article about the model that can be used to see the impact of emotion on ethical decision making.

1.     Emotion and Ethical Decision-Making in Organizations

Alice Gaudine and Linda Thorne

Journal of Business Ethics 
Vol. 31, No. 2 (May, 2001) , pp. 175-187

Published by: Springer

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25074527

In the past, numerous researches have identified the influence of emotion on people’s ethical decisions. However, little researches have been done to understand whether different emotions promote or discourage ethical decision-making. In this article, the author has designed a model to identify how emotion affects individuals’ ethical decision-making process. He believes that people’s ethical decision process has four major components that are ethical sensitivity, prescriptive reasoning, ethical motivation and ethical behavior. He mentioned that those components come from Rest’s Model of Moral Action. Those four components are defined as follow. Ethical sensitivity means the ability to realize the ethical dilemma’s existence. Prescriptive reasoning is coming up with the alternative that can solve the ethical dilemma. Ethical motivation is the time when a person decides whether to implement her idea. Ethical behavior is the action in resolving the ethical dilemma. In Gaudine and Thorne’s model, they exanimate how the feeling state (positive feeling VS negative feeling) and arousal dimension of emotion affect each component. The following graphs are the model they adapted from others’ work.

Disruptions cause medication disruptions.

(Tittle:) Avoidable Interruption During Drug Administration in an Intensive Rehabilitation Ward: Improvement Project.

(Authors:) Sara Buchini and Rosanna Quattrin.

(Source:) Journal of Nursing Management 20, 326-334.

Many medical errors cause irreversible and tragically avoidable human death and suffering. This study, which is based on data collected from observations of Italian hospitals, is trying to find ways to stop medication error. Medication error is when a patient is given the wrong medicine or is given overdose. These medication errors cause thousands of death each year in Italy. All medication errors are avoidable and are caused by ineffectual book keeping, unsatisfactory management, and poor training of medical staff. This study focuses on nurses who are primarily responsible for giving patients their medication.

The disruption that leads to the medication error happens during the preparation and administration of the drug.  Preparation of a drug has many steps that can be disrupted by a miss calculation, bad organization, or a random event (like patient falling and needing help). This can lead to a patient receiving an overdose or the wrong medicine.

A nurse administrating medicine can be distracted by a disruption; this can lead to the nurse to not log the medicine administration. If the nurse does not log the session then another nurse will give the patient the medicine again, this can cause an overdose. Nurses are disrupted between 2.8 and 14 time an hour. All these disruptions can lead to medication error.

Medication error can be avoided if hospitals make improvements. These include better methods of keeping medication records, having more nurses to spread out work load, and giving nurses better training.

Title: Antecedents and consequences of team stability on new product development performance
Authors: Ali E. Akgünb and Gary S. Lynna,

In this article the things that contribute to a social aspects of what makes a successful team are research. These things include benefits and consequences of bringing in new people and taking out people from a new product team, goals and goals clarity, and team stability.

Various teams are observed in for this research project. It was found that for the most part when people in a team are taken out or replaced then there is negative disruption. Things that needed to get done are not done as quickly and efficiently as before and there is a certain amount of time needed in order to recoup. However, in some events replacing members in a team is a good thing. This is only the case when the person coming in provides something new and more efficient than the person that left, such as a new way to look at things that makes future things move smoother.

When a person leaves a team and is replaced by another often times that person is not readily accepted. This slows down all process within a team because that new person is having much of their work over scrutinized. In order for things to function normally again the new team member must be fully accepted through whatever right of passage the team sees as adequate.

It was also found that goal clarity does not directly impact the stability of a team. However, according to the research done in this article, it does have an indirect impact on the team support of the project. And team support of a project has direct correlation with team stability.

In order for companies to maximize their productivity they must ensure that the new team member is well received. Meaning they contribute something more to the team than the member who left did. It is also important to ensure that there are goals and that these goals are clear, while it does not directly effect team stability is effects support. These are all things that need to be ensured when disrupting a team.

Social Team Disruptions:

 

Title: Social disruption and psychological stress in an Alaskan fishing community: The impact of the Exxon Valdex Oil Spill

Author: J. Steven Picou, Duane A. Gill, Christopher L. Dyer, Evans W. Curry

 Many things disrupt the forward movement of a team. One of the big things is a technology accidents that have serious negative social impacts upon a team. In this article the Exxon oil spill in Alaska, which is one of the largest oil spill in United States history, is examined in an attempt to understand the social impacts that a community experiences when a major sources of income is destroyed.

            In order to understand why there was such a large social impact this article made a point of distinguishing between a natural disaster and a technological disaster. Natural disasters are caused by nature, for example hurricanes and earthquakes. There is little to no perceived control over natural disasters and they do not produce damage that cannot be fixed. However, with technological disasters research has shown that those who survive have a sense of control taken from them as well as more severe PTSD. Technological disasters also damage a community more extremely because of the great social impacts.

            The Exxon oil spill impacted the community of Cordova, Alaska most, since it is where the oil spill occurred. Much wildlife was killed and the ocean where the spill occurred has irreversible damage. When the spill occurred Cordova was predominately a fishing community. Their economy dependent upon commercial fishing, making the oil spill into the ocean that much more devastating.

The town of Petersburg was used a control for the research in this article. The towns are incredibly similar in all aspects. People from both towns were interviewed at random, there was a wide range of ages as well as an even number of males and females. It was found that a more extreme case of PTSD was present in those living in Cordova. Meaning a greater social impact of the technological disaster was found in Cordova. Fifty-one percent of people in Cordova had made changes in their future plans because of the uncertainty brought about by the Exxon oil spill.

 

This event had a huge impact upon this community, but the impact was centralized to the one small town in Alaska based on the information gathered from Petersburg. Making this a severe social disruption on a small scale.

article about how uncertainty impacts teams behavior

Becoming Aware of the Unknown: Decision Making During the Implementation of a Strategic Initiative

Ronald Klingebiel and Arnoud De Meyer

Organization Science 
Vol. 24, No. 1 (January-February 2013), pp. 133-153

Published by: INFORMS

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23362104

Strategic initiatives are projects that are crucial for organizations’ future success, and they are usually associated with organizational strategic goals. In order to execute those initiatives for organizational strategic goals, managers have to make decisions on how they should behave differently based on different situations. Prior researches suggest that decision makers usually have a set of preconceived behaviors that they prefer to follow when they have enough information that are related to their decisions. When they lack information, they will then change their preconceived behaviors to make the best decision based on the information they gathered, which is defined as adaptive decision-making. However, these researches did not address how managers decide to adapt and what impact them to choose to either stick to plans or learn by doing when they implement strategic initiatives. In the study of Klingebiel and Meyer, they want to find out why the managers decided to adapt and what impact them to adapt. They find out that when the future is uncertain, managers tend to be more selective, deliberate and diligent to change their behaviors. They also find out that analytical comprehensiveness in adaptive decision-making is higher than preconceived decision-making when the future is uncertain.

Article report on how communication disruption causes waste during surgeries.

(Title:) Communication Failures in the Operating room: an Observation Classification of  Recurrent Types and Effects.

(Authers:) L Lingard, S Espin, S Whyte, G Regehr, G R Baker, R Reznick, J Bohnen, B Orser, D Doran, E Grober.

(Source:) Quality Safe Health Care 2004; 13:330-334.

Disruptions come in many forms. In teams a prominent cast of disruption is miss communication. A stable dialog between team members creates efficient flow of information that promotes shared goals and coordinated action among the team members.  Shared goals and action make the team more efficient. A communication disruption can quickly derail a team’s ability to identify and share goals and actions. L. Lingard and ect., article talk about the types of communication disruption, how often they occur and their effects on surgical teams.

This article draws data from the observation of 48 surgical procedures.  Reviewing those observation revealed four types of communication disruptions or failures. These communication failures occurred in 30% of surgical procedure. The researchers also determined which type of disruption had the most visible effect on the surgical procedure. 36.4% of communication failure had visible negative effects on the surgical procedures efficiency and team members.

A communication disruption can have seven negative effects; they are as follows. Inefficiency is redoing a part of the procedure, thus wasting time and effort. Tension is emotional distress between team members that can lead to lowered ability to work efficiently with each other. Delay is the slowing down of the procedure.  Workaround is the team deviating from the standard procedure, this can endanger the patient.  Resource waste is using too many supplies to finish the procedure. Patient inconvenience is using up more patients time then required and putting the patients through more suffering. Procedural error is making a mistake during the procedure. All types of communication disruption cause these negative affects.

The most common and disruptive of the communication disruption is ‘Occasion failure’, which is a failure to make a communication at the right time. ‘Occasion failure’ mostly results in inefficiency, tension between team members, and delay off key parts of the surgical procedure.

‘Content failure’ is the second most common and least disruptive of communication disruption. ‘Content failure’ is miss communicated information between team members. It is liable to cause all the negative effects.

The third most common and second most disruptive of the communication disruptions is ‘Purpose failure’, which is a failure of the leader of the team to communicate a clear goal to the rest of the team. ‘Purpose failure’ mostly results in inefficiency and tension.

‘Audience failure’ is the least common and third most disruptive of the communication disruption. ‘Audience failure’ is team members’ failure to listen and understand each other. It is liable to cause all the negative effects.

36.4% of communication failures endanger the patient by causing disruptions. The causes of these disruptions should be addresses, because they result and will continue to result in human death and suffering. 

Article report on waste caused by lack of medical response planning to a disaster.

(Title:) Emergency Medical Assistance Team Response Following Taiwan Chi-Chi Earthquake.

(Authors:) Edbert B. Hsu, Matthew Ma, Fang Yue Lin, Michael J. VanRooyen and Frederick M. Burkle Jr.

(Source:) Prehospital and Disaster Medicine / Volume 17 / Issue 01 / March 2002, pg. 17-22. 

            This article focuses on the reaction of emergency medical assistance teams (EMATs) during the Chi-Chi, Taiwan earthquake that happened in 1999. The earthquake was measured as a 7.3 on the Richter scale and caused damages that cost $92 billion USD to repair. The repairs were an unavoidable cost, but there were also avoidable costs that happened after the earthquake. 

            The earthquake caused injuries that needed medical attention all over Chi-Chi. Not all available EMATs were sent out to deal with these injuries, even though they were needed. This is a form of Waiting Waste, all resources weren’t capitalized to help deal with the disaster. This waiting caused the most tragic form of waste, Human death and suffering. This avoidable waste could have been evaded if there was a preexisting disaster procedure for EMATs teams to follow after the earthquake.

            After the earthquake most of the communication systems and equipment were taken off-line. This slowed coordination, request for help and information flow. The lack of information and procedure cause the EMATs that did go into the disaster area to be ill prepared. Most of EMATs teams reported to have too much of certain supplies and not enough of others supply that could have been used to help people; this is a strange mix of Transport Waste (delivering unrequired resources) and Ill Equipped Waste (Not having right equipment). The Ill Equipped Waste inhibited EMATs from stopping Human suffering and saving lives, which is the most costly of the avoidable waste that happened during the earthquake’s aftermath.

            The disaster has taken its toll. Taiwan’s government has implemented procedures and forms of communication to help EMATs stop avoidable Human suffering during future disasters.