Kreativitet har blivit allt viktigare inom dagens organisationer och forskningen har börjat intressera sig för hur kreativiteten påverkas av nominala eller riktiga grupper, samt hur dessa grupper är sammansatta. Syftet med undersökningen var att se hur kreativiteten i arbetsteam påverkas av mängden yrkesgrupper som ingår, samt att se hur externa faktorer som ledarskap och organisationskultur påverkar. I denna studie intervjuades 14 anställda inom olika branscher om deras syn på kreativitet och det visade sig finnas skillnader mellan grupperna. Arbete i grupp kan ge kreativiteten en annan kvalité och heterogenitet förknippades med mer dynamik och kreativa strategier. Samtliga respondenter i den heterogena gruppen var överens om att arbete i en blandad grupp var en styrka för kreativiteten.

The subject of this paper is to examine the view of diversity among ten teachers and three principals in the Swedish compulsory school. The purpose is to investigate how they relate to the diversity and in what ways it is involved in their work. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieus basic ideas of habitus, capital and field are used as a theoretical starting point. The study is mainly based on interviews supported by literature in the subject area. The findings show that diversity is associated with ethnicity among all informants. The drawn conclusion is that this is partly due to the mediated picture but also since ethnicity mainly serves as a starting point in the literature.

New venture team composition lies at the heart of this thesis. Drawing on social-psychological explanations and human capital reasoning, the thesis addresses the social as well as the instrumental foci facing new venture teams. This is done by addressing four research questions: 1) What are the characteristics of new venture teams and their team members? 2) What impact does team composition and firm performance have on team dynamics? 3) What impact does team member characteristics and individual deviation have on individual dynamics? 4) How does team composition and team dynamics influence firm performance? Dynamics is studied by investigating the adding and dropping of team members. Research on entrepreneurial teams is characterized by several methodological challenges that this thesis takes on. First, there is a lack of longitudinal studies. Second, no studies are based on truly random samples of teams. Third, the unit and level of analysis has been the team and the firm. Rarely is the individual considered. In addition, the thesis sheds light on team diversity and its effects as well as the relationship with performance, both as an antecedent and as a consequence. The empirical setting is based on a unique database covering all individuals entering into self-employment in knowledge-intensive industries in Sweden during the 1996 to 2000 period. Their firms are tracked annually up to 2002, providing a census panel three to seven years long consisting of five cohorts. This is done by using secondary data from Statistics Sweden (SCB) covering information on individuals as well as their firms. By combining individual and firm level data, the thesis demonstrates how team level constructs can be obtained. Overall, the hypothesized relations predicting team member and individual exits receive strong support. Entries to teams and the performance of the firms are not as well explained by the chosen constructs. The findings show that greater internal diversity along some but not all demographic dimensions is positively associated with a higher rate of team member exits. More precisely,when diversity can be linked to status differences, the impact is more pronounced. Furthermore, the findings show that deviation from others in the group has an impact on which individual is likely to leave the team. There are also considerable differences in behavior between teams consisting of spousal pairs and other teams. In fact, the findings show that spousal couples venturing together are very common and that the typical team does not match the entrepreneurial team as it often is portrayed in the literature. In sum, the study suggests that diversity in attributes related to status can influence team stability. In addition, trust and prior relationships appear to be especially important for the creation and development of new venture teams.

Secure symmetrical multilevel diversity coding (S-SMDC) is a source coding problem, where a total of L - N discrete memoryless sources (S1,...,S_L-N) are to be encoded by a total of L encoders. This thesis considers a natural generalization of SMDC to the secure communication setting with an additional eavesdropper. In a general S-SMDC system, a legitimate receiver and an eavesdropper have access to a subset U and A of the encoder outputs, respectively. Which subsets U and A will materialize are unknown a priori at the encoders. No matter which subsets U and A actually occur, the sources (S1,...,Sk) need to be perfectly reconstructable at the legitimate receiver whenever |U| = N +k, and all sources (S1,...,S_L-N) need to be kept perfectly secure from the eavesdropper as long as |A| <= N. A precise characterization of the entire admissible rate region is established via a connection to the problem of secure coding over a three-layer wiretap network and utilizing some properties of basic polyhedral structure of the admissible rate region. Building on this result, it is then shown that superposition coding remains optimal in terms of achieving the minimum sum rate for the general secure SMDC problem.

Research on the diversity in the context of internationalization process is rare. Our purpose of this thesis is to conduct a good understanding on diversity of internationalization process in telecommunication industry. Based on Uppsala Internationalization Model (U-Model) of Johanson and Vahlne (1977), we applied a qualitative research method, primary and secondary data collection to perform an empirical study. Afterward we discuss about how organizational diversity, marketing strategy diversity and diversity of core values on Ericsson show up in the process of internationalization. In the conclusion, we put forward our comments on the research problems. Then we also issued a direction on further research.

The purpose of this study is to give an insight in how home care givers with different ethnic background, other than European, experience their work as home care givers. It is a qualitative study based on interviews and observations of four different home care givers. Among the questions studied include; if ethnicity is a resource or not, how does it affect home care givers in doing their work? What importance does it have on the organisation as a home care entrepreneur? Has the home care entrepreneur a perspective of diversity? The results of the study have been analyzed with the help of symbolic interaction. The results have led us to conclude that the home care givers have a professional identity, which does not include an ethnic identity. Further more results indicate that ethnicity has a limited impact on the home care givers of non European origin that have not experienced discrimination. For the home care givers who earlier on in their carrier(s) have had experiences of discrimination, exist uncertainties, especially during their first visit in the homes. How the home care entrepreneur give guidelines to solving problems and conflicts between client and home care givers are of great significance.

The purpose of this thesis was to open up the black boxed TMT process by examining the interaction between TMT members using cognitive and demographic diversity variables, and to see how organisational performance could be affected by the process. By opening the process, a model of the process was developed, which can be tested in further research. The major findings are that there are some aspects that stand out; the CEO and the functional responsibilities that influence the process. Further, the integration within the TMT is not that high, so the upper echelon theory should not be used without considerations on studies where composition is related to organisational performance. These have shown to influence performance in different ways. The functional responsibility has shown to create subgroups that practice problem solving and decision making more frequent than the TMT hence also communicate more.

Software handover is a de facto process in all software organizations. It is one of the most business critical and complex processes. It is also one of the most diverse processes, and thereby, one of the most difficult processes to define. Despite this, software handover is not well recognized within the academia. Right now, there are no software handover process models whatsoever although software organizations desperately need guidelines for how to perform this important and critical task. To aid them in defining their handover process models, we are in the process of creating Evolution and Maintenance Management Model (EM 3 ): Software Handover focusing on handover (alias transition) of a software system from developer to maintainer. In this paper, we evaluate one of the EM 3 components, Management and Administration (MA), addressing activities for planning and controlling the transition process, its schedule, budget and resources. We do it within 29 organizations. Our primary goal is to find out whether the component is realistic and whether it meets the needs and requirements of the software industry today. Using the feedback from the industry, we tackle process diversity using the C ontext- D riven P rocess Orchestration M ethod (CoDPOM). / <p>QC 20120223</p>

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It is recognized that microbial transformations are the primary mechanism of organic contaminant removal in natural and constructed wetland systems. However, not much is known about urban wetland microbial communities or their functional capacity to process contaminants. The objective of this research was to first characterize the physiological and phylogenetic diversity of microbial communities of different urban wetland types using the BIOLOG™ method and through DGGE of 16S rRNA sequences. The capacity of urban wetlands to attenuate model chlorinated aromatic compounds (2,4-D and 3-CBA) was assessed by UPLC biodegradation and 14C mineralization experiments. Toxicity tests were conducted to assess microbial tolerance to pollutant addition. In general, results indicate that urbanization has a homogenizing effect on microbial community structure and distribution within urban wetland systems, regardless of type. Urban wetlands also appear to have a limited capacity to remove chlorinated organic pollutants. Microbial community tolerance to chlorinated organic pollutants is relatively high, whereas heavy metal tolerance was found to coincide with history of contaminant exposure. / UOIT