100 Chinese couples to take part in mass wedding in Sri Lanka Colombo, November 29 (IANS): One hundred Chinese couples will visit Sri Lanka next month to take part in a mass wedding in the island country, Sri Lanka’s Megapolis and Western Development Ministry announced on Wednesday. The Ministry said the event, the first of its kind in Sri Lanka, was expected to further increase ties between Sri Lanka and China, reports Xinhua news agency. The mass wedding would be held on December 17 in Colombo under the patronage of President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. Some 400 guests will attend. Tourism Minister John Amaratunga told reporters that the event will help promote the island nation as an ideal wedding destination. The mass wedding will be followed by a Sri Lanka-China food festival at a luxury resort in Colombo. Leading chefs from both China and Sri Lanka will take part in the festival. The couples will later be taken on a tour of Yala, Sigiriya and Kandy, popular tourist spots in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka has become a popular destination for Chinese tourists, with China currently being the second largest market. Bali airport reopens Jakarta, November 29 (IANS): The main airport on the Indonesian island of Bali re-opened on Wednesday after remaining shut for two days due to a volcanic eruption which blanketed parts of the island in ash forcing thousands of evacuations. Flights resumed at Ngurah Rai International Airport from 3 p.m. after the Volcano Observatory Notice for Aviation was downgraded from a Red alert to Orange. Layers of ash settled on houses and fields on Bali after an eruption of Mount Agung. More than 38,000 people had already been evacuated from the area around the volcano which began erupting late on Saturday, CNN reported. The authorities ordered the evacuation of nearly 100,000 people living in the danger zone and recommended the use of protective masks for the population. Emergency workers said they were encountering resistance from people concerned about their livestock and belongings. The massive plumes of dark smoke from Mount Agung were seen reaching as high as three kilometres above its rumbling summit. The airport might have to close again if the wind changed direction, officials said. The authorities warned tourists that they were likely to face long waits before returning home because of a huge backlog of flights. Singapore Airlines announced on its website that at least two flights will leave for the city-state from the Indonesian island and that it was negotiating approval for another nine flights to depart. Creativity flourish when boss is humble New York, November 29 (IANS): Employees show more creativity in their work when they find their boss to be humble -- leaders who give employees a chance to speak up and have a voice in the decision-making process and who also acknowledge their own limitations, suggests new research. Humble leaders are most effective when team members expect a low degree of distance between the leaders and followers, said lead researcher Jia (Jasmine) Hu, Associate Professor at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business in the US. For the study, published online in the Journal of Applied Psychology, the researchers collected data on work teams and team leaders from 11 information and technology companies in a major city in northern China at three time points over six months. In all, the final study sample included 354 members from 72 teams. At the beginning of the study, team members rated their leaders’ humility on a six-item scale. Workers rated how much they agreed with statements like “Our team leader is open to the advice of others.” Three months later, team members rated how much they shared information with each other. And six months after the start of the study, team leaders rated how creative their teams were. Results showed that humble leaders promoted higher levels of creativity on their teams when team members expected them to be humble. But humility may be seen as a weakness when employees expect their boss to be dominant, take charge and give strong direction, Hu said. “One practical implication for managers is that they need to understand what their team members expect and value from them,” she added.
