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Leaders are role models and through social influence processes, they shape the behaviour of their followers. We build on social learning, social identity and person-environment (P-E) fit theories of leadership to explore the association between leaders’ and followers’ resilient behaviours.

In a three-wave, multisource study amongst 269 Dutch leaders and their followers, we investigate the mediating role of coaching in the relationship between leaders’ resilient behaviour and followers’ resilient behaviour and the moderating role of regulatory focus in this mediation path.

Our results show that coaching is a key relational vehicle through which leaders’ resilient behaviours shape employees’ resilient behaviours, and this indirect association is stronger for employees scoring low on promotion focus. In addition, our results show that resilient employees attract more coaching from their leaders, which further strengthens their resilient behaviours.

Existing studies have shown the occurrence of trickle-down effects of various leader behaviours, moods and work states on those of their followers. However, it remained obscure whether leaders’ resilient behaviour could trickle down to followers’ as well. Our study shows that such a link indeed exists and that coaching is a relational vehicle that embodies two key mechanisms to (1) foster social learning through behavioural entrainment and contagion and (2) facilitate support provision through which leaders promote resilient behaviour in their followers.

This study aims to ascertain the personal characteristics of a group of successful academic entrepreneurs in a South African university enterprise and the prevalent barriers and enablers to their entrepreneurial endeavour.

The authors used a Delphi process to identify and rank the characteristics, enablers, barriers and behaviours of entrepreneurial academics, with a Nominal Group Technique applied to establish challenges they encounter managing their enterprise and to propose solutions.

Perseverance, resilience and innovation are critical personal characteristics, while collaborative networks, efficient research infrastructure and established research competence are essential for success. The university’s support for entrepreneurship is a significant enabler, with unnecessary bureaucracy and poor access to project and general enterprise funding an impediment. Successful academic entrepreneurs have strong leadership, and effective management and communication skills.

The main limitation is the small study participant group drawn from a single university enterprise, which complicates generalisability. The study supported the use of Krueger’s (2009) entrepreneurial intentions model for low- and middle-income country (LMIC) academic entrepreneur investigation but proposed the inclusion of mitigators to entrepreneurial activation to recognise contextual deficiencies and challenges.

Skills-deficient LMIC universities should extensively and directly support their entrepreneurial academics to overcome their contextual deficiencies and challenging environment.

This study contributes to addressing the paucity of academic entrepreneur research in LMIC contexts by identifying LMIC-specific factors that inhibit the entrepreneur’s movement from entrepreneurial intention to entrepreneurial action.

With the growing need for employees to be innovative, public-sector organizations are investing in employee training. This study aims to examine the effects of a combined Lean Six Sigma and innovation training, using action learning, on public-sector employees’ creative role identity and innovative work behavior.

The authors studied a public service agency in Singapore in which a five-day Lean Innovation Training was implemented, using a combination of Lean Six Sigma and Creative Problem-Solving tools, with a simulation on day one and subsequent team-based project coaching, spread over six months. The authors administered pre- and postintervention surveys among all the employees, and initiated group interviews and observations before, during and after the intervention.

Creative role identity and innovative work behavior had significantly improved six months after the intervention, enabled through senior management’s transformational leadership. The training induced managers to role-model innovative work behaviors while cocreating, with their employees, a renewal of their agency’s core processes. The three completed improvement projects contributed to an innovative work culture and reduced service turnaround time.

Starting with a role-playing simulation on the first day, during which leaders and followers swapped roles, the action-learning type training taught all the organizational members to use various Lean Six Sigma and Creative Problem-Solving tools. This nimble Lean Innovation Training, and subsequent team-based project coaching, exemplifies how advancing the staff’s creative role identity can have a positive impact.

Managers must make numerous strategic decisions in order to initiate and implement a business model innovation (BMI). This paper examines how managers perceive the management team interacts when making BMI decisions. The paper also investigates how group biases and board members’ risk willingness affect this process.

Empirical data were collected through 26 in-depth interviews with German managing directors from 13 companies in four industries (mobility, manufacturing, healthcare and energy) to explore three research questions: (1) What group effects are prevalent in BMI group decision-making? (2) What are the key characteristics of BMI group decisions? And (3) what are the potential relationships between BMI group decision-making and managers' risk willingness? A thematic analysis based on Gioia's guidelines was conducted to identify themes in the comprehensive dataset.

First, the results show four typical group biases in BMI group decisions: Groupthink, social influence, hidden profile and group polarization. Findings show that the hidden profile paradigm and groupthink theory are essential in the context of BMI decisions. Second, we developed a BMI decision matrix, including the following key characteristics of BMI group decision-making managerial cohesion, conflict readiness and information- and emotion-based decision behavior. Third, in contrast to previous literature, we found that individual risk aversion can improve the quality of BMI decisions.

This paper provides managers with an opportunity to become aware of group biases that may impede their strategic BMI decisions. Specifically, it points out that managers should consider the key cognitive constraints due to their interactions when making BMI decisions. This work also highlights the importance of risk-averse decision-makers on boards.

This qualitative study contributes to the literature on decision-making by revealing key cognitive group biases in strategic decision-making. This study also enriches the behavioral science research stream of the BMI literature by attributing a critical influence on the quality of BMI decisions to managers' group interactions. In addition, this article provides new perspectives on managers' risk aversion in strategic decision-making.

This study aims to contribute knowledge about different professional identities represented among HR practitioners from Weber's “ideal types” framework.

The paper is based on semi-structured interviews with 34 Swedish HR practitioners working in large public and private organisations.

The findings reveal that HR practitioners' identity is perceived as indistinct, unclear and shattered, which leaves lots of room for interpreting HR identity. Based on a thematic content analysis, three different ideal-type identities are presented, each representing the characteristic traits of an HR identity type. These are the Defender who always supports the managers, the Disturber who questions the managers in favour of the employees and the Driver who focuses on the economic expansion of the organisation.

One of the potential constraints of this study is the authors’ reliance on interview data. This finding implies that future research can employ mixed methods or observational techniques to bridge the gap between narrated responsibilities and real-time actions. The data source, predominantly from larger organisations, presents another limitation. This raises a significant research implication: there is a need to study identity formation among HR practitioners in smaller organisations. The theoretical framework this study contributes can aid in comprehending HR practitioners' identities and their corresponding actions. Continued research might explore the significance of these ideal-type identities.

The model presented provides a new way of understanding HR practitioners' complex and shattered professional identity and the various stakeholders that direct different expectations towards them. This knowledge can be used both in HR education and in HR work as a basis for discussing the social work environment of HR practitioners and negotiating their work and identity.

The study contributes knowledge of the professional identities of HR managers, an under-researched area, especially when it comes to empirical research about the HR practitioners' own experiences of their everyday work and view of the HR profession.

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has challenged leadership in hospitals worldwide. The experiences of leadership during the pandemic changed leadership significantly. This study aims to describe nurse leaders’ perceptions of what future leadership in hospital settings in the post-pandemic era needs to be like.

A qualitative descriptive study was used. A total of 20 nurse leaders from the Finnish central hospital were interviewed from June to October 2021. The data were analysed using inductive content analysis.

The analysis revealed five main categories describing nurse leaders’ perceptions of future leadership in hospital settings in the post-pandemic era: digitalisation and hybrid working culture, development of sustainable working conditions, moving smoothly to the post-pandemic era, dissolution of traditional regimes of organisation and flexibility in leadership.

In the post-pandemic era, the constantly changing demands and challenges currently facing healthcare systems have significantly increased the complexity of hospital organisations. This requires critical evaluation and change to traditional leadership. Enhancing flexibility and authenticity in leadership, strengthening competencies, implementing a wide range of digital resources and increasing the appeal of the nursing profession to build the next generation of nurses – all of these are needed to provide sustainability in future healthcare.

The results identify the critical points of leadership that need to be developed for future challenges and for maintaining a sufficient supply of qualified professionals. Acting on this information will enhance flexibility in organisations and lead to acceleration of changes and the development of new kinds of leadership in the future

This research aimed to explore the commonalities and differences in the type of information provided on corporate websites in relation to their employment brand equity.

Mixed methods of content analysis, ANOVA and regression analyses were employed to answer the research questions. The data were collected from multiple sources, including the websites of a sample of forty companies listed as the US Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work in 2012 and information presented on Fortune’s website as well.

Employment brand equity hardly showed any significant impact on either company’s job growth or reputation in the ranking as an “employer of choice”.

The results indicated some practices to make a company’s employment brand outstanding and how its web presence reflected its “brand” and presence for potential employees. They are useful for HR practitioners concerned with building an employee brand. For example, the more highly ranked companies in the Fortune 100 tend to provide more forms of online support related to employment opportunities.

Using brand equity theory from the marketing arena and applying this within the human resources management area, this study suggests that “employment brand equity” became a major factor that many companies and organizations should focus on to enhance their standing with job seekers, particularly talented ones. Nearly a decade before the COVID-19 pandemic, the best companies to work for in the US had paid attention to digitalization via websites and social media, to attract talent (and support employees).

The purpose of this paper is to describe the perception of real teamwork and sustainable quality culture as well as success factors for achieving a sustainable quality culture within an organisation, focusing on top management teams (TMTs). An additional purpose is to explore the relationship between real teamwork and sustainable quality culture.

A mixed-methods design focusing on TMTs was used. Four TMTs were open-sampled and located in different parts of Sweden. The data were collected through questionnaires and focus group discussions between April 2022 and December 2022. Follow-up meetings were thereafter held with the participants. A meta-analysis was conducted of the data from the four TMTs.

Two overarching conclusions of this study were: to follow the developed methodology can be one way to increase TMTs' abilities for real teamwork alongside a sustainable quality culture, and the results also showed the importance of a systems view, emotional commitment and continuous improvement for improving real teamwork and creating a sustainable quality culture.

Practical implications were suggestions on how to increase the TMTs' abilities for real teamwork alongside a sustainable quality culture. A deepened understanding of real teamwork and a sustainable quality culture was also achieved by the participants.

The novelty of this paper is the use of a new methodology for assessing teamwork and sustainable quality culture. To the authors' knowledge, no similar research has previously been performed to investigate teamwork alongside a sustainable quality culture, focusing on TMTs.

Our study centered on activity-based workspaces (ABWs), unassigned open-plan configurations where users’ activities determine the workplace. These workspaces are conceived and shaped by accommodation professionals (APs) like managers and architects and are loaded with their ideas, ideals, norms and values; therefore, they are normative and hegemonic. Previous research has largely failed to consider how APs’ spatial conceptions materialize in the workplace. To address this omission, we adopted a narrative approach to study APs’ impact during the conceptualization stage.

The data were collected via a 10-year at-home ethnographic study at a Dutch university, including observations, interviews, documents and reports. Studying the researchers’ organization allowed for a longitudinal research approach and participative observations. The data focused on the narrative techniques of APs when establishing an ABW.

In introducing ABWs, APs resorted to two principal narrative strategies. Firstly, the ABW concept was lauded as a solution to a host of existing problems. Yet, in the face of shortcomings, lecturers were often blamed.

Despite the considerable influence of APs on both the physical layout of workspaces and the nature of academic labor, there is little insight into their conceptions of the academic workspace. Our research contributes a novel perspective by revealing how APs’ workspace conceptions drive the narratives that underpin the roll-out of ABWs and how they construct narratives of success and failure.

To increase the understanding of how entrepreneurship education impacts entrepreneurial careers, the purpose of the paper is to investigate the role that a venture creation program (VCP) might have in mitigating or surpassing a lack of other antecedents of entrepreneurial careers. In particular, the authors focus on entrepreneurial pedigree and prior entrepreneurial experience.

Data from graduates of VCPs at three universities in Northern Europe were collected through an online survey. Questions addressed graduate background prior to education, yearly occupational employment subsequent to graduation and graduates' own perceptions of entrepreneurial activity in employment positions. The survey was sent to 1,326 graduates and received 692 responses (52.2% response rate).

The type of VCP, either independent (Ind-VCP) or corporate venture creation (Corp-VCP), influenced the mitigation of prior entrepreneurial experience. Prior entrepreneurial experience, together with Ind-VCP, made a career as self-employed more likely. However, this was not the case for Corp-VCP in subsequently choosing intrapreneurial careers. Entrepreneurial pedigree had no significant effect on career choice other than for hybrid careers.

Entrepreneurial experience gained from VCPs seems to influence graduates toward future entrepreneurial careers. Evidence supports the conclusion that many VCP graduates who lack prior entrepreneurial experience or entrepreneurial pedigree can develop sufficient entrepreneurial competencies through the program.

This study offers novel evidence that entrepreneurship education can compensate for a lack of prior entrepreneurial experience and exposure for students preparing for entrepreneurial careers.