Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (p. 178).

abstract: Scholars and practitioners increasingly recognize that coworker friendships are integral to both individual- and organizational-level outcomes. At the same time, though, the rapid increase in virtual work has taken a principal source of adult friendships – workplaces – and drastically changed the way that individuals interact within them. No longer are proximity and extra-organizational socializing, two of the strongest predictors of coworker friendships in a co-located workplace, easily accessible. How, then, do employees become friends with each other when interacting mostly online? Once these virtual coworker friendships are forged, individuals must balance the often-conflicting norms of the friendship relationship with the coworker relationship. How, if at all, are these tensions experienced and managed when co-worker friendships are virtual? My dissertation seeks to answer these questions through a longitudinal, grounded theory study of virtual coworker friendship in a global IT firm. The emerging theory articulates the “barrier of virtuality” that challenges virtual coworker friendship formation, necessitating that individuals employ two sets of activities and one set of competencies to form friendships with one another: presence bridgers, relational informalizers, and relational digital fluency. The data also suggest that the coworker friendship tension process itself is largely similar to the previously articulated process in co-located contexts. However, the virtual context changed the frequency, types of shocks that elicited the tensions, and management of these tensions. My findings have numerous implications for the literatures on relationships at work, virtual work, and organizational tensions. They also suggest significant ways in which individuals and organizations can more effectively foster virtual coworker friendships while minimizing the potential harm of virtual coworker friendship tensions. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Business Administration 2017

Thesis (MTech (Business Information Systems))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2015. / This study explores factors contributing to the slow adoption of virtual teams and virtual technology by South African organisations in Cape Town. The study adopted the Technology Organisation and Environment (TOE) framework to examine the influence of technological organisational and environmental contextual factors on organisation’s adoption of virtual teams and virtual technology. Three organisations from different industries in Cape Town were chosen as a case study. Data was collected via qualitative interviews and quantitative questionnaires while content analysis and a statistics package for social sciences were used to analyse and generate results. The results indicated that all three dimensions of the TOE framework significantly either enabled or inhibited organisational adoption of virtual teams and virtual technology. Technological contextual factors such as availability of technology were found to enable adoption while high set-up cost inhibited adoption, and perceived benefit and drawbacks either inhibited or enabled adoption due to the influence of other contextual factors. Organisational contextual factors like available resources and slacks were found to facilitate, whereas organisational competency and formal and informal linking structures impeded adoption. Management commitment, communication process, degree of centralisation, organisation size and technological competency were found to either enable or inhibit technology adoption owing to the influences of other contextual factors. Environmental contextual factors such as competition, government regulation and rapidly growing industries were found to encourage technology adoption. Lack of skilled labour was found to restrain technology adoption while industry characteristics, market structures and technology support infrastructure either enabled or inhibited organisational adoption of virtual teams and virtual technology due to the influence of other contextual factors.

Orientador: Nilson Tadeu Mascia / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Civil, Arquitetura e Urbanismo / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-09T14:29:25Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Forti_NadiaCazarimdaSilva_M.pdf: 2737779 bytes, checksum: ef0859d0c54102ccc7c7df3f3e38f2b0 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2004 / Resumo: O desenvolvimento tecnológico do projeto em estruturas de madeira permitiu melhorar o conhecimento de suas propriedades mecânicas e dos sistemas de conexões em estruturas. Estruturas mistas de madeira com concreto ou aço e os reforços do material com fibras de polímeros estruturais passaram a ser realidade. As estruturas mistas, constituídas por materiais de diferentes propriedades mecânicas associados, são uma solução alternativa às estruturas de uso corrente na construção civil. Essa medida busca obter redução de custos de construção, mantendo também a segurança estrutural, com um desempenho arquitetônico e ambiental vantajoso. A integração de uma estrutura mista deve-se, em geral, à eficiência do sistema de ligação, podendo ser do tipo rígido ou flexível. Esse sistema é responsável por transmitir a força de cisalhamento longitudinal na interface dos dois materiais combinados ao longo do comprimento da viga e também, impedir o desprendimento vertical dos mesmos. Esta pesquisa contribui para a análise do comportamento mecânico de vigas mistas de três maneiras: via programa de elementos finitos bidimensionais, via resolução analítica das equações de equilíbrio e via a equação do princípio dos trabalhos virtuais. A última abordagem foi concebida a partir de pesquisas de teoria das estruturas, expandindo seus conceitos para vigas mistas. A formulação proposta satisfaz as equações de equilíbrio mostrando-se consistente e seus resultados são condizentes com dados experimentais. Essa formulação pode ser facilmente integrada a códigos de elementos finitos requerendo apenas elementos unidimensionais / Abstract: The technologycal development of the design in wood structures has improved the knowledge of the material mechanical properties and the connection systems applied to structures. Composite structures of wood with concrete or steel and structural reinforcement using polymer fibers have become a reality. These structures, constituted by associating materials with different mechanical properties are an alternative solution for current using structures in civil construction. This arrangement aims at obtaining a reduction of construction costs also maintaing the structural safety with advantageous environmental and architectural performance. The integration of a composite structure is, in general, due to the efficiency of the connection system that can be rigid or flexible type. This system is responsible to transfer the longitudinal shear force on the interface of the associated materials along the beam length and to avoid the vertical detachment of them as well. This research contributes to the analysis of the mechanical performance of the composite beams in three ways: bidimensional finite element program, analytical solution of the equilibrium equations and virtual work principle equation via. The last approach was conceived from structural theory researches, expanding their concepts for composite beams. The proposal formulation fulfils the equilibrium equation showing to be consistent and the results fit with the experimental data. This formulation can be easily integrated to a finite element procedure requiring unidimensional elements only / Mestrado / Estruturas / Mestre em Engenharia Civil

Drawing upon configurational theory, work group design research, virtualness concepts, and the software agility literature, the purpose of this study was to provide a starting point for theorizing about the successful configuration of globally distributed agile teams by exploring the dimensions of team structure, virtualness, and agility. Due to the complex nature of this topic, the need to examine the phenomenon within its natural setting, and the limited amount of research that has been conducted in this particular area, this study adopted an embedded multiple-case research design. The primary data collection method consisted of semi-structured interviews involving members of globally distributed agile teams within three U.S. based organizations with members located in distributed sights in multiple countries. Additional data were collected from archival records. Within-case and cross-analysis was conducted using qualitative data analysis software. This study provides a starting point for answering the question of how the configuration of globally distributed agile teams differs from the configuration of other types of globally distributed teams; it synthesizes past research and findings into a comprehensive theoretical framework; it provides a starting point for theorizing about the successful configuration of globally distributed agile teams; it helps practitioners to identify and address the challenges related to the configuration of globally distributed agile teams; and it presents a set of best practices which will inform organizations on how to configure their globally distributed agile teams.

Virtuality of work has become increasingly important in the modern work environment due to globalization and increased technological development. Further, the workforce being composed of digital natives and digital immigrants with varying levels of technical abilities might have implications on organising virtual work due to different perceptions. Therefore, the purpose of our study is to understand how and why digital natives and digital immigrants differ in their perceptions of organising virtual work. In order to gain understanding of this an exploratory, qualitative research design was chosen. Data was collected from ten digital immigrants and ten digital natives and then analysed with a content analysis. The results showed that there are many similarities as well as differences between the populations. Beyond the populations, the findings suggest that work values as well as the usage of ICTs influence how the challenges and opportunities of performing work virtually are perceived by the individuals. Further, these challenges and opportunities shape the perceptions regarding the organisation of virtual work. These findings advance research in the field of virtual work through discussing the differences in perceptions between the populations and beyond them through the conceptual model on how perceptions about organising virtual work are formed. Additionally, the findings can benefit managers to understand their employees better and therefore create better virtual work environments for the future.

Virtual teams in industry are increasingly being used to develop software, create products, and accomplish tasks. However, analyzing those collaborations under same-time/different-place conditions is well-known to be difficult. In order to overcome some of these challenges, this research was concerned with the study of collaboration-based, content-based and temporal measures and their ability to predict cohesion within global software development projects. Messages were collected from three software development projects that involved students from two different countries. The similarities and quantities of these interactions were computed and analyzed at individual and group levels. Results of interaction-based metrics showed that the collaboration variables most related to Task Cohesion were Linguistic Style Matching and Information Exchange. The study also found that Information Exchange rate and Reply rate have a significant and positive correlation to Task Cohesion, a factor used to describe participants' engagement in the global software development process. This relation was also found at the Group level. All these results suggest that metrics based on rate can be very useful for predicting cohesion in virtual groups. Similarly, content features based on communication categories were used to improve the identification of Task Cohesion levels. This model showed mixed results, since only Work similarity and Social rate were found to be correlated with Task Cohesion. This result can be explained by how a group's cohesiveness is often associated with fairness and trust, and that these two factors are often achieved by increased social and work communications. Also, at a group-level, all models were found correlated to Task Cohesion, specifically, Similarity+Rate, which suggests that models that include social and work communication categories are also good predictors of team cohesiveness. Finally, temporal interaction similarity measures were calculated to assess their prediction capabilities in a global setting. Results showed a significant negative correlation between the Pacing Rate and Task Cohesion, which suggests that frequent communications increases the cohesion between team members. The study also found a positive correlation between Coherence Similarity and Task Cohesion, which indicates the importance of establishing a rhythm within a team. In addition, the temporal models at individual and group-levels were found to be good predictors of Task Cohesion, which indicates the existence of a strong effect of frequent and rhythmic communications on cohesion related to the task. The contributions in this dissertation are three fold. 1) Novel use of Temporal measures to describe a team's rhythmic interactions, 2) Development of new, quantifiable factors for analyzing different characteristics of a team's communications, 3) Identification of interesting factors for predicting Task Cohesion levels among global teams.

This thesis introduces a novel parametric beam model for describing the kinematics and elastic properties of ortho-planar compliant Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) with straight beams subject to specific buckling loads. Ortho-planar MEMS have the ability to achieve motion out the plane on which they were fabricated, characteristic that can be used to integrate optical devices such as variable optical attenuators and micro-mirrors. In addition, ortho-planar MEMS with large output forces and long strokes could be used to develop new applications such as tactile displays, active Braille, and actuation of micro-mirrors. In order to analyze the kinematics and elasticity of a curved beam contained in a Micro Helico-Kinematic Platform (MHKP) device, this thesis offers an improved model of straight and curved flexures under compressive loads. This model uses an approach similar to the one applied to develop a regular Pseudo-Rigid -Body Model but it differs in the definition of a key parameter, the characteristic radius factor, γ, which is not a constant, but a function of the moment, γ*=γ(M) . This approach allows for the Pseudo-Rigid-Body Model (PRBM) to describe the motion taken by the deflected beam precisely over a large range of motion. In developing the model, this thesis describes kinematic and elastic parameters such as the angle coefficient, C9, the characteristic radius, γl, and the torque coefficient, Tθ. Furthermore, the torque coefficient is divided into two component functions, Tf, and, Tm, which can be used to find the working loads (force and moment) on the beam. The input displacement is the only needed state variable, object variables, which describe the beam, include the material modulus of elasticity, E, the moment of inertia, I, and its length, l.

Thesis. 1976. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics. / Microfiche copy available in Archives and Aero. / Vita. / Bibliography: p.194-204. / Ph.D.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the civil engineering application of the law of virtual work to the determination of defelections, shears, bending stresses in truss structures, beams, structures subjected to both direct stress and bending, and indeterminate structures, and further to give examples of their mathematical solutions.