Cristina S. Rodrigues

Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management—Insights from Industrial Managers

There is an increasing recognition that the competitive advantage of firms depends on their ability to create, transfer, utilize, develop and protect the Organizational knowledge assets. Therefore, the projects context should be wisely used for properly foster the learning collection through the lessons learned gathered during project life cycle. However, organizations do not seem to learn from their mistakes, rarely exploring the reasons for their projects’ success or failure, and very rarely applying those lessons learned to the business management. In fact, there is little or no point in learning unless management adapts its behavior accordingly. Usually top management does not give sufficient resources for activities such as reflecting and learning. This research is focused on assessing the organizational environment in order to properly explore the factors and dependencies amongst the social demographic variables. The questions addressed intent to highlight the key determinants that might foresee a proper learning and knowledge management environment.

Self-efficacy, mathematics’ anxiety and perceived importance: an empirical study with Portuguese engineering students

The accomplishment in mathematics has gained attention from educators and arises as an emerging field of study, including in engineering education. However, in Portugal, there is still incipient research in the area; so it is high time to explore factors that might enlighten the gap in the study of the relationship between Portuguese engineering students and the learning of mathematics. The main purpose of this study is to explore three factors identified in the literature as influencing the learning of mathematical concepts – self-efficacy, anxiety towards mathematics and perceived importance of mathematics – and search for differences by gender and by type of engineering course, a dimension not much reported in the literature but which was revealed as important in the teams previous research. Based on a sample of 140 undergraduate students of different engineering courses from University of Minho, results only identify differences in the type of course and not in gender. These results constitute a contribution and open new paths for future research in the engineering education.

On the estimation of hospital beds occupancy after hip surgery

For hospitals, the variability on demand (number of daily urgent admissions) and the variability in the Length of Stay (LoS) (bed occupancy) may affect the quality of service provided to patients and the effectiveness of the overall service. This paper studies the LoS of 238 patients who performed hip surgery in the orthopedic service of a Portuguese hospital in 2014. It uses variables available in electronic databases, such as Age, Gender, ASA classification; Surgical Apgar Score, Type of hip surgery; Weekday of the surgery; Starting hour of the surgery and Duration of surgery to predict LoS and provides a model that correctly indicate if a patient stays more than 7 days in 72.1% of the cases.