Digital Transformation of Teaching and Perception at TU Graz from the Students' Perspective: Developments from the Last 17 Years

The use of digital technologies in teaching to make it more varied, better, more diverse, or even more accessible is being pursued systematically at many universities. This article shows the developments in the digital transformation of teaching at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) over the last 17 years. In the process, the various activities of Graz University of Technology and of the central department of teaching and learning technologies about the digital transformation of teaching and its focus and change during this period are described in the form of a workshop report. The consequences and developments of the Covid-19 pandemic on digital transformation efforts are also addressed. This is contrasted with results of two students' surveys from 2014 (N = 1,502 complete questionnaires) and 2021 (N = 1,386 complete questionnaires). Within this contribution, the authors use the survey's data to assess how students' attitudes towards technology-enhanced teaching were changing at TU Graz. Mean indices were created to be able to compare the two surveys. This shows that despite the less good experience with teaching at TU Graz during the pandemic the attitude towards digital teaching is relatively satisfying. Nevertheless, the authors point out that the students clearly indicate that digital (distance) learning has a negative impact on communication between students and teachers as well as between students themselves, and that measures would be desirable here. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The role of leadership in organizational post-traumatic growth

Organizational posttraumatic growth (OPTG) interventions may be the next modern risk management strategy (Winter, 2019). Organizational trauma (OT) includes, but is not limited to, COVID-19, office sexual harassment, mergers, toxic work culture, shootings, and empathic work (e.g., healthcare). This study aspired to fill the knowledge gap on how people in formal leadership roles and workers with leadership duties and functions can help facilitate OPTG. This study explored Individual Health and Wellbeing, Organizational Culture, Leadership Approach, and Meaning-Making as areas for OPTG interventions. Additionally, transformational and servant leadership attributes, burnout, and trauma competency were explored. The results revealed two priority OPTG intervention areas: Meaning-Making (e.g., sense-making from the traumatic experience, new identity) and Leadership Approach (e.g., communication, trust). Pearson correlations resulted in the strongest statistically significant correlations between Empathy and Trust, r = .87, p < .001, and Trust and Improvement and Growth, r = .82, p < .001. Additional significant correlations were between Empathy and survey item 36, "Overall my organization is improving or has improved from having gone through organizational trauma," r = .77, p < .001, and Trust and survey item 36, r = .77, p < .001. One-way ANOVA tests also revealed statistically significant differences in Organizational Culture scores between ethnic groups, F = 3.136, p = .018, and between industry groups, F = 2.292, p = .007, and in Leadership Approach scores between industry groups, F =1.796, p =.043. Hispanic or Latinx respondents disagreed more than White respondents on Organizational Culture (e.g., inclusion, psychological safety), and respondents from manufacturing and education disagreed more on Organizational Culture and Leadership Approach than other industries in the study sample. Significant t-test results revealed that respondents perceiving their organizations as having experienced NON COVID-19 trauma reported to be less likely to experience OPTG. Additional findings suggest that despite most respondents reporting feeling resilient, grateful, optimistic, and competent, they feel worn out at work and require better communication and OT meaning-making initiatives. This researcher hopes to stimulate more OPTG research and inspire university programs to empower today's future leaders with OPTG approaches and industrial/organizational consultants to help leaders facilitate OPTG. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Utilizing an organizational development framework as a road map for creating a technology-driven agile curriculum in predoctoral dental education.

The landscape of dental education is undergoing a paradigm shift from both the learner's and teacher's perspectives. Evolving technologies, including artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality, are providing synergistic opportunities to create new and exciting educational platforms. The evolution of these platforms will likely play a significant role in dental education. This is especially true in the wake of calamities like the COVID-19 pandemic during which educational activities had to be shutdown or moved online. This experience demonstrated that it is prudent to develop curricula that are both agile and efficient via creating hybrid courses that provide effective learning experiences regardless of the mode of delivery. Although there is growing interest in incorporating technology into dental education, there are few examples of how to actually manage the implementation of technology into the curriculum. In this paper, we provide a road map for incorporating technology into the dental curriculum to create agility and discuss challenges and possible solutions.

Counseling Organizations Remotely: A Qualitative Inductive Research on the Adjustment Process

The public-health-driven COVID-19 lockdowns unpredictably forced organization development (OD) consultants to work from home in no time. Because original interventions, driven by behavioral and social-science knowledge, were predominantly designed for face-to-face encounters, adaptation to virtual OD services was inevitable. This article analyzes that process. This study aimed to investigate how OD consultants adjusted their labor activity from a predominantly face-to-face to a solely technology mediated setting. We adopted a bottom-up research approach to inductive concept development, following Gioia and colleagues' (2013) methodology to study the adaptation process of 10 external and internal OD consultants. The findings indicate a parallel to Lewin's (1951) famous three-phase model of change. We suggest that our emergent framework can be well applied by other occupational fields (e.g., education sector, therapy, consultancies) in a transition process to a virtual setting. To facilitate the transition in other occupational fields we present a guiding framework.

Recession-Tackling Tools and Strategies

The fact that we are talking about how to survive recession for the second time in two years is a timely reminder that we must not take our clients or our businesses for granted. This article describes the key aspects of your business to think about and some simple marketing plans to put in place that will help you to win customers and survive this current storm in the best financial shape possible.

"Carriers of Hope." Creating Organizational Spaces of Hope During COVID-19

In this empirical study, we aim to explore how organizations can be targets of hope during COVID-19. More specifically, we ask: how do managers create spaces of hope, and what are the underlying mechanisms facilitating these processes of hope in a crisis situation? Based on an investigation of essays written by managers prior to and during the COVID19 pandemic and drawing on analyses from a focus group interview with managers, this article shows how creating organizational spaces of hope is part of a dynamic, relational and spiritual process. The managers are working on recognizing and affirming the organizational members' situation, helping them envision hope through a process of noticing despair, searching for meaning, and creating actions of hope to establish a horizon of possibilities. This hope process is facilitated through group reflection in safe spaces as well as times of slow-thinking, enabling hope practices in organizations to be part of viewing future horizons.

Change happens: Practitioner use of change management strategies

This study investigated the strategies that change management practitioners use to promote organizational change. Organizations implement change management plans to avoid losses in productivity and employee motivation (Bakari et al., 2017). Although there is an abundance of literature suggesting how change managers should implement a successful organizational change, practitioners and theorists approach change management differently (Saka, 2003). Practitioners may ignore the popular change literature (Bamford & Forrester, 2003) by relating their implementations to the context of the change instead of a prescribed model. 'There is a lack of empirical evidence in change management research that supports the theories mentioned in publications (Bakari et al., 2017;Bamford & Forrester, 2003;Brown, 2014;By, 2005;Cinite et al., 2009). The popular literature commonly states that 70% of organizational change fails (Balogun & Hope Hailey, 2008;Beer & Nohria, 2000;Burnes, 2015;Cinite et al., 2009;Washington & Hacker, 2005), but does not describe why the change fails (Decker et al., 2012). Although popular literature identifies numerous models and strategies to promote change, the field lacks empirical evidence that explains what strategies practitioners use and how they determine that their change was successful. The purpose of this research was to examine the choices that change managers make and how change managers promote organizational change. I collected survey data through questionnaires (n = 49) and interviews (n = 20) to answer the following four research questions: 1. What strategies do change managers use to facilitate organizational change? 2. How do change managers implement change management strategies to promote organizational change? 3. How do change managers measure the effectiveness of their change implementations? 4. How has the current global pandemic impacted the strategies used by change management professionals? The questionnaire results identified how frequently participants used the strategies found in six popular change management models. I used the interviews to determine how the change managers used the strategies in their implementations, how they measured their change implementations, and how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the strategies that they used. By triangulating the data from the questionnaire and interviews, I identified ten strategies that change managers often used when they implemented a successful organizational change. The strategies were (1) communicate with the employees about the change, (2) receive open support and commitment from administration, (3) focus on organizational culture, (4) use managers and supervisors as change agents, (5) include employees in change decisions, (6) listen to the employees' concerns about the change, (7) reward new behavior, (8) use training to prepare employees and leaders for change, (9) help clients relate the organization's vision to the change, and (10) build trust to increase buy-in. Most strategies contained sub-strategies that described how the participants implemented the change. Findings revealed that change managers used the strategies contextually based on the individual needs of the organization. This suggested that a linear prescriptive change model did not align with every change implementation. Communicating with members of the organization expanded across numerous strategies and promoting the change through leadership was an essential component of the change instead of an individual strategy. The participants measured the effectiveness of the change with both formal and informal feedback. They based the success of their change implementations on pre-defined goals set by the organization's administrators. Open support and commitment from administration was essential to promote a successful organizational change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

EU Policies on Learning Environmental Sustainability and Climate Change: What Social Implications for Human and Organizational Development and Resilience?

This article outlines the recent developments in European Union (EU) legislation on learning environmental sustainability (LES) since the 2000s. The main findings focus on the legal provisions of the: (i) European Commission (EC) Staff Working Document SWD/2022/3 final aimed to outline the key topics of LES;(ii) the Regulation (EU) 2021/1119 on climate change (CC) and climate neutrality (CN);(iii) the Regulation (EU) 2021/783 providing the legal framework for the LIFE programme and (iv) the Regulation (EU) 2018/1999 on EU governance in the sector of energy and climate action (CA). Therefore, the study reviews the action areas and the strategic decision making and evaluates seven mechanisms and policy responses, namely: (a) green transition (GT) and CC;(b) education;(c) training programmes;(d) EU governance and preparedness actions to sustainability;(e) approaches to key competencies;(f) COVID-19 challenges and societal and institutional responses to public health crisis (PHC);(g) key skills for GT. Thus, our findings show how the legal provisions for LES, CC and PHC can develop collaborative governance at the EU level. Moreover, the research considers three approaches for GT within the 2016 Skills Agenda (SA) namely: (i) first, the complex approach to "community engagement";(ii) second, the specific aim of learning and involvement;iii) third, the development of additional requirements regarding human development (HD) and organizational development (OD). In conclusion, these developments consider new approaches to GT and LES giving a complex overview of the HD and OD.

What do psychologists most value in their state organizations? The Connecticut Psychological Association (CPA) perspective

Professional psychology has gone through amazing growth and development in recent years. This corresponds with rapid changes to the healthcare landscape and is further accelerated by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Professional organizations are integral to addressing these challenges, with state psychological associations playing a critical role for professional psychologists. Since its creation, the Connecticut Psychological Association (CPA) has been championing the needs of its members to the benefit of all psychologists in the state. In 2019, CPA surveyed existing members and all licensed psychologists in Connecticut (CT) on professional concerns and interests. It also sought to engage CT psychologists in professional advocacy efforts and to counter declining membership numbers. The survey development process itself was valuable. Items were tailored to memberships status and included quantitative and qualitative data with thematic content covering: advocacy, networking, professional assistance, educational opportunities, marketing opportunities, and public service. Organizational housekeeping during survey development and the prepandemic timing of data collection proved invaluable. Results and implications are summarized with the discussion of the action steps that followed in the context of an emerging global pandemic. Insights generated by the survey facilitated strategic prioritization of limited resources, helping CPA to navigate the start of the COVID-19 syndemic and to take action steps that successfully increased membership. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved) Impact Statement Despite membership declines, professional organizations such as Connecticut Psychological Association (CPA) continue to play a critical role in supporting and sustaining professional psychologist needs. Targeted surveys not only provide important insights into an organization's value, but can also facilitate infrastructure development, improve strategic prioritization of limited resources, and generate action steps to increase membership in professional organizations during uncertain times. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Organizational structure enhancing airlines efficiency amid the pandemic: low-cost carriers in Thailand as a case

The pandemic of COVID-19 has extreme impact than the intense competitors in airlines industry that never turn up in history. It derailed all airlines' operations, company's structure, strategy, and its markets which is highly impact to Thailand's tourism industry. The purpose of this study is to assess the managerial practices of low-cost carriers (LCCs) to enhance the organization's performance during COVID-19. The managerial practices concern with strategic human resources management, organizational culture, high competence personnel, and risk management affect to organizational structure. The quantitative was administered to four anonymous low-cost airlines operating in Thailand. Questionnaires were used to collect data from 150 person of each airline, hence there were 600 samples in total. The descriptive statistic and path analysis were applied. The results found that LCCs stressed greatly on the high competence personnel, followed by organizational culture, risk management, and strategic human resource management affecting organizational structure that led to efficiency and competitiveness of organization. To investigate the effect of management issues of strategic human resources management (SHRM), organizational culture (OC), high competence personnel (HQP), and risk management (RM) on low-cost carriers (LCC) in Thailand toward organizational structure (OS) which result to the competitiveness of high-performance organization (CHPO). The quantitative approach was employed by using structural equation modelling for path analysis. The data was collected by using questionnaires. There were 600 samplings from four anonymous low-cost airlines. The results found that LCCs stressed greatly on the high competence personnel, followed by organizational culture, risk management, and strategic human resource management affecting organizational structure that led to competitiveness of organization. The authors would recommend LCCs to refocus its practices to strategic human resource management during the crisis. Since, the human resource management is dealing with organization changes through the leadership and organizational culture. Finally, researchers have developed the model creating organizational structure.

Identifying Strategies as a Ploy for Overcoming Negative Effects of COVIDization of Economy

The main goal of this publication is to highlight the importance of the strategy as a ploy to overcome the negative effects as a result of COVIDization of the economy. The term COVIDization of the economy is the term that best describes the situation caused by COVID-19 in the short term and the long term consequences it will have for the business. The first wave presented the companies the economic challenges that they had to deal with in the short term. The subsequent two new waves also determined the need for strategic changes on the part of companies. In these conditions, all five strategies derived by Mintzberg appear - plan, a pattern of behavior, positioning, ploy, perspective. The article substantiates from a theoretical point of view the importance of strategy as a ploy through some of the most popular concepts used in strategic management - McKinsey’s 7S, the Pyramid for organizational development;through the Value-added chain, the Strategic map and Balance scorecard. Viewed in this way, “strategy” means the definition (undertaking) of a set of actions to achieve a specific goal under certain, set as a result of COVIDization, external conditions and available internal prerequisites. The presented empirical data are the result of a study conducted in the period March-April, 2020. © 2021, University of National and World Economy. All rights reserved.

Core competencies and challenges among nurses transitioning into positions of leadership - a Caribbean perspective.

PURPOSE: Nurses are a significant part of the professional workforce, but leaders may be promoted without the requisite competencies. This study aims to explore the perspectives of nurse managers about the core competencies necessary for promotion as leaders in health. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: This was a mixed-methods study that targeted nurses (N = 126) who were promoted in four Caribbean countries over the past five years. A 30-item questionnaire was used for quantitative data collection and analyzed using SPSS version 25. Interviews yielded the qualitative data, which were analyzed using open coding and thematic analysis. Ethical approvals were received from ethics committees at the university and country level. FINDINGS: Most participants were female (n = 112), had 15 or more years' experience (n = 71) and an associate degree/diploma in nursing (n = 62). Leadership was the most important competency required of nurse leaders in spite of their position within the organization, followed by team building and motivation. Challenges to the transitioning into leadership positions included the prevailing culture and a lack of a systematic approach to building capacity in leadership. There was also between-group statistical significance, as determined by one-way ANOVA for delegation, motivation and leadership as core competencies based on occupations roles. RESEARCH LIMITATIONS/IMPLICATIONS: Notwithstanding the importance of the findings from this research, there were some limitations. While the researchers considered implementing this study in eight Caribbean countries, approvals were received for only four countries. This will affect the ability to generalize the findings to the wider Caribbean countries. One of the strengths of this research was the use of mixed methods for data collection. However, the qualitative component of the findings may be limited by the number of focus groups conducted, notwithstanding the richness of the data collected. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: The findings can be used as a framework from which the health system in developing countries can begin to examine practical solutions to developing 21st century leadership competencies in nursing. While there may be remanence of the colonial past in the way systems function, the complexity of health systems requires leadership that is rooted in competence that is multidimensional. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: This paper provides an important contribution to the literature on leadership and competencies from the perspective of low- to middle-income resource settings. The qualitative component of the research added richness to the nuances and understanding of the phenomenon of competencies for nurse leaders.