<p> Shared leadership paradigms are becoming more popular in organizations because of the increased responsibilities placed on leaders within health care organizations. Researchers have conducted little research on how individuals on leadership teams perceive their role in engaging with others in their team. The qualitative phenomenological hermeneutic study involved examining how radiology administrators in Northern California describe their lived experiences on shared leadership teams, with an emphasis on their perceptions of team productivity and trust. The conceptual framework for the study included shared leadership theory, which scholars have noted is still a new field of study. Seven research participants representing from three to 18 years of experience as radiology managers with experience serving on shared leadership teams. From the five initial questions and sub questions, the analysis involved breaking down the responses into 175 separate areas of exploration. In addition to the demographics of the groups and types of teams served on, four themes emerged from this data: lived experience on shared leadership teams, knowledge and skills learned from shared leadership teams, key factors affecting team performance on shared leadership teams, and the effect of diversity on shared leadership teams. The implications of the research to leadership are that radiology managers may gain a better understanding of when to use shared leadership and how to best staff the teams to support organizational work, and how to improve shared leadership team dynamics.</p>

The research was conducted to determine the degree of organisational performance measurement in SMEs in the ICT sector within the Limpopo Province of South Africa. Literature on performance measurement and SMEs was reviewed and provided the theoretical foundation for the research. A qualitative approach to research was followed using case research based on semi-structured interviews to determine the knowledge and perceived value of performance measurement in SMEs. The study also investigated the prominent performance measures used by SMEs and difficulties around the implementation of these measures. The findings were related to the literature regarding the attributes of measures, the dimensions of performance and the characteristics of performance measurement frameworks. In conclusion, a method for SMEs to use performance information to their advantage was proposed.

Executive Summary This report uses modified physics and the basic business relationship equations to describe the business system. The physics - business equations are derived using conformal mapping, while thermodynamic and kinematic relationships are further developed and related before being applied to a business situation. The system developed has general applicability to business and can be used for strategic competitive positioning, amongst other postulated uses. The main purpose of this project is to build on existing work in the area of process modeling and strategy formulation to define a quantitative management tool that will effectively enable the formulation of a generic framework, to measure the effects of various strategic options using time based financial management and physics models. The main aims of this research project are to provide an evaluative summary of the existing literature on the applications of process modeling and physics to business limited in scope to competitive strategic planning through a literature review of existing business models and the subsequent development of a mathematical model based on kinematics and thermodynamics for strategic formulation. From the literature review derive a mathematical framework relating business and physics based on an indirect relationship of physical laws to business models based on existing knowledge. Further explain why the derived model has applications to business, and derive a non-rigorous mathematical proof thereof. From these equations make recommendations on how this model can be utilised as a tool to assist in strategy formulation. Thereafter provide statistical proof that the model is applicable to a defined set of companies and show by means of applications how to determine optimal strategies using the model. The main objectives of the research project are to utilise the quantitative tool to determine where a company is, and where it should position itself in future to optimise its competitive position. Further, the framework must be developed into a strategic tool that would allow for the fast turnaround in the implementation of strategy, and the ability to quickly predict necessary changes in direction. The statistical hypothesis tested asks if it is possible to relate the laws of physics to business and use the resultant mathematical framework to analyse a firm’s competitive position in an industry and position it accordingly. From the derived equations a mathematical model to determine strategic options for a firm using time based financial accounting principles and physics equations can be formulated and used to find profitable options for a firm. By implication the model can be applied to strategic positioning of the firm. Unfortunately there is no work in the literature reviews to build this study on and much of it is built from first principles. This leads to complex mathematical relationships, which may prove difficult to follow. .

No description available.

<p>Hospital leaders who fail to respond to poor patient satisfaction reports may experience lower organizational performance. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore strategies of leaders in private health care settings to improve patient satisfaction. This study may provide strategies that health care leaders in the public setting can apply to improve patient satisfaction and organizational performance. One private health care provider operating in Vancouver, British Columbia, Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta, was selected as both private and public healthcare centers are located in these areas. Data were gathered from 12 participant interviews and from an examination of available physical artifacts such as organizational documents provided by the participants and the company website. Transformational leadership was the underlying conceptual framework for this research. Triangulation was used to ensure the rigorousness of the study. In the study, themes were identified after member checking the transcribed open-ended interview questions. The 5 themes identified were cohesive culture of employee engagement, patient-focused model of care, timely access and follow-up of results and coordination of care, continuous system quality improvement, and employee accountability. These themes underscore the importance of a culture of employee engagement; they also illuminate care that focuses on the patient-care that ensures timely access, follow-up and coordination of care, quality improvement based on patient feedback, and employee accountability. Current publicly-funded hospitals and health care centers may apply these findings to improve patient satisfaction and organizational performance. </p>

published_or_final_version / Surveying / Master / Master of Science

published_or_final_version / Business Administration / Master / Master of Business Administration

This thesis explores supply network structures, from the perspective of service innovation, over a period of five years (2005-2010). The initiating actor in the network, a financial institution, could be regarded as being the source, or at least the catalyst, for network interactions linked to service innovation. Research underpinning this thesis investigates the nature of network interactions. Of particular interest are interactions that co-created opportunities at the point of knowledge exchange, which in turn led to innovative value propositions. The services sector generates over 70% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in developed economies and over 50% in developing ones. Nonetheless, most innovation-related research has focussed on goods rather than services (Paton and McLaughlin, 2008). In studies of services the focus of attention is generally the enabling Information and Communications Technology (ICT) provision. This focus, however, reinforces a goods- dominant view of innovation; namely, that services follow advances in knowledge associated to tangible goods - the ICT. Moreover, most such studies have focused their analysis at the dyad level. Literature reviewed led to a greater understanding of how a service innovation takes places within a supply network, what enables such an innovation, and what characteristics can be associated to a particular level of analysis. Answers contribute to theory building in the field of Supply Chain Management (SCM) field (Madhavan et al., 2004, Wu and Choi, 2005, Dubois and Fredriksson, 2008, Choi and Wu, 2009a, 2009b, Li and Choi, 2009, Wu et al., 2010), by evidencing that dynamic triads within a network are the key to fostering service innovation. Research was exploratory, embracing an inductive theory-building methodology based on a qualitative approach. Altogether, 42 semi-structured interviews were conducted, transcribed and analysed; and 265 documents (hardcopies, electronic files, e-mails and web sites) were examined. Research was undertaken in three stages: initial exploration, in-depth research and findings validation. The method led to an iterative dialogue between data collection and analysis, supported by NVivo, which allowed pattern identification and category coding (labelling). Three issues highlight changes in the triads observed: a focal dyad, roles played by participating actors, and network interactions among actors. Findings helped develop a proposal for the de Vries (2006) service system model—used in literature on services—to include a set of customers, a set of suppliers, a set of buyers and a set of outcomes interacting through their respective competencies and technologies. This model has already been used in service literature, and the enriched model proposed by the researcher is one he argues can strengthen SCM literature.

This study investigates a recent UK Government Intervention established to develop Micro- and Nano- Technologies (MNTs) for technology-based economic growth. While the need for such innovation policies is well recognised, there is also a need to understand the key challenges to developing effective policy interventions for the innovation process that will create sound economic leverage (Harvey, 2010). A new method that helps us understand the innovation process at the organisational level has been developed, by working across disciplines and synthesising different methodologies. Constructs adopted from the Minnesota Innovation Research Programme (MIRP) were used to gather and analyse data. The methodological approach followed was a fusion of the Interactive Process Perspective (IPP) and Institutional Theory (IT). This method has been used to further explain the complexities of the innovation process by demonstrating the co-operation and contestation between actors from different interest groups in terms of agency and structure. Evidence of how innovation centres exhibit different characteristics relating to their local context along with the specific actors populating them is provided. Those actors bring their own institutional logics, belief systems and associated practices to their centres. The importance which the local context of an MNT Centre has within the extra-local context of the state intervention is shown to have a major bearing on its original purpose. For practitioners some important points have been raised: the intended purpose of the MNT government intervention was shown to evolve across MNT centres; the key influential actors of each centre demonstrably followed different institutional systems of reasoning, which in some cases resulted in internal conflicts. As demonstrated in this study, the ingrained institutional thinking and reasoning of actors can be difficult to change for the intended purpose of an intervention, once funding has already been awarded.

Current trends indicate that the prevalence of ontologies will continue to increase within many domains. They are already commonly used to define controlled medical terminologies and form the backbone of the Semantic Web initiative. Very few tools that support versioning of ontologies are currently available, and those that provide difference detection and visualization are particularly lacking. We have implemented a tool called PROMPT-Viz that provides advanced visualizations using treemaps to help understand the location, impact, type and extent of changes that have occurred between versions on an ontology. PROMPT-Viz runs as a plug-in for the popular ProtCgC knowledge engineering environment and as such should be applicable to a large number of ontology developers.