Researcher competencies: how do you measure the “assertiveness” competency?

In the following weeks, we want to present some examples of the competencies we measure in the competency measurement tools that you can check out on our website. Users of the tools and readers of the blog ask us how we do the measurement, what we take into account when measuring and how we created the indicators. Let’s take one of the competencies used in the competency profiles of our researcher competency measurement tools as an example. It will be assertiveness. First, let’s ask ourselves what assertiveness is. Thus, a person’s assertiveness is seen as the gentle, sincere and firm

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A series of workshop meetings within the VT-FLOW grant project

In cooperation within the VT-FLOW grant project, representatives of the University of Silesia in Katowice and the University of Lübeck took part in a series of workshop meetings aimed at jointly developing a plan for the analysis of variables relevant to the construct of collective communication (collective communication). The workshop was held on the premises of the University of Silesia from 29.07.2024-31.07.2024. The main purpose of the meetings was to exchange experiences and reflections on conducting analyses using specialized algorithms, jointly develop procedures to obtain relevant data, and juxtapose the solutions developed so far with the most current research practices

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Skill books for the vacations: A Simple Way to Get There. Mark Joyner

Another book for the vacations, or rather a booklet (it’s thin and there’s a lot of blank space in it), is “A Simple Way to Go” by Mark Joyner. He invented the term simple.ology and built an entire approach to problem solving around it. This is not a scientific book, nor is it aimed at scientists. What’s more, scientists may treat it indulgently, but it takes 2-3 hours to read, which is about as much as the average person browses social media every day. That’s why it’s worth turning off Whatsup, Instagram, Facebook or YouTube for a day and devoting

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Competence books for the vacations: Creativity Code. Marcus du Sautoy

Another book, perhaps for another week of researcher’s vacation, is “The Code of Creativity. Art and Innovation in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” by Marcus du Sautoy. Although the term “artificial intelligence” became really popular with the GPT Chat in 2022, the book was published in 2019 and you can already read from it how close the invention was. The author is a mathematician and treats both creativity and its most obvious result – art – from this perspective. Especially since his wife, he declares, is an artist, which has a big impact on the layout of the content, examples

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Competence books for the vacations: Fire up your thinking! Ozan Varol

Vacations in schools have already started, in universities it is that moment when employees go on their first vacations, so we are starting a series of posts about books describing competencies in a light and enjoyable way. The first such item is “Fire up your thinking. How to achieve personal and professional success. 9 simple habits and strategies” by Ozan Varol. It should be noted right away that the book is quite thick and heavy – for a suitcase or a backpack… it’s a bit unsuitable, unless you’re traveling by car. But for that it reads lightly and with great

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How does the balanced management of a virtual team affect its effectiveness? Part 2

In the previous blog post, we presented the answer to the research question, which was: to what extent does the lack of a defined manager of a virtual team affect the emergence of sustainable influence of team members on the course of the team? The question was raised as part of an article to be published in the journal Organization and Management, as well as participation in the conference “Sustainable Enterprise. Dilemmas of Sustainable Development.” Now we will answer the second research question, which was the following in our study: To what extent does the sustainable influence of virtual team

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How does the balanced management of a virtual team affect its effectiveness? Part 1

Recall that in April 2024 there was a national conference “Sustainable enterprise. Dilemmas of sustainable development”. The proceedings took place in Kazimierz Dolny on the Vistula River. The organizers were the Warsaw School of Economics, and the topics of the conference were part of the current issues of implementing the concept of sustainable development and building a sustainable enterprise. Among management theoreticians and practitioners, we discussed key management problems, conditions for the creation and development of a sustainable enterprise. The conference was attended by Olaf Flak, PhD, who gave a presentation entitled “Influence of sustainable team management in virtual teams

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Can your research project manager be a robot? We talked about it at the ESOF conference as part of Katowice City of Science 2024

At the ESOF conference, June 13, 2024, Olaf Flak, Ph.D., gave a presentation on replacing human managers with robots based on artificial intelligence. He has always been interested in robotics, and for the past 15 years has been involved in the search for a way to construct a robot manager. He is the creator of online manager tools on the TransistorsHead.com platform, aimed at monitoring manager’s performance and determining their behavior patterns, and then automating them and replacing the human manager with a robot manager. To do this, he developed a methodology for studying the organizational reality in which the

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We spoke at the ESOF conference as part of Katowice City of Science 2024 – we led a workshop on researcher competencies!

On June 13, 2024, we participated in the ESOF2024 conference. This is one of the most important international conferences with an impact on the transformation of science and the world. The conference was held in Katowice, as Katowice is the European City of Science this year. During the conference, scientists, entrepreneurs, politicians, journalists and residents discussed the latest developments in various fields of science and art and their impact on society. Participation in the conference was free of charge. In the workshop part, we conducted a training on research competencies. Participants were able to test their competencies using the tools

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What are the benefits for a research project manager when he or she is a mentor? Part 2

Two weeks ago we wrote about the benefits for a research project manager when he or she serves as a mentor. We outlined the “hard” areas of research project management. Today, we present the results of our conversations with researchers about why it is beneficial to be a mentor from the perspective of “soft” areas of management and personal development. Benefits in terms of personal development: Benefits in terms of increased academic satisfaction: If you want to develop your competence to be a mentor, contact us: contact us: icrk@us.edu.pl

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