Bibliographic record
Abstract
CONTEXT: Middle managers are increasingly required to work with, and between, many groups within an organization. This work is known as "boundary spanning," and it has been shown to support information flow throughout the organization. This work has also been reported to assist with the coordination of tasks that require contributions from multiple groups. However, to our knowledge, boundary spanning has never been studied in a public health setting. OBJECTIVE: To conduct an exploratory study of public health managers' perspectives regarding the frequency with which they engage in boundary-spanning behaviors and the importance of these behaviors in their role. DESIGN: A mixed-methods approach, involving focus group discussion and independent surveys, was used to capture both qualitative and quantitative data. PARTICIPANTS: Fourteen administrative and team public health managers. SETTING: An urban-rural public health unit in Ontario, Canada. RESULTS: Many boundary-spanning behaviors were reported to be frequently practiced, and most of the behaviors were identified by the participants as important to their role. Further analysis indicated that the participants' more frequently engaged in the ambassador, coordinator, and scout categories of boundary spanning than behaviors in the guard category. CONCLUSION: Although only examined with a small sample, boundary spanning appears to be an essential function for public health managers (similar to their colleagues in the private sector). These findings present a rationale and an opportunity for public health leaders to set organizational conditions that foster the most positive type of boundary-spanning, ambassadorial behaviors, which, in turn, can improve group performance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.095 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".