A paper by Magda Donia is honoured by a top journal in organizational behaviour
Professor Magda Donia has been honoured for her article in the Journal of Business and Psychology which makes an original contribution to the research on organizational-citizenship behaviours. She received an Editors Commendation from the JBP for her paper, one of only 8 papers selected for this distinction out of a total of nearly 500!
- Donia, M. B., Johns, G., & Raja, U. (2016). Good soldier or good actor? Supervisor accuracy in distinguishing between selfless and self-serving OCB motives. Journal of Business and Psychology, 31(1), 23-32.
Employees are said to engage in organizational citizenship behaviours, or OCBs, when they perform positive acts that go beyond the day-to-day tasks expected of them. Donia and her team were interested in the underlying individual motivation for engaging in these behaviours. They investigated the extent to which supervisors can effectively distinguish the “selfless actors” from those that engage in OCBs primarily to ingratiate themselves with their bosses. The results of the study, based on a sample of 197 supervisor-subordinate pairs, revealed that the supervisors were able to accurately identify their subordinates’ OCB motives. They were not fooled by “good actors.”
Reseachers will continue to be interested in the motivation people attribute to employees who engage in OCBs, given the role of supervisors in reward and promotion decisions and the notion that OCBs should be encouraged. For now, professor Donia has made an original contribution to the topic with her exploration of supervisors’ accuracy in identifying those motivations.
Creation of a research chair on health services organization
Professor François Chiocchio will study how health services can be enhanced by improving teamwork and collaboration as the inaugural Montfort Hospital Research Chair in the Organization of Health Services.
“We’re tremendously excited about this new research chair, which deepens the Telfer School’s collaboration with the Montfort Hospital and confirms that our school is home to outstanding research on transforming health services and improving delivery of care,” said François Julien, Dean of the Telfer School of Management. “Professor Chiocchio has been a highly productive affiliate researcher at the Institut de recherche de l’Hôpital Montfort since 2013, and with the new chair, he will have an opportunity make an even bigger contribution to the scholarship and best practices around effective healthcare teams.”
The Montfort Hospital officially announced two research chairs, one on the Organization of Health Services and another on Physical and Mental Comorbidities, during a ceremony at the hospital earlier today. Each comes with a value of $50,000 a year over a five-year period from the Institut du savoir Montfort (ISM).
Professor Chiocchio is a renowned expert on the efficacy of healthcare teams, which he studies using perspectives from organizational behaviour, project management and human resource management. His studies at Montfort will aim to understand and improve the mechanisms of collaboration on diverse care teams, management teams, and administrative teams, as well as on teams comprised of hospital volunteers, patients and their families.
Researcher’s biography
François Chiocchio is an Associate Professor in Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource Management at the Telfer School. He has developed a particular expertise on the processes that foster interdependence and interdisciplinarity among teams, such as communication, coordination, cooperation, and cohesion, as well as how teams manage change projects. Professor Chiocchio’s research focusing on teamwork and collaboration has been funded by the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC), the Project Management Institute's Research Program, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Researchers use big-data analytics to battle childhood chronic disease
Why the recent focus on IBD, asthma, and diabetes in health research?
There has been an increase in the incidence of these pediatric immune-mediated conditions. Many of them are also more prevalent in developed countries. A pair of recent studies by Dr. Eric Benchimol examined why Ontario immigrants from countries with low prevalence of these diseases might be at increased risk with early life exposure to the Canadian environment. However, the reasons behind the increased incidence of these immune-mediated diseases have not yet been clearly identified, and finding the predisposing factors is a high priority for healthcare providers.
Why big-data analytics as a research method?
With advances in computing and the availability of large and diversified datasets, big-data analytics is an increasingly useful method in health services research. It allows researchers to identify hidden patterns and relationships in a set of variables that would otherwise be overlooked. Researchers have opportunities to gain insights into early-life risk factors by virtue of linkable datasets held at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES). These diverse datasets cover health services records; medical and clinical information; data from newborn metabolic screening; immigration data; and socio-demographic data.
Professor Bijan Raahemi of the Telfer School and Professor Eric Benchimol of the Faculty of Medicine and the CHEO Research Institute have teamed up to identify factors that put children at greater risk of developing diseases such as asthma, type 1 diabetes, and inflammatory bowel disease. Together with doctoral student Mohammad Hossein Tekieh, they will be using novel big-data analytics to mine Ontario health data, and their findings are expected to contribute to improved health outcomes and lower costs related to chronic care.
“Investigating unknown patterns in health administrative records and population-based data offers exciting potential to improve health services for children,” said Raahemi, a Full Professor of Data Analytics and the Director of the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Research Laboratory. “Applying the latest data mining and artificial intelligence tools can generate important insights for better pediatric care, including more targeted and efficient health system interventions.”
The outcomes of the research could also identify how different risk factors might affect one another. Interactions between genetic predisposition, immune characteristics, and the environment are thought to play a role in the increased incidence of IBD, asthma, diabetes and other immune-mediated diseases.
Dr. Benchimol, an Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Epidemiology at the uOttawa Faculty of Medicine and a Core Scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES), explained: “Using various analytical models and data mining techniques to explore the interaction among these factors holds great promise in terms of identifying the at-risk population and early intervention to prevent chronic disease or provide timely treatment.”
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Mohammad Hossein Tekieh, a Ph.D. student in the Electronic Business Technologies Program at the University of Ottawa, will lead the data analysis. Funding for this project was provided by Mitacs and the CHEO Research Institute.
Transforming our Hospitals: Clinician-driven operations management
The Telfer School of Management welcomed over 70 health professionals, business leaders, civil servants and students on Wednesday, November 23, 2016, for an event organized by the Telfer Health Transformation Exchange (THTex), featuring Dr. Alain Mouttham from the Institut de Recherche de l’Hôpital Monfort.
Dr. Mouttham’s presentation, entitled Transforming our Hospitals: Clinician-driven Operations Management, highlighted the fact that Canadian hospitals have to become patient-centered and value-based, and that this transformation is made possible by using a clinical operations management (COM) model. The COM model, which is driven by clinicians, goes beyond administration and IT led projects and looks at the processes from the perspectives of increasing efficiency and adding value.
During his presentation, Dr. Mouttham stated: ‘‘I believe that it is possible to have nurses and clinicians driving the transformation of hospitals, and it is starting,’’ which is why the proposed COM model responds to the specific needs of the hospitals in terms of processes, organization and information.
During the talk different ideas were presented for a hospital transformation ecosystem that should bring together hospitals, universities, non-profit start-ups and public agencies, forming incubators for hospital transformation.
The presentation was followed by a panel discussion. Serving on the panel was Dr. Alain Mouttham, Dr. Michael Fung-Kee-Fung, Professor at the Departments of Obstetrics/ Gynecology and Surgery at the University of Ottawa and Head of Surgical Oncology at the Ottawa Regional Cancer Program and the Ottawa Hospital, and Dr. Andrew Falconer, Chief of Staff at the Queensway Carleton Hospital. The panelists presented their views and experiences around the broad issue of hospital transformation and development of value-based care delivery models. The audience engaged in a series of questions centered on engagement, role of clinicians in hospital transformation, and the impact a single payer system has on fostering healthcare innovation.
Click here to view the PDF of the slideshow.
Lavagnon Ika named to the editorial board of top project management journal
Professor Lavagnon Ika has been named to the editorial board of the International Journal of Project Management, the top-ranked journal in the field. An associate professor at the Telfer School of Management, Professor Ika has been contributing to the development of the project management discipline for a decade, in addition to teaching in the undergraduate program, at the MBA level, and most recently in the new Master’s in Complex Project Leadership.
His recent publications include an article entitled “Metaphysical questions every project practitioner should ask” which has been well-received by researchers and professionals alike; and a discussion of economist Albert Hirschman's contributions as a seminal early thinker in the field.
- Telfer study looks at caregiver experiences in the stroke rehabilitation system
- Professor Agnes Grudniewicz adds strength to healthcare analytics group
- Francois Eric-Racicot named to advisory board of prestigious finance journal
- Darlene Himick explores the activist turn of individual pension-plan members
