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The importance of modeling digital leadership in quickly digitizing countries, like the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is inevitable for building leadership capabilities to lead, engage and motivate remote employees in the digital environment. Using Blake and Mouton Grid, the current study examines the behavioral approach used by the leaders from both public and private sectors while managing their workforce digitally in the period of the pandemic, when 70% of the workforce worked remotely for the first-time in the region.

An online survey was conducted by the managerial employees working in different firms using self-administered questionnaires and adopting the snowball sampling technique. In total, 476 respondents participated in the study from both the Emirates of Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

The analysis using IBM SPSS and Smart PLS software reported that 9 out of 10 leaders positioned their digital leadership style well above the middle-of-the-road management style (5,5) oriented towards team management (9,9); with 7 out of 9 displaying high team management leadership style, while managing remote workers. However, millennials displayed higher task orientation when compared to generation-x leaders, who concentrated more on their relations with the workers.

The findings have implications for practitioners in technology driven regions. Also the results highlighting the task-oriented approach of millennials digital leaders have implication for owners and board of directors of the firms that seniority is not the only credible approach for leadership positions.

The study reveals the behavioral styles beneficial for digital leaders to develop their leadership capabilities and increase their effectiveness while managing the workforce digitally. Black Mountain Grid and its two-dimensional leadership matrix has been found to be a useful conceptual approach for understanding digital leadership behaviors, and based on study findings, recommendations have been provided to effectively improve its utilization for leading teams. The findings have implications for practitioners in technology driven regions as well as digital leadership field scholars.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic adversely affected small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in India. Amongst the challenges faced were the adjustments required in leadership skills to address pandemic-induced technological changes and the necessity for employee skill upgrading. This study examined the factors that influenced organisational performance in Indian SMEs, particularly in the context of the digital transformations that were brought about by the pandemic.

The study employed a cross-sectional design to investigate a set of hypotheses that were formulated to understand the relationships amongst digital leadership, digital training, empowerment and organisational performance. The data were collected during the pandemic from 487 employees who were working in various SMEs in India. Questionnaires were distributed through email and social media platforms, and electronic consent was obtained from each participant.

The study's findings indicated positive associations amongst digital leadership, digital training, empowerment and organisational performance. They also highlighted the mediating role of empowerment in these relationships. Furthermore, organisational resilience was found to positively moderate the relationship between empowerment and performance.

The study stands amongst the pioneers in exploring the role of digital leadership and digital training during the pandemic and their impact on employee empowerment amongst SMEs in a developing country.

As knowledge management increasingly becomes critical for the success of professional service firms, this paper uses social exchange theory to investigate the interactive impact of transformational leadership and organizational innovation on online knowledge sharing by employees in professional service firms. This study aims to investigate the mediating roles of job autonomy and job engagement in this process.

Data were collected from a survey of 350 frontline employees in professional service providers, including banking, telecommunication and insurance. Structural equation modeling was used for data analysis.

The results show that transformational leadership positively affects job autonomy, which in turn has a positive impact on online knowledge sharing through job engagement. Thus, job autonomy and job engagement mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and online knowledge sharing. Finally, organizational innovation moderates the relationship between transformational leadership and job autonomy.

This paper extends the knowledge management literature by studying the impact of transformational leadership on the online knowledge-sharing behavior and exploring the focal roles of job autonomy and job engagement in online-sharing behavior in professional service firms. The findings also provide useful implications for practitioners to help them engage employees in the adoption of digital technologies to optimize outcomes.

Emergence of COVID-19 has posed a big challenge around the world demanding responsible behavior at all levels for effective mitigation of its adverse effects on humanity. Despite deadly nature of the pandemic, people yet tend to violate the lockdowns, social distancing, and related protective measures. This study presents a critical view and identifies underlying causes of the deviant behavior of masses. It highlights specific areas where responsible leadership can make a difference in fighting the pandemic from organizational perspective.

Qualitative data collected through in depth interviews from three different countries - Pakistan, Turkey and Malaysia. The data was collected thrice with time lags and integrated view has been presented in this study.

The study finds that perceptual dissonance, cost of protective behavior, reactive attraction and perceived triviality of protective measures are some of the main causes of deviant behavior.

Although the data have been collected from three countries, yet smaller sample size remains a limitation of the study. Similarly, the longitudinal data was collected once in each wave of COVID-19 and its increased frequency could make findings more reliable.

The findings provide an “analysis template” for responsible leaders to analyze any crisis situation in future. In the light of findings, leaders can locate causes of deviant behavior and the way they can influence behavior of employees in a crisis.

The study is highly valuable in analysis of social dimension of COVID-19 crisis at organizational level. It clearly highlights the significance of social and financial support by responsible leaders for influencing the protective intentions of employees in an emergency situation.

The organizational perspective and the responsibilities of leaders for fighting the pandemic has not been adequately explored. This study has investigated the likely causes of deviant behavior of employees in adoption of protective measures. It also highlights the areas where responsible leaders can make a difference in inducing protective behaviors.

The purpose of this study was threefold: to trace the extent to which digital transformation strategies are being implemented in organizations; to statistically measure, validate, predict and examine how digital leaders perceive a synthesized digital transformation model (DTM); and to explore whether leaders with different demographic characteristics perceive the DTM similarly.

The study authors surveyed 778 leaders/managers from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to assess the synthetized DTM consisting of four dimensions and nine perception constructs that represent how leaders manage employees in a digital environment. The survey questions were adapted from the 2014 Westerman leading digital book published in Harvard business press.

The general findings revealed that UAE organizations that were already in the digital transformation stage before COVID-19 reacted and responded extremely quickly to speed up the implementation of their respective digital transformation strategies. We concluded that our proposed and synthetized DTM is valid and predictable, and can be adapted to trace the stages of digital transformation by leaders. A positive relationship was found between the DTM’s four dimensions and their related constructs as perceived by the leaders, regardless of differences in their demographic characteristics.

The synthesized digital transformation model is unique in that the authors believe there is no other research that purports to synthesize, validate and correlate using the digital transformation campus dimensions and its related constructs, reflecting leaders' perceptions toward adopting this campus. As well, this is the first UAE study to explore and compare the perspectives of leaders on their digital practices after COVID-19 in a country that has an established IT infrastructure.

This paper aims to facilitate researchers, practitioners and policymakers in understanding and managing the impact of the black swan event – COVID-19 on work from home in the social science subject area through bibliometric analysis. For this purpose, the authors analyzed publications from the Scopus database.

In this paper, the authors conducted bibliometric analysis based on two major techniques: performance analysis and science mapping. The authors applied VOSviewer and Biblioshiny to address the research questions of present study. The study explored the hot trend topics and summarized them with discussions and implications.

Based on the analysis of 500 publications, the authors present an overview of performance and science mapping from the perspective of different aspects such as publication output and authors. Also, authors visualized the text mining by co-word analysis forming nine clusters as well as mapping trend topics. The existing publications were divided into ten clusters according to different keyword analyses: Leadership, Mental health, Technology, Crisis Management, Gender, Challenges, well-being and Work-life balance.

Sample from the Scopus database is not exhaustive, and the dataset may be skewed due to the adoption of the selection criteria. The authors’ concentration was on academic publications in English that excludes potentially intriguing and pioneering studies done in other languages. The study area was limited to social science only.

The paramount lesson is that the COVID-19 quandary is multifaceted, necessitating not simply adaptations to current strategies but also an understanding and analysis of advancements in the economy, commerce and society. According to the analysis presented above, to overcome the COVID-19 “black swan event”, managers must think ahead. The analysis gives leaders and decision-makers a range of useful information on work from home (WFH) difficulties in COVID-19, as well as initiatives and revisions that must be implemented at the economic, social and scientific aspects when dealing with such uncertainties. The findings also aid managers in forecasting the need for sophisticated technology, organizational agility and resilience to attain the desired direction of progress.

With a focus on addressing WFH during COVID-19 from social science perspective and to synthesize its future research directions systematically, the authors performed Bibliometric analysis both with VOSviewer and Biblioshiny, in order to enhance the overall analysis for higher accuracy and more reliable results that is unique value addition and contribution to the existing literature.

Firms are driven to ride on the digital wave in today’s open innovation ecosystem. This study aims to explore the effect of digital transformation (DT) on knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) firms’ innovation ambidexterity, namely, radical versus incremental innovation, respectively. Meanwhile, the authors evaluated the moderating role of the complexity of R&D collaboration portfolio (i.e. organizational diversity and geographic diversity) in the above relationships.

Using a panel data set of 171 Chinese listed firms in the information and communications technology services industry from 2010 to 2018, the proposed hypotheses were empirically attested.

It is found that DT has a positive relationship with radical innovation and an inverted U-shaped relationship with incremental innovation. In terms of the R&D collaboration portfolio, organizational diversity positively moderates the relationships between DT and innovation ambidexterity, respectively. The geographic diversity weakens the inverted U-shaped effect of DT on incremental innovation; however, its moderating role in the link between DT and radical innovation is not empirically verified.

Extant scholars mainly addressed the interplay between KIBS firms and their manufacturing clients, while this study reveals the different consequences of DT on KIBS firms’ innovation ambidexterity to highlight the role of KIBS firms is an independent and essential innovator in a knowledge-driven economy. Notably, the findings contribute to knowledge management (KM) and R&D literature by confirming the diversity of the R&D collaboration portfolio is a critical KM strategy for KIBS firms to develop and promote external knowledge resources.

A new type of digital-based worker emerged during the COVID-19. As a result, during the adjustment to this scenario, family, resources and emotions were impacted. Technological and emotional skills were crucial to give continuity and certainty to business. However, despite benefits, remote working has negative consequences, especially in well-being perception. This study proposes a model to measure the impact on the well-being perception of workers that adapted their job to remote positions during a pandemic and offers a valuable framework to understand future emerging changes in remote working and the relationship with well-being perception, especially during crisis scenarios.

The study used an online questionnaire and a structural equation methodology by partial least squares (PLS) using SmartPLS 3.3.3. Data were obtained from 567 respondents workers who adapted to their jobs during the pandemic in Mexico.

The results showed that six model dimensions: human relations (RH), emotions (E), well-being behaviors related to Covid-19 (CB), family economics (EF), routines and habits (RS) and family life (VF) were positive and significant to reflect the Index of Perception of Well-being (iWB) using a structural equation model. This indicates how the lockdown process changed people's perception of well-being and concerns. According with this, for remote working employees, two dimensions were relevant: RH and EF. This finding is relevant because during emergency lockdown, these workers needed to adapt their activities and were separated from all human interactions.

The researchers’ model of Index of Perception of Well-being (iWB) has conceptual and practical implications. From a conceptual point of view, it offers a methodology to measure the relationships between remote working and employees' well-being perception. While for practice, it offers managerial implications to better manage remote working adaptation without compromising people's well-being to create future innovation management environments (IME) for organizations.

This study contributes to develop research about changes in workers' well-being perception during digital adaptation.

This study aims to test the relationship between emotional labor and service quality of the frontline employees of Chinese restaurants during the coronavirus disease pandemic (COVID-19). This study further investigated the mediating role of work fatigue (WF) and the moderating role of supervisor–subordinate Guanxi (SSG).

The authors used a time-lag approach to gather data from a sample of 365 frontline staff members working in Chinese restaurants. All hypotheses were tested using SPSS and AMOS.

First, restaurant frontline employees’ deep acting was associated with higher service quality, whereas surface acting leads to lower service quality. Second, WF mediated the relationship between emotional labor and service quality. Third, SSG moderated the impact of emotional labor on WF during COVID-19.

All variables measured in this study were self-reported by restaurant frontline employees, which may increase the risk of common-method bias. However, this study enriches the literature on emotional labor, WF and SSG during COVID-19.

COVID-19 has severely affected the hotel, restaurant and catering sector and especially the psychological state and the work performance of frontline employees. Restaurant managers should implement some measures to improve employees’ service quality during COVID-19.

The present findings show that restaurant frontline employees adopted various emotional labor strategies when they were faced with higher than usual job demands and the risk of infection during COVID-19.

Work-from-home (WFH) has gained popularity over the past years. This study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis to systematically review and synthesize scholarly literature on the complex interplay between WFH, employee well-being and performance.

The study incorporates analysis of the bibliometric including performance analysis, content analysis and scientific mapping that is applied to 497 Scopus papers. VOSviewer software was used to evaluate the data.

This study posits an imbalance between the count of documents and the citations earned by each author. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health was regarded as a leading journal with maximum citations and publications. The highest count of publications came from most Asian countries such as India, China, Indonesia and Japan. The investigation indicated that the writers with the maximum citations were predominantly the authors of the majorly cited papers. Further, the text mining through co-occurrence of keyword analysis generated five clusters and cocited references revealed three themes.

The current research might benefit both research groups as well as human resource professionals since it also reveals the research necessity and gaps in the WFH domain.

This research delves into unexplored facets of WFH beyond traditional studies over the past decade by examining remote work arrangements in today’s economy, revealing previously unnoticed dynamics affecting employee well-being and performance. This innovative viewpoint enhances the literature and provides an empirical foundation for strategic organizational decision-making and future study.