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Organizational leaders value effective communication in employees, but ineffective communication persists (Peart, 2019). Communication Skills Training (CST) programs often face time and engagement constraints (Wright et al., 2006), necessitating increased resources for improvement. This study investigates the fields in which communication skills are examined and the research methods used. Given past training-communication associations, it explores CST programs' positive impact through experimental research (Bakker & van Wingerden, 2021). The study aims to enhance CST research by providing insights into effective training methods for facilitators and practitioners.

This systematic literature review examines CST's effectiveness in improving employee communication outcomes and identifying key factors. It highlights the importance of communication training, provides insights into existing research, and identifies areas for future investigation. As communication training is not context-specific, a comprehensive understanding of its effectiveness is necessary. This review establishes a foundational framework to support the creation of impactful training programs.

This research reaffirms the importance of Communication Skills Training (CST) in enhancing key competencies such as communication competence, self-efficacy, and empathy for workplace success, benefiting collaboration, conflict resolution, and problem-solving. It provides a foundational understanding of CST's impact, serving as a resource for researchers, trainers, and leaders, while also emphasizing the need for further research, including larger experiments, diverse skill sets, and long-term assessment. In our digital age, exploring contemporary skills, including digital communication, is essential for comprehensive training. The systematic categorization of skills into intrapersonal and interactional dimensions ensures consistency and supports in-depth analysis.

To address the broad range, outcome skills were categorized as intrapersonal or interactional, excluding the behavioral aspect concerning societal improvement. Leveraging Zimmerman's (1995) empowerment theory to enhance focus, this framework provides value for diverse CST research outcomes. Intrapersonal encompassed self-views, like self-efficacy and knowledge, while interactional involved understanding and aligning exchanges with personal goals. This categorization enhances research clarity and effectiveness by systematically understanding how these skills are related.

This study examines how carbon tools, including carbon accounting and management tools, can be created, used, modified and linked with other traditional management controls to materialise and effectuate organisations’ response strategies to multiple interacting logics in carbon management and the role of sustainability managers in these processes.

This study utilises the construct of accounting toolmaking, which refers to practices of adopting, adjusting and reconfiguring accounting tools to unfold how carbon tools are used as means to materialise responses to multiple interacting carbon management logics. It embraces a field study approach, whereby 38 sustainability managers and staff from 30 organisations in New Zealand were interviewed.

This study finds that carbon toolmaking is an important means to materialise and effectuate organisations’ response strategies to multiple interacting carbon management logics. Four response strategies are identified: separation, selective coupling, combination and hybridisation. Adopting activity involves considering the additionality, detailing, localising and cascading of carbon measures and targets and their linkage to the broader carbon management programme. In adjusting carbon tools, organisations adapt the frequency and orientation of carbon reporting, intensity of carbon monitoring and breadth of carbon information sharing. Through focusing on either procedural sequencing, assimilating, equating or integrating, toolmaking reconfigures the relationship between carbon tools and traditional management control systems. Together, these three toolmaking activities can be configured differently to construct carbon tools that are fit for purpose for each response strategy. These activities also enact certain roles on sustainability managers in the process of representing, communicating and/or transferring carbon information knowledge, which also facilitate different response strategies.

The study demonstrates the various carbon toolmaking practices that allow organisations to handle the multiple interacting logics in carbon management. The findings provide suggestions for organisations on how to adopt, adjust and reconfigure carbon tools to better embed the ecological logic in organisations’ strategies and operations.

The authors identify how carbon toolmaking materialises and effectuates organisations’ responses to multiple interacting logics in carbon management.

The purpose of this study is to propose an innovative and efficient process in urban policy-making that combines a divergent and creative method with a convergent and strategic one. At the same time, the purpose is also to propose a useful innovation to enforce the usability of both methods. On the one hand, mission-oriented policies run the risk of being overly focused on the present and of not being able to develop preparedness in organization. On the other hand, scenario development has the reverse problem it often does not point out how to use scenario narratives to inform and devise short-term strategic actions.

The paper proposes an innovative methodological approach, the mission-oriented scenarios, which hybridizes Mazzucato's mission-oriented public policy framework with Jim Dator's Manoa school four futures method. The proposed methodological innovation emerges from a urban foresight academic-led project carried out in the context of the Metropolitan City of Turin, Italy, where a first application of the mission-oriented scenarios was tested on six different focal issues (from reindustrialization to cultural policies) and the scenario narratives were used as sources for the grounding of 12 missions and 48 strategic actions towards 2030.

Mission-oriented scenarios can contribute to the generation of more sustainable and inclusive urban public policies. This methodological proposal is based on an original mix of knowledge exchange procedures borrowed from methodological approaches with different backgrounds: the mission-oriented and the archetypal scenarios. Their conjunction could support the formulation of ambitious yet pragmatic policies, giving a plurality of actors the opportunity to act and establish fruitful and lasting partnerships.

The paper reconstructs one of the first urban foresight projects carried out in a major Italian city by two prestigious universities and exposes a methodological innovation resulting from reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of the project, which opens the door to the development of a new scenario technique.

Strategy implementation is a critical component of firm performance and middle managers play a key role in the implementation process. This study was conducted to enhance the authors’ understanding of how middle managers influence strategy implementation (SI) effectiveness by investigating the impact of leadership and work team coordination.

A field study was conducted using interviews and survey data gathered from executive managers, middle managers and work team members within a large municipal organization undergoing a major strategic change.

Middle manager transformational and instrumental leadership have a direct positive impact on work team SI effectiveness. Additionally, middle manager transformational leadership has an indirect positive effect on work team SI effectiveness through coordination.

The study offers insights into managers and practitioners seeking to improve SI effectiveness by highlighting the importance of middle manager leadership development and the coordination of interdependent tasks within work teams.

The study provides valuable insight into an important but previously unstudied relationship between middle manager leadership and SI effectiveness. The work also helps bridge the chasm between leadership research and strategy research by linking leadership behavior to SI effectiveness – a key ingredient of firm performance.

Every year several thousand female cadets participate in the Combined Cadet Force (CCF) in the UK, but little is known about the impact that this experience has on the subsequent employability of the female cadets. This study aimed to understand the perceptions of academic teenage girls from one all-female unit of their participation in CCF and the personal benefit or otherwise in relation to their ultimate employability.

This qualitative study used semi-structured interviews to explore the experiences of 10 young women who had participated in CCF for at least three years. Data were analysed using a thematic analysis.

Participants were effusive about the transformative effects of CCF in relation to personal confidence, recognising transferable skills and raising personal aspiration, all key elements to employability, particularly for women. They also considered they had gained future workplace advantage having had opportunity to trial leadership strategies in mixed gender teams, an experience unavailable elsewhere to them. Loyalty to the contingent pervaded every discussion and the importance of team goals, although this level of selfless commitment may be detrimental to employability, subsuming their personal interests to the greater good.

Research into the benefit or otherwise of teenage girls' extra-curricular activities is scarce, and this is the first study, to the authors' knowledge, that explores the perceptions of the impact their time in CCF had on their graduate employability skills.

Policy brief on how to mitigate the negative impacts of Universal Credit on financial insecurity and crime based on the paper d’Este, R. and Harvey, A. (2022), “The unintended consequences of welfare reforms: Universal Credit, financial insecurity, and crime”, The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization.

This paper aims to explore the characteristics of playful literacies in case study research examining digital games in secondary English classrooms. It analyzes how educators use play as a resource for meaning-making and the impacts of play on student learning.

The authors used a keyword search in relevant academic databases to identify articles within specified search parameters. This was followed by bibliographic branching to identify additional articles. Following the identification of 30 articles, two rounds of open coding were used to identify themes for analysis.

The literature revealed five types of playful pedagogical practices: single-player gameplay, turn-taking gameplay, multiplayer play, play-as-design and little or no gameplay. Discussion of these findings suggests that classroom play was a highly social activity across case studies. Furthermore, boundaries between types of play and their contributions to learning were blurred and often disrupted normative approaches to curriculum and teaching.

Given the novelty of replacing traditional texts with digital games in English classrooms, this study represents an important moment to pause and review the literature to date on a particular, understudied aspect of digital games in English curricula: their playfulness. This is especially important given the innovative ways in which digital play can shift thinking about meaning-making and narrative, two historically dominant concerns within the discipline of English.