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The article seeks to show that companies should and can build winning cultures.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

Companies that systematically and continuously put the right leaders in the right jobs outperform companies that don’t – by a wide margin. In this article, the authors argue that chief executives must recognize and act on the consequences of how they deploy their best managers.

Reviews empirical studies examining psychological characteristics of innovation. States that the literature was delved into to analyse characteristics which are relevant. Evaluates and discusses the various literature sources and suggests various advantages and disadvantages therein. Concludes that, though difficult, the need for the future is: more studies using the same psychological inventory across many products; more studies on the same product using many psychological inventories.

Best practice facility management operations share several common traits, and two in particular stand out above the rest: outstanding leadership and clarity of purpose. Achieving the balance between minimum levels of service and minimum cost requires quality information, great planning and, above all, a well‐led, talented and focused team of motivated facilities managers (specialists and generalists) operating from a clear purpose of intent. This paper examines the benefits of taking a ‘high performance business unit’ approach to facility department management using a smarter mixture and application of skill sets and process management which ensures the best value service delivery outcomes are achieved and that clarity of purpose becomes the norm.

This study investigates the impact that perpetrator coercion type, victim resistance type and respondent gender have on attributions of blame in a hypothetical child sexual abuse case. A total of 366 respondents read a hypothetical scenario describing the sexual assault of a 14‐year‐old girl by a 39‐year‐old man, before completing 21 attribution items relating to victim blame, perpetrator blame, the blaming of the victim's (non‐offending) parents, and assault severity. Overall, men judged the assault more serious when the perpetrator used physical force as opposed to verbal threat or misrepresented play as a coercive act. Men also deemed the victim's non‐offending parents more culpable when the victim offered no resistance, rather than physical or verbal resistance. Women judged the assault equally severe regardless of coercion type, although they did rate the victim's family more culpable when the victim offered verbal rather than physical resistance. Implications and ideas for future work are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact victim symptomology, victim resistance and respondent gender have on attributions of blame, credibility and perceived assault severity in a hypothetical child sexual abuse case.

In total, 356 respondents read a hypothetical child sexual abuse scenario in which victim symptomology (negative vs none vs positive) and victim resistance (resistant vs non-resistant) were manipulated before completing six childhood sexual abuse (CSA) attribution items. The impact these manipulations plus respondent gender differences had on attributions ratings was explored via a series of AN(C)OVA.

Overall, respondents judged the victim more truthful if she displayed negative – as opposed to either no or positive (i.e. life affirming) – symptomology and a resistant victim to be more truthful than one who offered no resistance. Finally, men deemed a 14-year-old female victim of sexual assault less reliable and more culpable for her own abuse than women. Men were particularly mistrustful of the girl if she was non-resistant and later failed to display negative, post-abuse symptomology.

Findings highlight the need for greater awareness of the fact that not all CSA survivors display stereotypically negative post-abuse symptoms. The current study also extends knowledge of the role victim resistant and respondent gender play in this growing research field.

The current study is the first to explore attributions of CSA blame and credibility across negative (i.e. typical) verses no or positive/life affirming (i.e. atypical) post-abuse symptomology.

Breakaway training is a mandatory training programme for mental health staff in both NHS and private services. However, the question that remains outstanding from the recent guidance on the management of short‐term violence published by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) (NICE, 2005a; 2005b) is whether breakaway training is effective?This paper provides a history of and evidence for breakaway training, and a study examining the content of breakaway training in one English high secure hospital is provided.

To demonstrate that high performance in organizations results from their being decision‐driven.

Executives from 365 companies in seven countries were surveyed. More than 40 high‐performance companies were then interviewed. Industry leaders in the study were compared with trailing competitors, while transformations where organizational change was clearly a leading factor were also examined in depth. More broadly, the article draws on the experience of more than 1,000 organization cases for more than 500.

The findings were that only 15 percent of companies have an organization that helps them outperform and that these companies are differentiated by the quality of their decision‐making – and their ability to repeatedly implement their decisions successfully. Successful implementation depends on an integrated organizational system that aligns five attributes – leadership, accountability, people, frontline execution and a performance culture.

This research has lead to the development of a scorecard to measure organizational effectiveness. This enables companies to benchmark their performance against the 365 businesses in the survey. The scorecard gauges agreement (on a one‐to‐four scale) among managers and employees with ten key statements that reflect the five attributes of high performance.

The article will help focus company leaders on the organizational issues that drive high performance. In addition to identifying the key attributes of high performance, it presents an organizational effectiveness scorecard to isolate the causes of underperformance and guide change. It should be of value to all management levels from the chief executive to front line staff.