The purpose of this study was to survey the occurrence of and obstacles to team training in neonatal life support in Swedish hospitals and, accordingly, to compare university hospitals with other hospitals. The study included all the managers in 37 pediatric wards who participated in telephone interviews with the aid of a questionnaire. The results showed that 81 % of the Swedish hospitals that have a paediatric ward train the staff in neonatal life support. All of the university hospitals and 74 % of the other hospitals are running training in some form. The methods of training varied and so did the occurrence of training. All the managers thought it was important to train neonatal life support. No statistical significant difference occurred between university hospitals and other hospitals concerning the methods of training, evaluation of training or in possibilities and obstacles of training. The conclusion is that training multidisciplinary teams in neonatal life support is going on in most of the Swedish hospitals. The team training in neonatal life support is quite a new method in Sweden and several hospitals have started the training this year. One third evaluate their training by oral reports, which is twice as often as written reports. A recommendation based on the results of this study is that certification for the professionals who are involved in neonatal life support should be considered.

The purpose of this study is to get an understanding of how teachers in electricity and electronics use teamwork in school. The study was carried out in two upper secondary schools in the middle of Sweden. The method I use is qualitative interviews. The analysis method I selected is an ad hoc method. Teachers regard the use of teamwork in school today as valuable because society and several occupations today demand co-operation and teamwork. Teachers see the advantages when pupils can exchange ideas with each other and get other opinions. Other aspects to why teachers choose teamwork in school is that poor pupils can get support from others. A problem teachers discover is that good students can be prevented to move forward at a higher pace as result of the teamwork. The importance of group size for teamwork and other positive effects due to the presence of others is also discussed. / Syftet med undersökningen är få en insikt i hur ellärare på gymnasiet jobbar med grupparbete i skolan. Metoden som undersökningen bygger på är kvalitativa intervjuer som gjordes på två olika gymnasieskolor i Mellansverige. Valet av analys metod blev den vanliga ad hoc. Resultatet visar att lärarna ser vikten av grupparbeten och samarbetsträning i skolan idag beroende på att det krävs samarbete inom flera yrkesområden och verksamhetsfält ute i samhället. Lärarna ser också behovet att elever får byta idéer och får andra elevers åsikter i undervisningen. Andra aspekter som lärarna tar upp är att svaga elever får stöttning i grupparbetet, men också att starka elever ibland ser grupparbetet som ett hinder för att gå snabbare fram. Gruppstorlekens betydelse för grupparbetet och de positiva effekter som kan uppstå vid enbart social närvaro mellan personer belyses.

I omvårdnadsarbetet behövs förmågan att samarbetaoch kommunicera för att ge god vård. Dialog anses nödvändig vid hälso- ochsjukvårdsarbete då informationsutbyte ger ökar kunskap och bidrar tillkollektivt ansvar. Såväl patienter sompersonal på de svenska sjukhusens vårdavdelningar vittnar om att samarbetetmellan professioner inte är optimalt. Syftet med studien varatt undersöka vilka faktorer som skapar ett fungerande vårdteam. Studien genomfördes som en litteraturstudie där nio vetenskapligaartiklar utgjorde underlaget för resultatet. Ett välutvecklat vårdteam med godkommunikation och gott samarbete bör utveckla goda relationer. Goda relationerkommer ur att arbeta mot gemensamma mål, respektera varandras professionellakompetens och att lyfta och bearbeta konflikter. För att detta ska uppnås krävsgod kommunikation. Kommunikationen mellan medlemmarna i teamet underlättas ommedlemmarna talar ett gemensamt språk. Ett sätt att styra kommunikationen motett gemensamt språk kan vara att införa kommunikationshjälpmedel med SBAR somett gott exempel. Problem bland nya medlemmar i ett vårdteam är oförståelse förhur mycket arbete som ligger bakom att bygga ett effektivt team med godkommunikation. Ett team skapas inte av att bara sätta ihop en grupp människor,teamarbete kräver arbete.  En rekommendationär att tidigt i alla utbildningar, som leder till att bli en del av ettvårdteam utbildas och diskutera detta. Dock bör även personal i vårdteam fåchans till fortsatt utbildning i vårdteamsarbete och kommunikation. Merforskning inom området som studien syftar till behövs och speciellt forskningmot svenska förhållanden. / Within caring the ability to collaborate and communicate is needed in order to provide good care. Dialog is considered essential in healthcare work, the exchange of information increases knowledge and contributes to collective responsibility. Patients and staff at Swedish hospital wards testify that cooperation between professions is not optimal. The aim of this study was to examine what factors creates a functioning team. The study was conducted as a case study in which the result was based on nine scientific papers. A well-developed healthcare team with good communication and collaboration develops good relationships. Good relationships come out of working toward common goals, respecting each other’s professional expertise and processed conflicts. Communication between team members is facilitated if members speak a common language. One way to enhance the communication of a common language can be the introduction of specific communication aids with SBAR as a good example. A problem among new team members is the lack of understanding of how much work is behind building an effective team with good communication. A team is not created by simply putting together a group of people, teamwork requires work. One recommendation is that early in any training, which leads to being part of a healthcare team, educate and discuss this issue. However, staff in care teams should also get the chance for further education in communication and teamwork. More research in the area in which the study aimed is needed, especially research on Swedish conditions.

Intrinsic motivation has been shown to contribute to participation and adherence in sport (Biddle & Mutrie, 2001). The importance of social and task cohesion within teams has also been studied in an attempt to create and maintain a bonded group (Loughead & Hardy, 2006). However, these two factors have yet to be looked at in relation to one another, especially when exploring gender as a contributing variable. The purpose of this study was to determine if gender and motivation type are related to perceptions of team cohesion. It was hypothesized that athletes’ who are more internally motivated would view the group as more cohesive. It was also hypothesized that female athletes would perceive high levels of team social cohesion regardless of motivation type where male athletes would perceive higher levels of team social cohesion when they are more intrinsically motivated. In order to answer these questions, 253 male and female collegiate athletes were asked to complete a demographics questionnaire, the Sport Motivation Scale (SMS; Pelletier, Fortier, Vallerand, Tuson, Briere, & Blais, 1995) assessing individual motivation type, as well as the Group Environment Questionnaire (GEQ; Carron, Widmeyer, & Brawley, 1985) that examined group social and task cohesion issues within sport. The results revealed that there are significant positive correlations between intrinsic motivation types and perceptions of task and social cohesion. However, gender was not a significant predictor of perceived cohesion when moderated with motivation type. These outcomes indicate that promoting intrinsic motivation, despite gender, in sport teams contributes to more positive social and task cohesion in the group. / Access to thesis permanently restricted to Ball State community only / School of Physical Education, Sport, and Exercise Science

Teamwork has become increasingly important in many disciplines. To support teamwork in dynamic and complex domains, a teamwork programming language and a teamwork architecture are important for specifying the knowledge of teamwork and for interpreting the knowledge of teamwork and then driving agents to interact with the domains. Psychological studies on teamwork have also shown that team members in an effective team often maintain shared mental models so that they can have mutual expectation on each other. However, existing agent/teamwork programming languages cannot explicitly express the mental states underlying teamwork, and existing representation of the shared mental models are inefficient and further become an obstacle to support effective teamwork. To address these issues, we have developed a teamwork programming language called Role-Based MALLET (RoB-MALLET) which has rich expressivity to explicitly specify the mental states underlying teamwork. By using roles and role variables, the knowledge of team processes is specified in terms of conceptual notions, instead of specific agents and agent variables, allowing joint intentions to be formed and this knowledge to be reused by different teams of agents. Further, based on roles and role variables, we have developed mechanisms of task decomposition and task delegation, by which the knowledge of a team process is decomposed into the knowledge of a team process for individuals and then delegate it to agents. We have also developed an efficient representation of shared mental models called Role-Based Shared Mental Model (RoB-SMM) by which agents only maintain individual processes complementary with others?? individual process and a low level of overlapping called team organizations. Based on RoB-SMMs, we have developed tworeasoning mechanisms to improve team performance, including Role-Based Proactive Information Exchange (RoB-PIE) and Role-Based Proactive Helping Behaivors (RoBPHB). Through RoB-PIE, agents can anticipate other agents?? information needs and proactively exchange information with them. Through RoB-PHB, agents can identify other agents?? help needs and proactively initialize actions to help them. Our experiments have shown that RoB-MALLET is flexible in specifying reusable plans, RoB-SMMs is efficient in supporting effective teamwork, and RoB-PHB improves team performance.

The most important thing for company to stay competitive is keeping innovative. When a new product launches to the market, you must keep developing another new product to move faster than the competitors. Besides, the human resource and equipment to develop new products must be a huge investment. The returns are not always guaranteed. Without R&D investment, the company will be out of competition in a short time.The employees always be encouraged to have innovative thinking with incentives. Sometimes, their creative ideas would bring unexpected effect and benefit the company. How does R&D personnel to have innovation? The purpose of the research is to understand the elements of innovation on R&D personnel. From the case company, Taiflex Scientific Co., Ltd, to have creative employees would bring tremendous benefits to the company. Every company would ask the R&D team to keep innovative and to develop new products continuously in order to be the leader in the market. If we can understand what the elements of the innovation, we can recruit creative personnel and speed up the development. While the company can launch new products quicker and raise up the company competitiveness, R&D team is the main weapon to fight the competitors. This is a case study of Taiflex Scientific Co., Ltd. There are 5 teams in the case company and all members are treated equally under same working environment and incentive policy. This study focus on the relationship between the innovative behavior of R&D personnel, also the team innovation performance and the influencing factors. The Purpose of the study is to understand the factors of the innovative behaviors on R&D persons and the relation between innovative team and performance. The factors are personality traits and KEYS. This study adopts Five Factor Model (Big Five) that includes Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness , Conscientiousness, on the personality traits. The study of organization factors adopts KEY structure. The result is concluded from questionnaire survey and interviews. The main factors on R&D innovation are personality traits, but team atmosphere would have only certain influence. From the case study, Openness to Experience and Extraversion have higher contribution to innovative behavior than Neuroticism, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. The freedom from the team atmosphere is the main factor for R&D personnel innovation. The challenging job is the second important factor. The case company shows that innovative team behavior has positive connection on R&D performance. The more creative team has better performance. Besides, personnel working experience and education would have certain effect. The purpose of the study is to know the requirements such as personality traits, working experience and education while recruiting R&D personnel. Then we can find the suitable person, have better performance and keep the company competitive.

In a rapidly changing business environment, it is difficult for enterprises to achieve their objectives by functional structures only. When organizational tasks become more complex, ¡§team¡¨ plays an important role on overcoming these challenges and helps achieving team performance. As a result, researches on team effectiveness have becoming ever more important today. The purpose of this study includes below: 1.Users should be involved because they possess knowledge which developers don¡¦t have but is required for system development. They should be viewed as partners with the developers that could make team to get target. 2.The most critical resource for knowledge teams is expertise, or specialized skills and knowledge, but the mere presence of expertise on a team is insufficient to produce high-quality work. Expertise must be managed and coordinated in order to leverage its potential. That is, teams must be able to manage their skill and knowledge interdependencies effectively through user and developer¡¦s good relationship. 3.The six facets of the Teamwork Quality (TWQ) construct, i.e., communication, coordination, balance of member contributions, mutual support, effort, and cohesion, are specified. TWQ shows a strong association with team members' personal success.

Zugl.: Wien, Wirtschaftsuniv., Diss., 2008

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Tübingen, 2003.

Given the continuing improvements in design and manufacturing processes in addition to improvements in artificial intelligence, robots are being deployed in an increasing variety of environments for longer periods of time. As the number of robots grows, it is expected that they will encounter and interact with other robots. Additionally, the number of companies and research laboratories producing these robots is increasing, leading to the situation where these robots may not share a common communication or coordination protocol. While standards for coordination and communication may be created, we expect that any standards will lag behind the state-of-the-art protocols and robots will need to additionally reason intelligently about their teammates with limited information. This problem motivates the area of ad hoc teamwork in which an agent may potentially cooperate with a variety of teammates in order to achieve a shared goal. We argue that agents that effectively reason about ad hoc teamwork need to exhibit three capabilities: 1) robustness to teammate variety, 2) robustness to diverse tasks, and 3) fast adaptation. This thesis focuses on addressing all three of these challenges. In particular, this thesis introduces algorithms for quickly adapting to unknown teammates that enable agents to react to new teammates without extensive observations. The majority of existing multiagent algorithms focus on scenarios where all agents share coordination and communication protocols. While previous research on ad hoc teamwork considers some of these three challenges, this thesis introduces a new algorithm, PLASTIC, that is the first to address all three challenges in a single algorithm. PLASTIC adapts quickly to unknown teammates by reusing knowledge it learns about previous teammates and exploiting any expert knowledge available. Given this knowledge, PLASTIC selects which previous teammates are most similar to the current ones online and uses this information to adapt to their behaviors. This thesis introduces two instantiations of PLASTIC. The first is a model-based approach, PLASTIC-Model, that builds models of previous teammates' behaviors and plans online to determine the best course of action. The second uses a policy-based approach, PLASTIC-Policy, in which it learns policies for cooperating with past teammates and selects from among these policies online. Furthermore, we introduce a new transfer learning algorithm, TwoStageTransfer, that allows transferring knowledge from many past teammates while considering how similar each teammate is to the current ones. We theoretically analyze the computational tractability of PLASTIC-Model in a number of scenarios with unknown teammates. Additionally, we empirically evaluate PLASTIC in three domains that cover a spread of possible settings. Our evaluations show that PLASTIC can learn to communicate with unknown teammates using a limited set of messages, coordinate with externally-created teammates that do not reason about ad hoc teams, and act intelligently in domains with continuous states and actions. Furthermore, these evaluations show that TwoStageTransfer outperforms existing transfer learning algorithms and enables PLASTIC to adapt even better to new teammates. We also identify three dimensions that we argue best describe ad hoc teamwork scenarios. We hypothesize that these dimensions are useful for analyzing similarities among domains and determining which can be tackled by similar algorithms in addition to identifying avenues for future research. The work presented in this thesis represents an important step towards enabling agents to adapt to unknown teammates in the real world. PLASTIC significantly broadens the robustness of robots to their teammates and allows them to quickly adapt to new teammates by reusing previously learned knowledge. / text