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Thesis advisor: Lyndon Garrett / Coinciding with the upsurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement in the Summer of 2020, collegiate and professional sports teams have exhibited increased involvement in social issues. Existing research primarily analyzes the platform and visibility that athletes have to promote social agendas, but there is a gap in knowledge regarding how a sports team forms a collective identity around a social movement. This study seeks to fill this gap in research by utilizing qualitative surveying and interviewing to examine how Boston College athletes engage in the Black Lives Matter Movement. Processes of grounded theory and inductive analysis are used to understand how the Boston College Women’s Rowing Team values contribute to the team’s shared mental model to fulfill the conditions of social movement emergence and further promote team value adoption and team success. Evaluation of student-athletes across different Boston College teams through this study also offers insights to the controversy over sports teams engaging in social issues. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: Sociology.

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2010. / Statement of responsibility on t.p. reads: Laura E. Aust, Zachary W. Rose, Ariadne G. Smith, Amrita Saigal. Each student submitted a title page and vita. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 87-89 ([i.e. p. [99]-[101])). / Every mechanical engineering student at MIT takes the same courses: 2.009 being one of them. In our capstone product design course at MIT, most students glean an incredible amount from their teams, mentors, and projects, then focus their efforts on slightly more pressing issues, such as graduating and finding jobs and grad school. But what if the project you found was bigger than just a course, and had the potential of improving the lives of those less fortunate than you? The Komera project creates affordable sanitary protection for women in developing countries from the locally available and all-natural fiber from banana plants. In doing so, the initiative not only empowers girls by allowing them to attend school during their periods, but also creates employment and income within their communities. Our first initial iterations of the machine to fabricate pads were created in 2.009. Previous mechanical solutions to this problem are inefficient and labor-intensive. With our prototype, we seek to reduce the labor involved and increase pad output by twofold. However, we didn't want out work to stop there. Over the course of the semester, we continued to expand the Komera project twofold: by working on the mechanical design of the product and by expanding our scope to transform the product into a public service initiative. This thesis discusses the trials and tribulations of both directions. We explore the differences and challenges in designing for the developing world within a 1 st-world product design context - paying attention to manufacturing, materials, cost, and usability. We also offer a guide through the creation of an initiative: how we took a product and turned it into an IDEAS-winning public service project. It has been an incredibly rewarding experience for us, and we hope that we can inspire others to work on international development products as well. / by Laura E. Aust ... [et al.]. / S.B.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This study served as a preliminary test of the Sports Team Effectiveness (STE) Model developed by Devine, Lindsey, and Wolfarth in 2017. The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which several variables help explain winning in professional basketball. The value of the STE model in predicting the winner of basketball games was compared to already-existing predictors of winning. Archival data from 435 games from the 2016-2017 season of the National Basketball Association (NBA) were examined. Bivariate correlations between each antecedent of team effectiveness and team effectiveness were computed. Secondly, multiple logistic regression was used to examine the extent to which the antecedents predict winning while controlling for the other antecedents. Finally, hierarchical logistic regression was used to examine the extent to which the STE model can predict the winner of the game above and beyond game location and opposition quality. The variables of game location, opposition quality, role performance, and number of contested shots taken by the opposing team were significantly related to winning. Overall, the STE model did significantly reduce model error above and beyond game location and opposition quality, giving empirical support to the theoretical model.

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A research of effectiveness of team work in a concrete company, that acts in the sphere of the information technology, is an object of my diploma paper. To take the view about the team work in the company it was necessary to perform an analyse of the team work. I confronted results of the analyse with the real position in the team. An evaluation of conditions in the monitored team and a proposition of pertinent recommendation to increase the effectiveness of team work is an inseparable part of my diploma paper.

This qualitative study was conducted with participation from social workers employed at a Southern California child welfare agency and researched whether the use of Child/Family Team-Decision Making meetings were a benefit to social workers’ practice. Furthermore, the study examined social workers’ beliefs about the meetings’ impact on foster children and their families in connection with the outcomes of safety, permanence and well-being. Safety, permanence and well-being are the three domains used to evaluate the success of foster children and their families. Family team-decision making meetings have the common goals of safety, permanence and well-being through promoting shared decision-making, empowerment and continued relationships between workers and the families they serve. The 10 participants of this study were recruited by the researcher through self- knowledge of employees and their job function. Data was gathered through in-person interviews with participants as well as the participants they referred. The data in this study was qualitative and was gathered in two phases then recorded and analyzed using open coding followed by axial coding. The findings of this study revealed that including all of the people who are affected by the decisions made in these meetings is essential to good child welfare social work practice. Concepts such as engagement, group and community cooperation and dynamics, social worker training and knowledge and agency support were themes that permeated throughout the data. These themes were intertwined with foster child safety, permanence and well-being. This study also concluded that attending and participating in CFTDMs enhances a social worker’s knowledge base and assists in their feelings of competence and confidence in their job performance.

<p>The main aim of this study was to test and ascertain, objectively, theexistence/occurrence of the phenomenon of Synergy in teams. To do this, the results of anonline course in Umea University, where students are invariably required to do a bunch ofindividual as well as team assignments, were analysed: the idea was to compare the marksobtained by the students in their team assignments with their marks in their individualassignments and to check if there was a reasonably good number of instances where the teammark was higher than the highest individual mark in that particular team. The basicassumption was that in case the team mark of a team was higher than the highest individualmark in that team, then, it can be presumed that synergy has taken place in that team for thatparticular team assignment. And, given a reasonably large sample of teams, it would beinstructive to see what percentage of groups/teams actually show synergy. In case a goodnumber of teams show such results then we could conclude that there was objective evidencein favour of the synergy. In case our analysis brought to fore such results then it would benatural to take the study one step ahead and test a broad causal relationship of synergy withthe complexity/difficulty of task at hand.After analysing the results of about 387 students, who worked in about 104 teams, itwas found that about 69.23% teams scored higher than the highest scoring individual; 93.26%teams faired better than the average score of team members; and, 98.07% teams can be said tohave performed better if compared to the lowest individual score.Further, one level below, when team-score and individual-score were compared acrossdifferent team and individual tasks (Case Studies), it still came to fore that teams hadoutperformed the individuals. And, when a single student’s marks in his team assignmentswere compared with his marks in his individual assignments, in five out of six comparisons itwas found that the team mark was convincingly higher than the individual mark.All these results strongly indicated the existence/occurrence of synergy in teams.In addition to this, an experiment on two teams of students was also performed toshow that synergy was more likely to happen if the task at hand was complex/ difficult. Theresults of this experiment seemed to corroborate the contention of the researchers.Keywords: Project Management, Team, Team Work, Individual work, Synergy</p>

This study investigates whether team members work harder and perform better when they are compensated based on both team and individual performance than when compensated based on team or individual performance alone and whether teammates? familiarity with one another influences the effectiveness of the compensation scheme. Four-member ad hoc student teams repeatedly complete an interdependent task on the computer in an experiment in which I manipulate individual compensation plan (flat wage or performance-based incentives), team compensation plan (flat wage or performance-based incentives), and teammate familiarity (identified teammates with pre-experiment interaction ? strong id or unidentified teammates with no pre-experiment interaction ? weak id). Results indicate that while the combination of team and individual performance-based compensation results in the highest performance, the incremental performance boost is higher from the first performance-based reward strategy, regardless of whether it is team or individual. Under both strong and weak identity, offering a combination of individual and team performance-based compensation results in comparable performance, suggesting that lower productivity levels associated with low team identity can be overcome with performance-based compensation. Together these results suggest that, regardless of team identity, firms can benefit from offering both team and individual performance-based compensation. However, companies should understand that the performance bump may be smaller from the second performance-based scheme.