The purpose of this research study was to analyze the leadership styles of owners of small land surveying businesses in the states of Tennessee and Virginia to determine what leadership style was currently being employed by the majority of those owners. The participants in this study were chosen from members of the Virginia Association of Surveyors and the Tennessee Association of Professional Surveyors. The respondents to the questionnaire were licensed land surveyors who owned small firms of fewer than 101 employees. In addition, a corollary purpose was to flesh out the skeletal literature available on small business leadership styles and their effect on small business success. The owners of the small surveying businesses were asked to reply to a series of questions on demographic data and Likert-type scale questions designed to examine the respondents' leadership styles as Participatory, Situational, or Autocratic in a both external and internal environments. The results of the questionnaire produced nominal data, which were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software to compute the frequency and significance. Additionally, a nonparametric Kruskal-Wallis K Independent Samples procedure and one-way Chi -Square tests were used to analyze the statistical relationships and differences in the respondents' answers. The results of this study suggested that the majority of the respondents used a participatory style of leadership when confronted with internal environment decisions and an autocratic leadership style in the external environment. The overall conclusion drawn from this study was that the owners of small land surveying firms who responded to the questionnaire were predominantly situational because they adjusted their leadership styles to meet the needs and demands of their changing situations.

Excerpt: The current study explores these variables simultaneously to illustrate how both leader and follower characteristics influence organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and counterproductive work behavior (CWB).

A troubling trend has developed in the increasing number of commuter rail accidents causing injuries, fatalities, and safety concerns. The specific problem addressed in this study is that current leadership practices have not achieved success reducing safety violations and rail accidents. The purpose of this qualitative cross-sectional study was to explore the potential influence of perceived leadership styles of 16 frontline rail supervisors and 4 managers on safety management practices within a metro rail system. The conceptual framework was based on Bass's transformational leadership theory and Reason's human error model. The key research question dealt with how leadership style might influence safety management practices. Data collection involved a 45-question, Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) leader form administered to assess perceived leadership styles and a 10-question structured interview conducted to understand participants' attitudes toward safety management practices. MLQ analysis involved comparing results to normative population data. Key MLQ results indicated that participants were inside the ideal frequency ranges for the five transformational scales and outside for the two transactional scales. Coding and thematic analysis was used to identify emergent themes in the experiential data. The analysis indicated that safety management and leadership were primary concerns of participants. Further research on the relationship between transformational leadership models and improved system safety practices is recommended. Transformational leadership models could influence positive social change by improving system safety practices in the transit rail industry.

Empirical evidence suggests that transformational leadership is positively correlated with job satisfaction, job performance, organizational commitment, and survivability. Although transformational leadership has been implemented in various organizations, little research has examined the issues in implementing transformational leadership concepts within a scientific laboratory. The purpose of this exploratory, qualitative case study was to examine (a) the current leadership style of the president of a scientific laboratory from the scientists', analysts', and technicians' perspective and their preferred leadership style; (b) the president's self-perceived leadership style and perceived subordinate style preference; and (c) the employees' perceptions of advantages and challenges to applying and implementing a transformational style of leadership. The laissez-faire, transactional, and transformational leadership models of Avolio, Bass, Burns, and Kouzes and Posner provided the theoretical basis for the case study. Data were collected from the president and subordinates and responses were coded and classified according to patterns and emerging themes. Results indicated that the president's current leadership style was transactional, whereas the subordinates' preference was transformational. The president's self-assessment of current style and perceived subordinate preference was found to be transformational. Subordinates expressed ideal and effective leadership qualities and shared advantages and barriers to transformational leadership. Leaders in scientific laboratories who apply these findings and implement more effective leadership may impact social change through increased subordinate job satisfaction and performance, thereby enhancing organizational survivability and improving the status quo.

This study investigated a synchronous web-based course system (SWBCS) as a supplement todistance learning courses. Although challenges exist (such as the complex interface and potentialtechnological problems); these systems hold the potential to enhance the distance learning experiencethrough increased interaction, immediacy, social presence, group work, and collaboration. Using a rigorous blend of research methods, the study investigated the following questions: (1) what types of pedagogical strategies do instructors implement, (2) how do instructors utilize the tools, (3) which tools do instructors choose to use, (4) why do instructors use the tools and strategies that they choose, and (5) what perceptions do students and instructors have about using a SWBCS? A total of five unique cases were examined using surveys, interviews, focus groups, analysis of archival documents and extensive classroom observations. The classrooms observations were essential to answering the research questions; a comprehensive observation instrument was developed and validated during this research. Results show instructors implemented familiar strategies based on their teaching styles. The most successful strategies were: (1) mini lectures with interactive exercises, (2) structured group work and collaborative exercises, and (3) case study discussions. Each instructor used the tools in the synchronous system to solve a problem or address an issue, such as lack of immediacy or the need to guide the assimilation of information. Most instructors used a wide variety of the tools, including: (1) VOIP, (2) textual chat, (3) white board, (4) hand raising and emoticons, and (5) breakout rooms. Although some tried many tools, most chose to use tools based on training, experience, the teaching strategies selected and student needs. Both instructor and student perceptions were positive and all of the instructors planned to continue to use a SWBCS in the future. Overall, the SWBCS was found to supplement existing distance courses, allowing educators to build connections with and among students more efficiently and increase the potential for interaction in the online classroom. In addition, this research provided the initial framework for the development of a set of guidelines to support the planning and use of SWBCS in higher education instruction.

This study examines if a relationship exists among three rich research streams, specifically the behavioral science of motivation, adult learning and leadership. What motivates adult professionals to continue learning and how is that connected to their style and efficacy as leaders? An extension of literature to connect Andragogy, Self-determination and Transformational Leadership Theory is explored. Responses to questions adapted from the Carré Model of Adult Orientation and Implication on Learning and Training Activities (Carré, 1997) and the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (Avolio & Bass, 2000) are compared among a sample of adult professionals in leadership positions. Results indicate that learning motivation orientation is predictive of and positively correlated with leadership style. How learning motivation can be used as a tool to predict leadership style, enhance leader selection, development and succession is discussed along with further implications of the “learner-leader” for the purposes of research, practice and higher education initiatives. This quantitative study can offer important insights into how the attribute of an intrinsic motivation to learn can act as an antecedent to Transformational leadership behavior, and the impact that Transformational leaders have upon their teams and organizations.

The purpose of this study is to research the relationships among leadership style, team cohesion, collective efficacy, organizational justice, and organizational capital. This study used the questionnaires as a measurement tool to research, and the questionnaires samples was drawn out from CSBC Corporation, Taiwan all engineers, managements, engineer assistants, and management assistants, the writer released 460 questionnaires to them, eventually ended up effective 375 questionnaires with 82.06% return rate. The findings are as follows. 1. The transformational leadership has positive influence on intellectual capital including human capital, structural capital, and social capital, and the transactional leadership have positive influence on structural capital, but have not any influence on human capital and social capital. 2. Team cohesion merely has partial medium on the relationships among transformational leadership, human capital and structural capital; Team cohesion has full medium on the relationships between transformational leadership and social capital. 3. Collective efficacy has full medium on the relationships between transformational leadership and human capital; Collective efficacy merely has partial medium on the relationships among transformational leadership, structural capital and social capital. 4. Organizational justice has full medium on the relationships between transformational leadership and human capital; Organizational justice merely has partial medium on the relationships among transformational leadership, structural capital and social capital.

Esta tesis investiga la implementación hardware eficiente de los sistemas de memoria transaccional (HTM) en un chip multiprocesador escalable (CMP), identificando aspectos que limitan el rendimiento y proponiendo técnicas que solventan dichas patologías. Las contribuciones de la tesis son varios diseños HTM complementarios que alcanzan un rendimiento robusto y evitan comportamientos patológicos, mediante la introducción de flexibilidad y adaptabilidad, sin que dichas técnicas apenas supongan un incremento en la complejidad del sistema global. Esta disertación considera tanto sistemas HTM de política ansiosa como aquellos diseñados bajo el enfoque perezoso, y afrontamos las sobrecargas en el rendimiento que son inherentes a cada política. Quizá la contribución más relevante de esta tesis es ZEBRA, un sistema HTM de política híbrida que adapta su comportamiento en función de las características dinámicas de la carga de trabajo. / This thesis focuses on the hardware mechanisms that provide optimistic concurrency control with guarantees of atomicity and isolation, with the intent of achieving high-performance across a variety of workloads, at a reasonable cost in terms of design complexity. This thesis identifies key inefficiencies that impact the performance of several hardware implementations of TM, and proposes mechanisms to overcome such limitations. In this dissertation we consider both eager and lazy approaches to HTM system design, and address important sources of overhead that are inherent to each policy. This thesis presents a hybrid-policy, adaptable HTM system that combines the advantages of both eager and lazy approaches in a low complexity design. Furthermore, this thesis investigates the overheads of the simpler, fixed-policy HTM designs that leverage a distributed directory-based coherence protocol to detect data races over a scalable interconnect, and develops solutions that address some performance degrading factors.

I denna studie undersöks det ledarskap som idag bedrivs inom Skånes kommunala verksamheter, utifrån nio ledarskapsstilar som är kompatibla med organisatorisk framgång världen över. Frågeställningen ”Finns det några skillnader mellan manligt och kvinnligt ledarskap i Skånes samtliga kommuner, studerat utifrån McKinseys nio ledarskapsstilar?” har syftet att undersöka eventuella könsskillnader i ledarskap.Fördelningen i studiens population har syftet att kartlägga samt studera de skillnader det manliga och kvinnliga ledarskapet kan ge exempel på. Urvalsgruppen har således fått svara på en enkät behandlande de områden de eventuellt kommit i kontakt med under sin chefskarriär och därmed fått bedöma sitt agerande.Enkäten skickades ut till totalt 101 chefer, fördelat på 54 män och 47 kvinnor, inom Skånes samtliga 33 kommuner. 65 svar erhölls, fördelat på 31 kvinnor och 34 män. Deltagarnas chefstitlar var bland annat ekonomichef, personalchef samt informationschef.Resultatet visade att vi inte kunde redovisa någon signifikant skillnad mellan kvinnor och mäns ledarskapsstilar. Inte heller kunde ett utmärkande medeltal, dvs. en större skillnad mellan de manliga och kvinnliga medelvärdena, påvisa märkbara skillnader delfrågorna emellan. Endast 5 av 38 frågor visade sig avvika ifrån det generella resultatet. Där vi kunde se en antydan till signifikanta skillnader mellan könsgruppernas svar. Studiens slutsats blir därmed att vi, med hjälp av egen utformad enkät, inte har kunnat finna några skillnader mellan manligt och kvinnligt ledarskap i Skånes samtliga kommuner.

Within the last decade multi-core processors have become increasingly commonplace with the power and performance demands of modern real-world programs acting to accelerate this trend. The rapid advancements in designing and adoption of such architectures mean that there is a serious need for programming models that allow the development of correct parallel programs that execute efficiently on these processors. A principle problem in this regard is that of efficiently synchronizing concurrent accesses to shared memory. Traditional solutions to this problem are either inefficient but provide programmability (coarse-grained locks) or are efficient but are not composable and very hard to program and verify (fine-grained locks). Optimistic Transactional Memory systems provide many of the composability and programmabillity advantages of coarse-grained locks and good theoretical scaling but several studies have found that their performance in practice for many programs remains quite poor primarily because of the high overheads of providing safe optimism. Moreover current transactional memory models remain rigid - they are not suited for expressing some of the complex thread interactions that are prevalent in modern parallel programs. Moreover, the synchronization achieved by these transactional memory systems is at the physical or memory level. This thesis advocates a position that memory synchronization problem for threads should be modeled and solved in terms of synchronization of underlying program values which have semantics associated with them. It presents optimistic synchronization techniques that address the semantic synchronization requirements of a parallel program instead. These techniques include methods to 1) enable optimistic transactions to recover from expensive sharing conflicts without discarding all the work made possible by the optimism 2) enable a hybrid pessimistic-optimistic form of concurrency control that lowers overheads 3) make synchronization value-aware and semantics-aware 4) enable finer grained consistency rules (than allowed by traditional optimistic TM models) therefore avoiding conflicts that do not enforce any semantic property required by the program. In addition to improving the expressibility of specific synchronization idioms all these techniques are also effective in improving parallel performance. This thesis formulates these techniques in terms of their purpose, the extensions to the language, the compiler as well as to the concurrency control runtime necessary to implement them. It also briefly presents an experimental evaluation of each of them on a variety of modern parallel workloads. These experiments show that these techniques significantly improve parallel performance and scalability over programs using state-of-the-art optimistic synchronization methods.