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The purpose of this paper is to describe five salient factors that emerge in two successful change processes in healthcare. Organizational changes in healthcare are often characterized by problems and solutions that have been formulated by higher levels of management. This top-down management approach has not been well received by the professional community. As a result, improvement processes are frequently abandoned, resulting in disrupted and dysfunctional organizations. This paper presents two successful change processes where managerial leadership was used to coach the change processes by distributing mandates and resources. After being managerially initiated, both processes were driven by local agency, decisions, planning and engagement.

The data in the paper derive from two qualitative case studies. Data were collected through in-depth interviews, observations and document studies. The cases are presented as process descriptions covering the different phases of the change processes. The focus in the studies is on the roles and interactions of the actors involved, the type of leadership and the distribution of agency.

Five factors emerged as paramount to the successful change processes in the two cases: local ownership of problems; a coached process where management initiates the change process and the problem recognition, and then lets the staff define the problems, formulate solutions and drive necessary changes; distributed leadership directed at enabling and supporting the staff’s intentions and long-term self-leadership; mutually formulated norms and values that serve as a unifying force for the staff; and generous time allocation and planning, which allows the process to take time, and creates room for reevaluation. The authors also noted that in both cases, reorganization into multi-professional teams lent stability and endurance to the completed changes.

The research shows how management can initiate and support successful change processes that are staff driven and characterized by local agency, decisions, planning and engagement. Empirical descriptions of successful change processes are rare, which is why the description of such processes in this research increases the value of the paper.

I examine three recent cases where local governments changed their processes for selecting capital projects. The central question is whether these changes institutionalized a more “strategic” outlook in capital improvement planning and budgeting for these jurisdictions? The findings suggest that local governments can set capital priorities strategically, but that the process of implementing those reforms must be adaptable to changing political circumstances. These findings add to the limited literature on the political, administrative, and other challenges that local governments must confront when reforming their capital improvement planning and budgeting processes.

Purpose – As change creates more uncertainty for library practitioners, graduate library education needs to explore how best to prepare students to manage ambiguity through new approaches to identifying and solving challenging problems. We advocate for incorporating design into graduate library education.

Design/Methodology/Approach – First, we discuss the need for a design approach to librarianship. We then introduce the nature of design thinking and philosophy and discuss the ways in which it is already present in librarianship. We review past developments and recent trends with a special focus on the ways in which design thinking, methods, and philosophies are (or are not) incorporated into library and information science (LIS) education.

Findings – We synthesize these findings to propose recommendations and suggestions for an alternative degree program to the traditional Master of Library Science (MLS): the Master of Library Design (MLD). This includes the presentation of a new model of library education that blends design philosophy with traditional library science content.

Originality/Value – This is the first compilation in the library literature to propose the development of a new type of library degree that we refer to as the MLD; hence, it has a high level of originality. While the library literature has examples of practitioners applying design thinking to improve library services, this chapter’s value is that it promotes the integration of design thinking and philosophy more broadly in order to better equip future library professionals for a rapidly changing information landscape.

Within the context of policies on developing the workforce of the government health sector in England, this paper aims to investigate participation in work‐related continuing education and training (WRCET), its pedagogy and effectiveness. Individual and organizational characteristics associated with effective WRCET are examined.

The paper employs a cross‐sectional study, using data from annual large‐scale National Staff Surveys of 2006 and 2009. Based on detailed occupational groups, the authors classify respondents to high‐ and low‐skilled staff and develop four dependent variables that combine specific types of training with respondent assessments of the effectiveness of their training for their professional development. Probit regressions models are estimated for both groups of workers, controlling for individual and organizational characteristics.

Participation in WRCET increased between 2006 and 2009 for both groups with differential patterns of participation across four types of training. Applying an effectiveness criterion eliminates relative change in participation rates between the groups and results in only about a quarter of those who participated in WRCET rating it as effective. Appraisal and particularly membership of positively rated work teams are strongly associated with training being rated as effective.

This is the first use of this large‐scale data set to appraise health sector policies on WRCET. Distinguishing between participation alone and whether participation is perceived as effective has benefits in appraising training policies and identifies appraisal and membership of positively rated teams as factors associated with effective WRCET. Use of an effectiveness criterion shows very large differences between participation alone and participation in effective WRCET.

Strategy development has become an often haphazard process decoupled from annual resource allocation and planning. Sometimes, it is even overlooked entirely. It is all too common to see the budgeting process driving the strategy, one year at a time. Many companies need to reestablish their basic approaches to strategy development and create explicit mechanisms to link the resulting strategy to execution.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of process orientation at the employee level on operational performance (OP) and customer-focused performance (CP), where the components process thinking by staff, process mapping (PM) and process standardization (PS) are cumulative developments, building on each other.

Structural equations modeling is used to analyze survey data collected from 198 participants at a business school in the period 2012/2013.

The results show that the impact of process thinking by staff on both OP and CP is mediated by PM and PS and improvement. The study also shows that process thinking by staff is a prerequisite for PM and standardization.

This research makes several important theoretical and managerial contributions toward the objective of a better understanding of the working of process orientation. It shows that different components of process orientation reinforce each other; process orientation maturity depends on the effort being applied in creating a particular sequence of process management components and that these components should be considered as cumulative developments, building on each other.

The aim of this paper is to examine how performance management (PM) is adopted in the public university sector and the problems it faces in an environment of conflicting management cultures.

This paper draws on institutional logics as a theoretical framework and inductive qualitative interviews as a research approach.

The results reveal that the conflicting values instilled in key players aligned with the different cultures have resulted in PM assuming a hybrid form, rather than the corporate form. Three identified problematic factors further demonstrate that the level of hybridity varies across the sector. The paper alludes to a theory-practice gap as a result of the findings and the concept of negative hybridity and its risk to effective governance aligned with the corporate approach.

The results are limited to Australian public universities. In addition, interviews were conducted with a specific set of university management staff. A different perspective on the findings may have been generated with a different set of management or operational staff.

The results provide policymakers and university management with information on the theory practice gap and the problematic factors contributing to it. It also informs policymakers to the risks associated with negative hybridity.

The results reveal the existence of a theory–practice gap because of a number of common problematic factors in the adoption of a corporate-oriented PM system in Australian public universities. The results highlight the need for further studies to establish the extent to which the current hybrid PM system deviates from the expected corporate-oriented PM system, and whether this poses a risk to effective governance aligned with the corporate approach.

This paper outlines the continuous improvement journey of a voluntary organisation. The significant level of organisational growth and improving quality of services described is clearly linked to the organisation’s commitment to improvement. One of the approaches used in adopting a total quality culture was the EFQM model, specifically interpreted for the voluntary sector. Until recently such an approach would have been considered alien to the sector, not least because of its origins in the business community. This article contradicts this assumption. Issues addressed include how the improvement process is driven, the use of performance measurement, external verification and the difficulties in accessing sector appropriate benchmark data. It is suggested that the pursuit of excellence is no longer optional for the voluntary sector, it is essential.

In this chapter, we raise awareness of the larger network in which multiteam systems (MTSs) are situated. We posit that in the complex operations conducted by military units, MTSs are not isolated entities, but rather exist in exponentially complex systems that include additional challenges for both research and practice.

An operational example involving an Army Brigade Combat Team Headquarters is presented to explain the details of the exponentially complex MTSs inherent in military operations, raise awareness about challenges that plague successful mission accomplishment, and discuss the way forward for research and practice.

The Army Brigade Combat Team Headquarters is characterized as a traditional MTS, embedded in a system of hierarchical MTSs, further embedded within a parallel structure of MTSs. Challenges inherent in these organizational structures provide direction for research and practice to address the exponentially complex meta-systems that are prevalent throughout the military.

While researchers have begun to address teams existing in larger networks, or MTSs (Mathieu, Marks, & Zaccaro, 2001), much of the existing research is based on small or isolated systems. As a result, our understanding of the meta-systems in which many of these MTSs exist is limited. This chapter provides concrete examples of an exponentially complex MTS within a military environment and highlights challenges to be addressed in both research and practice.