No abstract

PurposeThe high-pressure nature of the construction industry, along with the COVID-19 pandemic, triggered abusive supervision (i.e. workplace bullying and incivility behaviour) that has diminished workers' well-being. However, despite the growing prevalence in practice and increasing concern in academia, abusive supervision remains largely unexplored by construction management scholars. This study aims to fill the gap in the current literature by analysing the effects of abusive supervision on construction workers' well-being, the mediating role of guanxi closeness and the moderating role of trust in the manager.Design/methodology/approachA questionnaire survey was completed by 258 Chinese construction workers. The data underwent mediation and moderation analyses using PROCESS macro 3.5 for SPSS.FindingsThe results revealed that managers' abusive supervision reduced construction workers' well-being at work and in life. Guanxi closeness between manager and workers mediated the relationship between managers' abusive supervision and construction workers' well-being. Additionally, trust in managers moderated the mediating effect of guanxi closeness. This study further revealed that the emotional connection between construction managers and workers, such as expressive guanxi closeness and affective-based trust, is important in handling the impact of abusive supervision on the workers.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study provide support for recent calls to address negative manager behaviours such as abusive supervision in construction management. They aid the development of a more comprehensive internal mechanism that considers the influence of guanxi closeness on the outcomes of abusive supervision by managers at construction sites. Additionally, interventions that develop trust in managers may be particularly effective in alleviating the tension of abusive supervision. More attention should be paid to managers' emotional connections in daily construction project management.Originality/valueRather than concentrate on positive leadership, this study shifts the focus to negative leadership in construction project management by identifying abusive supervision as a negative primary antecedent of workers' well-being. While prior research has highlighted how negative manager behaviours affect workers' well-being from the conservation of resources theory (COR) perspective, this study is the first, to the authors’ knowledge, to adopt a social exchange theory perspective by introducing guanxi closeness as a mediator. It contributes to a greater understanding of how trust in the manager alleviates the negative effect of the person's abusive supervision on construction workers.

In this paper, an agricultural robot vision system is proposed for two typical environments—farmland and orchard—combined with weeding between crops. The system includes orchard production monitoring and prediction tasks, the target information recognition approach, and visual servo decision making. The results obtained from the proposed system show that using the region combination features of image 2D histogram as the decision-making basis, the accurate and rapid indirect identification and positioning of crop seedlings can be accomplished while skipping the complex process of accurately identifying crops and weeds. The algorithm performs reasonably good as the time of target recognition in the prototype system is found to be less than 16 ms, and the average accurate recognition rate of 97.43% is achieved. The benefits of the proposed system are the continuous improvement of the quality of agricultural products, the rise of production efficiency, and the increase of economic benefits.

The calibration process of a digital Multi-meter (DMM) is complicated and tedious. The whole procedure needs to calibrate dozens of test points of several measuring ranges. Usually, the automatic calibration system is used to replace the manual operation. In metrology, the MAT/CAL which is a software produced by Fluke company has been widely used, but it can’t meet our special needs. This article is mainly on the introduction of design method of an automatic calibration system for DMM basing on Fluke MAT/CAL. It describes the setup of hardware, the improvement of ACC file in MAT/CAL and the basic principle of our software.