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The purpose of this article is to present qualitative research of the past organizational crisis at Mississippi Chemical Corporation that the authors use to theorize a typology of organizational crisis from the leadership perspective.

The authors combined ANTi-microhistory approach and staff ride research design to re-enact the sensemaking of the company’s former crisis leaders and elicit their retrospective oral accounts. A long interview format was used to interview the crisis leaders.

The authors found that the former crisis leaders not only conceptualized organizational crisis conventionally as an event or as a process but also that they engaged in the denial of the crisis to guard the company’s reputation and competed with their claims against the stakeholder claims about the ways how the crisis was to be managed.

Based on the paper’s findings, the authors proposed an original typology of organizational crisis.

The modern construction industry is highly competitive and cost driven, with tangible adversarial relationships between projects' contractual parties at individual and organisational levels; there are conflict of interest as people to survive. Accordingly, team leaders on construction megaprojects (CMPs) in multinational engineering organisations strive to survive in such competitive markets. The research’s aim is to investigate relationships between team leaders' tenure and management styles towards professional subordinates on CMPs and elaborate how corporate governance can optimally address this conflict of interest and adversarial relationships.

The research methodology adopted processes of inducting theory using case studies. A qualitative approach was adopted as a primary data collection and analysis source. It involved case studies through primary data collection in semi-structured face-to-face interviews with 38 professional subordinates (interviewees) to discuss impacts of team leaders' tenure on their management style (a five-team leader, case studies). The research methodology is based on building theories from case study grounded theory research methodologies.

The research introduced the notion that team leader survival syndrome is pronounced and evidenced by adversarial reactions towards new or experienced professional subordinates where team leaders perceive professional subordinates, especially at senior technical levels, as potential risks that jeopardise their positions and employment survival possibilities. The syndrome is proven based on real-life case studies; it is constant, tangible and serious disorder of attitudes and behaviours. Longer tenure stimulates and accelerates these phenomena and syndrome, with 58% of team leaders exhibiting such syndromes. Optimum employee tenure is between 7 and 10 years. Corporate governance provides good resolution practices.

The research implications are useful to construction industry and academia. However, the analysis is limited to the case studies considered in Canada and Qatar. Due to small sample size for both case studies and respondents to the questionnaire survey, it is recommended for future exploration to expand the scope of research to larger sample size and various demographic and geographical locations.

Corporates should acknowledge the presence of team leader survival syndromes. They should thoroughly investigate sociopolitical relationships behind it and seek to understand consequences on professional subordinates. Corporates should also adopt a 360-degree feedback system; they should limit trust given to team leaders in this regard to responsible trust, to eliminate manipulation. Team leaders are perceived as being not always truthful and misrepresent capabilities and performance of their professional subordinates to senior managers. Corporate governance holistic multidimensional perspectives are required to provide resolutions of team leader survival syndromes.

The research has discovered a phenomenon that team leaders on CMPs in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) organisations, prompted by virtue of long tenure in corporates or by power of their managerial level in organisations, perceive their professional subordinates, especially senior technical employees, as potential risks. It is thought promoting them would put their own positions and security of tenure at risk. Hence, team leaders act adversarially, to enhance their own survival prospects. This research introduced the novel team leader survival syndrome and introduced analyses, practical implications and recommendations.

The objective of this chapter is to identify the key characteristics of Global Services businesses that will thrive and achieve success in the future. These factors are integrated into three main pillars, which we refer to as the Triple-Win. The first and most obvious pillar is technology as a tool. The second pillar is the design and sustainability of the business model, without which the previous factor would be merely a cost and not an investment. And last but not the least, there is the purpose which gives meaning to the proposal, focusing on the human being and their environment. The DIDPAGA business model sits at the intersection of these three elements.

The case describes the internal growth workshop initiative at Vedanta Group. Anil Agarwal in 1976 founded Vedanta as a scrap-metal dealership in Mumbai (then Bombay). Over the years, Anil pursued a very aggressive growth journey with a vision to create a leading global natural resource company. The principal objective of discussing this case is to understand how Vedanta introduced this initiative and how it fits within the strategic human resource management at the group.

This chapter explores the role of ethics in shaping, underpinning and sustaining authentic leadership. Viewing ethics as a system of moral principles that govern individual behaviour and conduct, Mould discusses the basis of ethics for authentic leadership, recognising that it has multiple overlapping and conflicting sources. Recognising the multiple ‘moral’ pressures and dilemmas that leaders face, Mould asks how they can construct and live by coherent ethics in a globally minded, interconnected, culturally diverse and often incoherent world. He suggests tools that may assist in searching for ethics that support authentic leadership. The author concludes that examining the interplay between ethics and leadership practices challenges theories of authentic leadership.

Understanding societal expectations of a leader's responsibility and context-specific challenges in less-researched emerging economies has become imperative for foreign Multinational enterprises (MNEs) to survive in these contexts while developing globally responsible leaders. Identification of institutionally sanctioned characteristics, competencies and strategies that assist leaders in dealing with such challenges while achieving shared value has wider implications for academics, practitioners and the literature on responsible leadership (RL), which is the purpose of this paper.

The authors conducted in-depth interviews of 28 senior indigenous leaders in 3 Indian Multinational corporations (MNCs) in construction sector, following a grounded theory approach.

The authors identified three vital institutionally driven challenges and four individual-level societal-driven factors, subsequently influencing leaders' strategic decisions and choices to deal with such challenges beyond passive conformance. Contrary to the previous findings, this study also briefly discusses that a mere ethical climate is insufficient; organizations must develop a holistic values climate that works as contextual factors to influence RL.

Contrary to the previous findings suggesting Indian leaders' conformance to constraining forces to RL, by adopting a multilevel approach, the authors identify the context-specific strategic behaviors that responsible leaders adopt in dealing with such forces responsibly. Thus, it is the first multilevel inductive approach conducted in a non-Western context, offering a discrete understanding of RL while addressing some of the inconsistencies in the literature and contributing to cross-cultural leadership research. Also, findings highlight the factors of RL that are more emic and etic for generalization.

The study aims to explore ‘motivational climate', which designs the recurring patterns associated with employees' attitudes, behaviour, and feelings. If organizations successfully adopt a motivational climate, such climate influences the performance and behavior of employees to a great extent. Responsible leadership plays a constructive role in injecting a motivational climate in an organization to ensure information flow. In a motivational climate, top management or leaders reward their employees for individual progress, improvement and mastery. Knowledge sharing is supported in a mastery climate because such a climate can reduce the motive of knowledge hiding and instead further help in stimulating creativity.

Study was to scrutinize a moderated-mediation model, a quantitative hypothetic deductive approach to verify the hypotheses of the study. The data were gathered from employees and supervisors of advertising agencies and marketing departments in metropolitan cities of Punjab, Pakistan. Such firms and departments are considered because they offer a great opportunity to relevant variables and their relations. These organizations and departments are the most creativity-seeking domains and involve frequent interactions (for instance, regular meetings) between leaders with their employees and among peers. Data were primarily gathered from managerial employees performing their duties in the areas mentioned above.

Current study reveals that RL has a positive and significant relation with employee creative behaviour. Increasing RL characteristics can ultimately boost employee performance in the creativity domain. Being a responsible leader becomes mandatory for leaders to foster employee creativity to maintain the sustainability of an organization. It is confirmed from the results that responsible leadership articulates the mind thinking of employees, which creates an open environment of information while persuading creative and similar behaviour.

The current research investigates how responsible leadership can efficiently leverage the stakeholder approach in influencing employees through a knowledge-based pathway to boost their creative behaviour. The current study tends to uncover the mediating effect of the basic construct of knowledge management, which is knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing enables employees to exchange their information while creating mutual understanding, which helps in the smooth flow of knowledge within the organization; this flow enriches employees to think openly in a creative and appreciative environment.

After completion of the case study, the students will be able to understand the importance of being culturally savvy when working in a culturally diverse environment and managing people from different cultures; critically reflect on the risks resulting from the absence of a clear direction from the company’s top management regarding unifying corporate values and a diversity policy for cooperation across cultures; be aware of best practices in implementing diversity management (DM) initiatives in the company; and learn that changes in the strategic orientation (i.e. focus on automation projects) must be cascaded down to hard elements of structures, processes and systems, as well as to soft elements of skills, staff and management style.

The Kuwaiti branch of a Japanese corporation specialising in control systems and instruments, Rising Sun IT, hired a German professional, Alex, to handle the increasing demand for automation from customers. This recruitment followed several unsuccessful attempts by the company to deliver more advanced automation solutions. Recognising the need to adapt to Kuwaiti customer requirements or risk losing market share, Japanese management understood the importance of transforming their engineering staff. Failure to achieve this next automation step would result in a steady decline in market share and ultimately impact the company’s survival. However, Alex, who was supposed to lead automation projects, was confronted with opposition from the Indian engineering staff and managers. He was not able to find common ground with the staff and perceived issues such as lack of communication, delays in work schedules, missed deadlines and high levels of absenteeism, as a sign of low work morale. Although he tried to increase the awareness of his supervisor and other managers by informing them repeatedly about the problems regarding employee behaviours, his interventions went unheard. He felt ousted by his fellow colleagues and the other employees. Besides, from Alex’s point of view, the Japanese top management did not provide clear directions to the staff and explicit support to Alex in his efforts. This case study highlights three dimensions of Alex’s problem with establishing and maintaining working relationships with other people in the company:▪ Alex’s cultural “blindness” and ignorance of differences in work behaviours that ultimately led to his inability to build solid and trustful relationships with other employees. The case study demonstrates Germany’s performance-oriented and individual-centric culture versus India’s family- and community-oriented culture and the Japanese employees’ strongly hierarchical and company loyalty-oriented culture.▪ Lack of support from the Japanese top management to Alex, which is connected with a wider problem of the lack of a systematic strategic approach to managing a culturally diverse workforce. The case study pinpoints the rhetoric–reality gap in DM in the company, where the diversity, equity and inclusion programme and corporate values were applied only formally and had little attention from the leaders as well as non-managerial employees.▪ Employee resistance to change: The lack of positive communication from the top management level in the company regarding automation projects and the lack of support for Alex’s mission in the company resulted in steady resistance to executing projects, which endangered the company’s survival in the market. Also, one part of Alex’s problem with building a working relationship with the Indian engineering staff was based on the fact that others perceived him as the automation “change agent” – an advocate and catalyst of an undesirable change connected with adverse consequences on employment in the Indian community.

This case is intended for discussion in undergraduate management and business study programmes.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 6: Human resource management.

The purpose of this paper is to examine US public relations professionals' perceptions of the benefits and challenges associated with the concept of moral entrepreneurship, defined as the purposeful process of changing or creating new institutionalized ethical norms. This study argues that the concept of moral entrepreneurship provides organizations with a potentially valuable framework to actively recognize societal pressures and problems and act accordingly to better the environment in which the organization resides and operates.

This exploratory study uses purposive in-depth interviews with 25 diverse public relations professionals, who represented communication firms, in-house public relations departments, higher education, nonprofits and government.

Respondents assigned a high value to the concept of moral entrepreneurship: In addition to its being viewed as the right thing to do, they recognized its practice as a way to help organizations recruit and retain employee talent and improve stakeholder trust. However, based on the interviews, organizational leadership is the primary initiator of ethical changes; therefore, without a seat at the management table, practitioners lack the influence to initiate such new organizational directions and take on the role of moral entrepreneurs only when directed to do so by their superiors. Barriers to adopting a moral entrepreneurship approach included a limited budget and shortage of staff, employees' resistance to change, fear of failure, poor leadership and a politically polarized workplace.

Practice implications include considerations for furthering moral entrepreneurship in organizations.

This study is the first to explore the applicability of the concept of moral entrepreneurship in public relations. The paper underscores the need for further discussion around novel approaches to ethics in public relations that go beyond simple compliance with professional codes and industry standards and that help organizations lead societal change.