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The purpose of this paper is to uncover the right type of organizational slack for innovation. It examines how city managers conceive slack, and how they create slack to facilitate innovation while dealing with fiscal stress.

The study is built around a comparative case study approach to uncover contrasts, similarities and patterns of slack-building for innovation in austere times. It relies on the experiences of 12 experienced city managers. Data are sought from elite interviews and one focus group.

The main finding is that innovation in the public sector does not benefit from slack in general, but from a specific type of slack. The evidence shows that useful slack for innovation is not so much about financial slack or HR slack, but about psychological slack.

This study adds to the literature that the key questions of slack research should not only focus on identifying the “right amount” of slack but also on identifying of the “right type” of slack.

Public managers who want to deal with (fiscal) crises more innovatively might reconsider their perceptions of slack and its value. Rather than operating on a pure cost effectiveness paradigm, they should balance the costs of slack and its innovative abilities.

This paper highlights the social/psychological side of austerity management. It concludes that increasing the ability of public organizations to innovatively cope with fiscal stress is not so much about increasing predictive capacity or financial buffers, but about increasing the mental leeway of coworkers.

The aim of this paper is to contribute with increased knowledge of the complex role of internal communication during a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, the authors want to address the following research questions. How can the overall approach to internal crisis communication during the pandemic be interpreted, and what view of internal crisis communication does this approach reflect? What has been characteristic of the leadership communication during the pandemic? What do coworkers think of their communication role and how well does the internal communication support that role?

This article is based on a case study of an authority with 1,000 employees. The empirical material consists of both documents and interviews. The analyzed documents include steering documents, e-mails to managers from the support function and newsletters from the top manager. The 17 interviews comprise managers, coworkers and communication managers. All interviews were recorded and the authors have conducted verbatim transcriptions.

The pandemic is an example of a wicked problem that involves a lot of ambiguity. Often organizations try to handle wicked problems by trying to control it through traditional management skills and practices. A pandemic demands a leadership, culture and communicative approach that highlights the importance of coworkers. In the studied organization the authors found knowledge and rhetoric about the value of coworkers and communicative coworkership. However, top management does not encourage, support and award practices that are in line with the espoused culture. The key to success is top managers that walk the talk and act as role models.

Crisis managers and crisis communicators need to focus more on improvisation, flexibility, listening and how to approach and make sense of the uncertain. In general, there is a tendency to rely too much on simple tools and to oversimplify complexity. Complex crises such as the pandemic raise new demands on leadership. Effective crisis leadership in a complex crisis seems to be much more democratic and collaborative than often assumed. If coworkers are expected to act as ambassadors or organizational representatives, they also need to be given better support for that role.

This article highlights the importance of closing the gap between espoused and enacted culture in order to change from a managerialistic internal crisis communication to a process internal crisis communication approach.

The major purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of openness to change on research publication in higher education institutions (HEI) in Tanzania.

With a sample of 247 academics, a cross-sectional survey design was used and questionnaires were the primary data collection tool. The collected data were tested using mean and standard deviations, and the causal–effect relationship between the independent and dependent variables was tested using simple linear regression.

The findings of this study revealed that openness to change positively and significantly influence research publication in higher education (β = 0.598 and p < 0.001).

The study recommends that HEI should consider openness to change value as one among criteria for hiring academics as well as developing good programs that will help academics develop the academics' self-awareness with regard to what takes for one to be a productive researcher.

This is the first study to examine the influence of openness to change as a personal value on academics’ research publication in Tanzanian HEI. In this instance, the study contributes to the existing literature on the influence of academics' personal values in terms of openness to change on research publication.