Managing formalization to increase global team effectiveness and meaningfulness of work in multinational organizations

Global teams may help to integrate across locations, and yet, with formalized rules and procedures, responsiveness to those locations’ effectiveness, and the team members’ experiences of work as meaningful may suffer. We employ a mixed-methods approach to understand how the level and content of formalization can be managed to resolve these tensions in multinationals. In a sample of global teams from a large mining and resources organization operating across 44 countries, interviews, observations, and a quantitative 2-wave survey revealed a great deal of variability between teams in how formalization processes were enacted. Only those formalization processes that promoted knowledge sharing were instrumental in improving team effectiveness. Implementing rules and procedures in the set-up of the teams and projects, rather than during interactions, and utilizing protocols to help establish the global team as a source of identity increased this knowledge sharing. Finally, we found members’ personal need for structure moderated the effect of team formalization on how meaningful individuals found their work within the team. These findings have significant implications for theory and practice in multinational organizations

Singing Function: Exploring Auditory Graphs with a Vowel Based Sonification

Grond F, Hermann T. Singing Function: Exploring Auditory Graphs with a Vowel Based Sonification. Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces. 2012;5(3-4):87-95.We present in this paper SingingFunction, a vowel-based sonification strategy for mathematical functions. Within the research field of auditory graphs as representation of scalar functions, we focus in SingingFunction on important aspects of sound design, which allow to better distinguish function shapes as auditory gestalts. SingingFunction features the first vowel-based synthesis for function sonification, and allows for a seamless integration of higher derivatives of the function into a single sound stream. We present further the results of a psycho physical experiment, where we compare the effectiveness of function sonifications based on either mapping only f'(x), or including hirarchically further information about the first derivatives f'(x), or the second derivative f''(x). Further we look at interactivity as an important factor and report interesting effects across all 3 sonification methods by comparing interactive explorations versus simple playback of sonified functions. Finally, we discuss SingingFunction within the context of existing function sonifications, and possible evaluation methods

Comparing User Performance on Parallel-Tone, Parallel-Speech, Serial-Tone and Serial-Speech Auditory Graphs

Visualization techniques such as bar graphs and pie charts let sighted users quickly understand and explore numerical data. These techniques remain by and large inaccessible for visually impaired users. Even when these are made accessible, they remain slow and cumbersome, and not as useful as they might be to sighted users. Previous research has studied two methods of improving perception and speed of navigating auditory graphs - using non-speech audio (such as tones) instead of speech to communicate data and using two audio streams in parallel instead of in series. However, these studies were done in the early 2000s and speech synthesis techniques have improved considerably in recent times, as has the familiarity of visually impaired users with smartphones and speech systems. We systematically compare user performance on four modes that can be used for the generation of auditory graphs: parallel-tone, parallel-speech, serial-tone, and serial-speech. We conducted two within-subjects studies - one with 20 sighted users and the other with 20 visually impaired users. Each user group performed point estimation and point comparison tasks with each technique on two sizes of bar graphs. We assessed task time, errors and user preference. We found that while tone was faster than speech, speech was more accurate than tone. The parallel modality was faster than serial modality and visually impaired users were faster than their sighted counterparts. Further, users showed a strong personal preference towards the serial-speech technique. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical study that systematically compares these four techniques. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2019