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To highlight the personal qualities and skills that inspire people to work for leaders.
Abstract
Purpose
To highlight the personal qualities and skills that inspire people to work for leaders.
Design/methodology/approach
The article is based on work that has helped to develop emotionally intelligent leadership.
Findings
That an integrated approach to developing leaders that focuses on honesty, commitment and trust is important, and is supported by mentoring and other learning vehicles.
Practical implications
The article is about successful programs that have supported the development of leaders in various organizations, and demonstrates the elements of an integrated learning design.
Originality/value
The article will be of value to managers, leaders and HRD/learning‐and‐development executives.
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Ingmar Björkman, Mats Ehrnrooth, Kristiina Mäkelä, Adam Smale and Jennie Sumelius
The purpose of this paper is to develop an “HRM-as-practice” research agenda. The authors suggest that the HRM-performance literature would benefit from an actor-centric approach…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to develop an “HRM-as-practice” research agenda. The authors suggest that the HRM-performance literature would benefit from an actor-centric approach and a focus on activities, and that the HR roles research needs to shift its attention toward a more dynamic perspective of HR work and link this further to performance.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper first provides an overview of strategy-as-practice (SAP) literature, and then review how extant HRM literature deals with three core notions of SAP: practices, praxis and practitioners. Based on this, the paper outlines an “HRM-as-practice” research agenda.
Findings
Focussing on the intersections between praxis, practitioners and practice, the paper suggests that an “HRM-as-practice” approach can give new insights into first, how people-related decisions are made, implemented and enacted in organizations; second, how employees and other HRM stakeholders interpret and engage with HRM; third, how HR actors become more effective and influential organizational agents; and fourth, what the short-term and long-term effects of these actions and activities are.
Research limitations/implications
The authors acknowledge the fuzzy and intertwined nature of the practices, practitioners and praxis categories, but believe that their intersections provide a fruitful theoretical lens to examine the practice of HRM.
Originality/value
The authors use the HRM-as-practice lens to suggest novel research approaches that can shed new light on several open questions within the HRM field.
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Lucy Rattrie and Markus Kittler
The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore well-being experiences of international business travellers (IBTs) and contribute to our understanding of personal and job…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore well-being experiences of international business travellers (IBTs) and contribute to our understanding of personal and job characteristics as antecedents of ill- or well-being.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors’ insights are based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 32 IBTs assigned to various destinations ranging from single-country travel to global operation. Participants in this study represent a range of traveller personas (regarding demographics, type of work, travel patterns). Thematic analysis is used to reveal new insights.
Findings
The authors’ analysis revealed trip-load (i.e. workload, control, organisational support) and intensity of travel (i.e. frequency, duration and quality) as job characteristics that sit on an energy stimulation continuum, driving work-related outcomes such as stress and burnout or health and well-being. Energy draining and boosting processes are moderated by cognitive flexibility and behavioural characteristics.
Practical implications
Findings represent a framework for managing IBT well-being via adjustments in job and travel characteristics, plus guidance for training and development to help IBTs self-manage.
Originality/value
The insights within this paper contribute to the conversation around how to enhance well-being for IBTs and frequent flyers. The study intends to offer direction as to which specific job, psychological and behavioural characteristics to focus on, introducing a novel framework for understanding and avoiding serious consequences associated with international mobility such as increased stress, burnout and ill-health.
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Mary Vigier and Helen Spencer-Oatey
The purpose of this paper is to explore how newly formed culturally diverse project teams develop and implement rules, and how these processes may be affected by language-fluency…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how newly formed culturally diverse project teams develop and implement rules, and how these processes may be affected by language-fluency asymmetries.
Design/methodology/approach
Using a case-study research design, the authors investigated three multicultural project teams within a management integration program in a multinational company in France. Their complete data set includes 37.5 hours of observations and 49 hours of semi-structured interviews.
Findings
Findings revealed that subgroups formed on the basis of language-fluency and this affected the development and implementation of rules. While rule-setting mechanisms emerged across teams, they varied in form. On the one hand, tightly structured rules emerged and rules were rigidly applied when there were greater language inequalities. In contrast, implicit behavior controls guided interactions when language-fluency subgroupings were less salient. The findings also revealed that the alignment of other individual attributes with language fluency reinforced subgroup divisions, further impacting the rule development and implementation processes.
Practical implications
Understanding rule development and implementation in culturally diverse teams and how these processes are impacted by language disparities enables managers to help members develop more successful behavioral patterns by keeping language-fluency (and other) attributes in mind.
Originality/value
The study extends and complements previous team research by providing in-depth insights into the process of rule development and implementation. It demonstrates the impact of language-fluency asymmetries and subgroup dynamics on these processes. The authors propose a model to capture the processes by which culturally diverse teams create rules, and how the rule-setting mechanisms might be moderated by faultlines such as language-based disparities.
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Andreas Wallo and Alan Coetzer
This study aims to explore how human resource (HR) practitioners conceive of their practice, reveal challenges they grapple with in daily work and generate a conceptual framework…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to explore how human resource (HR) practitioners conceive of their practice, reveal challenges they grapple with in daily work and generate a conceptual framework of HR praxis.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is based on interviews with HR practitioners in Sweden and a review of articles that examine aspects of HR practitioners' work.
Findings
The HR practitioners' work is fragmented and reactive, filled with meetings and affords few opportunities to work undisturbed. Operational tasks are prioritised over strategic work, and their work sometimes involves tasks that are not HR's responsibility. The nature of HR practitioners' daily work mimics the work of their main “customer”, i.e. managers within the organisations.
Practical implications
The HR practitioners were working mainly in the service of managers, which suggests that they have an internal focus. Consistent with current, prescriptive HR discourse, HR practitioners should adopt a multi-stakeholder perspective of human resource management (HRM) and a more external focus that is necessary to contribute to wider, organisational effectiveness. The findings could enrich what is taught in higher education by providing students with an account of the reality of HR practitioners' daily work.
Originality/value
The study provides a situated account of the daily work of HR practitioners, which is largely absent from the literature.
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Emmanuel Intsiful and Ato Essuman
In the 21st century, placing higher education institutions in the global world has become the norm. Therefore, many higher education institutions in Ghana and across the globe…
Abstract
In the 21st century, placing higher education institutions in the global world has become the norm. Therefore, many higher education institutions in Ghana and across the globe have set out to internationalise or become world-class universities as part of their strategic ambitions. Thus, finding ways to become visible on a global scale and transcend beyond the countries in which they operate has become of major interest to most universities. The authors of this chapter were curious to determine how universities adopt imported organisational templates as a strategic ambition. One should not assume that the semblance of such imported concepts is mere institutional isomorphism stemming from internationalisation and globalisation. The study employed semi-structured interviews and institutional documents as data collection tools among ten (10) university actors in a flagship university in Ghana. The study used postcolonial theory to critically examine the drivers and current practices embedded in dominant hegemonic global discourses, such as internationalisation. The findings revealed that the drivers and reforms underpinning university internationalisation ambition are framed within economic rationalities, producing human capital, self-marketisation to promote visibility, and a quest for global competition couched within global neoliberal ideology. The study recommends the need for university actors to (re)focus and (re)evaluate university internationalisation discourse to ensure a balance between local relevance and global forces.
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This paper uses the case of Islamic banking in Amman, Jordan, to assess the wide moral range of expectations, levels of satisfaction, and means of evaluating banks’ “Islamicness.”
Abstract
Purpose
This paper uses the case of Islamic banking in Amman, Jordan, to assess the wide moral range of expectations, levels of satisfaction, and means of evaluating banks’ “Islamicness.”
Design/methodology/approach
The information is gathered from interviews conducted during over 21 months of ethnographic research and one month in participant observation and research access as an intern at the Middle East Islamic Bank (MEIB) in Amman, Jordan.
Findings
I found three modes for evaluating “Islamicness” when actors decide whether or not to become customers of Islamic banks.
Research implications
These modes demonstrate that Islamic banking is no longer the cultural protectionism of a relatively homogeneous community of Muslims. Rather it is a fraught and tense field for actors’ debates about types of moralities in the markets and modes of moral assessments of “Islamicness.”
Originality/value
The amplification of the individual and individual choice and authority in the moral assessments of Islamic banking may ultimately serve to unseat prior dichotomous theoretical framings of morality’s presence or absence as “Islamic” or “not Islamic” and “good” and “bad.” By unleashing to individuals the construction of morality in the markets, moral rights and wrongs, and moral evaluations, fragmentation of moral consensus in market practices will occur.
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Igor Laine, Sami Saarenketo and Xiaotian Zhang
This chapter investigates the role of authentic leadership in international entrepreneurship. The authors examine how the four pillars of authentic leadership – self-awareness…
Abstract
This chapter investigates the role of authentic leadership in international entrepreneurship. The authors examine how the four pillars of authentic leadership – self-awareness, relational transparency, internalised moral perspective and balanced processing of information – can promote effective collaboration for cross-border social value creation in entrepreneurial ventures. Questions that the authors address are: How do we define ‘international’ entrepreneurship from the perspective of authentic leadership? Are new or different leadership qualities required for the ‘international’ dimension? What are international leadership values or/and qualities and how does the international context change what competencies are needed? The authors call for research to examine how leadership can be depersonalised and become collective rather than an individual trait.
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