In this article, we present a new perspective on how to combine inquiry-based, problem-oriented learning with practices in the Humanities. Our particular interest is how the initial phase of findin...

Intensified job demands originate in the general accelerated pace of society and ever-changing working conditions, which subject workers to increasing workloads and deadlines, constant planning and decision-making about one’s job and career, and the continual learning of new professional knowledge and skills. This study investigated how individual characteristics, namely negative and positive affectivity related to competence demands, and multitasking preference moderate the association between IJDs and cognitive stress symptoms among media workers. The results show that although IJDs were associated with (...) higher cognitive stress symptoms at work, that is, difficulties in concentration, thinking clearly, decision-making, and memory, competence demands-related negative affectivity explained the most variance in cognitive stress symptoms. In addition, IJDs were more strongly associated with cognitive stress symptoms at work in individuals with high competence demand-related negative affectivity, and low multitasking preference. Altogether, the present findings suggest that HR practices or workplace interventions to ease employees’ negative affectivity from increasing competence demands at work could usefully support employees’ effective cognitive functioning when confronted with IJDs. (shrink)

Reframing Authority provides new perspectives by focusing on the role of materiality and media for questions of authority, as well as on the changing roles of authority historically and cross-culturally.

Network neuroscience provides a systems approach to the study of the brain and enables the examination of interactions measured at different temporal and spatial scales. We review current methods to quantify the structure of brain networks and compare that structure across different clinical cohorts, cognitive states, and subjects. We further introduce the emerging mathematical concept of multilayer networks and describe the advantages of this approach to model changing brain dynamics over time. We conclude by offering several concrete examples of how (...) multilayer network approaches to neuroimaging data provide novel insights into brain structure and evolving function. (shrink)

This study investigated the factorial validity of the 58-item Corporate Ethical Virtues scale :923–947, 2008). The major aim was to test the invariance of the factor structure across different organizational samples. The CEV scale was designed to measure eight corporate virtues: clarity, congruency of supervisors, congruency of senior management, feasibility, supportability, transparency, discussability, and sanctionability. The data consisted of four organizational samples that are operated in the private and public sector. The results of confirmatory factor analyses supported the hypothesized eight-factor (...) structure, as well as its alternative second-order factor structure, where high correlations between the first-order factors were explained by a general CEV factor. These factor structures remained the same across samples, lending strong support for the group invariance assumption of the scale. Thus, the 58-item CEV scale was found to be a valid tool for measuring the aspect of ethical organizational culture in different organizations, and its use can be recommended for future research. (shrink)

The present study had two major aims: first, to examine the construct validity of the Finnish 58-item Corporate Ethical Virtues scale (CEV; Kaptein in J Org Behav 29:923–947, 2008) and second, to examine whether the associations between managers’ perceptions of ethical organisational culture and their occupational well-being (emotional exhaustion and work engagement) are indirectly linked by ethical strain, i.e. the tension which arises from the difference in the ethical values of the individual and the organisation he or she works for. (...) The sample consisted of 902 managers from different organisations, in middle and upper management levels, aged 25–68 years. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) provided support to the hypothesised eight-factor structure of the CEV scale; i.e. the scale contained the factors of clarity, congruency of supervisors, congruency of senior management, feasibility, supportability, transparency, discussability and sanctionability. In addition, it emerged from the CFAs that the high intercorrelations of these factors can be explained by the second-order factor of ethical culture. The managers’ perceptions of the ethical culture prevailing in their organisations were associated with their occupational well-being both directly (high-work engagement) and indirectly via a low level of ethical strain (low-emotional exhaustion). Thus, the findings indicated that the ethical culture of organisations plays a major role in managers’ occupational well-being. (shrink)

Within the literature, Daoist political philosophy has often been linked with anarchism. While some extended arguments have been offered in favor of this conclusion, I take this position to be tenuous and predicated on an assumption that coercive authority cannot be applied through wuwei. Focusing on the Laozi as the fundamental political text of classical Daoism, I lay out a general account of why one ought to be skeptical of classifying it as anarchistic. Keeping this skepticism in mind and recognizing (...) the importance of wuwei in arguments for the anarchist conclusion, I provide a non-anarchistic interpretation of wuwei as a political technique that is consistent with the text of the Laozi. Having presented a plausible alternative to the anarchist understanding of wuwei, I close my discussion with a brief sketch of a positive account of the political theory of the Laozi. (shrink)

The aims of this study were to investigate what kinds of personal work goals managers have and whether ethical organisational culture is related to these goals. The sample consisted of 811 Finnish managers from different organisations, in middle and upper management levels, aged 25–68 years. Eight work-related goal content categories were found based on the managers self-reported goals: (1) organisational goals (35.4 %), (2) competence goals (26.1 %), (3) well-being goals (12.1 %), (4) career-ending goals (7.3 %), (5) progression goals (...) (6.8 %), (6) prestige/influence goals (4.2 %), (7) job change goals (4.2 %) and (8) employment contract goals (3.9 %). Ethical organisational culture operated as a context for personal goal setting: Those managers who evaluated their organisational culture as more ethical were more likely to report organisational goals (e.g. goals toward the success or performance of the organisation). However, if managers gave lower ratings regarding ethical culture, then they named job change and career-ending goals in more cases. Therefore, investing into ethical virtues of the organisational culture can promote managers’ personal work goals, which also benefit the organisation. (shrink)

Background:Nurses frequently face ethically demanding situations in their work, and these may lead to stress of conscience. Working life is currently accelerating and job demands are intensifying. These intensified job demands include (1) work intensification, (2) intensified job-related planning demands, (3) intensified career-related planning demands, and (4) intensified learning demands. At the same time, many healthcare organizations are implementing major organizational changes that have an influence on personnel.Aim:The aim of the study was to investigate the association between intensified job demands (...) and stress of conscience, and whether their association is moderated by organizational change experiences among nurses. Experiences of organizational change may expose employees to stress of conscience or serve as a buffer because employees appraise, involve, and cope with changes differently.Research design:Questionnaires measuring stress of conscience, intensified job demands, and organizational change experiences were completed by nurses (n = 511) in a healthcare district undergoing a major organizational change.Ethical considerations:Throughout, the study procedures were implemented according to the guidelines of the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity and the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments. According to the Finnish regulations, because participation was voluntary, informed consent was requested, and participants were advised of their right to withdraw from the study at will. No permission from an ethics committee was necessary.Findings:Work intensification and personal worry considering organizational change were associated with more severe stress of conscience among nurses. Nurses’ experiences of managements’ competent handling of organizational change buffered the association between work intensification and stress of conscience.Conclusions:During organizational changes, management may alleviate nurses’ stress of conscience by proper communication and support procedures. (shrink)

Emotion-processing impairment represents a risk factor for the development of somatic illness, affecting negatively both health-related quality of life and disease management in several chronic diseases. The present pilot study aims at investigating the associations between alexithymia and depression, anxiety, and HRQoL in patients with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis ; examining the association between these three psychological conditions together with HRQoL, and thyroid autoantibodies status as well as thyroid echotexture in patients with HT; and comparing the intensity of all these clinical psychological (...) features in patients with HT versus controls. Twenty-one patients with serologically or ultrasonographically verified HT and 16 controls with non-toxic goiter or postsurgical hypothyroidism were recruited for this study. Serum thyrotropin and free thyroxine, as well as thyroid autoantibodies, were assayed. Alexithymia, depression, anxiety, and HRQoL were assessed with Toronto Alexithymia Scale; Beck Depression Inventory, second edition; Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale; and Health Survey Short-Form 36, respectively. A negative relationship between the difficulty to describe feelings and the cognitive component of depression was found. Besides, patients with seronegative HT had lower somatic anxiety than patients with HT who tested positive. Besides, no statistically significant difference was found between patients with HT and controls with regard to somatic anxiety. The present study suggests the relevance of alexithymia in patients suffering from HT, which may be intertwined with a possible state of underreported depression that is mainly expressed through physical complaints. Promoting the capability to describe and communicate feelings could contribute to psychological elaboration and coping with the disease and, consequently, to the improvement of self-management and perceived HRQoL. (shrink)

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

The main aim of the present study was to examine whether an ethical organizational culture is associated with sickness absence in a Finnish public sector organization at both the individual and work unit levels. The underlying assumption was that employees working for organizations that are characterized by a strong ethical organizational culture report less sickness absence. The sample consisted of 2192 employees from one public sector city organization that included 246 different work units. Ethical organizational culture was measured with the (...) Corporate Ethical Virtues scale covering eight sub-dimensions. Sickness absence was inquired by asking the participants to report how many days they had been absent from work because of their own sickness over the past year. Multilevel structural equation modelling showed that, at the individual level, perceptions of a strong ethical organizational culture were associated with less sickness absences after controlling for the background factors. This link was not found at the work-unit level. The findings indicate that an ethical organizational culture plays a significant role in enhancing employee well-being measured as sickness absence. It seems that especially supervisor’s ethical role modeling and possibilities to discuss about ethical issues are important factors in preventing sickness absence in the organizations. (shrink)

The legacy of Nisbett and Wilson’s classic article, Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes , is mixed. It is perhaps the most cited article in the recent history of consciousness studies, yet no empirical research program currently exists that continues the work presented in the article. To remedy this, we have introduced an experimental paradigm we call choice blindness [Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S., & Olsson, A. . Failure to detect mismatches between intention and (...) outcome in a simple decision task. Science, 310, 116–119.]. In the choice blindness paradigm participants fail to notice mismatches between their intended choice and the outcome they are presented with, while nevertheless offering introspectively derived reasons for why they chose the way they did. In this article, we use word-frequency and latent semantic analysis to investigate a corpus of introspective reports collected within the choice blindness paradigm. We contrast the introspective reasons given in non-manipulated vs. manipulated trials, but find very few differences between these two groups of reports. (shrink)

The aim of the present longitudinal study was to quantitatively examine whether an ethical organizational culture predicts turnover among managers. To complement the quantitative results, a further important aim was to examine the self-reported reasons behind manager turnover, and the associations of ethical organizational culture with these reasons. The participants were Finnish managers working in technical and commercial fields. Logistic regression analyses indicated that, of the eight virtues investigated, congruency of supervisors, congruency of senior management, discussability, and sanctionability were negatively (...) related to manager turnover. The results also revealed that the turnover group is not homogeneous, and that there are several different reasons for leaving. The reasons given for turnover were grouped into five different categories: lay-off, career challenges, dissatisfaction with the job or organization, organizational change, and decreased well-being/motivation. ANCOVA analyses showed that those managers who stayed in their organization perceived their ethical culture to be stronger than those in turnover groups, and especially compared to groups 3 and 5. The results acquired through different methods complemented and confirmed each other, showing that by nurturing ethical virtues an organization can decrease job changes and encourage managers and supervisors to want to remain in their organization. (shrink)

It is important to ascertain whether in the Actium campaign Antony really had only the small proportion of Italian legionaries sometimes assigned to him, and this can only be done by analyzing his legionary figures from Philippi onwards. Unfortunately, though Appian is usually quite clear, he omits one figure at the very start, which prevents one treating the matter synthetically; so one must analyze backwards from Antony's legionary coins.

This paper is a contribution to the question of how far Polybius fulfilled that part of an historian's duty which consists of acquiring information; it gives an instance, small in itself no doubt, where he definitely neglected to obtain good information which lay to his hand, and preferred to repeat a commonplace untruth of the literary hacks.

Contemporary inscriptions prove practically beyond doubt that Philip V. was the son of Demetrius II. and of the Epeirot princess Phthia. But historians have always started from Eusebius' statement that he was the son of Chryseis, a Thessalian captive whom Demetrius married and who afterwards married Doson, and have tried to fit other things in with Eusebius. Now it does not much matter to us which of two unknown women was Philip's mother; but it does matter how we approach our (...) evidence, and we must start from the contemporary evidence and work downward, not vice versa. I need not here go through all the different theories based on the late evidence; what I am going to do is first to examine the inscriptions, which has not yet been done in this connexion, and then explain how Eusebius' blunder arose; for even if a definite statement be certainly wrong, we want to know how it got there. (shrink)

It has been common in history for the conqueror or usurper to fortify his position by marrying a daughter of the old line. It was done by Alexander at the beginning of the Hellenistic period, by Herod at the end. There is reason to believe that it was also done both by Ptolemy I. and Seleucus.

It has been common in history for the conqueror or usurper to fortify his position by marrying a daughter of the old line. It was done by Alexander at the beginning of the Hellenistic period, by Herod at the end. There is reason to believe that it was also done both by Ptolemy I. and Seleucus.

Background Healthcare workers frequently face ethically demanding situations in their work, potentially leading to stress of conscience. Long-term work intensification (more and more effort demanded year after year), organizational change and COVID-19 may be risk factors concerning stress of conscience. Aims The main aim was to investigate the relationship between long-term work intensification and stress of conscience among the personnel in a healthcare organization. Organizational change management was considered a mediator and COVID-19-related work stress a moderator in the association between (...) work intensification and stress of conscience. Research design, participants and context A total of 211 healthcare district employees participated in a longitudinal survey using questionnaires collected in 2019 (major organizational change in the planning stage) and 2021 (organizational change completed). Ethical considerations The study was implemented according to the guidelines of the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity. The Finnish instructions were that no review by an ethics committee was necessary because participation was voluntary, informed consent was requested, participants were assured that they were free to withdraw from the longitudinal study at any time and no health data were collected. Findings Long-term work intensification was associated with more severe stress of conscience. Long-term work intensification was partially mediated through change management to stress of conscience. High COVID-19 stress strengthened the association between long-term work intensification and stress of conscience. Conclusions Long-term work intensification must be addressed to reduce stress of conscience in healthcare, otherwise the healthcare system will be vulnerable to changes and crisis. Extra resources for personnel and management should be allocated because of work intensification during organizational change and health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic to alleviate stress of conscience. (shrink)

This study investigated the reasons that leaders have given for their leader role occupancy. By using a mixed-method approach and large leader data, we aimed to provide a more nuanced picture of how leader positions are occupied in real life. We examined how individual leadership motivation may associate with other reasons for leader role occupancy. In addition, we aimed to integrate the different reasons behind leader role occupancy into the framework of sustainable leader careers and its two indicators: leader’s health (...) and performance. The survey data consisted of 1,031 leaders from various sectors of working life. Qualitative analysis revealed that leaders mention various factors behind their leader role occupancy, resulting 26 themes. After inductive investigation of the data, theory-driven analysis focused on the sustainable career components and agency vs. non-agency. Qualitative data was quantitized based on the theory-driven categories for statistical analysis. Based on the these analysis, we found out that only Affective-Identity MTL predicted all of the studied reasons behind leader role occupancy, whereas the other motivation types did not. All of the reasons for leader role occupancy except non-agentic ones were related to both leaders’ own and their followers’ occupational well-being. Leaders with more person-related and agentic reasons for leader role occupancy experienced better occupational well-being. Person- and context-related and agentic reasons behind leader role occupancy associated also with followers’ occupational well-being, but the associations differed from those of leaders’ well-being: person-related and agentic reasons associated with followers’ exhaustion, but this association was not found among leaders. Our study provided important information for practitioners in the field of human resources and development, as it has shown that if the reasons for leader role occupancy mainly reflect circumstances or other non-person-related reasons, the experienced occupational well-being and person-career fit may remain weak. It is necessary to try to support the leadership motivation for those leaders, or to shape the job description in such a way that it can also offer the experiences of meaningfulness from aspects other than self-realization through a managerial role. (shrink)

So far, the field of business ethics lacks validated measures for assessing virtues at the organizational level. The aim of this study is to investigate the measurement invariance of a shortened Corporate Ethical Virtues scale. In this manner, we contribute to validating an instrument that is both psychometrically sound and efficient to use. We conducted two survey studies of two independent groups (managers and school psychologists). Confirmatory factor analysis supported the eight‐factor model of the scale, and we found it to (...) be invariant in two different occupational groups. The managers gave higher appraisals of ethical culture than the psychologists did in seven out of the eight dimensions. We found that despite the contextual differences, the shortened scale measures the eight dimensions of organizational ethical virtues, as intended. Thus, the use of this more compact scale can be recommended for future studies, which will hopefully stimulate more research on ethical culture in various work contexts. (shrink)