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This study explores how compassionate managerial leadership style can help to mitigate workplace stressors and alleviate stress experiences among employees — particularly in an extreme situation, such as the current global COVID-19 pandemic. The study's context is Nigeria's banking, manufacturing and healthcare sectors, which have a history of high employee stress levels.

Using a qualitative, interpretive methodology, the study adopts the thematic analysis process (TAP) to draw and analyse data from semi-structured telephone interviews with 10 banking, 11 manufacturing and 9 frontline healthcare workers in Nigeria.

It was found that a compassionate managerial leadership can drive a considerate response to employees' “fear of job (in)security”, “healthcare risk” and concerns about “work overload, underpayment and delayed payment”, which respondents considered to be some of the key causes of increased stress among employees during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

The study is limited to exploring the relationship between compassionate managerial leadership and an organisation's ability to manage employee stress in the COVID-19 situation, using 30 samples from organisations operating in three Nigerian cities and sectors. Future studies may involve more Nigerian cities, sectors and samples. It may also possibly include quantitative combination to allow generalisation of findings.

In order to survive in extreme situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, organisations are forced to take drastic and often managerialist-driven work measures which can trigger high stress levels, low productivity and absenteeism among employees. Hence, organisations would benefit from implementing compassion-driven policies that are more inclusive and responsive to the workplace stressors facing employees.

Employee stress has been widely explored in many areas, including definitions, stressors, strains, possible interventions and coping strategies. There remains, however, a dearth of scholarship on how management-leadership compassion can help to reduce employee stress levels in extreme conditions, such as the COVID-19 pandemic — particularly in emerging economies.

This paper explores the link between employee stress and the high-power distance (HPD) culture in Nigeria. The study context is the banking and manufacturing sectors in Nigeria, which have a history of exploitation, unconducive work environments to productivity, work-life imbalance, work overload, burnout and employee stress.

Using a qualitative, interpretive methodology, this article adopts a thematic analysis of data drawn from semi-structured interviews with 24 managerial and non-managerial workers to explore the process by which Nigerian manufacturing and banking sectors' work (mal)practices go unchallenged, thereby triggering and exacerbating employees' stress levels.

The study found that the high power distance culture promotes a servant-master relationship type, making it impossible for employees to challenge employers on issues relating to stressors such as work overload, unconducive work environments, work-life imbalance and burnout, thereby exacerbating their stress levels in a country in which stress has become a way of life.

Research on the relationship between employee stress and HPD culture is relatively underdeveloped. This article sheds light on issues associated with stressors in Nigeria's human resource management (HRM) and employment relations practices. The link between the inability of employees to challenge these stressors (which are consequences of an HPD culture) and increased employee stress has substantial implications for employment and work-related policies and practices in general. The study is constrained by the limited sample size, which inhibits the generalisation of its findings.

The article adds to the scarcity of studies underscoring the relationship between high-power distance and the inability of employees to challenge work-related stressors as a predictor of employee stress and a mediator between workplace practices and employee stress, particularly in the emerging economies.

This study aims to provide a systematic literature review (SLR) of extant research on talent management (TM) in hospitality and tourism (H&T). The objectives are first, to offer an empirical mapping analysis of TM research in H&T; second, to identify and discuss key research topics; and third, to recommend avenues for future research.

The authors conducted a SLR of TM literature in the context of H&T by analysing peer-reviewed papers published between January 2000 and October 2020. Following the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis process, three independent coders undertook a content analysis of 74 papers for the SLR.

The authors found that TM in H&T offers contextualised evidence consistent on five key research topics: TM practices; conceptualisation of talent and TM; TM antecedents and outcomes; key TM stakeholders; and talent education and graduate careers. The analysis indicated that most studies are qualitative, focussed on Europe and North America and that primarily examine hotels. The small number of TM studies in H&T along with the lack of strong theoretical groundings show that the field is at the early stages of the growing stage, yet the sharp increase demonstrates an exponential growth in interest.

This study highlights the importance of TM and indicates that businesses in the sector need to reconsider the definition of talent, their approaches to TM and the bundling of TM practices to improve their effectiveness. It also calls for partnerships among the industry’s key stakeholders and a revisiting of agendas for educators.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that offers a holistic examination of research on a wide range of TM topics within various H&T sectors over the past 20 years. It clarifies the conceptualisation of talent and TM in this field and provides insights, as well as context-specific evidence on the management of H&T talent. This study is the first to argue that the research stream is moving towards a growth stage and offers recommendations on advancing the field.

Based on a study of internationally oriented Greek small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and using the lens of institutional theory, this paper extends the understanding of the extent to which Greece's institutional context influences talent management (TM). In so doing, the authors focussed on the key TM practices employed by SMEs to enhance and sustain TM: talent acquisition, development and retention. The authors also explore how these practices are shaped by the Greek institutional context.

Employing a multiple case-study approach, the authors conducted 18 interviews in six distinctive SMEs operating in north, central and southern Greece. The data were thematically analysed to identify patterns across all SMEs.

This study found that unlike multinational corporations, internationally oriented Greek SMEs adopt a more inclusive approach to TM practices as well as that the country's institutional context presented important yet not deterministic hurdles. The authors also found that SMEs adopt an opportunistic approach to talent acquisition by utilising appropriate available sources to reach out for available talent. The authors provided evidence that SMEs adopt a hybrid approach to talent development in addressing talent scarcity. Finally, this study reported that talent retention is significantly appreciated by SMEs, who offer a range of intrinsic and extrinsic incentives to retain their talented workforce.

This study provides stakeholders with insights into how effective TM practices can be considered a lifeline to organisational sustainability – particularly for SMEs in the contemporary challenging and fiercely competitive business environment. It also highlights the potential of inclusive TM practices to be part of an effective workforce management strategy: Relative to the prevailing institutional dynamic, stakeholders (policymakers and human resource practitioners) must engage in the multiple areas of individual talent acquisition, development and retention.

In a context of reforms, this study reports on TM practice in internationally oriented Greek SMEs. The authors also add to the literature on TM in SMEs by providing evidence on the conceptualisation and management of global talent in this context.

Since its inception, the term ‘corporate governance’ (CG) has attracted mainstream attention, continuing to generate discussion among academics, practitioners and policy-makers. This heightened interest generally revolves around clarifying the principles of CG, both in theory and practice. This is particularly important in the context of emerging economies, where the sociocultural ethos and values often differ from those of most developed economies, where the CG concept was conceived and developed. In this vein, this chapter draws on empirical data to explore practical CG challenges faced by corporations in the Nigerian manufacturing and banking sectors. Nigeria is a country whose dominant national culture is one of high-power distance (HPD), which endorses servant-master relationships and encourages deference to authority. In this study, we found that HPD culture can undermine stakeholders’ ability to hold corporate executives to account on practices and behaviours that are antithetical to principles of corporate integrity and ethics, accountability, transparency, autonomy and stakeholder engagement, which in turn, leads to (and exacerbates) corporate misgovernance among businesses in the sectors. The theoretical and practical implications of the study are expatiated in the discussion section.