High Performance Organization (HPO) characteristics indicate why an organization is able to achieve significantly better results than other organizations and these characteristics can facilitate associations to optimize employees’ work outcomes. The independent professional (IP) is an increasingly occurring phenomenon in the labor market that fulfils an organizations’ need for flexibility in knowledge productivity. This study focuses on the contribution of HPO characteristics to the knowledge productivity of IP's. It was conducted among managers and HRM professionals in various Dutch knowledge-intensive organizations that frequently enlist the services of IPs. This study found a number of HPO attributes that appeared to contribute to the IPs' knowledge productivity, namely the quality of management, an open and actionfocused organizational culture, and continual improvement and innovation. We will use these results to look ahead and consider the future consequences for professional practice. Managers and HRM professionals should strive to contribute to the incorporation of these characteristics within the organization in order to safeguard and enhance knowledge productivity of independent professionals.
"The booklet presents curated real-world good practice examples that help translate our strategy into concrete actions, and in turn, into the design of education and training programmes that will contribute to skill, upskill, or reskill individuals into high demand professional software roles."
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Background: In face-to-face therapy for eating disorders, therapeutic alliance (TA) is an important predictor of symptomreduction and treatment completion. To date, however, little is known about TA during web-based cognitive behavioral therapy(web-CBT) and its association with symptom reduction, treatment completion, and the perspectives of patients versus therapists.Objective: This study aimed to investigate TA ratings measured at interim and after treatment, separately for patients andtherapists; the degree of agreement between therapists and patients (treatment completers and noncompleters) for TA ratings;and associations between patient and therapist TA ratings and both eating disorder pathology and treatment completion.Methods: A secondary analysis was performed on randomized controlled trial data of a web-CBT intervention for eatingdisorders. Participants were 170 females with bulimia nervosa (n=33), binge eating disorder (n=68), or eating disorder nototherwise specified (n=69); the mean age was 39.6 (SD 11.5) years. TA was operationalized using the Helping AllianceQuestionnaire (HAQ). Paired t tests were conducted to assess the change in TA from interim to after treatment. Intraclasscorrelations were calculated to determine cross-informant agreement with regard to HAQ scores between patients and therapists.A total of 2 stepwise regressive procedures (at interim and after treatment) were used to examine which HAQ scores predictedeating disorder pathology and therapy completion.Results: For treatment completers (128/170, 75.3%), the HAQ-total scores and HAQ-Helpfulness scores for both patients andtherapists improved significantly from interim to post treatment. For noncompleters (42/170, 24.7%), all HAQ scores decreasedsignificantly. For all HAQ scales, the agreement between patients and therapists was poor. However, the agreement was slightlybetter after treatment than at interim. Higher patient scores on the helpfulness subscale of the HAQ at interim and after treatmentwere associated with less eating disorder psychopathology. A positive association was found between the HAQ-total patientscores at interim and treatment completion. Finally, posttreatment HAQ-total patient scores and posttreatment HAQ-Helpfulnessscores of therapists were positively associated with treatment completion.Conclusions: Our study showed that TA in web-CBT is predictive of eating disorder pathology and treatment completion. Ofparticular importance is patients’ confidence in their abilities as measured with the HAQ-Helpfulness subscale when predictingposttreatment eating disorder pathology and treatment completion.
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Denim Democracy from the Alliance for Responsible Denim (ARD) is an interactive exhibition that celebrates the journey and learning of ARD members, educates visitors about sustainable denim and highlights how companies collaborate together to achieve results. Through sight, sound and tactile sensations, the visitor experiences and fully engages sustainable denim production. The exhibition launches in October 2018 in Amsterdam and travels to key venues and locations in the Netherlands until April 2019. As consumers, we love denim but the denim industry, like other sub-sectors in the textile, apparel and footwear industries, faces many complex sustainability challenges and has been criticized for its polluting and hazardous production practices. The Alliance for Responsible Denim project brought leading denim brands, suppliers and stakeholders together to collectively address these issues and take initial steps towards improving the ecological sustainability impact of denim production. Sustainability challenges are considered very complex and economically undesirable for individual companies to address alone. In denim, small and medium sized denim firms face specific challenges, such as lower economies of scale and lower buying power to affect change in practices. There is great benefit in combining denim companies' resources and knowledge so that collective experimentation and learning can lift the sustainability standards of the industry and lead to the development of common standards and benchmarks on a scale that matters. If meaningful, transformative industrial change is to be made, then it calls for collaboration between denim industry stakeholders that goes beyond supplier-buyer relations and includes horizontal value chain collaboration of competing large and small denim brands. However collaboration between organizations, and especially between competitors, is highly complex and prone to failure. The research behind the Alliance for Responsible Denim project asked a central research question: how do competitors effectively collaborate together to create common, industry standards on resource use and benchmarks for improved ecological sustainability? To answer this question, we used a mixed-method, action research approach. The Alliance for Responsible Denim project mobilized and facilitated denim brands to collectively identify ways to reduce the use of water and chemicals in denim production and then aided them to implement these practices individually in their respective firms.
The denim industry faces many complex sustainability challenges and has been especially criticized for its polluting and hazardous production practices. Reducing resource use of water, chemicals and energy and changing denim production practices calls for collaboration between various stakeholders, including competing denim brands. There is great benefit in combining denim brands’ resources and knowledge so that commonly defined standards and benchmarks are developed and realized on a scale that matters. Collaboration however, and especially between competitors, is highly complex and prone to fail. This project brings leading denim brands together to collectively take initial steps towards improving the ecological sustainability impact of denim production, particularly by establishing measurements, benchmarks and standards for resource use (e.g. chemicals, water, energy) and creating best practices for effective collaboration. The central research question of our project is: How do denim brands effectively collaborate together to create common, industry standards on resource use and benchmarks for improved ecological sustainability in denim production? To answer this question, we will use a mixed-method, action research approach. The project’s research setting is the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area (MRA), which has a strong denim cluster and is home to many international denim brands and start-ups.
