ABSTRACT
Green spaces provide people with countless intangible benefits, particularly important during crises. Restrictions imposed in many countries due to the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to maintain social distance, limit travels, and even refrain from visiting green spaces and stay at home at a certain point. The survey in one of the largest cities in Poland, Kraków, was intended to help understand the impact of the pandemic on the importance of urban green spaces to the public. The study focused on the first three stages of the pandemic in Poland, from March to November 2020. Nine weeks of the survey yielded over 1250 responses. Responses to spatial questions were analysed with GIS tools and geoprocessing algorithms. The number of visitors to green spaces during the pandemic fell to 78.9% of the population, which is down 13.1% compared to before the pandemic. At the same time, the percentage of people refraining from the visits fell with each phase of the crisis. According to the study, residents believed green spaces to be important for their mental and physical health. Over 75% of the participants considered visits to green spaces as having a very big or big impact on stress level reduction. The work provides empirical proof of the importance of green spaces to residents, particularly during a crisis. The results can affect urban spatial policies and management of green spaces and can potentially be applied in other cities.
ABSTRACT
The objective of the paper is to diagnose organisational culture of selected universities and analyse its impact on the innovation processes within them. The subject matter of the study was organisational culture and innovation at universities. The subjects were four selected universities in Poland, Austria, Germany, and Ukraine. The paper provided a definition of organisational culture and its typology. It further discussed the organisational culture of universities and the relationships between organisational culture and innovativeness. The literature review provided foundations for building a model for the formation of a type of organisational culture at universities that is innovation-friendly, which is the added value of the paper. It offers actions worth taking to shape innovation-friendly culture at universities. It is particularly important during difficult time of changing labour market, when universities greatly impact the attitudes of young people. The knowledge of how to shape innovation-friendly organisational culture at universities is necessary for academia to profile future employees in times of continuous changes. To investigate the relationship between organisational culture and the innovativeness of universities, we designed an original survey questionnaire [S1 File]. Organisational culture was diagnosed with the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument by K.S. Cameron and R.E. Quinn. The analyses were conducted in Dell Statistica v. 13.1 (StatSoft Polska). We normalised data from the Likert rating scale using Kaufman's and Rousseeuw's formula. We used Spearman's correlation coefficient and Kendall's W to calculate correlations. The research shows that the investigated Polish and Austrian universities are dominated by hierarchy and market cultures. On the other hand, the German and Ukrainian universities host all cultures, but clan and adhocracy dominate there. Moreover, the analyses demonstrated that although the adhocracy culture was the least visible in the investigated organisations, it contributes to university innovativeness the most. The conclusions were used to build a model for promoting innovation-friendly organisational culture at universities. The model contains answers to the research questions. In addition, it offers guidelines for shaping organisational culture to bolster innovation at universities. The research identified relationships between organisational culture and university innovativeness and components that create innovation opportunities at universities as its contribution to management theory. When applied in practice, the guidelines can help form the university's organisational culture bottom-up.
