The article seeks to show that companies should and can build winning cultures.
Abstract
Purpose
The article seeks to show that companies should and can build winning cultures.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 365 companies in Europe, Asia and North America were surveyed for links between financial out‐performance and winning culture. Three dozen high performers were analyzed in in‐depth case studies; one from each region that has transformed its culture is presented.
Findings
Findings were that building a winning culture – which fewer than 10 per cent of companies succeed in doing, despite broad recognition that culture provides the greatest source of competitive advantage – requires five key steps: setting expectations, aligning leaders, accountability for delivery, organization‐wide consistency and communication/celebration. Winning cultures tend to display six key behaviours: high aspirations, external focus (customers and competitors), attitude of ownership, bias to action, valuing collaboration and striving for the exceptional. These can be measured through the daily performance of the company's front line.
Research limitations/implications
By definition, out‐performance is rare, but further insights into winning cultures may result when the survey of companies is extended to new regions, such as Latin America.
Practical implications
Practical implications are the winning culture key behaviours, key building steps and performance measurement identified. The article also shows that challenges and even crisis can help, rather than hinder, the transformation of a corporate culture into a winning one.
Originality/value
The article will help focus company leaders on the opportunity and challenges in building a winning culture. It identifies the key behaviours of winning cultures, key steps in building them, and how to measure their progress. It should be of value to all management levels from the chief executive to front‐line staff.
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Kelly George and Aaron Clevenger
At Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, an annual short-term, research abroad non-credit program was created in 2012 as a core component of the undergraduate research initiative…
Abstract
Purpose
At Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, an annual short-term, research abroad non-credit program was created in 2012 as a core component of the undergraduate research initiative that achieves learning outcomes in a meaningful way. The paper aims to discuss this issue.
Design/methodology/approach
In order to describe, and analyze the short-term research abroad activity, an instrumental case study design was created. The instrumental case study was chosen as a means of allowing the facilitators/authors to communicate how they attempted to assure that the program was educative. In order to determine if the program was in fact educative and that it met its goal of being an effective research experience the authors utilized two additional research methods. The first was a document analysis of the participant’s research artifacts. Each participant was required to communicate their findings by writing a paper that was submitted for publication to an applicable research journal.
Findings
The study found that an experiential education as a pedagogical framework coupled with a short-term research abroad activity can lead to a substantive educative experience, where the authors described and analyzed attempts to ensure that the short-term research abroad program was educative, it also describes the educational assessment findings which describe what was found when the authors tested whether they, in fact, met this goal.
Research limitations/implications
During the design phase of the short-term research abroad program, the authors turned to experiential education as a principle for how they would ensure that the program was grounded in an acceptable educational theory. Experiential education is a widely accepted educational practice used in experiences such as co-ops and internships, study abroad, undergraduate research and service learning.
Practical implications
To frame the short-term cultural research abroad program as something from which student could learn the authors utilized the National Society of Experiential Education’s (2013) list of eight principles of good practice. In order to safeguard that an activity is educative, an assessment or an evaluation of a demonstrative artifact is essential. In assessing the final artifact against a rubric or some other non-biased or less biased criteria, an educator can ensure that the student has gained new knowledge in the form of student learning outcomes (SLOs). In addition, the educator can use the results of this assessment to modify many different aspects of the experience ranging from the timing, the modality, the pre-work, even the learning outcomes themselves.
Social implications
Given financial and curriculum inflexibility of some students, Universities and faculty could achieve attainment of research-based, program agnostic, SLOs by offering short-term study abroad alternatives to the traditional semester or year-long experiences. With graduates looking to enter the job market where businesses are more globalized and executive’s recognition of a need for more international experience, carefully constructed short-term study abroad programs are meaningful avenues to build those credentials.
Originality/value
Such offerings can be constructed as customized experiences to achieve highly integrated skills across all degree programs.
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To bring to the attention of health care professionals a framework and set of ideas for conceptualising a typical patient's experience and ways to respond out of a subjective…
Abstract
Purpose
To bring to the attention of health care professionals a framework and set of ideas for conceptualising a typical patient's experience and ways to respond out of a subjective inner quality called personal excellence.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper essays the viewpoint of the author on a selection of his experiences as a patient over 19 hospital admissions during his lifetime. He integrates these findings with his understanding of personal construct psychology, the psychology of change and the Greek philosophical concept of “arete” or excellence.
Findings
The paper offers a theory that patients experience three kinds of emotions or anguish when admitted to hospitals called threat, fear and anxiety. These three ways of interpreting an experience of change are based on the diagnostic constructs of transition from the psychology of personal constructs or the psychology of change. The paper asserts that a holistic approach is more likely to be delivered by health care staff with a calling than those who are merely doing a job or pursuing a career.
Originality/value
This paper is significant in that it draws on authentic experiences of a patient that are conceptualised into a coherent framework and linked to a well‐accepted theory within the science of psychology. Further it offers an alternative to essays on quality that are confined to objective features only. It offers a way, via the philosophical concept of “arete” to tap into the subjective attitudinal dimension of quality that is often the lever or more often the impediment to enabling quality improvement programmes to be effective.
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Maurizio Catulli, Julian K. Lindley, Nick B. Reed, Andrew Green, Hajra Hyseni and Sushma Kiri
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the interaction between access-based consumption (ABC) and consumer culture in the specific context of baby products, and connect the two…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the interaction between access-based consumption (ABC) and consumer culture in the specific context of baby products, and connect the two streams of consumer research and design theory, by associating ABC with product service systems (PSS) which are seen as desirable as they offer a promise of sustainability.
Methodology/approach
Within an action research approach consisting of the establishment of a pilot service provision, we conducted ethnographies including in-depth interviews and focus groups.
Findings
The adoption of access-based provisions is constrained by low compatibility with consumer culture. Consumers are concerned with the provision’s ability to satisfy their needs, what this mode of consumption says about them, and the extent to which it associates them with communities of practice.
Research limitations
The limitations are the typical ones of action research, which is linked to a unique, researcher-generated context where the researcher is also a participant, and therefore are difficult to generalize.
Research implications
The large-scale implementation of PSS underpinning ABC is problematic as it challenges consumers’ needs for self-expression and affiliation; however, we found that consumers in this specific context are responsive to the environmental efficiency of PSS.
Originality/value
Our research explores the intersection between consumer research and design, and consumers’ response to sustainable business models which underpin ABC.
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Our preoccupation with the Repertory Grid Technique has left little time and attention to the core ideas articulated in Kelly’s (1955) Theory of Personal Constructs. After more…
Abstract
Our preoccupation with the Repertory Grid Technique has left little time and attention to the core ideas articulated in Kelly’s (1955) Theory of Personal Constructs. After more than 20 years engaging with the method, I have (re)discovered his theorizing about man’s quest for knowing, to be the most insightful. This chapter shares my reflections/reflexions about the crucial role he placed on the notion of “anticipation.” I position this importance within the context of the challenges of our times and advocate that his “psychology of the unknown” is just as important today as it was 62 years ago.
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Richard E. Plank and Joel N. Greene
Proposes an alternative approach to understanding personal selling performance based on personal construct psychology, a cognitively based personality paradigm, originally…
Abstract
Proposes an alternative approach to understanding personal selling performance based on personal construct psychology, a cognitively based personality paradigm, originally formulated in clinical psychology by George Kelly. Explains how personal construct psychology theory (PCT), which reflects a constructivist epistemology, provides a conceptual framework for understanding and predicting sales performance. Demonstrates how PCT can be integrated with existing theoretical models of sales performance by suggesting a series of research propositions which can be tested using a number of different research methodologies. Considers research and practical implications.
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The purpose of this paper is to present George Kelly's The Psychology of Personal Constructs and to discuss how Repertory Grid Technique can aid a better understanding of friends…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present George Kelly's The Psychology of Personal Constructs and to discuss how Repertory Grid Technique can aid a better understanding of friends and members in an arts marketing context.
Design/methodology/approach
The project is a phenomenological study drawing on Kelly's The Psychology of Personal Constructs. The author conducted 16 unstructured face‐to‐face interviews across the UK during 2007 with individuals who were friends or members of at least five heritage supporter groups as part of a larger mixed methods study. The interviews included the building of Repertory Grids.
Findings
Analysis of the Repertory Grids gives a detailed understanding of participants' perceptions of, and involvement in, heritage supporter groups. Five themes emerged from the analysis: Organization; Engagement with the Organization; Involvement; Motivation; and Relationships with other members.
Practical implications
The paper provides a rich understanding of the portfolio of memberships that individuals have and of how they perceive and interact with them.
Originality/value
The paper contributes to the arts marketing literature methodologically by illustrating how to use Repertory Grid Technique in an arts marketing context and by focusing on friends and members, whose perspectives the academic literature does not cover extensively.
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David Marsden and Dale Littler
Examines some of the underlying assumptions, research objectives and practical applications of the repertory grid technique (RGT) in consumer research. It explains why the use and…
Abstract
Examines some of the underlying assumptions, research objectives and practical applications of the repertory grid technique (RGT) in consumer research. It explains why the use and evaluation of the RGT should be grounded in the assumptions of the theory from which it derives, George Kelly’s personal construct psychology (PCP), and examines the way in which it is both congruent with and can contribute to the development of the emerging interpretive paradigm in consumer research. The specific questions that the RGT can help to answer about consumer behaviour experience are identified and illustrated with the findings from a short empirical study. Overall, it is argued that when the RGT is employed within the guidelines of PCP it provides a useful interpretive research framework for exploring some of the similarities and differences in the content and structure of consumers’ subjective meaning systems.
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This paper proposes an uncertainty principle for information seeking. The principle is based on the results of a series of studies conducted by the author into the user's…
Abstract
This paper proposes an uncertainty principle for information seeking. The principle is based on the results of a series of studies conducted by the author into the user's perspective of the information search process. A basic principle of uncertainty is elaborated by six corollaries. The principle is proposed to explain the constructive process of information seeking and use bringing affective considerations to what has usually been regarded as a cognitive process.
The past few years have seen the emergence of a new technique of considerable generality into the personnel field. It is based on the Personal Construct Theory of the psychologist…
Abstract
The past few years have seen the emergence of a new technique of considerable generality into the personnel field. It is based on the Personal Construct Theory of the psychologist George Kelly and incorporates a wide range of approaches to the assessment and measurement of people.