Team cohesion represents arguably the most studied team construct as it has been consistently shown to be associated with improved performance. However, although cohesion is now understood to be an emergent state—as it develops over a team's life cycle—research has yet to uncover the dynamic nature of cohesion. The current study was designed to particularly test the impact of team personality composition both on the initial status of cohesion, and on changes in cohesion over time. 80 newly formed teams performed a highly interdependent team task, and team cohesion was measured over six time points. Personality was measured prior to the task and calculated at the team level, as both an average and a variability score. After performing longitudinal hierarchical linear modeling, results indicated that team personality impacts cohesion differently at initial status and over time. In particular, higher team agreeableness predicted greater slopes of cohesion, but not initial cohesion levels. Also, higher extraversion predicted greater initial status of cohesion, but not greater slopes. These results present important boundary conditions for understanding the role of team personality composition on team cohesion. / Master of Science

Systems engineering has many subdisciplines which would be useful to study in terms of complex system behavior. However, it is the interactions between a complex system and its operating environment which drive the motivation for this analysis. Specifically, this work introduces a new approach to assessing these interactions called "boundary resilience." While classical resilience theory measures a system's internal reaction to adverse event, boundary resilience evaluates the impacts such an event may have on the surrounding environment. As the scope of this analysis is quite large, it was deemed appropriate to conduct a case study to determine the fundamental tenants of boundary resilience. SpaceX's satellite Internet mega-constellation (StarLink) was chosen due to its large potential to impact the space environment as well as its size and complexity. This study produced two boundary resilience measures, one for local boundary resilience of a single component and one for the global boundary behavior of the entire system. The local metric measures the likelihood of an adverse event occurring at that boundary location as well as its potential to impact the surrounding environment. The global boundary resilience metric reflects a nonlinear relationship among the system components. / Doctor of Philosophy / It is no secret that the world and the systems which enable it to function have become increasingly complex in recent decades. This complexity has the potential to create both innovative uses as well as unplanned and unexpected behaviors in these systems. As they interact with their environment, complex systems can produce equally complex and unpredictable behaviors which have potential to have a negative impact on their environment. This work seeks to study one component of this behavior: resilience. Resilience usually measures a system's ability to continue providing a service in the event of a disruption, or to recover the ability to provide the service after some amount of time. Boundary resilience, on the other hand, takes the perspective of potential environmental damage caused by an adverse event, rather than damage to the system's functionality. This study uses a case study of the StarLink satellite constellation to examine this phenomenon. The outcome of the analysis shows that the size of a complex system negatively impacts its potential to cause damage to the surrounding environment, but increasingly mature components can mitigate this degradation.

Phytate is the major storage form of phosphorus in seeds of soybeans. Because phytate chelates mineral cations including calcium, iron, and zinc, these mixed salts are often excreted by non-ruminant animals such as humans, swine, poultry, and fish. While this causes iron and zinc deficiencies, phytate is also considered a water pollutant due to the excess phosphorus excreted in animal waste. These negative environmental and nutritional effects, create a need for low phytate soybeans. While several low phytate soybean lines have been developed, a major drawback is the reduced seedling emergence of these lines resulting in low yields. Therefore, understanding the genetic and molecular bases of the low emergence trait in relation to seed phytate content in major crops such as soybean is of great economic importance. This PhD project worked towards the long term goal of developing low phytate soybean cultivars with good seedling emergence and high-yield. This dissertation focused on metabolomic differences between low and normal phytate lines and how these could relate to the low emergence phenotype. The genetic materials used here include four near isogenic lines that differ in mutations in two multi drug resistance-associated proteins (MRPs). Only the line with both mutations was low phytate. The phytate levels, field- and lab-based emergence rates were determined for these lines, their parents and a control line through replicated field experiments for three consecutive years. The emergence rates of the low phytate lines were not always reduced. This showed that the environment the seeds were produced in is highly important, especially when breeding and commercially growing low phytate lines. A protocol was developed for successful metabolomic discrimination of these closely related soybean lines. The polar and non-polar metabolite profiles were determined using ultra performance liquid chromatography mass spectrometry and metabolomic differences between the low and normal phytate lines were identified. The low phytate double mutant did not contain C22 glucose terminated Group A soyasaponins and almost exclusively contained C22 xylose terminated Group A soyasaponins (A4, A5 and A6). Compared to the normal phytate lines, the low phytate soybean line showed a higher concentration of storage lipids (triacylglycerols and diacylglycerols) and certain phospholipids. / Ph. D.

The purpose of the present study was to examine the perceptual processes associated with gender differences in leadership emergence recognition. Prior research has indicated that females are less likely to be identified as an emerging leader, even when they display identical leadership behaviors as that of their male counterparts. Unlike most of the previous research performed in this area which has obtained only static snapshots of leadership recognition, the present study used a nonlinear dynamic modeling technique, called cusp catastrophe theory. It was predicted that a nonlinear model would account for more variance than a linear model. Furthermore, it was also predicted that participants would be more resistant to recognizing a female as an emerging leader, as compared to a male. This effect was expected to be greater for male participants than female participants. Participants included 19 organizational members, who watched videos of either a male or female emerging as the leader of a four-person group. Participants recorded their perceptions of leadership through a dynamic measure. In accordance with cusp catastrophe theory, results were analyzed using the program GEMCAT II (General Multivariate Methodology for Estimating Catastrophe Models). Contrary to expectations, none of the predictions were supported. It is suggested that this was primarily due to methodological issues, rather than the relevance of cusp catastrophe modeling for leadership perceptions. Recommendations for future work in this area are provided. / Master of Science

Yes / This article presents an integrative review of the rapidly growing body of research on trust in work teams. We start by analyzing prominent definitions of trust and their theoretical foundations, followed by different conceptualizations of trust in teams emphasizing its multilevel, dynamic, and emergent nature. We then review the empirical research and its underlying theoretical perspectives concerning the emergence and development of trust in teams. Based on this review, we propose an integrated conceptual framework that organizes the field and can advance knowledge of the multilevel nature of trust in teams. Our conclusion is that trust in teams resides at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously, is subject to factors across levels in organizations, and impacts performance and other relevant outcomes both at the individual and team levels. We argue that research should not only differentiate between interpersonal trust between members from collective trust at the team level, but also emphasize the interplay within and between these levels by considering cross-level influences and dynamics. We conclude by proposing four major directions for future research and three critical methodological recommendations for study designs derived from our review and framework. / NASA/Johnson Space Center. Grant Number: NNJ16HP08P

This article considers emergence in the context of systems of systems, examining the earlier proposed tri-layered architecture in some depth. In contrast with healthcare reform, a social media phenomenon, the emergence of topics in the Twitter user community, is shown not to satisfy a critical condition of the architecture. Nevertheless, detection of topic emergence is shown to offer insights into the design of Emergence Behavior Observers.

Dans le cadre de la gestion de projet, pour une plus grande efficacité, il est important de connaître les critères qui aident les acteurs et porteurs de projet à mieux orienter le devenir de leur projet. Notre travail a consisté dans la construction et la validation d'un descriptif du processus d'un projet de changement. Cette construction s'est faite à l'aide de l'analyse fonctionnelle et d'analyse décisionnelle de chaque élément constituant le processus de projet. Ces critères ainsi définis ont été validés par des sondés issus de l'entreprise et de la santé afin de déterminer leur capacité à stabiliser le projet dans sa phase de mise en place (robustesse) ou d'impulser de nouveaux projets (émergence). Une analyse des résultats entre la santé et l'entreprise, nous a permis de mettre en évidence la pertinence de nos hypothèses en caractérisant un certain nombre de critères influençant le devenir du projet. La connaissance de ces critères est donc une aide supplémentaire pour piloter les projets en milieux complexes comme dans le secteur de la santé et de l'entreprise / Within the framework of the management of project, for a bigger efficiency, it is important to know the criteria which help the actors and the carriers of project to direct better the future of their project. Our work aim to the design and the validation of the process of a project of change. The design of the criteria was elaborated with the functional analysis and the decision-making analysis of every element constituting the process of project. These criteria so defined were validated by pooled stemming from the company and from the health to determine their capacity to stabilize the project in its phase of implementation (robustness) or to impulse of new projects (emergence). An analysis of the results between the health and the company, allowed us to put in evidence the correctness of our hypothesis by characterizing a nwnber of criteria that influencing the future of the project. The knowledge of these criteria is thus a supplementary help to pilot the projects in complex organization in health sector and the company

Les réseaux sont présents dans pratiquement tous les aspects de la vie. Le monde quinous entoure comporte énormément de réseaux. Par exemple, les réseaux de communicationconstitués de téléphones, les réseaux électriques, les réseaux d’ordinateurs, le réseaudes lignes aériennes, ... etc, sont autant de réseaux importants dans la vie de chaque jour.Le cadre mathématique des réseaux est bien approprié pour décrire plusieurs systèmescomposés d’un grand nombre d’entités qui interagissent entre elles. Chaque entité est représentéepar un noeud du réseau et chaque interaction par un lien entre deux noeuds. Ilest donc possible de modéliser ces réseaux par des graphes. Pour la plupart de ces réseaux,la difficulté provient principalement du grand nombre d’entités, ainsi que de la façon dontelles sont interconnectées. Une approche naturelle pour simplifier de tels systèmes consistedonc à réduire leur taille. Cette simplification n’est pas faite aléatoirement, mais de tellefaçon à ce que les noeuds de la même composante aient plus de liens entre eux qu’avec lesautres composantes. Ces groupes de noeuds ou composantes sont appelés communautésd’intérêt. Notre thèse se positionne dans le domaine de l’étude des graphes sociaux. Elle s’intéresseprincipalement à l’étude de la robustesse des structures sociales émergentes dansles réseaux d’interactions. L’aspect de la robustesse des réseaux constitue un challengetrès important pour comprendre leur fonctionnement, le comportement des entités lesconstituant et surtout pour comprendre les interactions qui peuvent se produire entreelles, permettant l’émergence de certains comportements qui n’étaient pas du tout prévisiblesau préalable. Actuellement, les études de la robustesse des réseaux qui existentdans la littérature traitent cet aspect du point de vue purement structurel, i.e. toutes lesperturbations sont appliquées soit sur les noeuds, soit sur les arêtes du graphe. Pour cequi est de notre étude, nous nous sommes intéressés à définir une nouvelle stratégie qui sebase sur des perturbations appliquées sur les paramètres qui permettent l’émergence desgraphes sociaux dans les réseaux d’interaction. Cette façon d’aborder l’aspect robustessedes graphes constitue une nouvelle manière d’évaluer et de quantifier les changements quipeuvent intervenir dans les structures de ces graphes. / Networks are present in virtually all aspects of life. The world surrounding usincludes to many networks. For example, communication networks constituted of phones,electrical networks, computers networks, aerial lines network, ? etc, are such importantnetworks in our daily life. The mathematical framework of networks is well appropriatedto describe different systems composed of many entities interacting with each other. Eachentity is represented by a network node and each interaction by a link between twonodes. Therefore, it is possible to model these networks by graphs. For most of thesenetworks, the difficulty comes mainly from the large number of entities and the way theyare interconnected. A natural approach to simplify such systems is therefore to reducetheir size. This simplification is not made randomly, but in such a way that the nodes ofthe same component would have more connections between themselves than with othercomponents. These groups of nodes or components are called communities of interest.Our thesis is positioned in the field of social graphs study. It is mainly interested instudying the robustness of social structures emerging in interaction networks. The aspectof networks robustness is a very important challenge to understand their functioning,the behavior of the constituting entities and especially to understand the interactionsthat may occur between them, allowing the emergence of certain behaviors that were notpredictable at all in advance. Currently, studies of networks robustness that exist in theliterature treat this aspect from a purely structural point of view, ie, all perturbations areapplied either on nodes or on the edges of the graph. In terms of our study, we focused ondefining a new strategy based on perturbations applied on the parameters that allow theemergence of social graphs in interaction networks. This way to approach the robustnessappearance of the graphs is a new way to assess and quantify the changes that may occurin the structures of these graphs.

This thesis concerns with both practical and theoretical aspects of phenomenon called Emergence. First part has been devoted to the research of available specialized resources on emergent topic and also on main features of complex systems. Acquired knowledge of two topics has been implemented on a real practical example of complex information system by creation of method which purpose is to help finding and determining emergent behavior. Last part of the thesis brings outcome of analysis of real system and discusses the recommendations for researchers on how to determine emergent behavior in their own systems.

L’auteur de cette thèse a réalisé, en tant que compositeur, un ensemble d’installations sonores. Ce travail part d’une composition déterministe et linéaire et mène progressivement à une œuvre ouverte. Durant les dernières années, ce travail a été influencé par les méthodes d’écritures utilisées dans la conception de jeux vidéo, aboutissant à des œuvres sonores spatiales et interactives. Dans le processus de conception de ces dernières, le compositeur va être amené à penser la conception sonore dans un espace virtuel ou réel en fonction des déplacements d’un auditeur. Une façon de mener cette démarche est de laisser l'auditeur interagir avec le système au travers de personnages non joueurs (PNJ). Un tel choix témoigne de l'évolution du rôle du compositeur depuis la construction d’une œuvre linéaire et déterministe vers celle d’une œuvre ouverte et non déterminisme. Pour une pièce donnée, le créateur laisse à l’interacteur un certain degré de liberté et au système un certain degré d'autonomie.Nous débutons ce travail par un état de l'art couvrant divers domaines, de l'art interactif aux agents intelligents.Le troisième chapitre est consacré à l'analyse des pièces interactives conçues par des musiciens, plasticiens, designers de jeux. De cette analyse, nous dégageons un ensemble de critères de classification et nous plaçons ces œuvres d'art dans un triangle Concepteur/Interacteur/Système (C.I.S.). La position d’une œuvre dans ce triangle détermine la latitude que laisse le concepteur aux deux autres protagonistes.Le quatrième chapitre pose la problématique de cette thèse. Nous sommes partis du fait qu’une méthode et à fortiori des outils informatiques sont souvent liés à un style d’écriture. L’histoire des outils d’écriture informatique, jusqu’aux moteurs de jeux vidéo, reflète des visions différentes de ce qu’est la notion d’interactivité dans un domaine et à une époque donnée. Nous proposons ici que le concepteur puisse prendre le point de vue d’un des deux autres protagonistes: l’interacteur ou les PNJ. Ceci aboutit à deux styles que nous appelons le style scripté d’une part et le style émergent d’autre part. Nous comparons ces styles d’un point de vue de l’écriture dans les jeux, de la notion de narrateur, de l’ouverture de l’œuvre et du style de programmation. Cette première comparaison formelle ne permet pas de tirer des conclusions convaincantes. Le cinquième chapitre est consacré à la conception et au développement d’une même installation, Le promeneur écoutant, selon les deux styles cités au chapitre précédent. La version scriptée a été réalisée dans le cadre du projet Terra Dynamica. Nous en proposons une seconde écriture en style émergent et comparons le résultat des deux approches. Nous parcourons l’ensemble des étapes de conception et de réalisation, de la spécification informelle à la programmation. Nous analysons du point de vue du concepteur ces deux styles. Nous montrons que le style émergent, séduisant à priori, aboutit à une complexité de création et de mise en œuvre très importante. Dans les deux cas, les lacunes et besoins en matière de méthodes et d’outils sont mis en évidence.Dans la conclusion, ce travail d’expérimentation est complété par une enquête donnant le point de vue de plusieurs concepteurs d’œuvres interactives sur notre problématique. Nous concluons par une synthèse de ce travail et une analyse de ses développements possibles tant sur le plan conceptuel de l’écriture que sur le développement d’outils auteurs. / The author of this thesis has worked as music composer on numerous sound walk art installations. During the last decade, this work has been influenced by the design methods used in video games, leading to interactive sound walk pieces. In the design process of such pieces, as compared with interactive music works, the composer must write her/his sound design in a real or a virtual space according to the listener’s promenade. A way to drive this walk is to let the listener interact with the System through Non Player Characters (NPC). Such an installation shows the evolution of the composer’s role from that of a deterministic creation to a non-deterministic one. For a given piece, the creator leaves to the interactor a certain amount of freedom and to the system, according its level of self-sufficiency, a certain amount of autonomy. According to these two parameters, each art piece can be positioned somewhere within a triangle D.I.S. which vertices are the Designer, the Interactor and the System. The main goal of this thesis is to analyze the goals and the needs of the designer of such interactive pieces, in terms of methodology and tools. We begin this work by a state of the art covering various fields, from interactive art to intelligent agents. The third chapter is devoted to the analysis of interactive pieces designed by musicians, plastic artists, game designers. From this analysis we propose a set of classification criteria and we place these art works in the DIS triangle. The fourth chapter raises the problematic of our research. We assume that the choice of a position in this triangle is directly related to a choice between two writing styles, the “scripting style” and the “emergent style”. In the scripting style, the designer takes the point of view of the interactor who becomes the narrator. In the emergent style, the designer takes the point of view of the NPC. The two styles are first compared according to the criteria presented in the previous chapter.For a deeper analysis of the two styles, we have designed, with the help of a development team, two versions of the same interactive sound installation The Listening Walker. The installation was created in Paris during the “Futur en Seine” Festival in June 2013 and shown as an art installation for ICEC 2013 in Sao paulo.The goal of this sound walk is to discover a virtual district of Paris around the Pantheon. This installation is designed as a video game with different levels of exploration. The player’s reward is the discovery of the city mainly via sound. Success depends on his listening behavior: NPC are moving around him, interpreting his moves, the direction he takes and the time spent listening particular sounds. Depending upon the listener’s attitude, each NPC has his own reaction such as running away, getting closer to the listener, ignoring him or helping him to discover secret areas. In the fifth chapter, we present the whole creation and development process of the two versions of the installation. It starts with the constraints and artistic choices. The informal specifications of the two versions are presented and the methods and programming methodologies used described. In both cases, the lack of efficient tools for non programmers is pointed out. This experiment shows also the great complexity of the emergent style compared to the scripting style: it is much more difficult to specify a world than to write a story, even an interactive one.In the conclusion, we corroborate our analysis with the point of view of creators working in different fields from interactive music to game design. Some possible extensions of this work are then presented.