Leadership & Distributed Teams

That’s “days of the dogs” to the Romans and a glance at this week’s forecast suggests they aren’t over yet!

Still, it’s been a long and productive summer and I’d like to think most of the dog days are past.  It is almost relaxing to settle in to the hectic pace of school for one more semester.  The past few months have seen the submission of three journal articles as well as a conference paper and poster presentation.  Everything’s still under review, so cross your fingers!  They (and their brief summaries) are:

• Leadership Research in Video Games (co-author) — A review and discussion of leadership research in serious games.
• Mandatory Items in an Internet Survey – Empirical study of online survey completion rates.  Contrary to the literature, the surveys with mandatory items had higher overall completion rates than the surveys with optional items.
• Personality and Workplace Communication Media – A study of media use & preference with personality as the primary predictor.  The interactions between conscientiousness and agreeableness turned out to be particularly fascinating.
• Choosing a Channel: Personality, Gender, and Age as Predictors of Media Richness Preference in Adult Interpersonal Communication (second author) — In this study, men preferred richer media (e.g., FTF) and some interesting gender/personality interactions cropped up.
• Self-Efficacy as a Predictor of Workplace Technology Use (co-author) — Both generalized self-efficacy (GSE) and domain-specific self-efficacy (DSE) were considered as predictors of technology use.  The importance of self-efficacy is supposed to fade as users gain more experience, but DSE did significantly predict use and GSE approached significance even among experience users.

What’s in store for the future?  A few irons are in the fire and should be kicking off in the next few weeks.  We’ll probably be looking for a new team of UCI research interns soon.  In particular, I expect a lot of qualitative document coding (text & A/V) coming our way within about a month.  You’ll be kept in the loop!