Clustering in Real Estate Prices: Determinants and Consequences

We examine the determinants and consequences of price clustering. Real estate list and transaction prices exhibit two price-ending characteristics: even (000-ending) and just-below-even (900-ending). The use of even-ending prices is negatively related to the precision of the price estimates and the cost of rounding. However, the tendency to use just-below-even-ending prices is related to the cost of rounding and to listing agency characteristics. The transaction price and the number of days on market are associated with list price clustering and with listing agency characteristics. Most properties are listed at just-below-even-ending prices, but those listed at even-ending prices sell faster and at a higher price. Finally, better transaction outcomes are positively associated with the number of area-properties listed by the seller?s real-estate agency.

Leading creative teams: A process-perspective with implications for organizational leaders

Leaders often find themselves managing teams of individuals who are tasked with creative problem-solving while confronting complex issues and ambiguous situations. Using a process perspective, we review three core processes of creativity (problem construction, idea generation, and idea evaluation/selection) and provide best-practice recommendations for leaders to increase their teams’ performance during each process. To facilitate problem construction, leaders should define constraints and goals without outright instructing teams on their course of action or defining the presenting problem. Leaders can apply project management techniques that budget for increased exploration and experimentation while building visions for the end product and providing opportunities for sensemaking. Idea generation can be facilitated by fostering a climate of psychological safety and avoiding the pitfalls of production blocking or evaluation apprehension. Leaders may recruit expert facilitators or apply technological solutions we describe. Finally, during idea evaluation, expert leaders may be well-situated to determine the best ideas themselves. However, nonexpert leaders should instruct their team to define evaluation criteria and take steps to avoid routine “tried-but-true” methods from being viewed disproportionately favorably during evaluation

Collective Impact versus Collaboration: Sides of the Same Coin OR Different Phenomenon?

Collective impact is a recently developed concept and approach to solving social problems that rectifies many of the issues associated with isolated impact. We compared collective impact and the formal definition of collaboration and made integrations between the two concepts. Specifically, we explored effective assessment and facilitation methods and applied them to collective impact initiatives in order to facilitate more purposeful implementation of collective impact. We concluded that collective impact is a specific form of collaboration

Teams in Small Organizations: Conceptual, Methodological, and Practical Considerations

Research on teams and teamwork has flourished in the last few decades. Much of what we know about teams and teamwork comes from research using short-term student teams in the lab, teams in larger organizations, and, more recently, teams in rather unique and extreme environments. The context in which teams operate influences team composition, processes, and effectiveness. Small organizations are an understudied and often overlooked context that presents a rich opportunity to augment our understanding of teams and team dynamics. In this paper, we discuss how teams and multi-team systems in small organizations may differ from those found in larger organizations. Many of these differences present both methodological and practical challenges to studying team composition and processes in small complex organizational settings. We advocate for applying and accepting new and less widely used methodological approaches to advance our understanding of the science of teams and teamwork in such contexts

Intellectual risk taking: A moderating link between creative confidence and creative behavior?

Having confidence in one’s creative ability seems necessary for creative behavior. The relationship, however, may not be as direct as creativity researchers have initially posited. Previous research on the relationship between creative confidence (CC) and creative behavior (CB) has yielded mixed findings. Moreover, emerging theoretical and empirical work suggests that the CC–CB relationship is moderated by other beliefs. In this exploratory study, we examined the relationship among intellectual risk taking (IRT), CC, and CB. Specifically, we tested 2 theoretical propositions. The first involved examining the posited relationship between creative confidence and creative behaviors. Consistent with our expectations, our preliminary results indicate positive, albeit somewhat modest correlations between creative confidence and creative achievements (r = .33), creative achievements in the arts (r = .17), creative achievements in science (r = .27), and participation in creative activities (r = .35). The second proposition involved examining whether IRT moderates the relationship between CC and CB. Our results indicate that IRT did serve as a moderator in the relationship between CC and CB. Specifically, our preliminary results indicate that willingness to take intellectual risks enhances the relationship between CC and CB. Moreover, our findings also indicate that at very low levels of IRT, there is no relationship between CC and CB. In sum, our results suggest that even if people have high levels of confidence in their creativity, they may also need to be willing to take the creative risks in order for creative confidence to develop into creative behavior. Theoretical and research implications of these findings are also discussed

Memory and Age Differences in Spatial Manipulation Ability

Young and old adults were asked, in 3 experiments, to make decisions about the identity of line segment patterns after either adding or subtracting line segments from the original pattern. On some of the trials, the line segments from the initial display were presented again in the second display to minimize the necessity of remembering early information during the processing of later information. Although this manipulation presumably reduced the importance of memory in the tasks, it had little effect on the magnitude of the age differences in any of the experiments. Because the 2 groups were equivalent in accuracy of simple recognition judgments, but older adults were less accurate when the same types of decisions were required in the context of an ongoing task, the results suggested that older adults may be impaired in the ability to retain information while simultaneously processing the same or other information

Memory Factors in Age-Related Differences in Simple Reasoning

Adults in their 50s were compared with adults in their late teens or 20s in the accuracy of relatively simple reasoning decisions involving varying amounts of information. Because the magnitude of the age differences in decision accuracy was independent of the amount of information relevant to the decision, it was suggested that adults in their 20s and 50s do not differ in the effectiveness of integrating information across multiple premises. However, the 2 groups differed in the accuracy of trials involving only a single relevant premise, and thus it was inferred that 1 factor contributing to reasoning differences within the age range from 20 to 60 may be a failure to encode, or retain, relevant information

Introduction to the Special Issue: What We Can Learn from Large Scale Human Resources Initiatives in the Federal Government and Department of Defense

Arguably, the government has some of the most complex and sophisticated Human Resource (HR) initiatives of any organization in the country. This is due to at least three reasons. First, the sheer size of the government requires sophisticated HR systems to manage the huge number of HR decisions required. Second, the HR systems in the government must respond to much greater external (public) scrutiny than any other organization because it is funded by government money and must be responsive to taxpayers interests and concerns. As such, fairness and defensibility are far more important factors than in other organizations. Third, the government HR systems must comply with many more laws and regulations than other organizations, thus placing constraints on informal judgment and discretion and requiring sophisticated formal decision-making systems

Debriefs: Teams Learning From Doing in Context

Debriefs are a type of work meeting in which teams discuss, interpret, and learn from recent events during which they collaborated. In a variety of forms, debriefs are found across a wide range of organizational types and settings. Well-conducted debriefs can improve team effectiveness by 25% across a variety of organizations and settings. For example, the U.S. military adopted debriefs decades ago to promote learning and performance across the various services. Subsequently, debriefs have been introduced in the medical field, the fire service, aviation, education, and in a variety of organizational training and simulation environments. After a discussion of various purposes for which debriefs have been used, we proceed with a historical review of development of the concepts and use in industries and contexts. We then review the psychological factors relevant to debrief effectiveness and the outcomes for individuals, teams, and organizations that deploy debriefs. Future directions of particular interest to team researchers across a variety of psychological disciplines are presented along with a review of how best to implement debriefs from a practical perspective

Reanalysis of Genetic Data and Rethinking Dopamine\u27s Relationship With Creativity

Several genetic analyses of creativity have recently been reported. A key finding is that dopamine might be related to ideational fluency (Runco, Noble, Reiter-Palmon, Acar, Ritchie, & Yurkovich, 2011) or even to creativity per se (Reuter, Roth, Holve, & Hennig, 2006). Previous analyses have ignored an important part of genetic theory, however, namely the likelihood of polygenetic contributions. Many human characteristics are polygenetic