Woo-Cheol Kim

Leadership and Employee Engagement Proposing Research Agendas Through a Review of Literature

Leadership is one of the most studied topics in the organization sciences, and employee engagement one of the more recent. However, the relationship between leadership and employee engagement has not been widely investigated. As many organizations invest significant resources in retaining, developing, and engaging employees, human resource development (HRD) professionals are tasked to develop and partner with leaders to deliver those strategies effectively. Thus, a comprehensive understanding on the relationship and mechanism between leadership and engagement is essential to HRD professionals informing leaders on how best to cultivate positive results in followers. In this vein, this research conducted an extensive review of empirical and conceptual studies that examined the relationship between leadership and employee engagement, analyzed/synthesized the studies into integrated frameworks for the leadership–engagement relationship, and proposed future research agendas.

The Relationship Between Work Engagement and Performance A Review of Empirical Literature and a Proposed Research Agenda

Engagement has been defined in a variety of ways. Engagement in the workplace generally is viewed as a positive, fulfilling, affective-motivational state of work-related well-being. Due to its structural relationship between antecedents (e.g., job resources and personal resources) and consequences (e.g., performance and turnover intention), work engagement has been receiving considerable attention from both scholars and practitioners in the fields of human resource development (HRD), organization development (OD), psychology, and business. In spite of this popularity, there is a scarcity of empirical research on work engagement in the academic literature. The relationship between work engagement and performance, in particular, is deserving of attention given our field’s focus on performance improvement. In this article, we review and analyze relevant research and then propose a research agenda to guide future research on this topic. Conclusions and implications for HRD and OD are discussed.

The effect of a 1550 nm fractional erbium-glass laser in female pattern hair loss.

Background  Female pattern hair loss (FPHL) is the most common cause of hair loss in women, and its prevalence increases with advancing age. Affected women may experience psychological distress and social withdrawal. A variety of laser and light sources have been tried for treatment of hair loss, and some success has been reported.

Image retrieval model based on weighted visual features determined by relevance feedback

An accurate and rapid method is required to retrieve the overwhelming majority of digital images. To date, image retrieval methods include content-based retrieval and keyword-based retrieval, the former utilizing visual features such as color and brightness, and the latter utilizing keywords that describe the image. However, the effectiveness of these methods in providing the exact images the user wants has been under scrutiny. Hence, many researchers have been working on relevance feedback, a process in which responses from the user are given as feedback during the retrieval session in order to define a users need and provide an improved result. Methods that employ relevance feedback, however, do have drawbacks because several pieces of feedback are necessary to produce an appropriate result, and the feedback information cannot be reused. In this paper, a novel retrieval model is proposed, which annotates an image with keywords and modifies the confidence level of the keywords in response to the users feedback. In the proposed model, not only the images that have been given feedback, but also other images with visual features similar to the features used to distinguish the positive images are subjected to confidence modification. This allows for modification of a large number of images with relatively little feedback, ultimately leading to faster and more accurate retrieval results. An experiment was performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model, and the result demonstrated a rapid increase in recall and precision using the same amount of feedback.

An Analysis and Synthesis of DLOQ-Based Learning Organization Research

The problem The development of the Dimensions of the Learning Organization Questionnaire (DLOQ) has been contributing to the research on the learning organization both academically and practically. However, scholarly use of the DLOQ has been greater in the human resource development (HRD)-related disciplines. To encourage wider use, HRD researchers should acknowledge and reflect on the limitations of the extant literature and put an effort into providing theoretical foundations for how the DLOQ could be extensively used in several related disciplines. The Solution This study reviews comprehensive studies on the DLOQ and provides an underlying theoretical rationale for utilizing the DLOQ in multiple disciplines. In addition, future research recommendations are provided for enriching the learning organization studies using the DLOQ in HRD discipline. The Stakeholders Stakeholders for this article include HRD scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners interested in the DLOQ-based theory, research, and practice.

A B-Tree index extension to enhance response time and the life cycle of flash memory

Flash memory has critical drawbacks such as long latency of its write operation and a short life cycle. In order to overcome these limitations, the number of write operations to flash memory devices needs to be minimized. The B-Tree index structure, which is a popular hard disk based index structure, requires an excessive number of write operations when updating it to flash memory. To address this, it was proposed that another layer that emulates a B-Tree be placed between the flash memory and B-Tree indexes. This approach succeeded in reducing the write operation count, but it greatly increased search time and main memory usage. This paper proposes a B-Tree index extension that reduces both the write count and search time with limited main memory usage. First, we designed a buffer that accumulates update requests per leaf node and then simultaneously processes the update requests of the leaf node carrying the largest number of requests. Second, a type of header information was written on each leaf node. Finally, we made the index automatically control each leaf node size. Through experiments, the proposed index structure resulted in a significantly lower write count and a greatly decreased search time with less main memory usage, than placing a layer that emulates a B-Tree.

Team performance in learning organizations: mediating effect of employee engagement

Purpose – This aim of the current research is to provide empirical evidence for the relationships among several organizational factors affecting team performance improvement, including the learning organization and employee engagement. In addition, the mediating effect of employee engagement was assessed to explain team performance improvement within the supportive learning organization. The target sample consisted of major Korean for-profit firms, and a total of 309 cases were used for data analyses. Structural equation modeling was used along with basic descriptive and multivariate research assumption tests. Results support that cultural aspects of the learning organization in Korean for-profit firms positively and directly affect the employee engagement, whereas cultural aspects of the learning organization positively affect team performance positively and indirectly only through employee engagement, and employee engagement plays a full mediating role in explaining the relationship between the learning...

An efficient location encoding method for moving objects using hierarchical administrative district and road network

Due to the rapid development in mobile communication technologies, the usage of mobile devices such as cell phone or PDA has increased significantly. As different devices require different applications, various new services are being developed to satisfy the needs. One of the popular services under heavy demand is the location-based service (LBS) that exploits the spatial information of moving objects per temporal changes. In order to support LBS well, in this paper, we investigate how spatio-temporal information of moving objects can be efficiently stored and indexed. In particular, we propose a novel location encoding method based on hierarchical administrative district information. Our proposal is different from conventional approaches where moving objects are often expressed as geometric points in two-dimensional space, (x,y). Instead, in ours, moving objects are encoded as one-dimensional points by both administrative district as well as road information. Our method becomes especially useful for monitoring traffic situation or tracing location of moving objects through approximate spatial queries.

Congenital combined dermal and epidermal melanocytosis: a new entity?

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An efficient DNA sequence searching method using position specific weighting scheme

Exact match queries, wildcard match queries, and k mismatch queries are widely used in various molecular biology applications including the searching of ESTs (Expressed Sequence Tags) and DNA transcription factors. In this paper, we suggest an efficient indexing and processing mechanism for such queries. Our indexing method places a sliding window at every possible location of a DNA sequence and extracts its signature by considering the occurrence frequency of each nucleotide. It then stores a set of signatures using a multi-dimensional index such as the R*-tree. Also, by assigning a weight to each position of a window, it prevents signatures from being concentrated around a few spots in indexing space. Our query processing method converts a query sequence into a multi-dimensional rectangle and searches the index for the signatures overlapping with the rectangle. Experiments with real biological data sets have revealed that the proposed approach is at least 4.4 times, 2.1 times, and several orders of magnitude faster than the previous one in performing exact match, wildcard match, and k-mismatch queries, respectively.