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This paper aims to build upon the accountability pyramid model by presenting two studies that examine the dimensionality of individual accountability among Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) gig workers.

For the first study, aimed at investigating the dimensionality of individual accountability of gig workers, the authors collected data from MTurkers by administering two surveys in the English and Mandarin Chinese languages with 185 respondents. The authors implemented principal component analysis and confirmatory factor analysis to analyse the data. For the second study, aimed at establishing validation of the dimensionality found in the first study, the authors collected data from an additional 148 respondents.

The results indicated that the intensity and salience dimensions merged into one factor that the authors labelled Accountability Significance, while the process and outcome dimensions merged into one factor labelled Accountability Focus. Additionally, the authors found that individual accountability is a second-order construct encompassing Accountability Significance and Accountability Focus as first-order factors. The authors validated the findings in the second study.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first quantitative study investigating the individual accountability of gig workers. The validation of individual accountability in MTurkers offers valuable insights into MTurkers’s Hybrid Accountability Focus and Accountability Significance.

The study aims to attain insights into the impact of destructive leadership and citizenship pressures in inducing employee silence through the lens of social exchange and the conservation of resources theory. The research further relies on Friedkin’s attitude-behaviour linkage framework (2010), while taking into account the role of employees’ defensive cognitive evaluations, as against the previously accented emotion-focused explanations.

In order to corroborate the pertinence and contextual relevance of the framework, a survey-based study was conducted with a purposively selected sample of 133 full-time employees from the systemically important banks. The sample size was determined through an a-priori power analysis using G*Power, and the hypothesized serial mediation model was tested using PLS-SEM in SmartPLS v_4.0.

The findings accentuate the significance of destructive leadership in navigating employees’ silence directly and serially through continuance commitment and compulsory citizenship behaviours. The study also underlines that rather than being portrayed as unidimensional outcomes centered on attitudes, employee behaviours ought to be considered contingent retorts under attitude-behaviour cascades.

The study contributes to strategic human resource management literature by offering a cognition-based explanation for employees’ silence, taking Pakistan’s cultural and contextual orientation into cognizance. Extending on the attitude-behaviour linkage framework, the study provides that attitudes shaped by defensive cognitive evaluations may concurrently foster involuntary (citizenship) as well as voluntary (silence) behaviours.

At the beginning of the 21st century, a new class of information workers, the “information have-less” has risen. This class of workers alleviates the influence of information and communication technologies (ICTs) revolution on poverty and unemployment. The purpose of this study is to investigate the presence of this class of workers in Egypt and assess the size and potential growth of this category of workers.

The study clarifies the conceptual framework of the new division of labor, in the information age. The Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and Information and Decision Support Center websites provided secondary data for this study. These data are used to assess the size of “the information have less” in Egypt.

The division of work and class, in the 21st century, depends on the level of skills possessed to work with ICTs. So, class and labor nowadays could be divided into self-programmable labor (Innovators). Information have-less labor class, adding value to the economy by learning skills and presenting repetitive work. Generic labor class, who cannot work with ICTs, and work in jobs, that do not need computers or other ICTs. The study has shown that the “information have-less” labor class is present in Egypt since the beginning of the 21st century, in all its categories; entrepreneurism, the service sector and the manufacturing sector. There are approximately 50% of this labor class in the service sector and only 13% of the information have-less works in manufacturing sector despite the great opportunities that Egypt has to expand manufacturing to absorb more employment. The inclusion of information technology (IT), in all domains, has not decreased employment in Western countries but has reallocated information have-less employment toward the service sector, and there would probably be the same effect in Egypt.

The study highlights the need for Egyptian policymakers to encourage the manufacturing and service sectors to provide huge working opportunities. The Egyptian government has to change the educational policies, at all stages, to include digital learning skills so IT can be incorporated in a wide range of economic activities. Further research includes: conducting a survey to measure the contribution of the entrepreneurial part of the information have-less employment in Egypt. In addition, a model may be developed, by the researcher to examine the reallocation of employees in Egypt.

Studying employment, in Egypt, using the conceptual framework of the information age is rarely being done.

Some firms excel at positively presenting their employer brand (talk), while others excel at effectively implementing human resource management (HRM) practices for the benefit of the employees (walk). Which approach is more effective? Focusing specifically on small and medium-sized hotels (SMHs), this study explores the relation of employer branding (EB) and HRM practices with organizational performance (OP).

Stratified sampling was used to identify 34 top management figures (owners, CEOs, and top HR managers) from SMHs across Greece. These individuals agreed to participate in in-depth, semi-structured, one-on-one interviews, focusing on their hotels’ HRM, EB, and organizational performance. The interviews were subjected to content analysis, further coupled with graphical exploration of the relations between the concepts under study.

The findings reveal a noteworthy pattern: high-performing SMHs tend to prioritize EB, particularly leveraging social media channels. This prioritization is further reinforced by the implementation of HRM practices, including extensive training and rewards. Clustering SMHs into four different levels based on their application of EB and HRM practices and the effect of these practices on OP, enables us to extend this study and gain valuable insights into the interplay of these factors.

This study highlights the need for practitioners to invest in HRM practices, especially in training and rewards, while giving due attention to EB, despite the potential resource limitations SMHs often face. Importantly, when basic levels of HRM are combined with high levels of EB, OP seems to be maximized.

Both HRM and EB deal with the employer – employee interaction, that’s why EB in most companies is the responsibility of the HRM department. Surprisingly, academic research has treated them as distinct fields, in isolation, ignoring their combined effects. This paper is the first to conceptualize EB as communication (“talk”) and HRM as practice (“walk”) and to thus propose that a complementarity relationship between these two dynamics may facilitate OP. Additionally, this study is the first to combine content analysis with a quantitative exploration to gain more holistic and valuable insights on the topic.

This study aims to investigate the predictive role of team personality composition in facilitating shared leadership through team member exchange (TMX), while also to examine the moderating effect of organizational culture.

The authors conducted a two-stage online survey and selected the customer service teams, claims teams and financial teams of 26 Chinese insurance companies as the research samples. The authors finally obtained validated questionnaires from 107 teams with 457 members. The hypothesized relationships were tested using SPSS 25.0 and Mplus.

The results indicate that both team relationship-oriented and task-oriented personality composition have significant positive effects on shared leadership with team-member exchange serving as a full mediator for both paths. As a boundary condition, organizational culture (i.e. including internal integration values and external adaptation values) has a moderating effect on the influence of TMX on shared leadership.

The study investigates the predictive role of team personality composition on shared leadership, which complements the empirical studies of shared leadership antecedents in the literature. Drawing on social exchange perspective, the authors find out that TMX serves as a mediator between team personality composition and shared leadership. The authors also identify the moderating effect of organizational culture on the emergence of shared leadership. The research emphasizes the contextual boundary condition in this process.