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The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between four organizational cultural types defined by the Competing Values Framework and three Lean Six Sigma implementation components – management involvement, use of Lean Six Sigma methods and Lean Six Sigma infrastructure.

The study involved surveying 446 human resource and quality managers from 223 hospitals located in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts and Rhode Island using the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument.

In total, 104 completed responses were received and analyzed using multivariate analysis of variance. Follow-up analysis of variances showed management support was significant, F(3, 100)=4.89, p < 0.01, η2=1.28; infrastructure was not significant, F(3, 100)=1.55, p=0.21, η2=0.05; and using Lean Six Sigma methods was also not significant, F(3, 100)=1.34, p=0.26, η2=0.04. Post hoc analysis identified group and development cultures having significant interactions with management support.

The relationship between organizational culture and Lean Six Sigma in hospitals provides information on how specific cultural characteristics impact the Lean Six Sigma initiative key components. This information assists hospital staff who are considering implementing quality initiatives by providing an understanding of what cultural values correspond to effective Lean Six Sigma implementation.

Managers understanding the quality initiative cultural underpinnings, are attentive to the culture-shared values and norm’s influence can utilize strategies to better implement Lean Six Sigma.

The purpose of this paper is to direct attention to the intersection of external and internal accountability systems within urban schools, and the role of school leadership, especially that of the principal, in managing this intersection. In particular, the paper explores how school leaders are able to strengthen and sustain the school's internal accountability system, in pursuit of school‐defined learning improvement agenda, and at the same time respond productively to external accountability demands. The paper also seeks to identify consequences of these leaders’ efforts to navigate an often problematic set of converging demands.

This paper draws on findings from a larger multi‐case study of learning‐focused leadership in 15 schools in four urban school districts in the USA. Schools were chosen to represent those that were “making progress” (by local measures). Data were collected over 18 months, spanning two school years, from Spring 2007 to Fall 2008. Data collection included multiple site visits, semi‐structured interviews and observations of leadership activity across school and district settings, and a variety of documentary evidence.

Though working in substantially different contexts, these leaders found remarkably similar ways of crafting tools and creating occasions, from the array of external accountability demands and resources, to serve internal accountability purposes. They did so by internalizing external expectations and developing accountable practice within the school, leading through data, and modelling what it meant to learn to lead in a fully accountable way. As they did so, they reshaped the scope of instruction and the instructional improvement conversation, and also made teaching and leadership practice more public.

This paper extends discussions of school‐level accountability in two ways. First, it updates scholarship on accountability by examining school‐level responses at a time five years into the new accountability context in the USA defined by strict system‐wide expectations and mechanisms. Second, the paper demonstrates ways in which the often onerous demands of external accountability systems can be treated as a resource by school leaders and used in ways that bolster the school's capacity for accountable professional practice.

While prior work has focused on the importance of visual access and visual cues to targets of deception, this article highlights its importance to deceivers. We introduce a new approach for conceptualizing deception and distinguish between two types of lies according to the relative value to the deceiver of being able to monitor the target's reaction to the lie; deceivers telling monitoring‐dependent lies benefit significantly more from being able to monitor their target than do deceivers telling monitoring‐independent lies. We examine this distinction and its implications for the strategic use of deception, by manipulating visual access in a negotiation experiment with teleconference and videoconference media. We find consistent differences between deceivers use of and consequences of these two types of lies as a function of visual access. First, the use of monitoring‐dependent lies was significantly greater with visual access than without it, while the use of monitoring‐independent lies was unaffected by visual access. Second, consistent with our conceptu‐alization, participants who lied were trusted less by their counterpart than were participants who did not lie, except when participants with visual access told monitoring‐dependent lies. In these cases deceivers were actually trusted more by their counterpart than participants who did not lie. These results support our conceptualization and suggest that visual access may actually harm potential targets of deception—by increasing their risk of being deceived and inappropriately increasing their interpersonal trust.

Evaluation of student performance in bibliographic instruction (B.I.) has been, and continues to be, an area of interest to B.I. practitioners. The last 15 years have seen a number of excellent analyses and reviews of evaluation techniques. Many recent articles focus on evaluation methods used within specific B.I. programs.

For employers, like many members of the general public, mental illness is a scary subject — the more so that they don't know who to turn to if a member of staff starts to show signs of abnormal distress. Susan Scott‐Parker argues that if employers are going to be persuaded that it is in the interests of their business to take on people with mental health problems, then mental health professionals and support workers must pay more attention to what employers actually need.