Search results

The purpose of this chapter is to provide the reader with tools to help change their organizational culture. Specifically, this chapter investigates the importance of leadership in understanding and changing culture within organizations and explores different change management models to effectively change culture within organizations. This chapter summarizes tools from the Leadership and Change Management literature, including findings from the author’s studies, and best practices from a variety of industries.

Tools are provided so that readers can target leadership changes in preparation for cultural change. Leadership behaviors at the top of an organization are discussed using the full-range leadership model, with a specific focus on understanding, developing, and harnessing transformational leadership behaviors within an organization. Leadership at the top of an organization is complemented with a discussion of the importance of middle leadership throughout the organization including a model to understand and develop those behaviors. The chapter ends with seven different approaches to structuring and managing change that organizations can adopt to improve the probability of driving successful change in their organizations.

For organizations seeking to develop or improve their safety culture, these tools provide a roadmap for harnessing the needed leadership behaviors and organizational tools to effectively make change. By understanding and applying these tools, organizations can find success in their culture change initiatives faster and with fewer problems.

This chapter develops a methodology to assist critical facility operators in designing physical protection systems to defend against a single adversary (thief, saboteur, terrorist, etc.) attack. The developed methodology utilizes a multicriteria decision-making approach that balances the competing goals of minimal security system cost and maximum system performance. The methodology utilizes a network-based approach to facility security system design and analysis, which locates physical protection (detection, delay, and response) elements throughout a facility. These elements enable the facility owner to prevent attacks through deterrence and to defeat the adversary if he or she chooses to attack. The developed approach results in the ability for the facility operator to assess relative facility and/or infrastructure safety, and make decisions regarding how to optimally allocate resources for physical protection elements to balance cost and performance. A hypothetical example is discussed which demonstrates the usefulness of the developed methodology.

Transaction costs, responsive housing supply, rent controls, tenant protection, and access to credit affect residential mobility – these different parts of housing policy are included in what has been defined as housing regimes, which embrace regulations, laws, norms, and ideology as well as economic factors. In this chapter, we investigate how these regimes change by using institutional theories of path dependence. We use Sweden as an example and study three Swedish housing market reforms during the past decades that may have affected residential mobility, each related to one of the main institutional pillars of housing provision: tenure legislation, taxation, and finance. More precisely, we study the development of the rental regulation since the late 1960s, the tax reform in 1991, and the new reforms on mortgages since 2010. What caused these reforms? What were the main mechanisms behind them, and why did they occur at the time they did? We argue, besides affecting residential mobility, these reforms have the common feature of including interesting elements of path dependence and forming critical junctures that have led the development on to a new path. Institutions of tenure legislation, housing finance, and taxation are often claimed to have effects on residential mobility. Although they are seldom designed with the explicit aim of supporting (or counteracting) residential mobility, they may sometimes do so as more or less unintended consequences.

Purpose – Measures aimed at reducing intersection crashes have high potential to be cost effective since intersections constitute only a small part of the overall highway system but intersection-related crashes constitute more than 50% of all crashes in urban areas and over 30% in rural areas. Roundabouts are a proven safety countermeasure, but several issues that significantly affect both crash frequency and severity have been observed at both existing and new roundabouts. This chapter aims to provide guidance on roundabout selection and design criteria.

Methodology – The chapter first describes the most relevant criteria to be considered for choosing a roundabout. Then, after the explanation of the roundabout design process and a clear description of the roundabout classification, the chapter provides recommendations for all the steps of the geometric design, highlighting the main design features that contribute to the best safety performances, including speed control and sight distance checks. Finally, the chapter explains traffic control devices and facilities for pedestrians and cyclists.

Findings – Roundabout design needs to balance opposing demands and it is important to adopt a performance-based design approach within an iterative process. The most important performance check is the analysis of vehicle speeds through the roundabout, since achieving appropriate vehicular speeds has a very positive safety effect.