Informal learning as mediating mechanism for the relationship between learning climate and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB)

PurposeThe goal of this study was to examine the mediating mechanism of informal learning between dimensions of learning climate and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). In addition, the study also aimed to investigate the learning climate, in the dimensions of learning facilitation, learning appreciation and error avoidance as antecedents of informal learning.Design/methodology/approachThe data were gathered from sports items manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Sialkot, Pakistan. Sialkot is home to manufacturing businesses that export their products worldwide. Survey data of 318 middle managers collected at 2 different times were used for testing the research model using structural equation modeling (SEM).FindingsThe results demonstrate that facilitation and appreciation learning climate have a positive relationship with informal learning and error-avoidance has a negative relationship with informal learning. The analysis also revealed that informal learning mediated the linkage between learning climate dimensions and OCB. Moreover, informal learning is significantly related to OCB.Practical implicationsHR practitioners and organizational leaders of SMEs can use, encourage and promote informal learning to improve the skills and knowledge of employees at low cost. For instance, management should strategically implement informal learning at the workplace by providing a supportive learning climate.Originality/valuePrevious studies have overlooked the impact of informal learning on OCB and its mediating effect. The present study addresses this gap by examining the mediating mechanism of informal learning between learning climate and OCB.

Error recovery training literature review: Implications for emergency field medicine

Training focused on recognizing when a medical procedure has not been implemented effectively may reduce preventable battlefield deaths. Although important research has been conducted about a range of error recovery training strategies, few studies have been conducted in the context of training for high stakes, dynamic domains such as combat medic training. We conducted a literature review to examine how error recovery training has been designed in other contexts, with the intent of abstracting recommendations for designing error recovery training to support military personnel providing emergency field medicine. Implications for combat medic training include: 1) a focus on error management rather than error avoidance, 2) a didactic training component may support training engagement and mental model development, 3) an experiential component may be designed to support perceptual skill development and anomaly detection, and 4) feedback should focus on allowing learners to make errors and encouraging them to learn from errors.

On the Epistemic Costs of Friendship: Against the Encroachment View

I defend the thesis that friendship can constitutively require epistemic irrationality against a recent, forceful challenge, raised by proponents of moral and pragmatic encroachment. Defenders of the “encroachment strategy” argue that exemplary friends who are especially slow to believe that their friends have acted wrongly are simply sensitive to the high prudential or moral costs of falsely believing in their friends’ guilt. Drawing on psychological work on epistemic motivation (and in particular on the notion of “need for closure”), I propose a different picture of what friendship requires in the doxastic realm. I argue that contrary to what the encroachment strategy suggests, exemplary friends’ belief formation ought not be guided by a concern with accuracy or error avoidance, but instead by a need to avoid a “specific closure” – namely, a need to avoid concluding in their friends’ guilt. I propose that exemplary friendship often generates a defeasible, doxastic obligation to exemplify such a need, despite its inherent corrupting effects on exemplary friends’ epistemic faculties.

Professionalism and communication

This chapter considers what it means to be professional and how this affects the daily practice and life of a dentist. As well as defining professionalism, there is consideration of the political implications of being a healthcare professional, such as the requirement to express both concerns about and potential solutions for systems that fail to deliver what they should for patients. The General Dental Council (GDC) standards are outlined with discussion of these in relation to dental professionals. Human factors, sometimes referred to as ‘ergonomics’, consists of a group of topics concerned with human–human and human–system interaction with a particular relevance to the prevention of error. This chapter outlines the impact of the blame culture, error avoidance, and system failure, defining key principles such as root cause analysis and situational analysis. There is an emphasis on communication skills and how these can be applied to teaching, learning, and presenting.

Neural Flip-Flops II: Short-Term Memory and Electroencephalography

For certain brain functions, the theoretical networks presented here almost certainly show how neurons are actually connected. Stripped of details such as redundancies and other error-correcting mechanisms, the basic organization of synaptic connections within some of the brain’s building blocks is likely to be less complex than it appears. For some brain functions, the network architectures can even be quite simple.Flip-flops are the basic building blocks of sequential logic systems. Certain flip-flops can be configured to function as oscillators. The flip-flops and oscillators proposed here are composed of two to six neurons, and their operation depends only on minimal neuron capabilities of excitation and inhibition. These networks suggest a resolution to the longstanding controversy of whether short-term memory depends on neurons firing persistently or in brief, coordinated bursts. Oscillators can also generate major phenomena of electroencephalography.For example, cascaded oscillators can produce the periodic activity commonly known as brainwaves by enabling the state changes of many neural structures simultaneously. (The function of such oscillator-induced synchronization in information processing systems is timing error avoidance.) Then the boundary separating the alpha and beta frequency bands is where μd and σd are the mean and standard deviation (in milliseconds) of delay times of neurons that make up the initial oscillators in the cascades. With 4 and 1.5 ms being the best estimates for μd and σd, respectively, this predicted boundary value is 14.9 Hz, which is within the range of commonly cited estimates obtained empirically from electroencephalograms (EEGs). The delay parameters μd = 4 and σd = 1.5 also make predictions of the peaks and other boundaries of the five major EEG frequency bands that agree well with empirically estimated values.The hypothesis that cascaded oscillators produce EEG frequencies implies two EEG characteristics with no apparent function: The EEG gamma band has the same distribution of frequencies as three-neuron ring oscillators, and the ratios of peaks and boundaries of the major EEG bands are powers of two. These anomalous properties make it implausible that EEG phenomena are produced by a mechanism that is fundamentally different from cascaded oscillators.The cascaded oscillators hypothesis is supported by the available data for neuron delay times and EEG frequencies; the micro-level explanations of macro-level phenomena; the number, diversity, and precision of predictions of EEG phenomena; the simplicity of the oscillators and minimal required neuron capabilities; the selective advantage of timing error avoidance that cascaded oscillators can provide; and the implausibility of a fundamentally different mechanism producing the phenomena.The available data are too imprecise for a rigorous statistical test of the cascaded oscillators hypothesis. A simple, rigorous test of the hypothesis is suggested. The neuron delay parameters μd and σd, as well as the mean and variance of the periods of one or more EEG bands, can be estimated from random samples. With standard tests for equal means and variances, the EEG sample statistics can be compared to the EEG parameters predicted by the delay time statistics.