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Deficient group processes such as conformity pressure can lead to inadequate group decisions with negative social, economic, or environmental consequences. The study aims to investigate how a group technique (called INFO) improves students' handling of conformity pressure and their collective judgments in the context of a transdisciplinary case study (TCS) for sustainability learning.

The improvement of normative functioning and output (INFO) group technique was tested in a field experiment embedded in a TCS. The INFO technique involves individual and group assessments of task difficulty. The experiment compares the performance of student groups assigned to control and experimental conditions in estimation tasks related to environmental planning and rail traffic.

The INFO interventions significantly improved the accuracy of group estimates compared to the control conditions. Applying the group technique could promote student's learning and facilitate the search for sustainable solutions in a TCS.

Results indicate that individually and collectively analyzing and discussing difficulties of a task as suggested by the INFO group technique can help students improve collective judgments on real world issues.

Group techniques are a prominent type of TCS methods as group processes are crucial for sustainability learning. First, this study applies the INFO group technique in a TCS in order to evaluate and further develop the technique.

The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss the potential of available event formats for facilitating the initiation of organizational change processes. It presents unconferencing, a relatively new event format, which seems to provide unique opportunities for this purpose. It reports and analyzes the case of a large Swiss university which initiated its pro‐sustainability transformation by organizing an unconference.

Researchers studied the effects of unconferencing and the mechanisms, which brought them about in a case study. In the empirical setting of a large Swiss university, a qualitative study triangulating participatory observation, narrative and problem‐centered interviews, participant survey and documentary analysis was carried out. Data were collected and analyzed at different points in time.

Empirical findings suggest that unconferencing is an appropriate event format for facilitating the initiation of the pro‐sustainability organizational change process of a university. In our case, unconferencing achieved systems connectivity, enabled mutual learning and generated excellent outputs in form of project proposals.

The paper raises the awareness of other universities and organizations of an event format they might wish to apply in their organizational change processes.

So far, research has not provided satisfactory answers to the question, how to best initiate organizational change. This paper provides a systematic investigation of available methodological approaches. It furthermore explains unconferencing, which is increasingly applied by practitioners but so far has stimulated only little discourse in the scientific community.

This paper includes three analyses concerning: expert support in the selection of impact variables for scientific models relevant to environmental planning, the quality of students’ individual estimates of corresponding impacts before and after a group discussion, and the accuracy of artificially‐aggregated judgments of independent groups. Participants were students of environmental sciences at ETH Zurich. The first analysis revealed that during participation in an environmental case study, students’ individual estimates of impacts of variables which have been suggested by experts increased, as compared to the estimates of impacts of additional variables, which have been selected by the students. The remaining analyses consider group discussions on the strength of particular environmental impacts. The quality of the estimates was analyzed referring to expert estimates of the impacts.

Professor Slawomir Magala is a full professor of Cross-Management at the Department of Organization and Personnel Management in Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University (RSM, 2015). His education stems from Poland, Germany and the USA, and has taught and conducted research in China, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Croatia, Estonia, the United Kingdom and Namibia. He is a former Chair for Cross-Cultural Management at RSM and has achieved many things, from being editor-in-chief of the Journal of Organizational Change Management (JOCM), to receiving the Erasmus Research Institute in Management (ERIM) Book Award (2010), for The Management of Meaning in Organizations (Routledge, 2009). It has received honors for being the best book in one of the domains of management research. It was selected by an academic committee, consisting of the Scientific Directors of CentER (Tilburg University), METEOR (University of Maastricht) and SOM (University of Groningen). All these research schools are accredited by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This is a review of Professor Slawomir Magala’s contributions as editor of Journal of Organizational Change Management.

Slawomir (Slawek) Magala will be known for many contributions to social, organizational, managerial research, and it will be remembered that he has created a great legacy in the field of cross-cultural competence and communication on processes of sense making in professional bureaucracies. He has authored and co-authored many publications including articles, books, professional publications, book contributions and other outputs, and is an established professor of cross-cultural management at the Department of Organization and Personnel Management in RSM, Erasmus University. He will be known for his work as editor of Qualitative Sociology Review, and one of the founding members of the Association for Cross-Cultural Competence in Management, not to mention the Journal of Organizational Change Management. Many of his articles have appeared regularly in leading refereed journals, such as the European Journal of International Management, Public Policy, Critical Perspectives on International Business and Human Resources Development International. His greatest legacy is in the field of cross-cultural management, but branches out to many other management studies.

The research is limited to his work in capacity of editor of Journal of Organizational Change Management.

This review provides a guide for positive role model of an excellent editorship of a journal.

Magala’s legacy acknowledges this research and its power to create numerous papers and attract a lot of attention (Flory and Magala, 2014). Because of these conferences, these empirical findings have led to disseminating the conference findings with JOCM (Flory and Magala, 2014). According to them, narrative research has become a respectable research method, but they also feel that it is still burdened with a lot of controversies on with difficulties linked to applying it across different disciplines (Flory and Magala, 2014).

The review covers the creative accomplishment of Professor Magala as editor.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test the scale of auditors’ awareness of the profession’s reputation for independence, defined as the degree to which auditors recognise the importance of the reputation for independence and acknowledge the impact of their judgements and decisions on that reputation, and to provide preliminary evidence of an association between auditors’ awareness of the profession’s reputation and auditors’ ethical judgement.

A seven-item scale was developed to measure auditors’ awareness of the profession’s reputation for independence, and an auditing case was used to measure auditors’ ethical judgement. A survey questionnaire of practising auditors working in auditing firms in Indonesia provides data for testing the validity and reliability of the new scale and proposed hypothesis.

The findings show that the scale is unidimensional and has satisfied reliability and validity. Moreover, the preliminary evidence of a positive association between the new scale and auditors’ ethical judgement is provided.

Further studies should test the validity and reliability of the scale of awareness of the profession’s reputation for independence with larger data and in different settings. Investigation of the antecedent factors of auditors’ awareness of the profession’s reputation for independence is suggested.

This paper develops a new measure, namely, the awareness of the profession’s reputation for independence. Preliminary evidence to establish an association between that awareness and auditor ethical judgement is provided.