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Benchmark surveys regarding talent management assessment practices and interventions of choice for organization development (OD) practitioners have shown 360-degree feedback to be a popular tool for both development and decision-making in the field today. Although much has been written about implementing 360-degree feedback since its inception in the 1990s, few longitudinal case examples exist where interventions have been applied and their impact measured successfully. This chapter closes the gap by providing research findings and key learnings from five different implementation strategies for enhancing 360-degree feedback in a large multi-national organization. Recommendations and implications for future research are discussed.

The aim of this paper is to generate a streamlined, transparent and effective instrument to fairly measure the contribution made by each student to a group project within a higher education context. The primary aim is to moderate the grades of underperforming students at the end of the project. There is a secondary benefit in alerting underperforming students to raise their contribution mid-task or face a potentially reduced grade at the final stage.

The development of this multi-dimensional instrument is guided by findings from previous research. The quest is to minimise the instructor's administrative work load in applying a moderation-only instrument that is open-source and available at no cost. Based on the literature, the survey instrument seeks to apply a peer-based, equitable and transparent evaluation of each member's contribution to a group task. The survey is applied at mid-task and again at end-task in order to afford underperformers the opportunity to address contribution deficits during the final phase of the project.

The instrument, called TANDEM©, offers a transparent, streamlined, equitable, confidential and practical measure of each student's contribution to a graded group task. Students whose end-task contribution falls below the group average rating receive a proportional reduction in their personal grade. Additionally, the end-task moderation instrument captures a single-item holistic measure of relative contribution that may, in the future, serve as a surrogate for the multi-dimensional measures currently in place.

TANDEM© was developed with group sizes of four or five members in mind. There is no evidence to support its application to three-person groups. Moreover, the application was applied only amongst under-graduate students. It is yet to be applied across post-graduate groups and within online learning environments. Future research into diverse cultural settings would serve to advance understanding of how moderation is perceived across borders.

Several existing group grade moderation methods propose complex algorithms that are “black box” solutions from a student's perspective. In establishing a fair, streamlined, confidential and transparent process for peer-rated moderation, TANDEM© deploys a concise instrument with a relatively small administrative load. TANDEM © may be applied to all groups or can selectively be applied to groups that report moderate, strong or extreme levels of conflict.

Students will appreciate the opportunity to rate peer contributions to group projects. This will dissipate the negative social sentiment that may arise when fellow students benefit from the work of others. Those students seeking conflict resolution within the group will value the transparent and equitable moderation of grades as well as the positive social implications that follow.

This research forms part of an ongoing quest to present a moderation instrument that fairly identifies student contribution to a group project. Whilst the solution proposed is one of many existing alternatives, its focus is on a practical moderation-only instrument that can immediately be applied to a course or major. The benefits lie in the ease of application and minimal administrative workload. This constitutes an original contribution to the individual (course or major) coordinator who seeks to apply a moderation-only instrument without having to commit to an extensive, broad-based group optimisation programme.

A seemingly obvious solution to improve resilience of built structures facing natural hazards is enhanced structural integrity. One program designed to achieve this is the building code effectiveness grading schedule (BCEGS) which rates communities on the strength and enforcement of local building codes. However, little is known on how well this program has fared in terms of community participation. The purpose of this study is to use the BCEGS program in Florida (a hurricane at-risk state) to provide tangible evidence of whether participatory achievement occurred and identify characteristics that predict high performance in the program.

Data is used from the Insurance Services Office, a division of Verisk Analytics to compare characteristics of communities with high levels of participation to communities with lower levels of participation. This is done using descriptive statistics and regression models.

Communities more likely to have high BCEGS ratings are more urban, have higher wealth and a younger, more educated population. Discussed also is the role risk exposure and public policy play in both maintaining higher ratings and overall improvement in BCEGS ratings across time.

Identifying what motivates communities to enhance their construction standards is a useful tool in attracting interest to enhance resilience. The results show that resilience can be improved by public policy initiatives and knowledge by communities of their risk profile.

BCEGS data is proprietary, so no study of this type has been conducted on what motivates communities to adopt higher standards in the strength and enforcement of local building codes.

In view of a lack of evidence on the effectiveness of climate change education (CCE) in China, this study aims to evaluate if a CCE course newly designed based on research recommendations and implemented with established pedagogy was effective in changing the beliefs and attitudes of first-year science students.

This study took a simple longitudinal approach with surveys administered at the beginning and the end of the course and the differences in the responses analyzed with nonparametric statistical analyses.

The results showed that the course produced significant changes in the beliefs concerning the anthropogenic causes of climate change and vulnerability to its impacts, which results in inequality of the impacts received. However, the course did not produce significant attitudinal changes among the students. Spearman’s correlation, which affirmed the belief–attitude association, revealed that the students already had desirable attitudes toward climate change and these attitudes had not been reinforced. The students’ perception of the importance of local government in climate action increased by the end of the course. Multimedia-aid learning, debates and discussions were useful in conveying the concepts of responsibility, ethics and vulnerability, but the addition of student-led community projects will increase personal significance of the course.

This study is instrumental for the development of a regional model of CCE in the mainstreaming of education for sustainable development in China, knowing that the regional approach is crucial to address the nuances in climate change knowledge, hence conceptions and beliefs across regions and, even, between different sectors of a region. This regional experience could also serve as a reference for other similar settings, particularly those of the developing countries.

This study presents one of the very few studies dedicated to gauging the effects of CCE in China, particularly of a newly developed climate change course, on the beliefs and attitudes of students. This permits pedagogical development and continuous improvement of CCE in China.

Universal Public Purchasing Certification Council (UPPCC) is an independent nonprofit entity formed to govern and administer the Certified Public Purchasing Officers (CPPO) and Certified Professional Public Buyers (CPPB) certification programs. Periodically, UPPCC performs a job analysis study to ensure that the certification exams are aligned with the skills, knowledge, and abilities needed for successful job performance in public procurement. This article provides a brief summary of the 2007 job analysis study.

Multiattribute ratings of country‐image are commonly obtained to study the influence of country‐of‐origin on product preference and purchase decisions. Usually, such ratings are obtained for products made in different countries in order to make comparisons across countries. However, recent research evidence indicates that, when individual respondents rate multiple entities (e.g., multiple countries), the ratings of a particular country can be affected by the other “contextual” countries included in the questionnaire. The purpose of this study is to examine, via a controlled experiment, the issue of measurement context effects in the measurement of country images. The hypotheses tested concern the stability of attribute‐based and entity‐based country image scaling and potential methods of reducing the vulnerability of multi‐entity scaling to entity context ‐‐ the use of an anchor entity and an insulator question set to increase country image measurement stability.

Most marketing researchers use rating scales to understand consumer preferences. These have a range of problems, which can be greatly ameliorated by the use of a new technique, best‐worst scaling (BWS). The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the BWS method by an empirical example, which demonstrates the steps to design and analyze a BW study.

A brief critique of ratings and rankings is presented. Then the basic concept of BWS is described, followed by how to use the BW method to explore how Australian and Israeli consumers choose wine in a retail store. The paper demonstrates the design of the questionnaire as well as the steps to analyze and present the results.

The BWS approach can be easily implemented for research in wine business especially for multicultural comparisons as it avoids scale confounds. After transformation of the best and worst scores of each respondent for each attribute, the data can be analyzed directly using various statistical methods and can be expressed as choice probabilities.

The advantage of BWS is its ability to compare attributes using B−W and B/W scores. The BW method provides a better discrimination of the attributes analyzed.

The simplicity of the analysis and graphical presentation makes a significant contribution to practitioners as the B−W counts and probabilities of attributes are easy to obtain and understand.

This paper presents BWS method in a form that researchers and practitioners can use and adopt for research and market surveys. The paper presents an empirical example using BWS method to determine the importance of wine cues while consumers are choosing wine in a retail store.

Drawing on mood regulation theories, the purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of employees’ coworker-helping behaviors (OCB-Is) on the relationships between prior negative affect and subsequent job satisfaction and creative performance. The authors hypothesize that employees’ work competence is a moderator of the relation between negative affect and OCB-Is.

Data were collected by the experience sampling method of self-rating (twice per day) and coworker-rating (once per day) over two weeks by 120 administrative employees and their coworkers in a university; 743 available days were obtained.

Multilevel modeling showed that self-rated negative affect during the morning was associated with coworker-rated OCB-Is during the afternoon; OCB-Is were positively associated with self-rated job satisfaction and coworker-rated creative performance during the afternoon; based on an indirect effect, OCB-Is mediated the relationships between negative affect and job satisfaction, and negative affect and creative performance; and employees with high-level work competences tended to engage in OCB-Is more than employees with low-level work competences when experiencing negative affect.

These findings suggest that OCB-Is create a positive reaction by converting negative affect into positive job satisfaction and creative performance and that employees’ work competence is the boundary condition.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an optimal technology selection (OTS) method considering technology alternatives' required input levels of resource, to help companies select an optimal technology.

The proposed method clustered technology alternatives according to their required input levels of resource. After that, in each cluster, the proposed method used data envelopment analysis‐assurance region (DEA‐AR) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) rating method to evaluate the efficiencies and priorities of the technology alternatives, respectively. Finally, combined scores of the technology alternatives were calculated. A company can choose a proper technology cluster, and then select the technology alternative with the highest combined score within the selected cluster as the optimal technology.

The results showed that the OTS method cannot only select suitable technology which accords with a company's actual input capabilities, but also provide a more accurate selection result.

Traditionally, technologies are evaluated without considering the technologies' required input levels, and simply ranked for selection. However, there are differences between a company's actual resource levels and a selected technology's required input levels of resource. This study proposes an integrated method to evaluate technology systematically and provides a more reasonable selection process for selecting optimal technology.