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The authors examine psychologically informed coaching approaches for evidence-based work-applied management through a meta-analysis. This analysis synthesized previous empirical coaching research evidence on cognitive behavioral and positive psychology frameworks regarding a range of workplace outcomes, including learning, performance and psychological well-being.

The authors undertook a systematic literature search to identify primary studies (k = 20, n = 957), then conducted a meta-analysis with robust variance estimates (RVEs) to test the overall effect size and the effects of each moderator.

The results confirm that psychologically informed coaching approaches facilitated effective work-related outcomes, particularly on goal attainment (g = 1.29) and self-efficacy (g = 0.59). Besides, these identified coaching frameworks generated a greater impact on objective work performance rated by others (e.g. 360 feedback) than on coachees' self-reported performance. Moreover, a cognitive behavioral-oriented coaching process stimulated individuals' internal self-regulation and awareness to promote work satisfaction and facilitated sustainable changes. Yet, there was no statistically significant difference between popular and commonly used coaching approaches. Instead, an integrative coaching approach that combines different frameworks facilitated better outcomes (g = 0.71), including coachees' psychological well-being.

Effective coaching activities should integrate cognitive coping (e.g. combining cognitive behavioral and solution-focused technique), positive individual traits (i.e. strength-based approach) and contextual factors for an integrative approach to address the full range of coachees' values, motivators and organizational resources for yielding positive outcomes.

Building on previous meta-analyses and reviews of coaching, this synthesis offers a new insight into effective mechanisms to facilitate desired coaching results. Frameworks grounded in psychotherapy and positive appear most prominent in the literature, yet an integrative approach appears most effective.

A major part of knowledge management for knowledge-intensive firms such as professional service firms is the increasing focus on thought leadership. Despite being a well-known term, it is poorly defined and analysed in the academic and practitioner literature. The aim of this article is to answer three questions. First, what is thought leadership? Second, what tensions exist when seeking to create thought leadership in knowledge-based organisations? Third, what further research is needed about thought leadership? The authors call for cross-disciplinary and academic–practitioner approaches to understanding the field of thought leadership.

The authors review the academic and practitioner literature on thought leadership to provide a rich oversight of how it is defined and can be understood by separating inputs, creation processes and outcomes. The authors also draw on qualitative data from 12 in-depth interviews with senior leaders of professional service firms.

Through analysing and building on previous understandings of the concept, the authors redefine thought leadership as follows: “Knowledge from a trusted, eminent and authoritative source that is actionable and provides valuable solutions for stakeholders”. The authors find and explore nine tensions that developing thought leadership creates and propose a framework for understanding how to engage with thought leadership at the industry/macro, organisational/meso and individual/micro levels. The authors propose a research agenda based on testing propositions derived from new theories to explain thought leadership, including leadership, reducing risk, signalling quality and managing social networks, as well as examining the suggested ways to resolve different tensions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, they are the first to separate out thought leadership from its inputs, creation processes and outcomes. The authors show new organisational paradoxes within thought leadership and show how they can play out at different levels of analysis when implementing a thought leadership strategy. This work on thought leadership is set in a relatively under-explored context for knowledge management researchers, namely, knowledge-intensive professional service firms.

This study aims to deepen the understanding of insurers’ role within the return-to-work (RTW) process by uncovering and categorizing the multiple roles assumed by the insurer based on the claimant’s perceptions and identifying the underlying mechanisms that explain the relationship between perceived insurer roles and occupational rehabilitation outcomes.

The author used a qualitative approach with theory-guided content analysis to examine 24 semi-structured interviews with occupational rehabilitation claimants who had undergone occupational rehabilitation within the earnings-related pension insurance system in Finland.

The author uncovered three perceived insurer roles in relation to other stakeholders in the rehabilitation network: financier, coordinator and leader. These roles have different perceived responsibilities and influences on rehabilitation outcomes. Additionally, the author found four perceived insurer roles in relation to the claimants, which varied according to their democracy and activity levels: ally, facilitator, enforcer or enemy. Based on this study, the author recommends that insurers adopt democratic and participatory actor roles (ally and facilitator) to promote the RTW process in occupational rehabilitation.

This inaugural study applied role theory to insurers within the RTW process, developing a new framework of insurer profiles. This study reveals the dynamic nature of insurers and enhances the understanding of the connections between perceived insurer roles and rehabilitation outcomes.

The climate crisis presents a global threat. Research shows the necessity of joint communication efforts across different arenas—media, politics, business, academia and protest—to address this threat. However, communication about social change in response to the climate crisis comes with challenges. These challenges manifest, among others, in public accusations of inconsistency in terms of hypocrisy and incapability against self-declared change agents in different arenas. This increasingly turns public climate communication into a “blame game”.

Strategic communication scholarship has started to engage in this debate, thereby acknowledging climate communication as an arena-spanning, necessarily contested issue. Still, a systematic overview of specific inconsistency accusations in different public arenas is lacking. This conceptual article provides an overview based on a macro-focused public arena approach and decoupling scholarship.

Drawing on a systematic literature review of climate-related strategic communication scholarship and key debates from climate communication research in neighboring domains, the authors develop a framework mapping how inconsistency accusations of hypocrisy and incapacity, that is, policy–practice and means–ends decoupling, manifest in different climate communication arenas.

This framework creates awareness for the shared challenge of decoupling accusations across different climate communication arenas, underscoring the necessity of an arena-spanning strategic communication agenda. This agenda requires a communicative shift from downplaying to embracing decoupling accusations, from mutual blaming to approval of accountable ways of working through accusations and from confrontation to cooperation of agents across arenas.

The research is aimed at elaborating a model in which dynamic capabilities affect sustainable competitiveness via organisational sustainability practices and the mediating role of organisational ambidexterity.

Emphasising the need for business sustainability in the face of technological breakthroughs, resource depletion and increasing expectations of stakeholders, it is necessary to reflect on a long-term organisational resilience that would enable sustainable competitiveness through dynamic capabilities. Hence, the paper provides insights on how an organisation can sustain its competitiveness by constantly balancing between the need for continuous improvement due to the pressure in economic, social and ecological environment, and the pursuit of continuous improvement of performance. The authors used structural equation modelling on data collected via a survey of 455 organisations from the Baltic region.

The results confirm the relationships between sensing and reconfiguring capabilities and sustainability practices, but reject them for scanning capabilities. They also confirm the impact of sustainability practices on some of the pillars of sustainable competitiveness. The research disclosed that ambidexterity was a mediator between dynamic capabilities and sustainable competitiveness.

The paper discloses the link between dynamic capabilities and sustainable competitive advantage by identifying the main characteristics of the constructs and revealing the linkage between them.

The purpose is to investigate whether Brazilian e-commerce nonusers all have the same reasons not to purchase online or whether different behavior patterns might lead them to cluster in different groups.

This study carried out cluster analyses on a large sample (N = 9,065) from a nationwide survey on the use of information and communication technology in Brazil.

Three clusters of e-commerce nonusers were identified: the first cluster is quite reluctant; the second is characterized by disbelief in e-commerce; and the last cluster includes members who must see a product to believe it. Overall, nonusers have different reasons not to shop online, but they also share some similarities in this regard. Furthermore, socioeconomic factors do not seem to affect their behavior. The findings suggest that merchants’ failure to attract customers’ attention and tangibility are the major barriers to e-commerce use.

Even though nonusers have different reasons not to shop online, the key pattern that emerges is the value of tangibility for these individuals, which is a barrier present in all three clusters. This suggests that current marketing strategies and advertisements are ineffective to reach these consumers. Vendors should therefore try different approaches.

The findings contribute to the information systems (IS) literature by bringing a new perspective to the understanding of e-commerce rejection in addition to having managerial implications that involve strategies to attract potential users based on their specificities.

Recent research acknowledges entrepreneurial passion’s outcomes, but far less is known about how entrepreneurial passion comes about. In this study, the authors are interested in the emergence of entrepreneurial passion, and how competences and social network are associated with entrepreneurial passion. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors investigate whether entrepreneurial passion emerges out of socialisation, entrepreneurial experience or various combinations thereof. The authors tested the hypotheses on a data set of entrepreneurs who started their businesses with government financial support (n=1150).

The findings show that within a social environment, perceived emotional support is positively associated with entrepreneurial passion. Moreover, entrepreneurs’ task-related competence moderates this relationship positively. By investigating the emergence of entrepreneurial passion, the authors contribute to prior passion literature, which has mainly focused on its consequences.

The findings demonstrate both how entrepreneurial passion is associated with and how perceived emotional support can stem from unexpected sources, such as from a government-based start-up grant. For entrepreneurs, an increased awareness of passion’s emergence could better encourage them in their entrepreneurial endeavours. To people who are engaged in promoting entrepreneurship, our findings emphasise the symbolic and emotional aspects of instruments intended to support entrepreneurship.

Over the past 20 years, China's infrastructure has developed at an extraordinary speed. The current literature mainly focuses on the effects of political incentives on the infrastructure. However, this paper indicates that the structural change of China's land regime is an important clue and that the supernormal development of China's infrastructure is an explicable result for that.

This paper theoretically proves that in a politically centralized and economically decentralized economic entity with a public land-ownership regime, the self-financing mechanism formed by local officials through regulation of the land-grant price is the primary factor that influences the optimal supply volume of infrastructure in a region, in addition to political and economic incentives, and whether the self-financing mechanism can be formed or not depends on the structure of a country's land regime, which can help to explain the difference between the development of infrastructure in China and that in other developing countries from a theoretical angle.

The paper suggests that the mode is facing an important transformation toward land reform and new-type urbanization construction, and the replication and promotion of China's experience in infrastructure construction are of further significance under the Belt and Road Initiative as it provides a method for helping developing countries to eliminate infrastructure bottlenecks.

Through the test of multinational panel data, the paper indicates that the structural change of China's land regime around 1990 had an overall effect on the supernormal development of infrastructure in China. The paper indicates that the “land-based development mode” of China's infrastructure indeed contributed to the supernormal development of infrastructure in China, but there are still some shortcomings in this mode.

This study investigates the dynamic causality linkages between fiscal deficits and selected macroeconomic indicators in a panel of five East African Community countries.

The research design is based on panel cointegration tests, panel cross-section dependence tests, panel error correction-based Granger causality tests and panel impulse response functions.

Results show that there is long-run feedback causality among fiscal deficits and each of the variables include gross domestic product (GDP) growth, current account balance, interest rates, inflation, grants and debt service. Short-run Granger causality dynamics indicate that there is feedback causality between fiscal deficits and GDP growth; no causality between fiscal deficits and inflation; no causality between fiscal deficits and current account; no causality between fiscal deficits and interest rates; feedback causality between fiscal deficits and grants; and no causality between fiscal deficits and debt service. Impulse response functions show positive and significant impacts of current account balance, inflation and grants; negative and significant impacts of real GDP growth and lending rates; and insignificant effects of debt service.

While the study examines the dynamic causality between fiscal deficits and selected macroeconomic indicators in the East African Community, the analysis excludes South Sudan due to significant data limitations.

In light of the East African Community's aspirations to achieve convergence on key macroeconomic targets, including the fiscal deficit, this research provides novel insights on fiscal policy determinants and causality dynamics.

The dynamic relationships between fiscal policy and macroeconomic variables may have social implications for welfare, equitable growth and distribution of resources.

With a focus on the East African Community, this paper contributes to the literature on the macroeconomic determinants of fiscal deficits in regional economic communities.