ABSTRACT
The coordination of maintenance work in manufacturing poses a crucial productivity factor in small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) but often seems to be rather neglected in practice as well as in much of the literature on maintenance. We shed light upon maintenance coordination work by presenting a design case study conducted in an SME over approximately two years. We took a participatory design-oriented approach, involving all roles on the shopfloor affected by maintenance work. In three major iterations during the pre-study, a release-ready prototype was developed and implemented by the users over the course of one year. The evaluation of the tool showed how a new and mostly unintended practice of information flow, error reporting, and prioritization emerged such that, for instance, foremen becoming a central node of communication, formal prioritization shifting away from higher management, and actual prioritization being done by maintainers. This paper contributes to the body of CSCW work on maintenance practice in SMEs by presenting detailed empirical findings on the coordination work of maintainers, as well as the evaluation of socio-technical interventions into maintenance practices.
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the impact of facial cues on leadership emergence. Using evolutionary social psychology, we expand upon implicit and contingent theories of leadership and propose that different types of intergroup relations elicit different implicit cognitive leadership prototypes. It is argued that a biologically based hormonal connection between behavior and corresponding facial characteristics interacts with evolutionarily consistent social dynamics to influence leadership emergence. We predict that masculine-looking leaders are selected during intergroup conflict (war) and feminine-looking leaders during intergroup cooperation (peace). Across two experiments we show that a general categorization of leader versus nonleader is an initial implicit requirement for emergence, and at a context-specific level facial cues of masculinity and femininity contingently affect war versus peace leadership emergence in the predicted direction. In addition, we replicate our findings in Experiment 1 across culture using Western and East Asian samples. In Experiment 2, we also show that masculine-feminine facial cues are better predictors of leadership than male-female cues. Collectively, our results indicate a multi-level classification of context-specific leadership based on visual cues imbedded in the human face and challenge traditional distinctions of male and female leadership.
