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There is currently a shortage of applications for the role of principal. There are a range of factors contributing to this, one of which may be the considerable levels of stress and burnout reported by principals and deputy principals. Distributed leadership may offer some solutions to this challenge. This study aimed to explore the lived experiences of distributed leadership from a role sustainability perspective of school principals and deputy principals.

This paper follows a qualitative interpretivist approach based upon 15 semi-structured interviews with principals and deputy principals working in Irish post-primary schools. Data were analysed via thematic analysis.

Results indicate challenges to the sustainability of the role of senior school leaders comprising administrative overload, policy proliferation and challenges due to the complexity and breadth of the role of these school leaders. It was reported that engagement with distributed leadership could aid the sustainability of participants in their roles and the importance of focusing on well-being practices was also highlighted.

Recommendations include the need to reconsider policy proliferation and the need to reconceptualise school leadership. Further consideration regarding how distributed leadership can aid the sustainability of the role of senior school leaders, without adversely contributing to the already busy role of schoolteachers is also recommended.

The findings of this study are valuable as they reflect previous findings relating to the current challenges to sustainable school leadership as well as highlight distributed leadership as a potential aid to mitigate against these challenges.

Existing research has examined the results of women’s political leadership participation (WPLP) and the reasons for the lack of advancement of women to management positions. However, little research has been adopting a more comprehensive framework and configuration perspective to investigate the determinants of WPLP. By integrating institutional theory and institutional complementarities theory, this study aims to construct an institution–culture–structure framework to investigate the multiple driving mechanisms of WPLP.

Drawing on the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method and a sample of 66 countries, the authors identify multiple equifinal combinations of conditions related to high and not-high levels of WPLP.

According to the results, the authors summarize five pathways influencing WPLP. These pathways include education and culture-driven pattern, political institutions-driven pattern, political institutions and structure-driven pattern, integrated-driven pattern and political institutions and culture restrictive pattern.

The authors shed new light on the driving mechanism of WPLP and contribute to research on making full out of women’s leadership.

Internal workplace coaches are employees who, in addition to their main job, volunteer to provide coaching to work colleagues who are not their direct reports. The purpose of this paper is to explore what motivates these individuals to volunteer to be an internal workplace coach and to continue carrying out the role.

To explore the experiences of internal coaches, a questionnaire was devised and issued; it attracted 484 responses – the largest survey response to date from this population. Following analysis of the questionnaire data, semi-structured interviews were carried out with 20 internal coaches from private, public and not-for-profit UK organisations. The responses were analysed in relation to motivation theory, principally self-determination theory.

Individuals were motivated to volunteer for the role, and to continue to practise as coaches, in the most part to satisfy intrinsic needs for competence, relatedness and autonomy. The research presents rich information about how coaches perceived these needs were satisfied by coaching. In general, there were only moderate or poor levels of support and recognition for individual coaches within their organisation, indicating limited extrinsic motivation.

The practical implications are that organisations can draw on the findings from this study to motivate individuals to volunteer to be internal coaches and to continue to act in that role.

Many organisations use internal coaches, but there is very little research into what motivates these volunteers.

In recent decades, emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) have predominantly adopted a big step internationalization strategy to expand their business overseas. This study aims to examine the effect of big step internationalization on the speed of subsequent foreign direct investment (FDI) expansion for EMNEs. The authors also investigate the potential boundary conditions.

The authors use the random effects generalized least squares (GLS) regression following a hierarchical approach to analyze the panel data set conducted by a sample of publicly listed Chinese firms from 2001 to 2012.

The findings indicate that implementing big step internationalization in the initial stages accelerates the speed of subsequent FDI expansion. Notably, the authors find that this effect is more pronounced for firms that opt for acquisitions as the entry mode in their first big step internationalization and possess a board of directors with strong political connections to their home country’s government. In contrast, the board of director’s international experience negatively moderates this effect.

This study provides insights into our scholarly and practical understanding of EMNEs’ big step internationalization and subsequent FDI expansion speed, which offers important implications for firms’ decision-makers and policymakers.

This study extends the internationalization theory, broadens the international business literature on the consequences of big step internationalization and deepens the theoretical and practical understanding of foreign expansion strategies in EMNEs.

How does a manager’s coaching behaviour encourage taking charge behaviour among subordinates? Although prior research has found a positive association between managerial coaching behaviour and employee performance, to date few studies have examined its effect on proactive behaviours in the workplace such as taking charge. Drawing on social exchange theory (SET) and social cognitive theory (SCT), this study develops a theoretical model to examine the mediating effects of work engagement and role breadth self-efficacy (RBSE) in the relationship between managerial coaching and subordinates taking charge. Additionally, drawing on social role theory (SRT), we test whether our proposed relationships are contingent on subordinates’ gender.

We tested our proposed moderated-mediation model using empirical data collected across two waves from 196 employees within a large Malaysian services enterprise. Partial least squares structural equation modelling was used to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results revealed that managerial coaching has a significant, positive relationship with taking charge, work engagement and RBSE. However, only work engagement was found to partially mediate the relationship between managerial coaching and taking charge. Subordinates’ gender was found to positively attenuate the direct effect between managerial coaching and taking charge among females. However, the mediating effects of work engagement and RBSE in managerial coaching and taking charge were found to be not contingent on subordinates’ gender.

Finding from this study reveals that managerial coaching is useful in shaping employees' taking charge behaviour through work engagement. Hence, organisations should focus on strategies aiming to enhance managers' coaching capabilities.

This study extends the nomological networks of managerial coaching by highlighting it as a predictor of taking charge. Moreover, drawing on SET and SCT to explain the mechanism of managerial coaching and taking charge, we provide a novel perspective on how managerial coaching can influence taking charge. Specifically, we highlight the critical role of work engagement as a key mechanism that influences the relationship between managerial coaching and taking charge. Finally, we demonstrate managerial coaching as a means through which organisations can improve individual functioning.

The combination of action and process has remained the attention of the psychology of entrepreneurship research. Moreover, special attention has also been paid to the whens and hows of entrepreneurial psychological training. Keeping this in view the current study has tested the impact of individual entrepreneurial orientation (IEO) training on small business entrepreneurial career resilience. Using action regulation theory (ART), a serial mediation model of IEO behaviour and entrepreneurial career adaptability is hypothesised.

This study used a longitudinal randomised controlled field experiment in which the data were collected at four points. A total of 546 small business owners from Lahore, Pakistan, participated in this research (training group = 265, control group = 281). The data were analysed using ANCOVAs and PROCESS Model 6.

The research has found that IEO training impacts the entrepreneurial career resilience of small business owners through the development of IEO behaviour and career adaptability.

This experimental inquiry is a novel attempt to extend the career-related outcomes of IEO training (career resilience) based on ART through the mediating role of IEO behaviour and career adaptability. In addition, it has tested the IEO training in the developing country of Pakistan, which is a relevant context for enhancing its socio-economic growth.

Considering rapid digitalization development, this study examines the impacts of digital technology innovation on social responsibility in platform enterprises.

The study applies the event study method and cross-sectional regression analysis, taking 168 digital technology innovations for social responsibility issued by 88 listed platform enterprises from 2011 to 2022 to study the impact of digital technology innovations for social responsibility announcements of different announcement content and platform attributes on the stock market value of platform enterprises.

The results show that, first, the positive stock market reaction is produced on the same day as the digital technology innovation announcement. Second, the announcement of the platform’s public social responsibility and the announcement of co-innovation and radical innovation bring more positive stock market reactions. In addition, the announcements mentioned above issued by trading platforms bring more positive stock market reactions. Finally, the social responsibility attribution characteristics of the announcement did not have a significant differentiated impact on the stock market reaction.

Most scholars have studied digital technology innovation for social responsibility through modeling rather than second-hand data to empirically examine. This study uses second-hand data with the instrumental stakeholder theory to provide a new research perspective on platform social responsibility. In addition, in order to explore the different impacts of digital technology innovation on social responsibility, this study has classified digital technology innovation for social responsibility according to its social responsibility and digital technology innovation characteristics.

The purpose of this short communication is to shed light on the accuracy of quantification methods of household food waste (HFW).

Thirty-seven recently published studies in HFW were surveyed for this commentary. Exemplary methods and findings of these studies were compared.

It is challenging to draw conclusions on the amount of the HFW per person/town/country due to the inconsistent and heterogeneous methodologies used. We recommend using direct measurements or triangulation of methods to help ensure valid findings. Governments should incentivize consumers to deliver their food waste to designated locations where weights could accurately be assessed. Monetary or tax incentives could help stimulate an accurate accounting of waste and encourage reductions. Food waste measurements should be consistently reported as kg/person/week.

Food and water security must be provided for all. It is estimated that one-third of edible food for humans is currently lost or wasted globally. According to the World Food Program (WFP), this is about 1.3 billion tons of food per year and at the same time this wasted food could be sufficient to feed two billion people.

The aim of this paper is to fill a gap in the literature about the magnitude and significance of HFW and its impact on the environment and social welfare. Currently, there are no generally accepted uniform methods of food waste quantification at the household level. This original communication brings the importance and challenges of the quantification of HFW to light.

The Covid-19 pandemic appears to have engendered heterogeneous effects on individuals’ labour market prospects. This paper focuses on two possible sources of a heterogeneous exposition to labour market risks associated with the pandemic outbreak: the routine task content of the job and the teleworkability. To evaluate whether these dimensions played a crucial role in amplifying employment and wage gaps among workers, we focus on the case of Italy, the first EU country hit by Covid-19.

Investigating the actual effect of the pandemic on workers employed in jobs with a different degree of teleworkability and routinization, using real microdata, is currently unfeasible. This is because longitudinal datasets collecting annual earnings and the detailed information about occupations needed to capture a job’s routine task content and teleworkability are not presently available. To simulate changes in the wage distribution for the year 2020, we have employed a static microsimulation model. This model is built on data from the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (IT-SILC) survey, which has been enriched with administrative data and aligned with monthly observed labour market dynamics by industries and regions.

We measure the degree of job teleworkability and routinization with the teleworkability index (TWA) built by Sostero et al. (2020) and the routine-task-intensity index (RTI) developed by Cirillo et al. (2021), respectively. We find that RTI and TWA are negatively and positively associated with wages, respectively, and they are correlated with higher (respectively lower) risks of a large labour income drop due to the pandemic. Our evidence suggests that labour market risks related to the pandemic – and the associated new types of earnings inequality that may derive – are shaped by various factors (including TWA and RTI) instead of by a single dimension. However, differences in income drop risks for workers in jobs with varying degrees of teleworkability and routinization largely reduce when income support measures are considered, thus suggesting that the redistributive effect of the emergency measures implemented by the Italian government was rather effective.

No studies have so far investigated the effect of the pandemic on workers employed in jobs with a different degree of routinization and teleworkability in Italy. We thus investigate whether income drop risks in Italy in 2020 – before and after income support measures – differed among workers whose jobs are characterized by a different degree of RTI and TWA.

This study is based on the regulatory focus theory and conservation of resources theory to examine how information confusion leads to users’ discontinuous usage intention of social networking sites (SNSs), with the mediating mechanisms of users’ motivation and affectivity.

Data were obtained from 270 users in different SNSs in Vietnam. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the sample data and test the hypotheses.

Results show that information confusion has a positive influence on discontinuous usage intention, and prevention focus positively mediates this relationship. Furthermore, the negative affectivity positively mediates the link between information confusion and discontinuous usage intention and that between prevention focus and discontinuous usage intention. In addition, prevention focus and negative affectivity together play a serial mediating effect in the link between information confusion and discontinuous usage intention.

This study extends the regulatory focus theory and conservation of resources theory to validate a model that explains the transitional process of users’ motivation and affectivity in the link between information confusion and discontinuous usage intention of SNSs. The findings of this study provide implications for academic researchers and business managers of SNSs to understand and make better decisions to retain their users.