Bombarded by constant and rapid change, healthcare organizations feel a sense of urgency to meet their needs for leaders. They rely on physicians to lead at all levels in their healthcare organizations. For them to successfully navigate today's healthcare environment, they require more than a medical education. To address this need, healthcare organizations are developing in-house leadership development programs.In this paper, I conduct a case study of physicians transitioning into leadership and their self-efficacy facilitated through an in-house leadership development program. Documentation, semi-structured interviews, and observations are examined to explore how physicians think about their leadership experiences following their participation in a six-month leadership development program.The study also explores at a high-level how these experiences influenced physician's self-efficacy as a first step in developing a theory of physician leadership and self-efficacy.

Globalization in the past few decades has been marked by increased mobility of highly skilled workers from one country to another. Even though self-initiated expatriation is a widespread phenomenon, it is a relatively under-researched phenomenon in the academic literature, especially in an organizational context. Existing literature shows that not all individuals are equally suited to embark on a new life in another country, and self-initiated expatriates (SIEs) could be particularly susceptible to failure since they have no support from a home organization. This study was designed to investigate the experiences of self-initiated professional expatriates and the effect it had on their work performance. The purpose was to understand how their organizational and social experience affected their cross-cultural adjustment process and in turn affected their individual work performance. The researcher used a qualitative method using semi-structured interviews, observations, and documents with ten self-initiated expatriates. This study contributed to the expanding literature on the experiences of self-initiated expatriates, specifically how different support systems affected cross-cultural adjustment and individual work performance.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether there are significant relationships between the general satisfaction of students and learner-content interaction, learner-instructor interaction, learner-learner interaction, and learner-technology interaction in 100% online courses. There were 310 responses from the students. This study did not use data from duplicate students and instructors. Excel was used to find duplicate students and instructors; therefore, 128 responses were deleted. After examination of box plots, an additional four cases were removed because they were outliers on seven or more variables. Nineteen responses were deleted because they did not answer all questions of interest, resulting in a total sample of 159 students. Multiple regression analysis was used to examine the relationship between the four independent variables and the dependent variable. In addition to tests for statistical significance, practical significance was evaluated with the multiple R2 , which reported the common variance between independent variables and dependent variable. The two variables of learner-content and learner-instructor interaction play a significant role in predicting online satisfaction. Minimally, the variable learner-technology can predict online satisfaction and is an important construct that must be considered when offering online courses. Results of this study provide help in establishing a valid and reliable …

Self-concept, discussed as a scholarly topic since the time of Socrates and Plato, is an important theoretical construct in education because self-concept is considered to be a desirable trait and a facilitator of positive future behavior. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the characteristics of students enrolled in career and technical education (CTE) programs and students' self-concept scores as measured by specific subscales from the Self-Description Questionnaire (SDQ). A total of 196 male and 89 female secondary students (Grades 9-12) enrolled in arts, audio/video technology and communications cluster courses in North Central Texas school districts participated in the study. Student characteristic variables of interest were age, gender, CTE program enrollment, and participation in CTE. The self-concept subscales analyzed were General, Academic, Verbal, Math, and Problem Solving. A canonical correlation analysis was conducted using the four student characteristic variables as predictors of the five self-concept variables to evaluate the multivariate shared relationship between the two variable sets. The full model across all functions explained about 23% of the variance between the variable sets. Function 1 explained 15% of the shared variance and Function 2 explained 7% of the variance that remained. This study detected a relationship …

With the increasing use of social media by students, researchers, administrative staff, and faculty in post-secondary education (PSE), a number of institutions have developed guideline and policy documents to set standards for social media use. Social media platforms and applications have the potential to increase communication channels, support learning, enhance research, and encourage community engagement at PSE institutions. As social media implementation and administration has developed in PSE, there has been minimal assessment of the substance of social media guideline and policy documents. The first objective of this research study was to examine an accessible, online database (corpus) comprised of 24, 243 atomic social media guideline and policy text documents from 250 PSE institutions representing 10 countries to identify central attributes. To determine text meaning from topic extraction, a rotated latent semantic analysis (rLSA) method was applied. The second objective of this investigation was to determine if the distribution of topics analyze in the corpus differ by PSE institution geographic location. To analyze the diverging topics, the researcher utilized an iterative consensus-building algorithm.Through the maximum term frequencies, LSA determined a rotated 36-factor solution that identified common attributes and topics shared among the 24,243 social media guideline and policy atomic documents. …

Diversity impacts organizations, both internally and externally. Responses to changes in demographics come from legal and moral imperatives. As a reflection of the changes in the population demographics in the United States, universities have seen and sought increased diversity in their student enrollment. Many institutions have purposeful plans to increase representation of under-represented groups as well as those students from low-income families. Some schools also recognize the importance of having diversity represented within their staff and faculty positions as a way of creating a supportive environment that also promotes diversity of thought. As schools increase the diversity of their student population, at what level are they increasing diversity among their tenured and tenure-track faculty? The purpose of this study is to examine the impact on full-time tenured/tenure-track faculty diversity compared to enrolled student diversity at institutions that promote, require, or provide access to training for faculty search committees, including diversity/cultural awareness, legal compliance, and process training, and those institutions that do not appear to have any training requirement as documented on their websites. Only tenured/tenure-track faculty were considered as they are the permanent teaching/research positions and generally represent the core faculty of every department at a university.

The purpose of this study was to examine a select set of organizational variables and determine their relationship to nursing assistants' intentions to quit in state-owned veterans' long-term care facilities located across the United States. America's long-term care industry (e.g., nursing homes, assisted living facilities) is a multibillion dollar industry. Because the U.S. government is projecting a 250% increase in the elderly population, staffing these nursing homes and related facilities is a critical concern. A vitally important but often overlooked factor of the long-term care industry is employee turnover. Of the staff in long-term care facilities, the nursing assistant (NA) position is particularly susceptible to turnover. Approximately 80% of NAs who enter the workforce leave within the 1st year and many leave within the first 3 months of employment. Some facilities report that they are unable to accept new residents because of a lack of qualified NAs. While many studies have researched this issue, staff turnover in long-term care facilities remains a serious and widespread problem. This study provides a foundation for future research related to the perceptions of intentions to quit of nursing assistants (NAs) working in state-owned veterans long-term care facilities by providing primary data regarding NAs intentions …

The purpose of this study was to examine a school-to-career program created and operated by a non-profit organization called Jobs for America's Graduates, Inc. (JAG). During the school year 2003-2004, they provided this service to 12,205 students in 426 schools and 21 states. Data was collected to measure the following: (a) were they successful in helping students graduate from high school, find a career, enter postsecondary education or the military; (b) how many of the youth were still employed 12 months after graduation; and (c) did school demographic and socioeconomic factors affect JAG's performance. JAG is a 25 year old organization that works with at-risk youth to help them graduate from high school and move into gainful employment, further education or the military. They provide students with nine months of in school instruction, mentoring, career connections and 12 months of follow-up service. Data was collected by job specialists through job placement reports and 12 month follow-up reports. School demographic and socioeconomic information was collected via the Internet. This study discovered that JAG students are graduating from high school at levels well above the national rates, attaining 90% graduation rather than the average of 68% (Swanson, 2004a). A year after graduation …

The primary purpose of this study was to test the theory of experiential learning by measuring to what extent work experience predicts the work ethic characteristics of students in baccalaureate nursing programs at three regional universities in Texas, including Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Tarleton State University in Stephenville, and West Texas A&M University in Canyon. Work experience is the amount full-time or part-time on-the-job experience. Work ethic attributes are referred to as considerate, ambitious, dependable, and cooperative. Results generated in this study failed to reject the null hypotheses, which means that work experience, does not provide evidence of the ability to predict the development of work ethic characteristics in baccalaureate nursing students who participated in this research study. Knowledge generated in this study provided alternative directions for future research with respect to the relationship between work experiences and work ethic characteristics in nursing students. Such research may be useful to nursing educators and trainers in the design and delivery phases of the educational process for nurses.

This report analyses the NHES: 2005 data to present the state of American education in reference to “adult” participation in education. Psychosocial interaction theory is applied to the social event of attaining adulthood to analyze and report the propensity of American adults to participate in non-compulsory adult education. The review of the literature of perceptual demographic variables of adult attainment: age, prior education, subordinate responsibility, child-age dependent care, marital status, job stability, and home ownership. The analysis compares the data of participants and non-participants of non-compulsory adult education using binomial logistic regression analysis with tests, for a 95% confidence level and .05 significance. Included is a discussion of how appropriately aligned development opportunities and experiences may further increase education effectiveness and performance outcomes.

Undergraduate enrollment in colleges and universities has grown and changed drastically over the past 2 decades, with a significant portion of this growth coming from the increased number of nontraditional students who have made the decision to make their way onto college and university campuses to pursue a college degree. Due to these changes, many institutions of higher education have had to rethink the way they have historically operated. In an attempt to better meet the needs and demands of adult nontraditional students, colleges and universities have reviewed their existing programs and instituted programs that allow for the awarding of academic credit for prior learning. For those institutions of higher education involved in the prior learning assessment (PLA) process and interested in providing a quality program, an increased emphasis and focus should be on the importance of determining what a learning activity is, and more importantly, what constitutes college-level learning. This study focused on the identification and profiling of prior learning assessment (PLA) processes in Texas public universities offering nontraditional baccalaureate degree programs, the identification of commonalties among such programs, and the determination of program quality based on established standards. The instrument utilized in this study was designed on Urban …

This work focuses on how to improve medical services for veterans in a manner that will result in high levels of satisfaction and attainment of needed services. This research assess how veterans access healthcare and receive service. The problem to be addressed relates to reports by veteran healthcare organizations regarding the presence of gaps in coverage and customer service disparities in healthcare. Common concerns involve the gaps between veterans’ expectations for services and the provided services. This study created a survey instrument that contextualized components of established scales along with demographics and constructs specific to the current study. This study assessed the relationships among a variety of constructs and dimensions with healthcare expectations and service quality using a series of simple regressions. The results showed a statistically significant relationship between quality and the use or intention to use technology. The study supports the contention that respondents are willing to use self-service technologies. Technology that incorporates digital devices into healthcare services offers an opportunity to bridge service gaps and holds a promise for giving veterans faster access to service and care in a beneficial manner.

This study examined training evaluation practices in U.S. nonprofit sector organizations. It offered a framework for evaluating employee training in the nonprofit sector and suggested solutions to overcome the barriers to evaluation. A mail survey was sent to 879 individuals who were members of, or had expressed an interest in, the American Society for Training and Development. The membership list consisted of individuals who indicated association/nonprofit or interfaith as an area of interest. Data from the survey show that training in the nonprofit sector is evaluated primarily at Level 1 (reaction) and Level 2 (learning). It also shows decreasing use from Level 3 (application) through Level 5 (ROI). Reaction questionnaires are the primary method for collecting Level 1 data. Facilitator assessment and self-assessment were listed as the primary method for evaluating Level 2. A significant mean rank difference was found between Level 2 (learning) and the existence of an evaluation policy. Spearman rho correlation revealed a statistically significant relationship between Level 4 (results) and the reasons training programs are offered. The Kruskal-Wallis H test revealed a statistically significant mean rank difference between "academic preparation" of managers with Level 3 evaluation. The Mann-Whitney U test was used post hoc and revealed …

The purpose of this study is to identify and analyze the relationships that exist between mathematics anxiety and nurse self-efficacy for mathematics, and the medication calculation performance of acute care nurses. This research used a quantitative correlational research design and involved a sample of 84 acute care nurses, LVNs and RNs, from a suburban private hospital. the participants filled out a Mathematics Anxiety Scale, a Nurse Self-Efficacy for Mathematics Scale and also completed a 20-item medication calculation test. Significant practical and statistical relationships were discovered between the variables utilizing multiple linear regression statistics and commonality analysis. As the Nurse’s Mathematics anxiety score increased the scores on the medication test decreased and the scores on nurse self-efficacy for mathematics scale also decreased. the demographic item of “Hours a nurse worked in one week” had the greatest significance. the more hours a nurse worked the lower their score was on the medication calculation test. This study agrees with others that nurses are not good at mathematics. This study also correlated that as the number of hours worked increased so did the medication calculations errors. and many nurses have a measurable level of anxiety about mathematics and dosage calculations and this may influence …

To impact student learning, educators’ implementation, or transfer, of new knowledge, skills, dispositions, and practices to daily work is the primary purpose of professional learning. The purpose of this study was to assess the multivariate relationship between individual and work environment characteristics as measured by the Collective Efficacy Scale and Dimensions of Learning Organization Questionnaire, respectively, and learning transfer factors as measured by the Learning Transfer System Inventory. The sample consisted of 249 PK-12 grade school- based instructional staff members of an education association. Canonical correlation and commonality analyses required using the two individual and work environment characteristics of learning culture and collective efficacy as predictor variables of the five learning transfer factors of performance self-efficacy, transfer-effort performance expectations, performance outcome expectations, performance coaching, and resistance to change to evaluate the multivariate between the two variable sets. Learning culture and collective efficacy demonstrated a relationship to resistance to change and performance outcome expectations. Learning culture and collective efficacy were insufficient to transfer-effort performance expectations, attend to performance self-efficacy beliefs, and increase support for transfer (i.e., performance coaching) factors. These findings might guide the decisions and practice of individuals with responsibility to plan, implement, and evaluate professional learning, and provide the …

The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationships between job satisfaction, work engagement, and turnover intention of health science teachers in the state of Texas. The healthcare profession is one of the largest growing occupations in the U.S. nationwide. The job growth outlook for healthcare professionals is projected to be on average 34% between 2014 and 2024. Despite the growing healthcare job categories, there is a shortage of healthcare professionals in the U.S. This study addressed the shortage of health science teachers in secondary education. Considering the importance of healthcare, especially with an aging U.S. population, it is critical to study the impact of work engagement and job satisfaction on teacher intent to leave the health science teaching profession. Through a correlational survey research design it was found that job satisfaction and work engagement are negatively related to turnover intention. Hierarchical regression analysis indicated that job satisfaction accounted for 39.6% of the variation in turnover intention. Findings also showed that work engagement did not moderate the relationship between job satisfaction and turnover intention. Implications for research and practice are discussed and conclusions are provided.

The study's purpose was to identify demographics, educational background, finances, formal and informal education and experiences, reading habits, external environmental factors, psychological factors, and computer efficacy factors that predict a student's ability to successful complete an online (Web-based) distance learning community college course. Major student retention theories and student attrition and persistence research guided the study. Distance learners (N = 926) completed four surveys, which collected data for 26 predictor variables that included age, gender, marital status, ethnicity, support others, course load, first-time student, last semester attended, student type and location, financial stability, tuition payment, prior learning experiences, reading habits, family support, enrollment encouragement, study encouragement, time management, study environment, employment, extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, locus of control, self-efficacy, computer confidence and skills, and number of prior online courses. Successful or unsuccessful course completion was the dependent variable. Statistical analyses included Cronbach's alpha, Pearson chi-square, two-sample t test, Pearson correlation, phi coefficient, and binary logistic regression. Variables in each factor were entered sequentially in a block using separate binary logistic regression models. Statistically significant variables were course load, financial stability, prior learning experiences, time management and study environment, extrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, and computer skills. Selected predictor variables (N = 20) …