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Whereas the achievement of students has closely been linked with the quality of teachers and there is a bulk of literature supporting the need of teachers' preparation in enhancing their quality, professional development (PD) of teachers has been a central focus of reform initiatives in education across the globe. This paper aims at analysing the existing literature on PD of teachers to reflect on the models and characteristics of effective PD, and to highlight the importance of context in PD of teachers.

To respond to the aim of the paper, a search in the field of pedagogy in Education Resource Information Centre (ERIC) was undertaken. The search strings used were “models of teachers' professional development”, “characteristics of teachers professional development” and “context in professional development” restricted to time period from 2000 to 2020.

The major argument this paper presents is that the models and characteristics of PD are relative and there is no uniform model to be implemented across contexts. Instead of debating the models and characteristics of effective PD, academics and practitioners have to be watchful to the context and the real needs of teachers in a particular context.

The paper critiques the generalisation of Western generated PD models to the developing world especially Pakistan which the existing research and literature is silent about.

Unless the expertise of multiple teachers is availed, it is very unlikely for an individual leader to bring improvement especially at classroom level. This realization had led to the emergence of distributed leadership which is about engaging multiple individuals in leadership roles. The purpose of this study is to explore the role of school leadership in distributing leadership to teachers in a private secondary school in an urban context of Pakistan.

Using qualitative approach and case study method, the research collects data from school leaders and teachers involved in leadership roles through interviews.

It was found that leadership facilitates distributed leadership through formulating a vision to develop teachers, enhancing the capacity of individuals involved in leadership roles, establishing a culture of trust, and creating opportunities for interaction and collaboration among teachers.

School leadership should distribute leadership to teachers in order to utilize the potential of multiple individuals which will ultimately lead to school improvement through initiatives from within. Educational reformers should incorporate the concept of distributed leadership in the professional development programmes designed for school leaders and teachers.

The study is first of its nature which reports on distributed leadership from a private sector school of Pakistan based on original data.

A sudden shift of work from the office to home amid global lockdown demands exploration of factors that facilitate or obstruct remote working and their impact on practical and psychological outcomes for the employee when individual mandatorily telecommutes full-time with no prior experience of the same. Based on job demands and resources model (JD-R), the present study explores the role of certain job demands and resources on negative and positive outcomes through mediating role of strain and well-being, respectively.

A data sample of 371 IT sector employees was collected and confirmatory factor analysis model was run to assess the model fit indices, convergent and divergent validities of the data. While proposed hypotheses of the study were tested using structural equations modeling (SEM) technique.

It was found that workload pressure, task interdependence, professional isolation and family interference in work lead to exhaustion and further stress, whereas the presence of autonomy and schedule flexibility and sufficient technology resources improve employee work-life balance and further better productivity and performance and job satisfaction. Improved well-being was also found to reduce stress for full-time telecommuters.

This study provides implications that will help in doing away with exhaustion and stress for employees and ensure business continuity in emergencies like COVID-19 pandemic.

There are no past instances of mandatory full-time telecommuting arrangement by organizations, and researchers never had the opportunity to study it. This research, based on the JD-R model provides for the first time empirical insights into the experiences of mandatory full-time telecommuting during COVID-19 induced lockdown.

Based on self-determination theory (SDT), the present study aims to assess the effect of managerial (manager trust and support), work (job autonomy) and individual (intrinsic motivation) characteristics on job performance of telecommuters in a pre- and post-coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak period and is further studied longitudinally after six months of continued mandatory telecommuting.

Data were collected from information technology (IT) sector employees in three phases and model fitness, reliability and validity of the data for all three phases were assessed through CFA models, while the hypotheses were tested through path analysis.

Perceived manager trust and support increases job performance and the effect strengthens with an increase in telecommuting extent. Job autonomy had similar effects with the exception that employees did not enjoy autonomy when mandatory telecommuting arrangement was initially introduced. Lastly, intrinsic motivation fades away as employees continue to work permanently from their homes.

Permanent full-time telecommuting is expected to continue for the unforeseeable future; the present study suggests that while ensuring increased trust, support and job autonomy to employees, managers must also ensure that employees do not feel professionally isolated and attempt to keep individuals intrinsically motivated.

The authors assess the effect of managerial (manager trust and support), work (job autonomy) and individual (intrinsic motivation) characteristics on job performance under three different types of telecommuting arrangements (voluntary part-time, mandatory full-time and continued mandatory full-time) by collecting data in three different time frames from the same individuals.

Working remotely in a COVID-19-induced lockdown has been challenging for both organisations and their employees; studies report that job demands changed, and teleworkers experienced increased burnout. This paper explores the negative employee outcomes that this work arrangement brings along and offers possible solutions to counter such negative outcomes since they could be detrimental to the much-touted future of work.

The study adopted a time-lagged longitudinal design and collected two-waved data from 403 quaternary sector employees. The data were analysed using structural equation modelling and model-21 in PROCESS macro for SPSS.

Findings affirm that employees experienced increased job demands during this crisis. Employees reported an increase in turnover intention because of burnout caused by increased job demands. However, increased task interdependence alone did not have any effect on turnover intention. The perceived organisational task support (POTS) was found to forestall the negative effect of job demands on burnout, and employee resilience (ER) buffered the burnout and turnover intention relationship.

Providing remote work task support and boosting resilience among employees will help in doing away with the negative effects of teleworking. However, managers shall prioritise reducing job demands for teleworkers.

The linkage between work factors and turnover intention is well established. Drawing on the event system theory and using the COVID-19 context, the present study added to the existing knowledge by studying the role of job demands (workload pressure and task interdependence) on turnover intention through the mediation of burnout. The study goes beyond the existing literature by accounting for POTS as a first-level moderator between job demands and burnout relationship, and ER as a second-level moderator between burnout and turnover intention relationship.

The objective of the work is to have an insight into the degree of the contemporary concept of greening the organization through human resource management (HRM) and to attempt to bridge the gap toward environmental awareness, as well as to observe the dimensions of green HRM (GHRM) practices and its impression toward environmental sustainability by using analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and FAHP.

The research was carried out in two phases; multi-method was employed. The first phase mainly includes a systematic review to convene comprehensive knowledge of widespread GHRM practices to leverage environmental sustainability. In the second phase, the AHP and fuzzy AHP (FAHP) were employed to examine the influence of the respective dimension of GHRM practices toward environmental sustainability.

This study emphasizes the status of GHRM practices such as green recruitment and green selection, green performance management, green training and development, green compensation and rewards, green welfare aspects as a way to aid environmental issues. The findings suggest that these initiatives help to leverage environmental sustainability. Further, this paper reveals that green compensation and rewards have the highest impact on leveraging environmental sustainability. However, this study also emphasizes the comparative study of GHRM dimensions through AHP and FAHP.

As existing studies reveal, there is least research carried on this field of study and no study was conducted using AHP and FAHP in this field. Thus, this study reveals the necessity to discover the degree of concern toward GHRM practices in context to India.

This paper aims to extend employer branding research by investigating the role of job satisfaction and organizational identification as predictors of employee retention, and their mediating role between employer branding and employee retention.

A cross-sectional survey is utilized to gather data from 352 employees working in top Indian IT organizations. Hypotheses were tested and analyzed utilizing SPSS PROCESS Macro.

The results reveal that employer branding is positively related to job satisfaction, organizational identification and employee retention. The analysis provides support for the mediating effects on employee retention of employer branding through job satisfaction and organizational identification. In addition, results also provide support for the serial mediation model, where employer branding was found to influence employee retention via job satisfaction and organizational identification in a sequential manner. The findings connote that the enhanced positive identity of satisfied employees suppresses the intention to leave among IT professionals.

The findings suggest that an employer branding strategy with a unique set of attributes can provide a competitive advantage to employers in terms of high retention levels. The findings also highlight the fact that the importance of employer branding strategy should not be merely confined to the issue of retention as it can also play a vital role in enhancing job satisfaction and employees' identification level. Hence, managers are required to devise an employer branding strategy with a long-term intent that focuses on gaining a competitive advantage and aiming to improve relationships with employees.

The researchers have enriched social identity and social exchange theory as a theoretical paradigm, examining antecedents of employee retention. The study has extended the foregoing direct or simple mediation models by integrating social identity theory and job satisfaction in a sequential mediation model.

Literature on workplace learning emphasizes that learning should be continually generated and negotiated in the workplace. How does this concept unfold in the developing context? This paper aims at understanding teachers' workplace learning and the conditions which influence such learning in a private school of Pakistani context.

First, a brief review of literature on workplace learning is presented to develop a conceptual framework for the study. Next, the research methodology undertaken to collect data from the studied school is described. The paper then presents the findings, followed by discussion, limitations and suggestions for further studies.

Drawing upon the data collected through a qualitative case study, this paper reveals that in Pakistani schools, the theoretically powerful concept of learning is not the same in practice. Teachers' work load, lack of awareness about the possibilities and importance of workplace learning, non‐existence of structures for teachers' interactions and lack of rewards are the conditions impeding workplace learning. Since the study has been conducted in the developing context, it also brings forth some fresh findings about cultural aspects of the specific context.

The study suggests that the change agents should concentrate on developing structures and cultures inside schools to facilitate teachers' workplace learning. Moreover, the external courses conducted for teachers should include the concept of workplace learning in their contents to make teachers learn how to learn in the workplace.

Uncertainty, overwhelmed, doubtful, anxious … and so the list of emotions of the doctoral candidate goes on. Yet, we can move from not just surviving emotional and cognitive challenges to thriving and embracing the challenges through the creation of a support network. While family and friends might be one supportive network, they often fail to understand the lived experience of doctoral research, so it is critical to establish a professional network early in the candidature. This may form naturally if you are researching within a laboratory setting, but for many doctoral candidates engaged in social science research, finding a place in a professional network may not be straightforward. In this chapter, co-written by doctoral students and their supervisor, the processes and power of creating a network are shared and explored in the hope of supporting others to achieve the same. The chapter presents ideas for creating or finding a place in a network but more importantly for recognizing the power of the network to ensure successful outcomes beyond the completion of the thesis. While completion of the thesis is a primary aim of the doctoral candidature, we argue the quality of the candidature experience can shape the future of the graduate and subsequently the next generation of academics.

The purpose of this paper is to explore Pakistani patterns of organizational learning (OL) in order to understand how schools as organizations learn and improve within this context.

Using a qualitative case study approach, and activity theory as diagnostic framework, data were generated from various school stakeholders through semi-structured interviews and observations.

It is found that schools in Pakistan are more inclined toward the technical perspective of OL; mostly relying on external sources to acquire knowledge for organizational improvement. This is due to the lack of strong intellectual capital as well as the lack of interactions among teachers inside schools.

The focus of academicians and practitioners in developing the context should be supporting schools in their acquisition of knowledge and its dissemination across the whole school system. Moreover, creating structures and cultures for teachers’ interaction inside schools might be helpful for generating knowledge from the workplace.

The paper also presents a model of OL which could be used to study and speed up the processes of OL especially in developing context.