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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.

This study seeks to offer a contextual, multilevel perspective on the impact of patriarchal culture and Islamic faith on issues facing women holding leadership positions in a Middle Eastern context.

Data were collected through 25 in-depth qualitative interviews along with open-ended questions in a paper-based survey. In view of the authors' research objectives, the authors purposively recruited participants who were identified as Muslim scholars (academics) and clerics (practitioners).

While the study challenges the prevailing stereotype that Islam holds women leaders back by referring to Islamic teachings that support gender equality, it also highlights the adverse impact of gender discriminatory misinterpretations of Islam for women leaders. The study identifies three interconnected, multilevel factors that lead to misinterpretations of Islamic teachings, i.e. (1) cultural factors (macro level – i.e. patriarchal and tribal culture), (2) organizational factors (meso level – i.e. organizational policies) and (3) individual factors (micro level – i.e. interpretations and practices of religion).

This study contributes to the existing theory development of religion and women in leadership by presenting a novel model highlighting the interplay between religion, patriarchy and women in leadership.

The study recommends the application of a gender egalitarian system that enables full utilization of women's skills and capabilities by (1) reducing the discriminatory function of tribal culture and (2) identifying steps to reform inegalitarian gender practices in the Arab region.

The research is unique as it is the first time that a study has incorporated Muslim academic scholars' and clerics' views into gender and organization research. The study is thus contextually relevant and offers fresh multilevel insights on the interplay among religion, culture and gender.

As the work context is dynamically changing, enhancing employee engagement through personal and organizational means is still capturing the attention of organizations as well as human resources researchers and practitioners. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between self-leadership, employee engagement, and perceived organizational support and to test the moderating effect of perceived organizational support.

Data were collected through an online self-reporting questionnaire, with a total of 225 employees from Lebanon and 251 employees from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Moderating analysis was conducted using Process v3.3 on both samples.

Results have shown that self-leadership and perceived organizational support were positively related to employee engagement in both countries. However, perceived organizational support served to enhance self-leadership and employee engagement in the UAE, but not in Lebanon.

The findings of this study can be used to help organizations as well as human resources and regional managers operating in the Middle East in giving insights about investing in self-leadership strategies and positively influence employee perception of organizational support to strengthen employee engagement.

This study is unique in exploring the moderating role of perceived organizational support on the relationship between self-leadership and engagement, and original in theoretically proposing and empirically examining the interaction between perceived organizational support and self-leadership. The context of the study in which the proposed relationships were tested for the first time in Lebanon and the UAE, is also novel as both countries are distinguished from other Middle Eastern countries.

This article provides an in-depth study of leader resilience during the prolonged COVID-19 crisis.

The research is based on interviews with leaders in the hotel, retail and manufacturing industries during the pandemic. The analytical framework is individual resilience as both a process and an outcome. The analysis method is a combination of deductive and inductive content analysis.

This study offers a rich description of the interaction among the behavioural, situational and individual factors influencing leaders during the various stages of the global COVID-19 crisis.

Highlighting the role of leaders' personal reflections on the interaction between resilience factors and leaders' identity work, this paper contributes to the field by introducing an extended model of leader resilience.

Educators need to engage in continuous learning to ensure that their knowledge and practice responds to the changing needs of society and students. Collaborative approaches, in which social capital resource is exchanged, can serve as an effective way of facilitating such learning. With this systematic review, the authors identify the opportunities and benefits inter-school social capital networks might bring by exploring: (1) what inter-school networks are available internationally for primary and secondary schools, (2) the features and activities present within inter-school networks and (3) evidence of impact of inter-school network activities.

For this study, the authors employed a systematic review methodology. The review comprised the five stages of the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses: PRISMA, 2021) protocol. The study findings derived from 111 research outputs (from a total of 1,221 originally identified).

The review highlights a number of different inter-school networks and their diverse purposes as well as key network features, such as the actors present in networks and the activities network participants engage with. At the same time, however, the authors only identify limited reliable evidence of the impact of inter-school networks.

The study fills a knowledge gap by exploring, for the first time, the presence, features of inter-school social capital networks available to school leaders as well as investigating the impact of these networks.

Do managers at different hierarchical levels in a firm perceive the effectiveness of a lean program differently, and does it matter for their commitment to it and the resulting lean implementation? This study answers these questions by analyzing the perceptions and behaviors of top and middle managers in a manufacturer deploying a global lean program.

The authors hypothesize that managers at different levels perceive lean programs differently, which, in turn, should affect their commitment to lean and the resulting implementation. To test these relationships empirically, the authors collect survey data from a global manufacturer in the process industry and analyze them using hierarchical linear regression and structural equation modeling.

The findings show that middle managers perceive lean programs as more effective than top managers do. They further show that higher commitment from the top and middle managers to the lean program is positively related to building the organizational infrastructure needed for lean implementation.

This research is conducted in one global company. Although the research setting implicitly controls for many possible confounding variables, such as the product and process complexity or organizational culture, future research can explore and test the findings in other organizational contexts.

This study is the first to empirically study the relations between perceptions of and commitment to lean programs across different hierarchical levels and what it means for program implementation. The paper contributes new plausible explanations for why many lean programs slow down.

This paper explores how INGOs communicate their activities and achievements. In doing so, the study seeks to increase our understanding of INGOs' accountability practices.

This paper uses thematic analysis to analyse 90 ‘leaders’ letters' (the letters that many charities include at the beginning of their Annual Reports and Accounts), published by 39 INGOs between 2015 and 2018.

This paper argues that within the Annual Report letters under consideration, INGOs' accountability practices focus on quantitative, process-driven, output reporting. In doing so, it is the actions and agency of INGOs that are primarily emphasised. INGO constituents are largely excluded from representation. Donors are presented only as contributors of financial capital. Drawing on field theory, the paper argues that this representational practice means INGO constituents are almost irrelevant to INGOs' representational and accountability communication practices.

This paper is indebted to previous important work and, building on such scholarship, seeks to contribute to the ongoing conversation about INGO accountability. While reinforcing some prior knowledge, the findings here also differ in the understanding of how donors are portrayed. The paper extends previous analyses by using field theory to show that the INGO field as considered here is a space in which representations of accountability are based on organisational and transactional factors, and does not value the humanity of INGOs' constituents. This connects to operations of power, between donors, INGOs, and constituents, and reinforces inequitable power within the development system.

This study aims to explore the influence mechanism of inclusive leadership on employees' innovative behavior, in order to provide useful inspiration for leaders and enterprises to develop.

This study constructs a moderated mediation model based on the valid questionnaire data of 211 employees in service in enterprises and used SPSS23.0 and AMOS24.0 analysis software to analyze the data and test the theoretical hypotheses, and explore the influence mechanism of inclusive leadership on employees' innovative behavior.

The empirical findings show that inclusive leadership has a significant positive impact on employees' innovative behavior; organizational harmony plays a mediating role in the relationship between inclusive leadership and employees' innovative behavior; and innovation self-efficacy plays a positive moderating role between organizational harmony and employees' innovative behavior. Therefore, inclusive leadership can create a harmonious organizational climate and further improve employees' innovative behavior under the influence of employees' creative self-efficacy, which can promote innovative behavior and sustainable development of enterprises.

The authors put two variables, organizational harmony and employees' innovation self-efficacy, into the same model for correlation tests for the first time, and introduced into the mechanism of inclusive leadership's influence on employees' innovation behavior, which broadened people's understanding of organizational harmony and innovation self-efficacy and broadened the ideas for the subsequent research about the relationship between them.

The scarcity of women in advertising creative departments has been reported globally, particularly in creative managerial roles. This study goes a step beyond this evidence since this paper aims to test whether having at least one token woman in creative managerial positions (token+) may be associated with a larger presence of females in low-level creative jobs compared to creative departments led only by male creative managers.

A content analysis of the credit forms of 839 Spanish campaigns released in 2019 was conducted to determine the gender composition of 116 creative departments with more than three professionals.

Generalized Poisson Regressions indicated that when at least a token woman is present in a creative management role within agency networks, the number of females in low-level positions doubles with respect to creative departments led only by male managers. This relation was not found for independent agencies, though. The results are discussed under the lens of critical mass theory, attraction paradigm and homophily theory.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first time in the literature that the relation among the number of token+ advertising female creative managers and the amount of females in lower-level creative positions is tested. This research is also original because the sample is from a non-Anglo-Saxon country. Moreover, the use of the Generalized Poisson Regressions technique is another novelty of this paper.

This paper features a narrative case study of a leadership team engaged in an effort to transform both culture and instructional practice at an urban charter school. The paper describes the team's effort to align their decision-making with two frameworks selected to anchor the school's institutional change process: restorative justice and deeper learning. Interweaving rich case data with analysis, the paper explores the dilemmas that emerged as leaders struggled to “walk the talk” of these two frameworks, using this to theorize about the synergies between them and to explore the broader leadership challenges involved in transforming schools from authoritarian to humanizing institutions.

The researcher employed an ethnographic approach with the goal of generating a thickly-textured single case study. Data-gathering activities included more than 400 h of participant-observation, in-depth interviewing and artifact collection, conducted over the course of a ten-month academic year. Data analysis was iterative and included frequent member checks with participants.

The paper finds that restorative justice and deeper learning have powerful epistemological connections that school leaders can harness in order to ensure a coherent approach to change processes. The paper also illuminates several of the core dilemmas that school leaders should anticipate facing when embracing these two frameworks: the dilemma of responding to feedback, the dilemma of power-sharing and the dilemma of balancing expectations with support.

The case study approach employed in this paper allows for rich understandings of specific phenomena while also providing a platform for exploring the general qualities that these phenomena might illustrate. This approach does not allow for statistical generalizability.

The paper suggests that it is imperative for school leaders to explore what it means to lead in ways that are coherent with their vision for change, e.g. to cultivate symmetry. Moreover, the paper demonstrates that the value of such explorations lies in the process of grappling with the tensions that arise when humanizing frameworks are implemented within systems that uphold traditional power hierarchies. Additionally, the paper affirms the value of de-siloing the transformation of school culture from the transformation of instructional practice.

This paper offers an unusually textured account of the messy and uncertain processes that constitute the work of school change. This paper also draws together two educational paradigms which are rarely brought into conversation with each other despite their epistemological synergy.