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The present article focuses on crises that arise from provocative advertisement images and products and introduces the shooting star crisis. Moreover, it aims to shed some light on the interconnection between the boomerang effect, crisis, crisis management and workforce diversity.

By examining the cases of two leading organizations of the fashion industry that found themselves involved in crises and how they confronted them, it seeks to explore whether investments in workforce diversity is a solution for these problems.

Sometimes provocative products and images that intend to spark customers' imagination can backfire and initiate a crisis. Based on the findings, organizations that admit their wrongdoing and react promptly to their stakeholders' demands tend to overcome a crisis relatively faster than organizations with passive behavior. By understanding the need for a proactive approach, fashion organizations can evade future crises and avoid creating products or images that can be perceived as racist and invoke public outrage. Additionally, the study revealed that workforce diversity initiatives can mitigate a crisis and its aftermath.

Its novelty is that it deals with the interrelationship between boomerang effect, crisis, crisis management and workforce diversity. Moreover, it introduces a new type of crisis, the shooting star crisis, in order to capture new crises that emerge in modern era, as a result of the extensive power of modern social media.

Organizational exploration has recently emerged in the literature as an essential aspect of contemporary organizations. However, little is known about its antecedents and, specifically, the role of contemporary leadership styles. The present study investigates the relationship between empowering leadership and organizational exploration. In addressing this relationship, we examine preoccupation with failure and leader gender as a mediator and a moderator, respectively.

We collected data from a sample of 326 US employees in March 2022. To test the present hypotheses, we used the PROCESS SPSS macro.

Our results supported our moderated mediation model, demonstrating that the indirect relationship of empowering leadership with organizational exploration via preoccupation with failure is stronger for male leaders than for female counterparts.

Concerning the practical implications of this study, organizations should be cognizant of empowering leaders’ impact on desirable outcomes. Additionally, organizations should promote preoccupation with failure to ameliorate organizational exploration. Preoccupation with failure can be achieved when error reporting is encouraged by organizations and supervisors and when a culture that promotes constructive feedback is established.

The present study offers novel insights into the underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions through which empowering leadership relates to organizational exploration. Additionally, it fills a gap in the literature concerning the relationship between empowering leadership and preoccupation with failure. Moreover, it adds to prior research regarding the outcomes of preoccupation with failure, filling the gap regarding the relationship between preoccupation with failure and organizational exploration. Lastly, it expands limited research focused on leader gender as a condition under which the effect of contemporary leadership styles could be enhanced or mitigated.