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Task Environment (task + environment)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting33%

Selected Abstracts

An examination of order effects in auditors' inherent risk assessments

ACCOUNTING & FINANCE, Issue 2 2000
Gary Monroe
While recency effects have been reported in a variety of audit tasks, recent studies suggest that these effects may be mitigated under certain conditions. The importance of investigating order effects in auditors' judgments rests with its potential to impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of audits. Since current studies suggest that recency effects may not impact on all audit situations, it is necessary to identify conditions or variables in the task environment that either induce or mitigate recency. This study examines the occurrence of order effects in auditors' inherent risk assessments, a task not previously examined. Using a case study administered to 70 auditors, this study found that auditors' judgments were not influenced by the order in which audit evidence was evaluated. Rather, the results suggest that judgments of inherent risk may be biased towards conservatism. This may not be surprising given the negative consequences associated with failing to adequately plan an audit. This may cause auditors to act cautiously and thus mitigate recency effects. [source]

The challenges are organizational not just clinical

JOURNAL OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR, Issue 7 2006
Ranga Ramanujam
Contemporary hospitals fall far short in applying both state-of-the art clinical knowledge and management practices of known effectiveness. Organization and management practices in hospitals are shaped by four factors: their conflicting missions, a distinctive and largely professional workforce, demanding external environments, and a complex day-to-day task environment. This article identifies two critical organizing challenges that hospitals face: organizational learning and implementing effective high involvement management practices. It discusses how findings from organizational research, including articles in this special issue, identify solutions to the problems underlying these challenges. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Determinants of environmental innovation adoption in the printing industry: the importance of task environment

BUSINESS STRATEGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT, Issue 1 2007
Sandra Rothenberg
In this paper, we investigate the impact that the task environment has on the adoption of environmental innovations by firms. Specifically, we investigate the impact of two dimensions of a firm's external context , munificence and dynamism. We investigate both of these factors by drawing on the relevant literatures, developing hypotheses and testing our hypotheses with data drawn from the US printing industry. Our major findings are that firms in highly dynamic environments, as well as firms that have adopted other productive innovations, are more likely to adopt a greater number of environmental innovations. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [source]

Resolving the paradox of the active user: stable suboptimal performance in interactive tasks

COGNITIVE SCIENCE - A MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL, Issue 6 2004
Wai-Tat Fu
Abstract This paper brings the intellectual tools of cognitive science to bear on resolving the "paradox of the active user" [Interfacing Thought: Cognitive Aspects of Human,Computer Interaction, Cambridge, MIT Press, MA, USA],the persistent use of inefficient procedures in interactive tasks by experienced or even expert users when demonstrably more efficient procedures exist. The goal of this paper is to understand the roots of this paradox by finding regularities in these inefficient procedures. We examine three very different data sets. For each data set, we first satisfy ourselves that the preferred procedures used by some subjects are indeed less efficient than the recommended procedures. We then amass evidence, for each set, and conclude that when a preferred procedure is used instead of a more efficient, recommended procedure, the preferred procedure tends to have two major characteristics: (1) the preferred procedure is a well-practiced, generic procedure that is applicable either within the same task environment in different contexts or across different task environments, and (2) the preferred procedure is composed of interactive components that bring fast, incremental feedback on the external problem states. The support amassed for these characteristics leads to a new understanding of the paradox. In interactive tasks, people are biased towards the use of general procedures that start with interactive actions. These actions require much less cognitive effort as each action results in an immediate change to the external display that, in turn, cues the next action. Unfortunately for the users, the bias to use interactive unit tasks leads to a path that requires more effort in the long run. Our data suggest that interactive behavior is composed of a series of distributed choices; that is, people seldom make a once-and-for-all decision on procedures. This series of biased selection of interactive unit tasks often leads to a stable suboptimal level of performance. [source]