published_or_final_version / Psychology / Master / Master of Philosophy

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The main purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which political deployees employed participatory management in state owned companies in the Republic of Burundi. The identified state owned company was REGIDESO, a water and electricity supply utility in Burundi. The study examined the extent to which REGIDESO employees participate in the decision-making within their organization bodies and to find out whether employees were willing to participate in their organization if they were given an opportunity to do so. Obstacles to employee participation in decision-making within REGIDESO were researched. The premise from which this study was undertaken was that participative management is touted as the best style for managing in contemporary organizations and has often been promoted as the quick cure for poor morale, low performance and productivity. To answer these questions, a structured questionnaire to test REGIDESO employee participation in decision-making was administered to a sample of 62 employees. Only 60 questionnaires were filled and returned. The survey findings revealed that the extent to which REGIDESO employees participate in decision-making was too low because the majority of the respondents said they did not have access to participation and said that senior managers were the ones who make decisions in the company. On willingness to participate, more than 95% of respondents were willing to participate in decision-making processes. Educational qualifications played a big role on the extent of willingness to participate where higher educated employees showed more eagerness. The main barriers to participation identified were that employees did not get feedback when they submitted their suggestions to superiors. The fact that managers in REGIDESO wanted full control of the organization and do not want to support employee involvement was also seen by workers as an obstacle to participation. The third obstacle mentioned by employees was that the organizational structure of the company did not allow employee participation. From the foregoing findings, some recommendations were made that would benefit both management and workers of REGIDESO. The law makers of Burundi were also given some advice. It also seemed necessary that researchers should examine other variables such as financial participation, labour turnover and absenteeism. / Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville, 2011.

This study examines the decision-making activities and communicative activities of two groups participating in a simulated medical emergency activity: the control group (CG) using a traditional whiteboard and the experimental group (EG) using a structured interactive whiteboard. The two groups differ in that the EG has a structured template to annotate and share their arguments with each other. Data analysis of the decision-making activities focused on planning, data collecting, managing, and interpreting patient data. Data analysis of the communicative activities focused on informative, argumentative, elicitative, responsive, and directive acts. In the early stage of decision-making the EG spent significantly more time interpreting the situation and less time managing the patient than the CG; in the later stage the EG spent significantly more time managing the patient but less time interpreting the situation. No significant results were found in communicative activities due to low cell frequencies of the utterances. Qualitative results indicated that shared visualizations can disambiguate and clarify verbal interactions and promote productive argumentation and negotiation activities. Shared cognition facilitates the construction of shared situation models and joint problem spaces which lead to better decision making and problem solving.

The process by which ideas, designs, and plans are formulated has an influence on whether or not they will be implemented. Consensus-based planning is a tool which is being incorporated more and more in planning efforts in order to create broad-based goals and objectives. However, many times it is used in the comprehensive planning process where it is more difficult to gauge the amount of implementation being done. There is a large amount of information on how consensus-based planning creates stronger decisions, goals, etc. based in the public interest but there is little information on how these decisions or goals impacted their communities. The study looks at obstacles to implementation and what would have helped to eliminate them. It also questions whether, if consensus-building techniques had been used during the planning process, it would have helped to eliminate these obstacles to implementation. In order to answer these questions, three charrettes conducted by Community Based Projects of Ball State University in the years between 1990 and 1992 are evaluated. / Department of Urban Planning

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Distributed cognition has been emerging as a new research direction in cognitive science over the last two decades and is gaining momentum. In a recent study Hollan, Hutchins and Kirsch argue that the distributed cognition framework enables the study of interaction between people and artifacts. This thesis views tools as an integral part of cognition, and focuses on the complex interaction between brain, body and environment, which complements automatic internal processing in the brain and assists with individual and group problem solving. The thesis analyses some existing research about teams working in high-pressure environments and their complex interactions with their external environment, cognitive tools and each other.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Auburn University, 2006. / Abstract. Includes bibliographic references.

Thesis (D.Min)--Abilene Christian University, 2006. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 66-68).