feedback environment influenced employees' OCB indirectly through (1) both positive affective-cognition and positive attitude (i.e., person-organization fit and organizational commitment), and (2) both negative affective-cognition and negative attitude (i.e., role stressors and job burnout). Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.