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The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had a big impact on organisations globally, leaving organisations with no choice but to adapt to the new reality of remote work to ensure business continuity. Such an unexpected reality created the conditions for testing new applications of smart home technology whilst working from home. Given the potential implications of such applications to improve the working environment, and a lack of research on that front, this paper pursued two objectives. First, the paper explored the impact of smart home applications by examining the factors that could contribute to perceived productivity and well-being whilst working from home. Second, the study investigated the role of productivity and well-being in motivating the intention of remote workers to use smart home technologies in a home-work environment in the future.

The study adopted a cross-sectional research design. For data collection, 528 smart home users working from home during the pandemic were recruited. Collected data were analysed using a structural equation modelling approach.

The results of the research confirmed that perceived productivity is dependent on service relevance, perceived usefulness, innovativeness, hedonic beliefs and control over environmental conditions. Perceived well-being correlates with task-technology fit, service relevance, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, attitude to smart homes, innovativeness, hedonic beliefs and control over environmental conditions. Intention to work from a smart home-office in the future is dependent on perceived well-being.

The findings of the research contribute to the organisational and smart home literature, by providing missing evidence about the implications of the application of smart home technologies for employees' perceived productivity and well-being. The paper considers the conditions that facilitate better outcomes during remote work and could potentially be used to improve the work environment in offices after the pandemic. Also, the findings inform smart home developers about the features of technology which could improve the developers' application in contexts beyond home settings.

This study aims to explore to what extent stakeholder engagement affects the sustainability reporting (SR) process and if it succeeds in facilitating the encounter between demand and supply of accountability, as well as the main challenges of this practice, by focusing on a crucial and under-investigated public sector area, the judicial system.

The study adopts an action research (AR) approach. Specifically, it focuses on a specific phase (i.e. stakeholder engagement) of the broader project that was carried on from 2019 in an Italian Public Prosecutor’s Office. Data were collected from multiple sources, i.e. written notes and reports gathered during meetings, the survey administered to stakeholders and the published sustainability reports.

Stakeholder engagement may be a valuable and effective tool for improving the level of accountability, as it increases the responsiveness of SR to the informative needs of stakeholders. However, the study also highlights some critical points that must be addressed to exploit this fully. Among these is the need to act upstream of the process by working on an accounting system that goes beyond the economic dynamics and can effectively answer the accountability demand.

The study contributes to theoretical and empirical knowledge by exploring a topic and a public sphere still limited investigated, i.e. the stakeholder engagement in sustainability in the judicial sector. The AR approach also presents some originality points, as it is low widespread in management and accounting literature.

The Covid-19 pandemic generated significant changes in the operating methods of hospital logistics departments. The objective of this research is to understand how these changes took place, what collaboration mechanisms were developed with clinical authorities and, to what extent, logistics and clinical care activities should be decoupled to maximize each area's contribution?

The case study is selected to investigate practices implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic in hospitals in Canada. The pandemic presented an opportunity to contrast practices implemented in response to this crisis with those historically used in this environment.

The strategy of decoupling logistical tasks of an operational nature from clinical activities is well-founded and helps free clinical staff from tasks for which they are not trained. However, the decoupling of operational tasks should be combined with an integration of the clinical information flow to the logistics hub players. With this clinical information, the logistics hub can generate its full potential enabling better inventory management decisions to be made.

The concept of decoupling is studied to identify configurations that offer the best benefits for clinical staff.

This study aims to investigate the consequences of middle managers’ sensegiving for organisational change in neglected workplaces, where middle managers are given insufficient resources because of receiving low attention from top management.

The authors conducted a case study of three call centres in the Japanese non-life insurance industry. To collect data, the authors conducted interviews with ten stakeholders and made multiple field observations.

The authors identified the following mechanism: in neglected workplaces, middle managers initially focus on sensegiving to employees because they recognise the difficulty of eliciting support from top management. However, as a result, they see sensegiving to employees as top priority and do not try to elicit the support of top management, which is necessary for further organisational change. As a result, organisational change stops at a certain level.

The authors identified the following mechanism: in neglected workplaces, middle managers initially focus on sensegiving to employees because they recognise the difficulty of eliciting support from top management. However, as a result, they see sensegiving to employees as their top priority and do not try to elicit the support of top management, which is necessary for further organisational change. As a result, organisational change stops at a certain level.

First, this study contributes to the body of research on the effects of sensegiving on organisational change. It shows the new problems hidden behind organisational change, which existing research merely regards as independent successes. Second, this study identifies middle managers’ behaviour during organisational change in neglected workplaces. Instead of focusing on the factors necessary for successful organisational change, as in existing studies, this study extends the knowledge of the role of middle managers in organisational change by focusing on their behaviours when success factors are not aligned.

This paper aims to highlight a broader definition of good building performance that goes beyond the traditional emphasis on technical aspects, only adopting the lens of the social construction of technology (SCOT) in the empirical space of the workplace sector. Several building performance evaluation (BPE) methods focus on technical aspects such as energy consumption, indoor environmental conditions and compliance with building regulations and standards. Technical aspects, albeit important goals, only embed a partial component of what buildings are expected to deliver. There is growing interest in considering the organisational and experiential expectations of building performance, particularly integrating various views of performance as expected by different user groups.

The paper adopts an archival research method to analyse the archive of the workplace consultants DEGW, particularly focusing on their work on London’s Broadgate development in the 1980s and the 1990s.

The findings reveal how voices from a pluralistic client organisation can be addressed to articulate a broad definition of building performance that integrates different viewpoints encompassing technical, organisational and experiential expectations. In DEGW’s work, the views on building performance of various stakeholders involved in the everyday use and management of buildings are identified without imposing predetermined agendas or research notions of performance. Particular emphasis is given to understanding clients as not a homogenous entity but consisting of different interest groups, which implies multiple conceptualisations of building performance and the building itself.

The performance expectations of a building vary between organisations and even within any organisation. Moreover, the needs of an organisation will change over time, and the BPE criteria need to be changed to ensure better alignment between organisations and the physical spaces they occupy. A critical reflection on the conceptualisation of “users” and “building” in BPE methods is required to create an integrated approach towards building performance.

The paper offers insights by adopting the theoretical lens of SCOT to explore an integrated approach to building performance that captures the varied needs of building users through the example of London’s Broadgate development.

The integration of sustainability, performance measurement and new product development (NPD) is key for aligning environmental and social objectives with business strategies. While previous research has initiated proposals for integrating sustainability into NPD or incorporating sustainability into corporate measurement systems, there is a notable deficiency in studies that comprehensively integrate these three perspectives. In this sense, this study proposes a performance framework (PF) to integrate sustainability performance indicators (PIs) into the measurement system considering the company’s NPD phases.

The PF was developed through a literature review and action research (AR). This resulting PF was positively evaluated by the practitioners in the company.

First, the review enabled the synthesis of an initial conceptual PF with 188 sustainability PIs and a five-step procedure. Then, the empirical results of the AR led to a new PF that presents the systematisation of the PIs database and a practice-based seven-stage approach.

This action-oriented research limits the extent to which this study’s findings can be generalised. Future research should apply the PF in different research designs to produce managerially relevant knowledge.

This PF may provide managers with actionable knowledge that best supports the measurement system integration with sustainability PIs considering the NPD phases.

Integrating sustainability, performance measurement and the NPD has been recognised as critical for supporting decision-making concerning the impact of processes and products. Compared with previous frameworks, the proposed PF extends the existing literature by introducing a systematised PIs database and a novel procedure for integrating sustainability measurement throughout the NDP.

Purpose: This chapter aims to unveil the challenges of adopting and using banking chatbots in India and identify the challenges of Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) for future banking.

Need for the study: Unveiling the challenges of chatbots and ChatGPT in the banking industry in India is crucial to understand the limitations and areas of improvement to enhance customer experience, ensure data security, and maintain regulatory compliance.

Methodology: The researchers conducted a narrative review systematically summarising and analysing existing literature on chatbots and ChatGPT, providing a comprehensive overview of the challenges faced in the industry.

Findings: The authors identify perceived risk, platform quality, connectivity and infrastructure, data privacy and security, user education and acceptance, existing legacy systems, and regulatory guidelines as the challenges of adopting chatbots. Additionally, the findings reveal that the challenges posed by ChatGPT in future banking include the potential reduction of traditional banking jobs, linguistic diversity, data privacy and security, ethical considerations and bias mitigation, explainability and accountability, integration with existing banking systems, and user trust and acceptance. However, implementing these new technologies also presents opportunities for individuals with unique human skills, such as critical thinking, empathy, and creativity, which are difficult to replace with technology.

Practical implications: By minimising the challenges of ChatGPT and chatbots, the banking industry could achieve improved customer service, cost efficiency, automation of routine tasks, and 24/7 availability, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and operational efficiency in the banking industry. Additionally, these artificial intelligence (AI) tools enable data-driven insights, personalised experiences, scalability, and efficient handling of large customer volumes, contributing to better decision-making and enhanced customer engagement.

This study offers an empirical framework for how hotel employees CSR perceptions affect their job satisfaction by incorporating the parallel mediating roles of organizational identification and psychological contract fulfillment. In addition, it examines the moderator effects of employees' CSR-induced attributions on the constructed mediated model, providing a powerful lens through which to evaluate when and how employees' CSR perceptions influence organizational identification and psychological contract fulfillment.

The study use PLS-SEM techniques to analyze a sample of 520 employees from 49 luxury hotels with 4–5 stars in Khanh Hoa province, Vietnam.

The results show that CSR positively influences job satisfaction through the mediating role of psychological contract fulfillment and organizational identification. Besides, attachment styles also play moderator role in the relationship between CSR and psychological contract fulfillment/organizational identification.

The discoveries elucidated within this research endeavor proffer actionable discernments to be earnestly contemplated by professionals entrenched in the hotel industry, earnestly aspiring to ameliorate the contentment of their workforce and, concomitantly, augment the overarching efficacy of their organizational operations.

This study provides human resource departments with insights and suggestions for maximizing the efficacy of CSR implementation in the hotel industry.

This paper aims to offer insight into how strategies within the accounting profession, which has been becoming more global, might be changed by the recent outbreak of the Second Cold War between the West and the Rest of the World.

We explore the strategies of those who called themselves “Confucian accountants” in China, a country which has recently discouraged its state-owned enterprises from using the services of the Big 4. We do this by employing qualitative research methods, including reflexive photo interviews, in which Big-4 accountants, recognised as the most Westernised accounting actors in China, and Confucian accountants are asked to take and explain photographs representing their professional lives. Bourdieu’s notions of “economy of practices” and “vision-of-division strategy” are drawn upon to understand who the Confucian accountants are and what they do strategically in their pursuit of a higher revenue stream and improved social standing in the Chinese social space.

The homegrown Confucian accountants share cultural-cognitive characteristics with neighbouring social actors, such as their clients and government officials, who have been inculcated with Confucianism and the state’s cultural confidence policy in pursuit of a “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics”. Those accountants try to enhance their social standing and revenue stream by strategically demonstrating their difference from Big-4 accountants. For this purpose, they wear Confucian clothes, have Confucian props in their office, employ Confucian phrases in their everyday conversations, use Confucian business cards and construct and maintain guanxi with government officials and clients.

This paper is the first attempt to explore Confucian accountants’ strategies for increasing their revenue and social standing at the start of the Second Cold War.

After completion of the case study, the students would be able to identify and evaluate organizational culture as a critical element of organizational resilience and assess its fit to the business context, evaluate different elements of organizational resilience and their contribution to business adaptation and develop leadership approaches that help adapt and leverage organizational culture to foster individual, team and organizational resilience.

This teaching case covers topics of organizational leadership, including organizational culture and organizational resilience. This case study is appropriate for the postgraduate and executive education programmes. This case study covers the approach to organizational leadership and resilience of the OKKO, a Ukrainian retail petrol station network. The dilemmas considered by top managers of the company emerged in February–April 2022 amid the unfolding Russian invasion of Ukraine. The case study protagonists solved multiple business and organizational dilemmas to continue efficient business operations while allowing the organization to adapt to a complex and fast-changing environment. They leveraged a distinct corporate culture, strong employee engagement and established business processes and management practices to ensure the viability of the business.

This case study is appropriate for postgraduate and executive education programmes. The level of difficulty is light to medium. Recommended pre-requisites are understanding human resources management terminology and reviewing preparation materials. The case study is suitable for teaching courses in leadership, people management and organizational development that cover corporate culture, leadership and organizational resilience.

CSS 6: Human resource management

Teaching notes are available for educators only.