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This manuscript explores the evolving roles of HR professionals amidst global megatrends and organizational transitions, focusing on the Italian context, which has experienced disruptive adoption of new forms of work such as remote and hybrid work. In this challenging scenario, our research aims to uncover if and how HR professionals are transforming their roles or maintaining the status quo in navigating organizational changes, dealing with the upcoming working scenario, and challenging conventional perceptions of HR practitioners.

The study employs the social-symbolic work lens, that contributes to a deeper understanding of how HR professionals work to construct organizational life, the identities of employees, and the societal norms and assumptions that provide the context for organizational action. This perspective highlights HR professionals’ personal efforts, consisting of the emotional labor entailed in steering organizational transformations and, eventually, maintenance in a context where remote work has become prevalent. Data was collected through 16 online focus groups involving 76 HR professionals from Italian organizations.

Our research offers two interrelated contributions to HR literature. First, we provide pieces of evidence on how HR practitioners act as agents of change in two emerging roles: the “Wannabe Hero” and the “Ordinary Hero”. This challenges the prevailing rhetorical discourse about the so-called HR business partner. Secondly, we delve into the persistent obstacles that hinder HR professionals from making a substantial impact in addressing radical changes. These findings will provide useful insights into effectively engaging HR practitioners as agents of change in organizational transformation, shedding light on praxis, structures, and their emotional work.

The paper analyzes HR professionals’ social-symbolic work, which offers an original contribution to the comprehension of the activities they carry on in practice and the emotions they have been experiencing. These influence both the way HR professionals play their role and the organizational and institutional environment.

This study explores the impact of transformational leadership on work engagement within remote work settings. More specifically, we investigate whether supervisor’s perceived digital communication skills moderate the relationship between perceived supervisor support and work engagement.

Moderated mediation model has been tested using a sample of 410 consultants in Italy who worked within a fully remote work setting during Covid-19 pandemic.

Drawing on construal level theory and social presence theory, our study provides insights into the dynamics of leadership and work engagement in remote work settings. We demonstrate that, despite the challenges posed by physical distance, transformational leaders can effectively stimulate the work engagement of remote collaborators. Moreover, our findings suggest that the perceived digital communication skills of supervisors play a crucial role in moderating the relationship between perceived supervisor support and work engagement. This underscores the importance of supervisors' adept use of digital tools in conveying psychological presence and fostering employee engagement in remote work environments.

Our study highlights the importance of developing supervisors' digital communication skills to support and stimulate employee engagement in remote work settings.

This study contributes to the literature by providing one of the first empirical tests of the relationship between transformational leadership, perceived supervisor support, supervisor’s digital communication skills and work engagement within a remote work setting. By challenging prior assumptions and offering novel insights, our research enhances understanding of leadership dynamics and provides practical guidance for organizations navigating the challenges of remote work.

This current study examines the moderating role of gender in the nexus between the dimensions of work-family culture and work-family enrichment in the hospitality industry.

This study employed a cross-sectional survey approach to conveniently gather data from a sample of 296 respondents in the Ghanaian hospitality industry. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to examine the data received from the respondents with the aid of IBM SPSS Statistics (V26.0) software and the PROCESS macro for SPSS (V3.5).

As hypothesised in the study, the dimensions of work-family culture significantly predicted work-family enrichment. Further, the results revealed that gender moderated the nexus between the dimensions of work-family culture and work-family enrichment.

The findings of this study imply that hotels in the hospitality industry should foster a working environment that embraces a positive work and family culture that ultimately influences the quality of work and family life of an employee, taking into consideration their gender.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this current study is amongst the first to examine the moderating role of gender in the nexus between the dimensions of work-family culture and work-family enrichment in the hospitality industry.

Based on social exchange theory and social identification theory, I investigated how employee organizational identification affects the effectiveness of commitment-based human resource (HR) practices. I focused on employee attitudes (job satisfaction) and behaviors (proactive knowledge seeking) as HR practices’ outcomes.

Using a structural equation modeling analytical approach, I tested the hypotheses with data from a web-based cross-sectional survey of 208 specialists and engineers of manufacturing subsidiaries in Poland.

Results showed that the positive relationship between commitment-based-HR practices and job satisfaction is weakened for employees strongly identified with the organization. Simultaneously, the connection between seeking knowledge and job satisfaction is stronger and more important for people who identify moderately to strongly.

The study limitations regard mainly its cross-sectional design and single cultural and industrial context.

From the managerial perspective, the study suggests that to enhance proactive employee behavior, companies need to increase employee organizational identification and ensure that employees have a positive perception of the implemented HR practices.

The study contributes to the ongoing discussion on whether individual contingencies affect the effectiveness of commitment-based HR practices in the form of individual attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. The findings revealed that the contingent effect of organizational identification depends on the type of individual outcomes, suggesting that the strength of organizational identification affects how employees decide to reciprocate the organization’s attention and investment.

Self-presentation is an important aspect of influencer marketing. Drawing upon self-presentation theory and source credibility theory, this study aimed to unravel how the self-presentation strategies of a layperson, opinion leadership and micro-celebrity influence source credibility (i.e. trustworthiness, expertise, physical attractiveness and social attractiveness) and how source credibility, in turn, affects brand responses.

An online experiment among female participants (N = 229) was conducted. Participants were shown a sponsored blog in which the influencer presented herself as either a layperson, an opinion leader or a micro-celebrity.

The study demonstrated that the presentation strategy of a layperson was more persuasive than a micro-celebrity presentation because of higher levels of (1) trust and (2) social attractiveness. In addition, opinion leaders were perceived as having more expertise than laypeople and, therefore, positively enhanced brand responses.

The current findings provide relevant insights into the theoretical mechanisms (i.e. expertise, trustworthiness and social attractiveness) that explain the effects of self-presentation strategies on brand responses.

Our findings imply that credibility perceptions determine the persuasiveness of the SMI. This study showed that layperson and opinion leadership self-presentation strategies are relatively more persuasive.

This study is the first to show that influencers’ self-presentation strategies determine how people respond to the brands that influencers promote. In addition, we show that these effects are explained by the influencers’ trust, social attractiveness and expertise.

This study explores the interplay between levels of cultures and aspects of quality management (QM), aiming to develop a conceptual framework and introduce propositions regarding managing quality in a multinational company (MNC).

A conceptual framework delineating the relationship between the levels of cultures in MNCs and various aspects of QM is proposed. Thereafter, based on a theory elaboration approach, a case study in Swedish facilities of MNCs is used to further illustrate the link between constructs of the framework, contributing to the identification of challenges and possibilities in managing quality in MNCs.

The research identifies key propositions regarding the intricate relationship between levels of cultures and their influences on aspects of QM in MNC. Proposition 1 emphasises the impact of national cultural differences on perceptions of QM principles. Proposition 2 reveals that diverse QM perceptions affect global consistency in QM practices. However, proposition 3 suggests that emphasising technical aspects in common QM practices fosters shared perceptions and a cohesive organisational culture, leading to Proposition 4, that a QM-centric organisational culture mediates national cultural differences, facilitating the management of quality globally.

This research relies on a case study from a Swedish perspective. There is a need for quantitative or mixed method approaches to validate the proposed framework.

This research yields practical insights into cross-cultural QM challenges and possibilities in MNCs.

By integrating national and organisational culture into the QM framework, this research offers a conceptual model and propositions as a foundation for future cross-cultural QM research in MNCs.

In this impact paper, I outline how a new inclusion theory generated non-scholarly impact even before it was published and share my personal experiences with mental and institutional barriers to creating that impact. With this, I hope to (1) help readers relate to and understand the issues that they are facing in creating impact and (2) inspire academics and academic institutions to remove obstacles to creating impact.

After outlining the new theory and the impact it has generated, I autobiographically describe the barriers to impact that I experienced, split up into two categories: mental and institutional barriers.

I discerned six main barriers that I had to overcome. Three of these are mental obstacles: impact order beliefs, prioritizing impact and a lack of examples. The other three are institutional obstacles: a lack of incentives for doing impact work, a lack of resources and an incompatibility between the impact form and the institutional environment.

It can be daunting to hear about the impact that others are having when the journey to get there is being left out and success stories run the risk of pretending that there were no or only a few obstacles involved. In sharing the struggles involved with doing an impact in my particular case, I hope to provide a more realistic insight into the barriers that one is likely to face in doing impact and issue a wider call for removing barriers to making impact.

This study aims to discern and refine the role of emotional intelligence (EI) in the development of customer orientation among banking employees in Morocco. This analysis seeks to enhance understanding about the significance of this emotional skill within the Moroccan banking sector.

The research embraces an interpretivist philosophical perspective to gain insight into the subjective meanings and experiences of study participants. The methodology employed is qualitative, involving data collected from semi-structured interviews conducted with 21 front-office bank employees. The analysis of the data was conducted through employing thematic analysis.

The findings of this study conclude that emotional intelligence fosters and stimulates customer orientation for bank employees. The perception, understanding and effective management of emotions – both those of the contact personnel and their customers – enable employees to better comprehend customer reactions. They experience heightened empathy through the impact of accumulated professional experience, adapt their behaviors according to the emotional state of the customer, maintain a positive relationship with them and ultimately gain their confidence.

This study offers clear theoretical explanations and conceptualizations that have identified and linked pertinent literature on the topic. It focuses on a salient subject, investigating how emotional intelligence influences the customer-oriented behavior of front-office bank employees. Notably, this study represents one of the first attempts to explore this relationship within the Moroccan context. As a result, it contributes to the enhancement of managerial practices and human resource policies, thereby fostering a more productive and harmonious working environment.

Organisations increasingly rely on professional interim managers (PIMs), i.e. independent contractors who perform managerial work. These managers, who are usually very experienced and skilled, could help organisations drastically improve their performance. However, research has found that they often fail to do so, indicating that PIMs face unique on-the-job challenges that challenge their capability to be effective managers. In the study reported in this paper, I explored PIMs’ on-the-job challenges and how they overcome them. To better understand the various on-the-job challenges, I developed the concept of the liability of outsiderness.

I applied an exploratory approach and conducted 32 interviews with 21 PIMs.

I uncovered three on-the-job challenges common and unique to PIMs – communicating the contract status and contract period, being quick off the mark and attaining power – and the ways they overcome these challenges.

This paper reports findings and theory that provide several valuable guidelines for practitioners involved with interim management.

Interim management has received little scholarly attention despite its increasing relevance. Empirical research, particularly on PIMs in executive positions, is lacking. This leaves us with little evidence to base our theories and guidelines for interim management. The study reported in this paper adds novel insights to an under-researched but important field of management. The study also introduces the liability of outsiderness concept, which holds much promise for future studies of interim management.

This paper evaluated the effectiveness of blended learning of business courses in higher learning institutions (HEIs) in developing economies.

A survey, involving 215 learners, was used to collect data. A stratified sampling technique was used in this study. The data were analyzed using the PROCESS macro in SPSS.

In the blended learning approach, student attitudes, social presence, IT infrastructure and flexible learning are all favorable predictors of learner satisfaction. The impact of blended learning on learner satisfaction is further mediated by IT infrastructure, social presence and learner attitude.

HEIs need to invest in planning and resource mobilization in order to realize several benefits derived from the use of blended learning. For optimal learning outcomes, this should be combined with training on IT infrastructure usage for both facilitators and learners. In order to assist learners in developing competencies through consistent use, institutions should also invest in tailored blended learning technologies. In addition, emphasis should be placed on training all actors in order to better manage change.

This paper presents and ranks several dimensions for blended learning success in low-budget universities. In addition, the study contributes to the understanding of intervening variables necessary for enhancing the potential of pedagogy in maximizing learner satisfaction.