Hand-in-hand in the golden years: Cognitive interdependence, partner involvement in retirement planning, and the transition into retirement

This research examined the influence of cognitive interdependence—a mental state reflecting a collective representation of the self-in-relationship—on the anticipation for and experiences with the transition into retirement. Among soon-to-be retirees (Study 1), greater cognitive interdependence was associated with seeing partners as more instrumental to one’s goals both pre- and post-retirement, anticipating greater goal alignment post-retirement, and having directly involved partners in retirement planning to a greater extent than those relatively lower in cognitive interdependence. Among recent retirees (Study 2), retrospective cognitive interdependence was associated with post-retirement goal alignment and goal instrumentality, and the extent to which they believed they had directly involved their partners in retirement planning. However, it was post-retirement goal alignment that was associated with greater ease of retirement and subjective well-being. Finally, soon-to-be retirees relatively high in cognitive interdependence responded to concerns about their retirement (i.e., goal discordance and high retirement ambivalence) by wanting to involve their partners in their retirement plans to a greater extent (Study 3). These studies highlight the importance of romantic partners across the lifespan, and how partners might influence retirement planning, the transition to retirement, and well-being among recent retirees.

Indications of Goal Displacement in Regulatory Enforcement Agencies: An Empirical Exploration

This paper describes indications of goal displacement in regulatory enforcement agencies as reported by enforcement professionals from a range of regulatory domains. The findings suggest that the occurrence of this phenomenon in these agencies may be more prevalent and multifaceted than expected. Among the goal-displacement types reported as most impactful were goal narrowing, induced by calamities, goal diversion through ongoing organizational reform, and goal diversion brought upon by strict regimes of output management. A systematic exploration of these various goal-displacement types as conducted here sheds light onto the intricate nature of goal alignment of these agencies.

Homeroom adviser’s role on school family involvement in Senior High School in Manila

Teachers play an important role in bridging the gap between school and home. The success of pupils is defined by their relationship to the educational process. Parent participation can improve the conduct, participation, and accomplishment of pupils. School and community partnerships can also serve to enhance, support, and even transform learners and individual partners to increase the quality, resources efficiency and goal alignment of the program. In this case, Republic Act No. 9155, school leaders should have authority, accountability, and responsibility in the school and community. The purpose of this descriptive study was to evaluate the roles of homeroom advisers in school-family involvement. The study polled 375 parents in grade 12 from a selected Senior High School in Manila's District VI. Its specific goal was to investigate the extent to which homeroom advisers play a role in school-family engagement as perceived by parent respondents for families to participate in school planning, leadership, and volunteering. The overall mean result of the evaluation on the degree to which homeroom advisers influence school-family engagement is involved. Among the indicators of respondent's assessment on the extent of Homeroom Advisers' Role on school-family involvement, the highest is Information to families to assist their children's learning, and the lowest indicator is Opportunities for families in school planning, leadership, and volunteer activities. There is a recommendation of the study that the homeroom adviser's manual should indicate the involvement of parents in school, planning, leadership and voluntary activities to improve their commitment to high-quality education.

The Influence of Team Goal Alignment and Awareness on Human-Centered Design Team Decision-Making Strategy

Design team decision-making underpins all activities in the design process. Simultaneously, goal alignment within design teams has been shown to be essential to the success of team activities, including engineering design. However, the relationship between goal alignment and design team decision-making remains unclear. In this exploratory work, we analyze six student design teams’ decision-making strategies underlying 90 selections of design methods over the course of a human-centered design project. We simultaneously examine how well each design team’s goals are aligned in terms of their perception of shared goals and their awareness of team members’ personal goals at the midpoint and end of the design process, along with three other factors underpinning team alignment at the midpoint. We report three preliminary findings about how team goal alignment and goal awareness influence team decision-making strategy that, while lacking consistent significance, invite further research. First, we observe that a decrease in awareness of team members’ personal goals may lead student teams to use a different distribution of decision-making strategies in design than teams whose awareness stays constant or increases. Second, we find that student teams exhibiting lower overall goal alignment scores appear to more frequently use agent-driven decision-making strategies, while student teams with higher overall goal alignment scores appear to more frequently use process-driven decision-making strategies. Third, we find that while student team alignment appears to influence agent- and process-driven strategy selection, its effect on outcome-driven selection is less conclusive. While grounded in student data, these findings provide a starting place for further inquiry into of designerly behavior at the nexus of teaming and design decision-making.

Indirect Governance at War: Delegation and Orchestration in Rebel Support

Instead of attacking their adversaries directly, states often do so indirectly by supporting rebel groups. While these support relationships vary considerably, existing research lacks a comprehensive account thereof. To explain states’ choice of support, we suggest differentiating between two modes of support relationships according to the control opportunities they offer states over rebels: while delegation enables “hands-on” control, “hands-off” orchestration allows for plausible deniability and does not harm rebels’ local legitimacy. We argue that sponsors prefer orchestration when “hands-on” control can be substituted by goal alignment or competition; and they prefer delegation when the conflict is highly salient. Tests using global data for the period 1975-2009 support the first two expectations. Surprisingly, states’ capabilities also render “hands-off” orchestration more likely. The paper advances the understanding of external rebel support by transferring insights from indirect governance theory to the study of indirect wars and putting it to statistical test.

Modeling the Critical Success Factors for Business Intelligence Implementation

Business intelligence (BI) helps organizations to make better and quicker decisions. The primary requirement, as per previous studies, for any successful BI implementation in an organization and its' stakeholders, is to understand and pay heed to the vital issues and factors governing it. The objective of this study is, thus, to analyze the various critical success factors (CSF’s) for Business Intelligence Implementation, in context to the Indian sub-continent. In this qualitative study, the CSF’s for BI implementation are classified, through the review of the literature and to identify the relationship among the CSF's, Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) is applied along with MICMAC classification method. The ISM approach's outcome shows that management support and business goal alignment are the most significant driving factors for implementing BI. These findings may help recognize the crucial facts that affect the firms adopting BI in India and give some insights for other countries

An Active Inference Model of Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligence, an emergent phenomenon in which a composite system of multiple interacting agents performs at levels greater than the sum of its parts, has long compelled research efforts in social and behavioral sciences. To date, however, formal models of collective intelligence have lacked a plausible mathematical description of the relationship between local-scale interactions between autonomous sub-system components (individuals) and global-scale behavior of the composite system (the collective). In this paper we use the Active Inference Formulation (AIF), a framework for explaining the behavior of any non-equilibrium steady state system at any scale, to posit a minimal agent-based model that simulates the relationship between local individual-level interaction and collective intelligence. We explore the effects of providing baseline AIF agents (Model 1) with specific cognitive capabilities: Theory of Mind (Model 2), Goal Alignment (Model 3), and Theory of Mind with Goal Alignment (Model 4). These stepwise transitions in sophistication of cognitive ability are motivated by the types of advancements plausibly required for an AIF agent to persist and flourish in an environment populated by other highly autonomous AIF agents, and have also recently been shown to map naturally to canonical steps in human cognitive ability. Illustrative results show that stepwise cognitive transitions increase system performance by providing complementary mechanisms for alignment between agents’ local and global optima. Alignment emerges endogenously from the dynamics of interacting AIF agents themselves, rather than being imposed exogenously by incentives to agents’ behaviors (contra existing computational models of collective intelligence) or top-down priors for collective behavior (contra existing multiscale simulations of AIF). These results shed light on the types of generic information-theoretic patterns conducive to collective intelligence in human and other complex adaptive systems.

Advancing the Field of Disaster Response Management: Toward a Design Science Approach

Multiorganizational response to emergencies and disasters requires collaboration. How to improve the collective response is therefore an essential question, but not easy to answer. In disaster research, normative research with a focus on providing evidence for how to improve professional practice has traditionally received less attention than explanatory ones. The aim of this article, using insights from design science where normative research is more common, is to suggest a complementary approach to response management research. Our approach, which combines experimental and explanatory research, is applied to a study of goal alignment. Goal alignment among response actors is often recommended despite literature’s contradictory evidence regarding its effect. We conducted an experiment with 111 participants, who, in groups of three, played a computer game under one of two conditions (goal alignment or not). Our results show that aligning goals did not improve the outcome in the game. Although this may serve as a counterargument to implementing goal alignment interventions, there are concerns with such conclusions. These reservations include, but are not limited to, the lack of validated models to use in experiments. Nevertheless, our suggested research approach and the goal alignment experiment highlight the importance of testing interventions and their effectiveness before implementation.