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The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of some pressing but under-researched aspects of public leadership. Ten propositions about public leadership are set out and these are intended to be thought-provoking and even controversial in order to stimulate researchers to design research which addresses key theoretical and practical questions about leadership in the public sphere. They will also help practitioners navigate an increasingly complex leadership context.

This invited essay uses ten propositions about public leadership, selected from three sources: the leadership literature, the author’s own research and from collaborative research discussions with academics, policy makers and practitioners.

The first proposition argues for distinguishing public leadership from public service leadership given that the former is about leadership of the public sphere. Other propositions concern context; purpose; conflict and contest at the heart of public leadership; leadership with political astuteness; dual leadership; leadership projections; fostering resilience; leadership, authority and legitimacy; and the challenge to researchers to use research designs which reflect the complexity and dynamism of public leadership.

While this essay is primarily addressed to researchers, there are many ideas and concepts which practising leaders will find insightful and useful in their work.

This essay draws on deep experience in undertaking high-quality academic research about public leadership which draws from and feeds into policy and practice. It utilises organisational psychology, public management and political science to create synergies in order to enhance the understanding of public leadership.

This study aims to investigate how different academic fields within and outside of international business (IB) engage with the topics of social value creation in the context of multinational enterprises (MNEs). The aim is to take stock of the main themes and offer suggestions for future research avenues.

The paper undertakes a scoping review. The authors use the Web of Science database to identify relevant articles. The database search yielded 466 articles. The NVivo software was used to code and identify key thematic areas.

The matrix analysis performed in NVivo yielded 15 main thematic areas spanning 37 research fields. However, further analysis revealed that 89 per cent of the articles originated from 13 fields. Furthermore, while IB journals represent the second-largest field home to publications related to the social value creation of MNEs, they only account for 12 per cent of the sample.

The paper responds to prior calls to reduce disciplinary silos through the performing of a thematic analysis across a multitude of research fields.

The purpose of this study is to understand the impact that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices have on the perceived attractiveness of companies in the eyes of their employees and potential candidates. Moreover, this study assesses the mediation role that Extrinsic (EA) and Intrinsic Attributions (IA) about Corporate Volunteering (CV) have on this relationship.

Three hundred and five responses were collected in an online questionnaire and a Structural Equation Modelling model was designed to explain the proposed relationships of the variables under study.

The authors found that the IA that employees/candidates make about CV programs have a direct and positive impact on the company’s attractiveness; it was not possible to conclude the same about EA.

Unlike studies already existing in the area of corporate attractiveness that focus on the perspective of companies and customers, with a high focus on the organizational implementation of CSR and organizational benefits, this study has adopted a different perspective that focuses on the opinion of company employees, as well as the perspective of possible candidates. By not limiting participation to anyone, it covers a wide range of participants, allowing a broader knowledge of the labor market.

本研究的目的是理解“公司社会责任实践项目”(CSR)对员工及潜在员工构成的公司吸引力的影响。其次, 本研究评估“公司志愿服务”(CV)外在归因(EA)与内在归因(IA)在此关系上的中介作用。

线上问卷收集了305份回复, 并设计了一个结构方程模型来解释研究中变量之间的所设想的关系。

我们发现员工或潜在员工对公司志愿服务项目的内在归因对公司吸引力有直接、积极的影响; 外在归因则不可能。

与之前在公司吸引力领域已经存在的研究不同, 之前的研究专注于公司和顾客的角度, 尤其关注“公司社会责任实践项目”的组织实施和组织效益。本研究采用了一个不同的角度, 聚焦于公司员工以及未来的员工的看法。本研究不限制任何人的参与, 覆盖了大范围的参与者, 因此有助于对劳动力市场更广泛的了解。

Frequently the universities' Placement Service is based on the student's hard profile at the expense of soft traits. On the other side, the “person–organization fit” axiom suggests firms are looking for profiles with specific soft skills to face the increasing level of environmental turbulence. This research aims to understand if high-resilience students also have high academic achievements and how the three components of resilience (emotional intelligence, positive thinking, planfulness) can have different impact on individual performances.

The research was conducted on students enrolled on different courses of studies and years in an Economics and Law faculty. A questionnaire was administered during the first exam session (ante-Covid) and the second and third exam sessions (post-Covid). This questionnaire consists of 84 questions related to planfulness, emotional intelligence and positive thinking, whose combination can be considered a measure of resilience. In fact, the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was carried to identify these three new variables (the components) based on the 84 initial ones. Finally, an ordered logit model was implemented to verify whether, and in what direction, planfulness, emotional intelligence, positive thinking and Covid 19 (the independent variables) affected the students' performance (the dependent one).

While planfulness positively affected academic performance, emotional intelligence affected it negatively. The impact of positive thinking and Covid was not significant, and thus what emerged from the preliminary analysis of the grades is not confirmed.

This is a case study of a university experience that is paying great care in preparing students to satisfy the firms' work demands. To confirm and refine results the sample will be expanded to other faculties and other life/soft skills will be investigated.

This soft trait approach—that studies how various measures of soft skills are related to course grades—has a two-fold significance by crafting universities' placement activities and facilitating firms' onboarding.

This is a case study of a university experience; a university that is paying great attention to preparing students ready to satisfy the firms' work demands but also citizens capable of supporting the growth of their nation and society in general.

The research can be considered a first step towards the inclusion of the formal evaluation of the students' life skills in their academic path, creating a link with their achievements.

The purpose of this paper is to present a strategic management framework for a successful digital transformation (DT) roll-out aimed at enabling organisational resilience. The study aims to identify the critical areas of consideration for management to strategically approach DT in order to build resilience.

The research study is based on the 3Ps framework: (1) people (culture, capabilities, engagement and well-being), (2) processes (systems) and (3) plant (technological infrastructure and tools). The research methodology is a qualitative study comprising semi-structured in-depth interviews, conducted with industry experts in different sectors undergoing major digital disruptions such as financial services, mining, oil and gas, energy and retail.

The research findings show that the successful roll-out of an organisation’s DT is largely driven by the people elements incorporating organisational culture, workforce skills and training and employee well-being. It also highlights that it is critical for organisations to invest in technological infrastructure, once the people elements have been addressed, as they are the drivers of technology implementation.

A bigger and broader sample size can validate the elements and structure of the DT framework in South Africa.

The study’s discussion unlocks understanding about: (1) what are the key enablers for successful DT; (2) what hinders organisations from realising the value of digital investments and (3) a strategic framework for the digital roll-out.

Technology is impacting employees at both a personal and professional levels. Ensuring that DT rollouts are strategical implemented lowers the impact on technostress and strengthens resilience.

The value and practical implication of this study is that the developed strategic framework can be used by managements to enable the smooth adoption of DT toward building organisational resilience in developing countries such as South Africa with low digital maturity.

Creating a logical and consistent picture of the state of leadership theory and research is a difficult task (Hernandez, Eberly, Avolio, & Johnson, 2011). Attempts to describe leadership studies occasionally include words such as “paradox,” “inconsistencies,” “contradictions,” and “messy” (Brungardt, 1996; Klenke, 1993). These adjectives flow from many diverse ways of thinking about leadership (Bass, 2008; Grint, 2000; Northouse, 2015; Ruben, 2012). This paper presents an alternative view of leadership theory providing practitioners, educators, and students with an additional-and perhaps a singular-conceptual framework for their toolbox. It also provides leadership studies students with a unifying perspective of leadership theory without taking anything away from individual theories.

Service robots are taking over the organizational frontline. Despite a recent surge in studies on this topic, extant works are predominantly conceptual in nature. The purpose of this paper is to provide valuable empirical insights by building on the attribution theory.

Two vignette-based experimental studies were employed. Data were collected from US respondents who were randomly assigned to scenarios focusing on a hotel’s reception service and restaurant’s waiter service.

Results indicate that respondents make stronger attributions of responsibility for the service performance toward humans than toward robots, especially when a service failure occurs. Customers thus attribute responsibility to the firm rather than the frontline robot. Interestingly, the perceived stability of the performance is greater when the service is conducted by a robot than by an employee. This implies that customers expect employees to shape up after a poor service encounter but expect little improvement in robots’ performance over time.

Robots are perceived to be more representative of a firm than employees. To avoid harmful customer attributions, service providers should clearly communicate to customers that frontline robots pack sophisticated analytical, rather than simple mechanical, artificial intelligence technology that explicitly learns from service failures.

Customer responses to frontline robots have remained largely unexplored. This paper is the first to explore the attributions that customers make when they experience robots in the frontline.

The increasing responsibility of organisations towards society and the environment has inverted the relationship between accounting and accountability, leading to accountability-based accounting systems. This study aims to explore the debate on accountability for climate change within the integrating thinking (IT) perspective. Ascertaining the most significant trends in the debate around purposes and performance that characterise climate mitigation engagement and their connections, the study would explore if and to what extent organisations are tackling climate actions.

A narrative review of the extensive academic literature developed from the Kyoto Protocol to date was performed. After selecting a representative sample, papers were analysed with the support of a new analytical framework that involves three dimensions – answerability, enforcement and outcome – and governance schemes that emerge from the involvement of the private and public sector and civil society. With the support of NVivo software, themes arisen were analysed and coded. Key items were labelled, creating specific nodes and synthesised into the proposed framework.

A “silo approach” largely characterises the debate on accountability for climate change. The most significant reasons behind the shortcomings of extant climate actions may be retrieved firstly in the weakness of the motivations that guide organisations to operate in a climate-friendly way.

This study underlines the need for a 360° integrated approach for strategically tackling climate actions.

This study would represent a further step towards an integrated approach for studying organisations behaviours in the “climate war”, embracing the connectivity between purposes and outcomes, capitals and the relationships amongst the various stakeholders.

The purpose of this study was to identify and describe how students experience academic coaching in higher education in Norway.

The study employed a descriptive and exploratory qualitative design where semi-structured interviews formed the basis for data collection. Thematic analysis was used as an analytic strategy to identify, organise and find patterns or themes that emerged from the data.

The findings showed that academic coaching positively influenced the respondents' ability to identify the necessary and efficient cognitive processes and metacognitive skills needed to cope with everyday scholastic challenges. Academic coaching affected the respondents' metacognitive skills and cognitive processes in terms of evolving their self-efficacy, self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, stress identification, goal identification, goal setting and development of new strategies.

The findings in this study reflect the respondents' subjective opinions and further research is needed to validate these findings.

This article addresses a gap in the field of research by offering a descriptive pilot study and thematic analysis of students' experiences with academic coaching in Norway.