\"What are your assumptions (implicit as well as explicit) about the most effective way to manage people?\" So began Douglas McGregor in this 1960 management classic. It was a seemingly simple question he asked, yet it led to a fundamental revolution in management. Today, with the rise of the global economy, the information revolution, and the growth of knowledge-driven work, McGregor's simple but provocative question continues to resonate-perhaps more powerfully than ever before. Heralded as one of the most important pieces of management literature ever written, a touchstone for scholars and a handbook for practitioners, The Human Side of Enterprise continues to receive the highest accolades nearly half a century after its initial publication. Influencing such major management gurus such as Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, McGregor's revolutionary Theory Y-which contends that individuals are self-motivated and self-directed-and Theory X-in which employees must be commanded and controlled-has been widely taught in business schools, industrial relations schools, psychology departments, and professional development seminars for over four decades. In this special annotated edition of the worldwide management classic, Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Senior Research Scientist in MIT's Sloan School of Management and Engineering Systems Division, shows us how today's leaders have successfully incorporated McGregor's methods into modern management styles and practices. The added quotes and commentary bring the content right into today's debates and business models. Now more than ever, the timeless wisdom of Douglas McGregor can light the path towards a management style that nurtures leadership capability, creates effective teams, ensures internal alignment, achieves high performance, and cultivates an authentic, value-driven workplace--lessons we all need to learn as we make our way in this brave new world of the 21st century.

The Human Side of Enterprise.

Objective. To review the extant literature on the prevalence of overweight and obesity in adolescents (10–19 years old) of both sexes. Design. The search was carried out using Medline and Scopus considering articles published from the establishment of the databanks until June 7, 2012. Data on the prevalence of children being overweight and obese from the International Obesity Task Force (IOTF) website was also reviewed. Only original articles and one National Health Report were considered. Forty studies met the inclusion criteria. Results. Twenty-five of these studies were nationally representative, and ten countries were represented only by regional data. Conclusions. The prevalence of overweight and obesity among adolescents worldwide is high, and obesity is higher among boys. The IOTF criterion is the most frequently used method to classify adolescents as overweighed or obese in public health research.

https://downloads.hindawi.com/archive/2013/392747.pdf

Prevalence of Overweight and Obesity in Adolescents: A Systematic Review

In June 2010, European Union (EU) Heads of State and Government adopted a social inclusion target as part of the new ‘Europe 2020 Strategy’: to lift at least 20 million people in the EU from the risk of poverty and exclusion by 2020. One of the three indicators used to monitor progress towards this target is the EU indicator of severe material deprivation (MD). A main limitation of this indicator is the weak reliability of some of the items it is based on. For this reason, a thematic module on MD was included in the 2009 wave of the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey. This article assesses the 2009 EU-SILC MD data and proposes an analytical framework for developing robust EU MD indicators. It carries out a systematic item by item analysis at both EU and country levels to identify the MD items which satisfactorily meet suitability, validity, reliability and additivity criteria across the EU. This approach has resulted in a proposed 13-item MD indicator covering some key aspects of living conditions which are customary across the whole EU covering a broad range of basic (food, clothes, shoes, etc.) as well as social (Internet, regular leisure activities, etc.) necessities.

/pdf/improving-the-measurement-of-material-deprivation-at-the-4n0aek95wp.pdf

Improving the measurement of material deprivation at the European Union level

The objective of this review is to determine the distribution of obesity by geographical location, income, age and sex in the Mediterranean region during the last decade. A meta-analysis was conducted for 102 articles cited during the period (1997-2007) in Medline database (for 17 Mediterranean countries) searched during the summer of 2007 using the word 'obesity' and its related keywords. The study showed that adults were more obese than children in all Mediterranean continents and in different levels of income. The prevalence of obesity among European children was higher than among Asians. Also, European adults were more obese than European children. The total female adults were found to be more obese (median: 25.3%) than male adults (median: 20.0%). The regression model analysis indicated that male adults were more likely to be obese in the Euro-Med region. Taking different factors into consideration, it was noticed that Mediterranean adults, especially those in the European region, are at higher risk of obesity. Awareness programmes addressing the importance of adopting healthy dietary habits combined with physical activity should target the whole community in general and adults in particular. The findings could guide health planners for better management of obesity.

Obesity in Mediterranean region (1997–2007): a systematic review

Risk perception is an essential factor affecting how individuals evaluate risk, make decisions and behave. The impact of risk perception on customer purchase behavior has been widely studied; however, the association has been debated. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between risk perception and customer purchase behavior and to examine factors that could moderate it.,This study conducted a meta-analysis of this relationship and examined factors that could moderate it. Six databases were comprehensively searched. Two reviewers independently selected the studies for inclusion, extracted data and assessed quality. Pearson's r was used as the effect estimate. A total of 33 studies were included in the meta-analysis.,The results revealed a negative relationship between risk perception and customer purchase behavior. The geographical region, purchase channel and country development level affected the relationship. The correlation between perceived risk and purchase behavior in European consumers was the highest, followed by the correlation in American consumers; the weakest correlation was found in Asian consumers. For consumers in developed countries, perceived risk had a stronger negative influence on customer purchase behavior than that for consumers in developing countries. The perceived risk of online purchase channels had a stronger negative impact on customer purchase behavior than that of offline purchase channels.,Risk perception is a useful context in which to explain barriers to customer purchase behavior. In addition, reducing consumers’ risk perception and perfecting the market transaction process with respect to buying behavior should be further studied.,The findings of this review indicate a direct negative relationship between risk perception and customer purchase behavior. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this review is the first to meta-analytically summarize the impact of risk perception on customer purchase behavior in social sciences research, and it also illuminates new perspectives for future studies.

Impact of risk perception on customer purchase behavior: a meta-analysis

Aims – The prevalence of overweight and obesity and the role of possible related factors were analysed among Italian early adolescents. Method – The survey reported here is part of the larger “Health Behaviour in School Aged Children” (HBSC) trans-national study, which is co-ordinated by the European Office of the World Health Organization. The data were gathered through self-administered questionnaires filled out by a representative sample of 4,386 (48.4% males) Italian students (11-, 13- and 15-year old). Results – The overall prevalence is 16.7% for overweight and 2.5% for obesity. Boys are more at risk than girls for the two phenomena. Moreover, age group, mother's education, area of residence, physical activity, and sedentary behaviour show a significant association with both outcomes. Conclusion – Findings of the present study are in agreement with similar studies carried out on early adolescents population, showing that prevalence in overweight and obesity decreases during this phase and is more diffused among boys than girls. The prevalence of both diseases is higher in the South and Islands. Sedentary behaviour and physical activity are substantive factors which preventive interventions could act on.Declaration of Interest: the HBSC study is partly funded by the University of Padova through a scholarship attributed to Dr. Alessio Vieno (Year 2001 – prot. CPDR013233).

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1121189X00006308

[Epidemiology of overweight and obesity among Italian early adolescents: relation with physical activity and sedentary behaviour].

This paper proposes a multidimensional indicator of higher education effectiveness that aims at going beyond the limits of measuring university effectiveness merely through employment rates. The units of analysis are the study programmes. Eleven indicators related to external effectiveness are selected, and their reliability for and relevance to the representation of the concept of effectiveness are empirically evaluated. The data are drawn from a longitudinal survey administered to graduates of the University of Padua, Italy, from 2008 to 2011. From our analyses, effectiveness appears to be a multidimensional concept composed by professional empowerment, employability and personal fulfilment. The right time for collecting relevant data on educational outcomes varies according to the types of indicators: indicators of professional empowerment assessed 1 year after graduation are most suitable, while for personal fulfilment measurement both short- and long-term evaluation are relevant, and, for employability, data collected 3 years after graduation cannot discriminate among study programmes.

/pdf/beyond-employment-rate-a-multidimensional-indicator-of-3zzwc98r2r.pdf

Beyond Employment Rate: A Multidimensional Indicator of Higher Education Effectiveness

Nowadays, the term “student” embraces people with different needs and lifestyles (e.g., people with part-time or full-time jobs, people with some forms of disabilities, etc.) and, in the attempt to reach out to these students, many educational institutes are recording and releasing classroom lessons. In this paper, we share our experience building ONELab, a system designed to capture, record, edit and stream video lectures. ONELab was designed to provide flexibility to educational contents (i.e., no time and geographical constraints) and to improve the students’ learning process. Moreover, the system had to be scalable and cost-effective. The system has been used in the 2017-18 Academic Year to manage the 49 courses offered by the five-degree programs available at our Department. In numbers, it supported 1,251 students and produced 1,376 video lectures (for a total of 2,064 hours). The usage analysis showed that students want to adapt the learning process to their lifestyle and showed that students who used ONELab acquired more credits (+119%) and had better grades (+9.4%) than those who did not use the system.

An Online Education System to Produce and Distribute Video Lectures

Asking questions about income is often a hard task: nonresponse rates are high, and the reliability of the surveyed answers is sometimes poor. In this contribution we propose a measure of the economic status based on a set of wealth-related items. This measure is based on the Rasch model, which allows to estimate different relevance weights for each item: difficulty parameters indicate the severity of each of the situations described by the items, while ability parameters indicate poverty level of each unit. This poverty measure is computed on survey data collected on a sample of 2,465 households living in Veneto. Some analyses conducted on the estimated poverty measure indicate a good consistency with the expected relationships, and confirm the possibility to get this kind of estimates from indirect measures.

A Measure of Poverty Based on the Rasch Model

Interpersonal trust is considered a risk moderator in choice under uncertainty (Einhorn, Hogarth, 1988) so it can help people to make decisions otherwise considered too risky (Galli, Nardin, 1997). Specifically, trust has been defined as a multi-dimensional construct, with cognitive and affective dimensions playing a different role to reduce perceived risk in low or high complexity tasks. In marketing field, trust has received increasing interest and research on brand trust scale validation has restated the multi-dimensionality of the construct, with a first detection of two crucial dimensions -competence and benevolence- (Delgado, 2003, 2004). Further research has enclosed other two dimensions, honesty and empathy (Martini, Galli, Arseni, 2016), and has hypothesised an evolutionary pattern, with cognitive dimensions preceding emotional ones in brand trust strengthening. With these premises, the research is aimed to evaluate the role of brand trust as moderator of risk perception in different buying contexts, characterized by increasing perceived complexity of the task. More specifically, the hypotheses are: purchase intention decreases when perceived complexity of the task increases; decreasing purchase intention is due to increasing risk perception; brand trust, with its cognitive and affective dimensions, is able to reduce risk perception and to moderate its impact on purchase intention. To test hypotheses, 432 Italian respondents to a structured online questionnaire had to declare their intention to buy a pair of Nike shoes, facing three different buying contexts: a traditional off-line store, the official online brand store and a famous on-line retailer. The results confirm that buying online is more complex than buying offline, with a corresponding increasing of risk perception and decreasing of purchase intention. Brand trust can reduce risk perception in both off and online contexts, with cognitive dimension playing a crucial role in offline context and emotional dimension in online one.

/pdf/on-and-off-line-purchase-intention-the-role-of-brand-trust-4qqr18h0vj.pdf

Maria Cristiana Martini

Papers

[Epidemiology of overweight and obesity among Italian early adolescents: relation with physical activity and sedentary behaviour].

Beyond Employment Rate: A Multidimensional Indicator of Higher Education Effectiveness

An Online Education System to Produce and Distribute Video Lectures

A Measure of Poverty Based on the Rasch Model

On and Off-line Purchase Intention: the Role of Brand Trust as Moderator of Risk Perception