Search results

This study aims to research the usage of virtual reality as a tool to train employees in a changeover process in a company, and if it guarantees the same level of quality. Moreover, another goal is to understand how it can influence the machines’ availability, reducing the number of hours a machine is stopped to perform training sessions.

To achieve the goals proposed, the action research strategy was used. After defining the context and purpose, two full cycles were applied, composed by five activities: diagnosis, action planning, action taking, action evaluation and specify the learning.

The results are extremely satisfactory. On the one hand, it can be concluded that virtual reality is a reliable training tool, guaranteeing proper training to the employees. On the other hand, based on the previous point, the researchers were able to conclude that it is possible to increase machines’ availability, reducing by 50% the time needed to have the machines stopped to run a changeover training.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to use the action research strategy to develop a virtual reality simulation as a training tool for machines’ changeover in the automotive industry.

The purpose of this paper is to present an attempt to develop an instrument containing operational measures of lean combined with safety and ergonomic conditions in a workstation or production line. This operational tool aims to help researchers and practitioners to prioritize and evaluate the lean implementations, as well as the ergonomic and safety conditions, in an integrated way.

Lean manufacturing methods and principles, as well as safety and ergonomics aspects, were exhaustively researched with the ultimate goal of finding a way to improve the workplace by taking into account the efficiency and well-being of workers. The instrument was validated in an interactive process between theory and practical insights. At the end, it was tested in several workstations/production areas.

The study reveals that high scores are derived from a good interaction between lean, ergonomics and safety.

It would be important to validate it in different companies and different types of industries because each one has its own characteristics.

This tool helps practitioners (technicians and ergonomic practitioners from manufacturing companies) assess the implementation of lean principles and the safety issues in their processes. It also allows managers to evaluate their business and identify the priority areas to improve according to the previously defined company’s aims.

As Peter Drucker said: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” For a successful implementation, managers should start the lean journey with a lean assessment and make it in a regular basis. To the authors’ knowledge, there are various lean assessment tools, but this work is innovative because it provides an assessment instrument to evaluate organizations’ workstations/production areas simultaneously in three dimensions: lean, safety and ergonomic aspects.

This study aims to determine the physicochemical and fatty acids composition of Serra da Estrela cheese (SEC), as well as health-related lipid indices, like the atherogenic and thrombogenic indices, and to evaluate the influence of producer, geographical origin and production date.

All 24 SEC produced between November 2017 and March 2018 were collected at selected certified producers and analyzed by NIR spectrophotometer and by GC. Data were statistically evaluated by chemometric tools.

In all evaluated SEC, 23 fatty acids were quantified. Cheese origin influenced nutritional and health-related lipid indices). The cheeses were characterized by a relative high abundance of saturated fatty acids (67-76%), followed by a medium content of monounsaturated fatty acids (17-25%) and by low level of polyunsaturated fatty acids (5-7%). A putative positive association between cheese consumption and healthy lipid indices could be reached.

The contents of some medium and long chain fatty acids as well as of nutritional and health indices were influenced by cheese producer, geographical origin and production date pointing out the need for standardizing production procedures.

The SEC plays a key role in the local economy, being an endogenous product with unique sensory characteristics and nutritional potential, for which the knowledge of the lipids profile and health indices is of utmost relevance.

SEC is an iconic Portuguese cheese with Protected Designation of Origin. Based on the results, like health-related lipid indices, evaluated for the first time, a positive association between cheese consumption and healthy lipid indices could be envisaged.

This article aims to present the differences in implementation between individual mentoring programs (IMPs) and group mentoring programs (GMPs).

This exploratory study used semi-structured interviews with 16 experts: mentoring program (MP) coordinators, consultants and mentors. During the interviews, the steps in implementing a mentoring program were reviewed and discussed by practitioners.

Based on the interviews and contrasting with the proposed implementation model, the authors compared IMPs and GMPs. The results highlight the role of the GMP coordinators, especially in the selection of mentors, mentees and generating resources that favor the beneficial effects of group dynamics on mentoring processes.

This model for implementing MPs and the differences identified between IMPs and GMPs provide practical help to program coordinators (PCs) and mentors to deploy MPs by highlighting the relevant aspects.

Mentoring is a Human Resource Development (HRD) technique whose implementation at the program level needs further deepening for practitioners. This is the first work that emphasizes the differences to be considered in the design and implementation of MPs by taking the individual or group dimension of mentoring.

The purpose of this study is to present a conceptual model that comprises the four phases of an inter-organizational mentoring (IOM) process.

This study used a focus group of 19 expert coordinators on IOM programs who met once at the Basque College of Economists. The session was recorded and notes were taken and distributed to all participants.

Based on the focus group, the authors developed a four-phase model of IOM. The phases this conceptual model proposes for IOM are awakening, transcendence, organizational bond and maturity.

These four phases should help mentors to guide mentees in the completion of an effective IOM process. This model is a re-conceptualization from the traditional mentoring phases, as the nature of the mentoring process is different. However, getting to understand the phases of IOM will enlighten the understanding of this phenomenon that is a growing option for managers in their career development as IOM helps managers to acquire skills and competencies.

This work contributes to the comprehension of this new form of alternative mentoring, clarifying for mentees and mentors, what process they are going to follow. Additionally, it provides clear criteria for inter-organizational program coordinators on how to organize these kinds of programs. In the opinion of the authors, this paper is original because it provides an in-depth understanding of IOM, which is an HRD technique that has barely been studied to date.

The purpose of this paper is to compare face‐to‐face versus online course delivery systems in the area of food consumption and to analyse the students' expectations and experiences. It aims to analyse the following dimensions: general expectations, learning organization and interactions in students' discourses. Design/methodology/approach – The methodology adopted is of interpretative nature using semi‐structured qualitative interviews. An interview guide was designed taking into account the learning modalities (styles and strategies), materials and learning tools, teacher‐student interaction and peer interaction dimensions. The students of both courses were interviewed in the second semester of the curricular year of the respective MSc degrees. Findings – This study has shown that face‐to‐face and online students are equally satisfied with their courses revealing the same confirmed general expectations. Comments for both course delivery systems are the need for more laboratory and practical classes. Results from this study also indicated that face‐to‐face and online educations are effective training food consumer sciences students suggesting, however, that both systems should evolve to blended‐learning. Practical implications – Both course delivery systems (face‐to‐face and online) contributed to the competencies acquisition in Food Consumer Sciences. B‐learning appears as the natural convergence of students needs. Originality/value – The online course results of the discourse analysis suggest the success developing a learning community pointing out the role of the online instructor and the course coordinator. The paper provided useful data and knowledge on which further research can be carried out.

The purpose of this paper is to gain a broader knowledge of the concept of cognitive age and its use as a variable when segmenting the market of people aged over 55.

A proposal for measuring this variable was developed, the dimensions used being: actions, interests, feelings, health, thinking and expectations. A personal survey of 400 individuals aged over 55 who had been involved in some tourist travel in the last year was undertaken.

A principal component analysis resulted in the extraction of a single factor labeled “cognitive age”. The outcome of the cluster analysis undertaken was the establishment of two segments, i.e. active livers and stable passives. The technique of multiple correspondence analysis reflected differences both in motivations for tourism and in the behavior as tourists of the two segments.

It should be pointed out that there were insufficient repetitions of the methodology to indicate reliably whether it is consistent and that difficulties were encountered in gathering information from the group investigated.

The results obtained permit it to be stated that cognitive age enriches knowledge about senior tourists; hence, it seems to be of interest to take it into consideration when establishing marketing strategies directed towards this group.

After its overview of the various methodologies relating to cognitive age, this investigation is one of the few applications of this criterion to segmentation of senior citizen tourists undertaking journeys of longer duration. Furthermore, it is the sole piece of research so far undertaken to investigate its usefulness in an individualized manner.

Whereas most societal commentators continue to review the historical patterns of men’s leadership in search of models for 21st-century success, few have begun to recognize, let alone appreciate, the equivalent patterns of women’s leadership and the future contributions that women could potentially make as leaders. What could and are women bringing to society as global leaders? Why at this moment in history is there such a marked increase in the number of women leaders? Are we entering an era in which both male and female leaders will shape history, both symbolically and in reality? And if so, will we discover that women, on average, lead in different ways than men, or will we learn that role (global leader) explains more than gender? This chapter reveals the accelerating trends of women joining men in senior leadership positions, establishes the relationship of women leaders to our overall understanding of global leadership, and sets forth an agenda to accomplish much needed research and understanding.

This article presents two Brazilian Portuguese corpora collected from different media concerning public security issues in a specific location. The primary motivation is supporting analyses, so security authorities can make appropriate decisions about their actions.

The corpora were obtained through web scraping from a newspaper's website and tweets from a Brazilian metropolitan region. Natural language processing was applied considering: text cleaning, lemmatization, summarization, part-of-speech and dependencies parsing, named entities recognition, and topic modeling.

Several results were obtained based on the methodology used, highlighting some: an example of a summarization using an automated process; dependency parsing; the most common topics in each corpus; the forty named entities and the most common slogans were extracted, highlighting those linked to public security.

Some critical tasks were identified for the research perspective, related to the applied methodology: the treatment of noise from obtaining news on their source websites, passing through textual elements quite present in social network posts such as abbreviations, emojis/emoticons, and even writing errors; the treatment of subjectivity, to eliminate noise from irony and sarcasm; the search for authentic news of issues within the target domain. All these tasks aim to improve the process to enable interested authorities to perform accurate analyses.

The corpora dedicated to the public security domain enable several analyses, such as mining public opinion on security actions in a given location; understanding criminals' behaviors reported in the news or even on social networks and drawing their attitudes timeline; detecting movements that may cause damage to public property and people welfare through texts from social networks; extracting the history and repercussions of police actions, crossing news with records on social networks; among many other possibilities.

The work on behalf of the corpora reported in this text represents one of the first initiatives to create textual bases in Portuguese, dedicated to Brazil's specific public security domain.

This paper aims to identify, assess and classify the most significant mentee outcomes of formal mentoring processes aimed at managerial development.

After conducting an extensive literature review to identify the most significant mentee outcomes in the management field, a survey was conducted with a sample of 80 experienced mentees. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) has been performed to simplify and contribute to operationalizing these results. Finally, focus group and nominal group techniques were conducted with practitioners to better understand the findings.

A total of 27 mentee outcomes have been identified in the literature. EFA analysis has allowed us to downsize the 27 outcomes into four factors encompassing the most relevant mentee outcomes. The authors then provide an interpretation and discussion of the results.

This work compiles, reviews and systematizes existing studies on mentee outcomes in the field of management, classifying the results in a novel manner.