The general aim of the thesis is to show how The Situational Language Intervention Programme (SLIP) was formulated in order to include the critical factors of: the cognitive abilities and linguistic characteristics of the intellectually handicapped; pragmatics, semantics and syntax and the four models of language acquisition; the criteria that guide language intervention programme development; the use of precise and systematic teaching methods that stimulate the use of language in the students' environment. The general objective of both SLIP and this thesis is to show how to increase moderately to severely intellectually handicapped adolescents' language-communication through the appropriate use of the forms of language applied to its functions in a specific range of situations. Chapter Two of the thesis is concerned with the cognitive abilities of intellectually handicapped people and the implications of intellectual handicap on communication and language development. In addition it discusses, stage by stage, the positive and negative markers of language acquisition. These markers illustrate to the teacher the signs of linguistic retardation at each stage of language learning. The contents of Chapter Three provide an outline of the four models of language acquisition, i.e. Pragmatic, Semantic/Cognitive, Psycholinguistic/Syntactic and Behavioural. Those models contribute to our understanding of how language develops and illustrate to us the complex nature of language acquisition. In addition, this discussion documents the past and current research viewpoints and draws our attention to the limitations that existing theories have in providing a "full�blown" model of language acquisition. Furthermore, Chapter Three is stating that the recent analysis of language-training for communication disordered and intellectually handicapped students has shown that a more balanced study of the semantic and pragmatic factors in language acquisition is emerging. This chapter is urging teachers to re-analyze, re-evaluate and modify their language intervention programmes by integrating the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors. Both the contents of Chapters Two and Three are demonstrating that it is necessary to address the theoretical viewpoint and academic findings both of which are important aspects of the role of the interventionist. They have to be addressed if the teacher is to make judgments concerning the efficacy of different models in attaining certain goals. Such factors govern the utilization and integration of certain approaches and procedures. The contents of Chapters Four and Five discuss how the language interventionist can lead the intellectually handicapped student into increased language usage and communicative competence. Chapter Four is concerned with the current critical issues and developments in: curriculum and programme design for the moderately/severely intellectually handicapped adolescent; criteria to guide programme development and direction of language intervention; direct instruction techniques; augmentative communication systems and their basic programme guidelines. Chapter Five outlines the framework of the Situational Language Intervention Programme (SLIP) which was designed and implemented by the author. The content and procedures utilized by SLIP are greatly influenced by the contents of Chapters Two, Three and Four. This influence is demonstrated in the discussion concerning SLIP's: aims and objectives; content and design decisions; selection of forms to be taught; sequencing; teaching procedures and methods of instruction. Chapter Five also discusses the implementation of SLIP.

The thesis aims to address a perceived gap in the training and development of music performers, namely the lack of a practical strategies framework for developing performance confidence, especially self-efficacy (situational selfconfidence) in music performance. To this end, a Training Program with Training Manual was designed to assist musicians in the management of practice and performance, using a framework of six integrative mental and physical strategies taken from Sport Performance and applied to Music Performance. Five musicians trialed the Training Program for five weeks. Five individual case studies were constructed to explore and interpret the musicians' practice and performance experiences before and after using the Training Program / Manual. Analyses of in-depth interviews and a follow-up questionnaire revealed that the Training Program had produced positive changes in mental and physical behaviour, along with increased concentration ability and coping skills in stressful situations, resulting in a sense of control in performance. A cross-case analysis revealed that the shared issues of significance for the musicians were Concentration, Stress and Lifestyle Practices, and Sense of Control in practice and performance. This qualitative study demonstrates that a training program addressing the lifestyle context of music performance is beneficial for practice and the lead-up to performance. Confidence in playing ability develops, when practice and performance are perceived to be effectively self-managed and practice becomes a positive experience. The findings of this study suggest the need for a holistic approach to music performance, based on awareness of the mind-body connections involved in performance.

<p>Palabras claves: liderazgo, cultura española y sueca, liderazgo situacional</p><p>Durante las últimas décadas, la globalización se ha extendido a todo el mundo. El desarrollo de nuevas tecnologías ha evolucionado rápido y nos ha dado posibilidades para enfrentar nuevos mercados más fácilmente que antes. Las condiciones para las empresas han cambiado y hoy en día no compiten solamente en su mercado local si no también con empresas en todo el mundo. Las empresas que entran en nuevos mercados se vuelven internacionales y diferentes culturas se mezclan en la organización. Esto a menudo es un problema ya que diferentes culturas utilizan distintos tipos de liderazgo. Qué pasa cuando una empresa española entra en el mercado sueco?</p><p>Hemos realizado esta investigación con el propósito de ver si una organización española, con un liderazgo centralizado, que entra en un mercado sueco, debe adaptarse a las diferencias culturales o puede seguir con la misma estructura de la organización que en el país de origen.</p><p>Resultado</p><p>En conclusión hemos notado que pueda haber grandes diferencias entre dos países europeos y que la ignorancia de estas diferencias pueden resultar en grandes problemas y malentendidos para las empresas. Las empresas españolas que abren sucursales en Suecia a menudo se encuentran en problemas en las siguientes situaciones:</p><p>· El trabajo esta por sobre el bienestar del trabajador.</p><p>· Un empleado es nombrado en un cargo por sobre otro aunque tenga menos experiencia.</p><p>· Los empleados son controlados y no pueden tomar iniciativas por el diseño estricto de la tarea del trabajo.</p><p>· Cuando existe una grán distancía entre jefes y empleados.</p><p>Esto lo podemos resumir en que las empresas españolas no han implementado un liderazgo situacional, en el que la empresa se adapta a la cultura, al abrir sus sucursales en Suecia. La adaptación del liderazgo ha sido minima y forzada por las experiencias que las empresas han vivido durante su estancia.</p><p>En conclusión una empresa, aunque tenga el poder centralizado en el país de origen, tiene que adaptarse y conocer hasta cierto punto la cultura del país de destino para tener éxito en el nuevo mercado.</p> / <p>During the last decades the globalization has spread and is now a concern for the entire world. The technological development has exploded and has given us new possibilities and access to information that make it possible to meet new markets. The conditions have changed and the companies not only compete with their closest competitors on the local market but also with everyone in the same business over the world. Companies go abroad with different entry modes to get new market shares and this results in a more international and multicultural organization. This is not always without problems since the companies are confronted with different types of cultures that are reflected in the organization and its work. Different kinds of leadership are used in different kinds of cultures but what happens when two cultures meet?</p><p>For example in Swedish culture hierarchy and power distance are distant ideas unlike the Spanish culture where it is to a great extent frequent.</p><p>After finishing the investigation it turned out that the cultural differences inside an organisation between two European countries can be big although in the beginning it’s not noticed. The ignorance of knowledge about the culture in the country of destination, from the employers, often contributes to a lot of problems and misunderstandings. We found that Spanish companies who open branches in Sweden often come across problems in following situations:</p><p>· When the work task is given priority to the wellbeing of the employees.</p><p>· When a less experienced person is given a position ahead of a more experienced employee.</p><p>· When the staff is controlled and can’t take their own initiative or haven’t the possibility to be flexible because of the strictly designed work task.</p><p>· When big differences in power distance between employer and employee are expressed.</p><p>We can establish that the implementation of the situational leadership has been rather absent in the beginning when opening in Sweden. The adjustment has come gradually and was strained because of the knowledge the Spanish companies acquired regarding Swedish employees and their culture. The companies were forced to adapt some of their leadership to the Swedish culture to be able to succeed on the Swedish market. The conclusion we come to is that a certain amount of situational adjustment is necessary even for the centralised governed company when opening branches in other countries.</p>

Projects have become a key strategic working form and it has been shown that all industries can benefit from project-based working. Each project is unique and present different challenges to managers, which requires good project management skills in order to face these chal-lenges. These skills are referred to as the science and art of project management. The science consists of skills in using different tools and techniques and the artistry refers to skills in practising leadership, which some researchers argue is the most important quality for manag-ers to posses. Since each project is a new situation, project manager s needs to be able to adapt their leadership style to the unique situation of the project. This way of exploring leadership has been done in the Situational Leadership Model originally developed by Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard. The interaction between a leader’s behaviour and the situational factors, ability and willingness, of the members are em-phasized. The purpose of this study is to study project management from a situ-ational leadership perspective, using the Situational Leadership Model. The empirical research was conducted through interviews made with representatives from four different companies located in or just outside the city of Jönköping. The representatives included one project leader from each company as well as one or two project members. The study showed that the Situational Leadership Model was able to predict the appropriate leadership behavior to adopt. Even though it was able to predict the appropriate behavior, it was not adopted in all projects. Two of the five project members were confronted with a faulty leadership behavior.

The use of systems development methods are, by many, seen as the way to solve development problems, decrease development time, and improve the quality of software systems. Despite this, little is known about how development methods are actually used in the software industry. The aim of this project is to investigate how a widespread development method is implemented and used in an organisational setting. The result of this project is a case study description of how Volvo Information Technology implements, adapts, and uses the commercial development method Rational Unified Process® (RUP®) in combination with other methods. The implementation is centrally administered and done incrementally over several years in order to build competence in the organisation. RUP is also adapted to the specific situation of the organisation, each division, each development project, and even adapted by individual developers.

The aim of this study was to develop a leadership measure using situational judgment test (SJT) methodology and to evaluate both construct and criterion-related validity of the developed SJT with respect to a well established measure of leadership, the Leadership Opinion Questionnaire (LOQ). In this study, it was hypothesized that task-oriented leadership-based SJT (SJT-T) is positively related to the supervisors&rsquo / and subordinates&rsquo / ratings of task-oriented leadership as assessed by the LOQ and relationship-oriented SJT (SJT-L) would be positively related to the supervisors&rsquo / and subordinates&rsquo / ratings of the relationship-oriented leadership as assessed by the LOQ. The data were collected from supervisors (N = 87) and their subordinates (N = 160) in a government organization in Ankara. The results indicated that the expected division of SJT-T and SJT-R was not possible. Therefore, rather than developing two SJTs measuring task- and relationship-oriented leadership, a decision was made to develop a general SJT-L measuring context-specific leadership and the hypotheses were tested on an exploratory basis without making a distinction between SJT-T and SJT-R. It was found that the relationship between the SJT-L and supervisors&rsquo / self ratings for task-oriented LOQ was significant but in the unexpected direction. However, the relationship between the SJT-L and subordinates&rsquo / ratings for their supervisors&rsquo / relationship-oriented leadership, using the LOQ, was positive and significant. Lastly, SJT-L was found to be a significant and unique predictor of subordinates&rsquo / ratings of leadership performance. Limitations of the study are acknowledged and results are discussed along with some suggestions for future research.

In the past decade, electronic negotiation has become an important research topic in the field of information systems. A desirable goal of negotiation agents is to understand their owners' requirements, and to learn their opponents' behavior, thereby lessening the involvement of human beings. Studies on human negotiation bring out that several issues can affect a human's negotiation behavior, including learning an opponent's behavior, exerting power on an opponent, and setting an individual goal to improve the level of accomplishment. Research on incorporating these issues into negotiation agents is, however, still at an infancy state. We therefore take up this topic in this thesis. Researchers have proposed many different negotiation agents that follow a preset behavior based on human models of negotiation. In this thesis, we consider one such model, known as the time-dependent-tactical model, which is used by human negotiators and in which the values of the negotiating issues are determined based on the time elapsed in the negotiation. A learning mechanism for this model might be beneficial, because this model is frequently used in electronic negotiation. Thus, we propose heuristic algorithms that estimate the parameters of an agent's time-dependent-tactical model, and that then react to the estimated parameters for achieving higher negotiation performance. Besides learning, we incorporate two other factors that have been found to affect a human negotiation outcome. These are situational power, which represents differences in negotiators' status based on market conditions, and goal constraints, which stand for the levels of accomplishment negotiators try to strive for. To validate the impacts of learning, situational power and goal constraints in electronic negotiation, we first present how to integrate these features into negotiation agents, and then conduct simulations. With 187,500 simulation runs, we observe that our learning algorithms are effective in improving both individual and dyadic negotiation performances. For the effects of situational power and goal constraints, we obtain congruent results between human and electronic negotiations. By incorporating learning into situational power and goal constraints, we achieve significant joint effect between learning and situational power as well as that between learning and goal constraints. In summary, this thesis provides three primary contributions to the fields of information systems and electronic-commerce research. First, we have designed algorithms for learning an opponent's negotiation behavior. Second, our learning algorithms are found to be effective in improving negotiation performance. Third, we have shown how learning can be integrated with situational power and goal constraints, although this is not a major focus in this study. Finally, the agreement on the joint effects of learning, situational power and goal constraints between human and electronic negotiations suggests that our integrated design of the agent appears to be effective.

This study aims at exploring the applicability of ¡¥Situational Leadership Theory¡¦ Hersey & Blanchard, 1993) for leadership of task force between chief purser leadership style and readiness of cabin crew. The survey method was used in the present study. Three questionnaires were used: ¡¥Leader Effectiveness and Adaptability Description¡¦ (LEAD), ¡¥Readiness Scale¡¦, and ¡¥Performance Effectiveness Scale¡¦. Subjects were from public Eva and Uni airline. Valid sample included 40 chief purser and 123 cabin crew. The conclusions are as the following: 1. The readiness of cabin crew was affected by their work experience and job level; work experience, and school region; it was not correlated with age, gender and educational background. 2. Leadership effectiveness of cabin crew was significantly correlated with work experience¡Beducational background and job level ; It was not correlated with age, and gender. 3. Leader¡¦s leadership style there was significantly correlated with age¡Bgender and educational background; It was not correlated with work experience. 4. It was no significant difference found between leadership styles and leadership effectiveness of chief purser. 5. There was significantly correlation between cabin crew¡¦s job performance and readiness. 6. The relationship between chief purser leadership style and readiness of cabin crew had no significant impact on leadership style effectiveness beside notification style. So the findings did partly support ¡¥Situational Leadership Theory¡¦.

<p>The use of systems development methods are, by many, seen as the way to solve development problems, decrease development time, and improve the quality of software systems. Despite this, little is known about how development methods are actually used in the software industry. The aim of this project is to investigate how a widespread development method is implemented and used in an organisational setting.</p><p>The result of this project is a case study description of how Volvo Information Technology implements, adapts, and uses the commercial development method Rational Unified Process® (RUP®) in combination with other methods. The implementation is centrally administered and done incrementally over several years in order to build competence in the organisation. RUP is also adapted to the specific situation of the organisation, each division, each development project, and even adapted by individual developers.</p>

<p>Projects have become a key strategic working form and it has been shown that all industries can benefit from project-based working. Each project is unique and present different challenges to managers, which requires good project management skills in order to face these chal-lenges. These skills are referred to as the science and art of project management. The science consists of skills in using different tools and techniques and the artistry refers to skills in practising leadership, which some researchers argue is the most important quality for manag-ers to posses. Since each project is a new situation, project manager s needs to be able to adapt their leadership style to the unique situation of the project. This way of exploring leadership has been done in the Situational Leadership Model originally developed by Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard. The interaction between a leader’s behaviour and the situational factors, ability and willingness, of the members are em-phasized.</p><p>The purpose of this study is to study project management from a situ-ational leadership perspective, using the Situational Leadership Model.</p><p>The empirical research was conducted through interviews made with representatives from four different companies located in or just outside the city of Jönköping. The representatives included one project leader from each company as well as one or two project members.</p><p>The study showed that the Situational Leadership Model was able to predict the appropriate leadership behavior to adopt. Even though it was able to predict the appropriate behavior, it was not adopted in all projects. Two of the five project members were confronted with a faulty leadership behavior.</p>