Information technology, organizational restructuring and the future of middle management

This article examines the impact of information technology as one of the factors affecting the numbers and roles of middle managers. The authors highlight the need to empirically examine middle management work in the context of the complexity of changes affecting the job of middle managers and the complexity of reactions to these changes, if further assertions about the future of middle management are to be avoided.     

Challenges for nursing in the 21st century

Nurse leaders face a myriad of challenges in the 21st century such as nursing workforce shortages, negative affectivity, generation workforce concerns, changing delivery systems, and increasing clinical practice complexity, to name a few. Visionary and strategic thinking centered on patients' well-being are needed to tackle these challenges and shape a more humane and compassionate health care system.     

The use of short role-plays for an ethics intervention in university auditing courses

This paper reports how short 10-minute role-plays can be used as an effective tool for ethics education within university auditing classes. A mixed method approach elicited student perceptions of role-plays in developing ethical awareness. While many students self-reported difficulty in recognising and dealing with the ethical dilemmas appropriately, most agreed role-plays helped them to prepare for dealing with these issues in the workplace. This was especially the case for students with English as an additional language. Students reported the role-play ethical dilemmas raised their awareness of the need to protect their professional independence. Students commented that they had a better understanding of the importance of the professional code of conduct and the code of ethics. Role-plays are a simple experiential learning approach that helps students to recognise ethical dilemmas, explore strategies to deal with such dilemmas in a safe environment, and practice listening and questioning skills to obtain information. Short role-plays can offer critical thinking opportunities that are more relevant to the student’s personal experience than case studies of historical ethical breaches.     

Industrial Relations in Hotels and Catering: Neglect and Paradox?

Given that hotels and catering comprise an important part of the service sector representing the changing face of the economy, their neglect in industrial relations discourse about the 'new' industrial relations is no longer sustainable. Previously unpublished data from the Workplace Industrial Relations Survey 1990 (WIRS3) have provided the first opportunity for systematic analysis and evaluation of employment relationship issues in the industry and finds them to be different from those observed elsewhere in the economy. Consequently, hotels and catering can be said to manifest a predominance of 'unbridled individualism' associated with 'poor' industrial relations outcomes which, paradoxically, exist alongside an above average presence of personnel specialists.     

A psychometric assessment of the Lennox and Wolfe self-monitoring scale in the sales force

In today's turbulent business environment, salespeople and sales managers must constantly adapt to changes. Self-monitoring, i.e., the cognitive ability to adapt one's own behavior in response to the behavior of others, may be a meta-KSA (knowledge, skill, or ability) that influences adaptive selling behavior. To assist researchers and practitioners seeking to identify and improve the self-monitoring skills of salespeople, this study investigates Lennox and Wolfe's (1984) self-monitoring scale with a sample of salespeople and one with sales managers. Although a hypothesized relationship between self-monitoring and job performance was supported partially, our results highlight potential problems with the measure. Further investigations are needed to determine whether or not the problems lie with the scale or the concept of self-monitoring in a selling context.     

Formal Analysis of Segregation of Duties (SoD) in Accounting: A Computational Approach

This study examines a computational framework for segregation of duties (SoD) in the design as well as implementation of accounting systems. The framework consists of a model of workflows in accounting systems based on workflow graphs, a partial order model of roles performed by the actors in the accounting system, and a specification of SoD rules. We develop a set of algorithms for four SoD rules that can be used in the enforcement of SoD. For the SoD rule that precludes task type conflicts, our results show that while compliance verification can be carried out efficiently, finding an SoD compliant assignment of tasks is computationally intractable. For those situations, we present an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation for finding compliant assignments using public domain ILP solvers. For the remaining three SoD rules, we demonstrate efficient ways of testing compliance for a given assignment as well as finding compliant assignments.