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The purpose of this paper is to offer a reconceptualization of the critical incident technique (CIT) and affirm its utility in management and organization studies.

Utilizing a case study from a leadership context, the paper applies the CIT to explore various leadership behaviours in the context of nonprofit boards in Canada. Semi-structured critical incident interviews were used to collect behavioural data from 53 participants – board chairs, board directors, and executive directors – from 18 diverse nonprofit organizations in Alberta, Canada.

While exploiting the benefits of a typicality of events, in some instances the authors were able to validate aspects of transformational leadership theory, in other instances the authors found that theory falls short in explaining the relationships between organizational actors. The authors argue that the CIT potentially offers the kind of “thick description” that is particularly useful in theory building in the field.

Drawing on interview material, the authors suggest that incidents can be classified based on frequency of occurrence and their salience to organizational actors, and explore the utility of this distinction for broader theory building purposes.

Principally, the paper proposes that this method of investigation is under-utilized by organization and management researchers. Given the need for thick description in the field, the authors suggest that the approach outlined generates exceptionally rich data that can illuminate multiple organizational phenomena.

The role of nonprofit boards is of major importance for those organizations and the clients that they serve. This paper shed new light on the leadership dynamics at the top of these organizations and therefore can help to guide improved practice by those in board and senior management positions.

The CIT is a well-established technique. However, it is timely to revisit it as a core technique in qualitative research and promote its greater use by researchers. In addition, the authors offer a novel view of incidents as typical, atypical, prototypical or archetypal of organizational phenomena that extends the analytical value of the approach in new directions.

Positivist deductive research on transformational leadership brings along with it 25 years of researcher presuppositions. Such research not only suggests that a transformational leader’s influence is unidirectional but also that transformational leadership theory is a universal theory. In this chapter, I inductively seek to examine board-executive director interactions, free from the shackles of existing theory.

The current chapter uses an inductive research approach to the collection and analysis of the empirical material. By being open to surprises in the empirical material, I am able to explore behaviors and relationships, while analyzing a specific context – the nonprofit board-executive director relationship.

The current study finds evidence that individualized consideration in a governance model frequently occurs in the opposite direction. Despite organizational documents promoting a hierarchical structure, evidence of top-down, collegiality, and bottom-up individualized consideration suggests hierarchical boundaries are commonly crossed in the decision making process.

Results of this exploratory study suggest that in a governance context, hierarchical actors do not fit neatly into the boxes defined by 30 years of research on transformational leadership theory, suggesting that the leadership process is more complex than portrayed by current dichotomizations. The findings provide support for recent criticisms of transformational leadership theory.

The findings of this chapter provide evidence of the benefits of eliciting input from organizational actors at multiple hierarchical levels. The empirical evidence provides practitioners with a fresh perspective on board roles and relationship, diverging from the traditional structural prescriptions.

Through an inductive approach, I examine the process in which autonomy is exercised in the board-executive director relationship. A further contribution of the current study is the exploration of the antecedents of the delegation process.

Utilizing the benefits of semi-structured critical incident interviews, and analysis of organizational documentation, I study the process in which autonomy is exercised in the board-executive director relationship.

Evidence is found within organizations of times when it is clear that board members understand that there are boundaries to their role, respecting this autonomy, and times when board members overstep their role. Next, in the current study, I explore the antecedents of the delegation process, including identification of role boundaries, role clarity, clear expectations, trust in the executive director, and trust in the governance control systems.

Autonomy has historically been examined within seemingly paradoxical frameworks; this has included investigating autonomy as part of the definition of laissez faire leadership, as a key feature of transformational leadership and as one component of the jobs characteristics model, while others have characterized it as a stream of shared leadership. In the current project, the process of providing autonomy takes on characteristics consistent with both vertical leadership and distributed leadership. The executive director similarly plays a role in maintaining previously defined role boundaries, which is evidence of bidirectional influence. However, the board plays a disproportionately larger role in delineating and maintaining role boundaries – characteristics I demonstrate as being consistent with transformational leadership.

In this chapter, I provide a refreshing divergence from typical board prescriptions, in that I examine the board-executive director relationship through a behavioural lens. A clear understanding of the mutual influence and antecedents of autonomy are important to practitioners seeking to enhance performance through the delineation of roles.

From earliest times the land and all it produced to feed and sustain those who dwelt on it was mankind's greatest asset. From the Biblical “land of milk and honey”, down through history to the “country of farmers” visualised by the American colonists when they severed the links with the mother country, those who had all their needs met by the land were blessed — they still are! The inevitable change brought about by the fast‐growing populations caused them to turn to industry; Britain introduced the “machine age” to the world; the USA the concept of mass production — and the troubles and problems of man increased to the present chaos of to‐day. There remained areas which depended on an agri‐economy — the granary countries, as the vast open spaces of pre‐War Russia; now the great plains of North America, to supply grain for the bread of the peoples of the dense industrial conurbations, which no longer produced anything like enough to feed themselves.

This chapter investigates a new human-centric perspective oriented to consider society as a whole, by following a systemic vision, where social well-being is important: Industry 5.0. The analysis is based on the great advantages for the ecosystem, going beyond the custom of affirming technological development and managerial views, favoring the dialog between the actors of the system, the adaptation of technologies to the context in which one operates, choosing the most appropriate business strategies, sustaining smart, sustainable and inclusive solutions in the innovation process. In this sense, big data, internet of things, augmented realities, or robotics are all technologies to increase productivity and improve working conditions but, at the same time, they have to improve social life. To overcome the main related challenges and support the transition, new insights to design innovative strategies urge. Our research aims to explore the scientific literature about Industry 5.0 and its development in the European Union. We carried out a systematic review and a bibliometric analysis of the scientific production through the Web of Science (WoS) and SCOPUS databases. In addition, our study analyzes how the proposed topic has evolved over time by collecting contributions from different countries and authors. We adopted an innovative tool that goes beyond the traditional statistical methods generally used in bibliometric research, and it allowed us to obtain more advanced results. Our software permitted us to join the findings of two databases simultaneously, such as WoS and SCOPUS, to generate a bibliometric analysis and identify new paradigm trends.

The purpose of this paper is to determine core competencies, for use as a foundation for staffing and training, and necessary to provide effective electronic resource (ER) access support.

The authors analyzed 580 ER access problem reports in a large academic library system to measure the specific skill(s) required for effective problem resolution. Problem reports were drawn equally from two different reporting systems: one using web forms and e‐mail and the other featuring real‐time user interaction.

Abilities fostered in reference work related to communication with users, staff, and vendors were by far the most crucial and highly used in successful problem solving, followed by the knowledge to make appropriate referrals within the organization.

Results reported are from one institution, albeit one which serves a very large user population with diverse information needs which provided a broad range of users and problem types.

Staffing for an access support service should draw upon employees whose skill set includes assisting users with more traditional information access, such as reference, as well as employees with expertise in areas such as licensing.

Resolving user‐reported online access issues is a mission‐critical library service function. The paper offers an objective demonstration that the skills leading to success in access support are the same communication skills valued in reference services and that the mechanism used for providing a virtual reference service can also be used for handling user‐access problems. Identifying and ranking these skills provides structure and best practice standards for continuous training and staff assessment.

It is no new thing that at the present time there should be all kinds of people gazing into the future, hazarding guesses about what is going to happen to mankind in the next few years, decades, or centuries,