Courses: Organizational Communication, Advanced Organizational Communication, Organizing Work, Management/Organizational History. Objectives: This activity will help students to understand major shifts in the organization of work and creatively represent changing work structures and practices. An optional follow-up assignment is included. A…

Knowledge exchange between employees is an essential feature of recent commercial organisations on the competitive market. Based on the data gathered by various information technology (IT) systems, social links can be extracted and exploited in knowledge exchange systems of a new kind. Users of such a system ask their queries and the system…

In a recent issue of "Academe," Stephanie Goodwin and Susanne Morgan point out that faculty members with chronic illness are likely to find current accommodation procedures unhelpful, both because they might choose to remain silent rather than risk the stigma of disclosing a disability and because accommodations often do not meet their…

This article describes the creation and implementation of a faculty interest group for historically underrepresented faculty at a large, urban community college in the Northeast. Faculty interest groups provide opportunities for faculty across disciplines to meet to explore common interests and share concerns and best practices. The faculty…

Cultural awareness training that emphasizes communication delivers only a partial solution to the challenges that intercultural work teams face. Improving collaboration requires a strong foundation of performance management before a work team can determine how they will cooperate to perform to excellence. Against the backdrop of the authors'…

Discusses performance-centered portals that focus on supporting the goals and objectives of a company within an integrated work environment. Topics include performance-centered design attributes; work context; goal establishment; work processes; designing portals in stages; and increased performance and productivity. (Author/LRW)

Examines a virtual work team to determine the domains of the team and the effect the virtual work environment had on the domains. Discusses results of a literature review and a phenomenological heuristic case study, including the effects of post-modern philosophy and postindustrial society on changes in the marketplace. (Contains 79 references.)…

Describes the benefits and potential drawbacks of transferring HPT (human performance technology) skills from outside consultants to managers within organizations. Discusses HPT competence and control over work environment, the role of traditional HPT experts after the shift, and three approaches to implementing the change. (PEN)

The new Hewlett-Packard was the largest merger in technology history. During its merger, the new company faced an intense organizational change and integration of two different corporate cultures. While all these changes were occurring, its Workforce Development (WD) was also facing its own reinvention--a paradigm shift from being just a training…

Discusses high-involvement work teams, in which groups of workers participate in improving their work activities; describes how a typical work team progresses through a project; and introduces a systems model of interrelated steps through which teams may progress to solve problems. (LRW)

Discusses issues associated with the virtual office. Summarizes advantages and disadvantages from employees' and employers' perspectives. Uses the behavior engineering model (Thomas Gilbert, 1996) as a framework to analyze different factors related to performance, and suggests the application of other concepts from human performance technology and…

Reviews five transfer models that are effective in organizing knowledge sources and stimulating understanding in the process of transferring training skills to the job. Highlights include trainee characteristics, design factors, work environment, a systemic model of factors that predict employee training, trainers becoming performance…

Presents 12 informal learning opportunities that human performance professionals can create for employees, including learning exchanges, conference summaries, exchanging ideas, posing questions and problems on email or bulletin boards, lunchtime programs, information sharing, recommended reading lists, vendor and consultant presentations,…

This sixth article in the Performance Technologist's Toolbox series focuses on the critical incident method of data collection. Critical incidents are narrative descriptions of important events that occur on the job and how employees behave in those situations. Critical incidents document the work context, the specific situation that arose, the…

Electronic performance support systems (EPSS) can provide alternative learning opportunities to supplement traditional classroom or training strategies. Today's students may benefit from educational settings and strategies that they will use in the future. In using EPSS to nurture the development of technological literacy, workers and students can…