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This research explores the impostor phenomenon (IP) within the context of gender and leadership, aiming to transform impostor feelings into catalysts for leadership empowerment and positive career outcomes.

Utilizing grounded theory, this study conducts in-depth interviews with 34 female Spanish senior executives to analyze their experiences with IP.

The research reveals that top executive women are not only affected by IP but can also harness it to foster personal and professional growth. It identifies key strategies – such as self-reflection, effective communication and cultivating positive habits – that enable women to transform IP into a lever for enhancing their careers. This approach leads to a proposed virtuous cycle model that empowers women to overcome the negative impacts of IP and advance their leadership capabilities.

This study contributes to the literature on gender and leadership by offering insights into the gendered nuances of IP. By framing IP as a potential catalyst for growth rather than a barrier, the study provides practical tools for human resource (HR) departments to promote gender diversity at senior levels. It also advocates for HR practices to dismantle internal barriers to women’s career progression and address conscious and unconscious gender biases.

Many PhD students have strong reading comprehension, but some struggle with how to read critically. The purpose of this study is to understand what reading looks like for PhD students, what they are doing when they read scholarly texts and how they bring these texts to life in meaningful ways.

The authors conducted a self-study using a phenomenological research approach. Five PhD students collected data on their academic reading for three weeks, including the references, purpose for reading, and what they did as part of the reading process. Second, students analyzed their reading processes according to Paul and Elder’s (2006) intellectual standards. Third, students participated in two semi-structured discussions about the standards in relation to doctoral reading.

Reading is inseparable from thinking, with Paul and Elder’s (2006) intellectual standards (e.g. clarity, relevance, logic and fairness) playing an essential role in the academic reading process. Alongside these cognitive aspects of reading, the affective domain also contributes to the reading process.

This study is important because being able to read scholarly work is crucial for completing doctoral programs, conducting research, and publishing. We suggest that just as we need to teach writing, we need to acknowledge that many doctoral students need guidance to read scholarly texts, they need to be educated on the intellectual standards, and supervisors must rest their assumptions about doctoral reading and explicitly teach these processes.

Mental health is not simply the absence of psychological problems any more than physical health is the absence of disease. This chapter explores various aspects of optimal mental health and wellbeing among college students. It examines the question of what is required for college students to both feel their best and function at or near their highest levels. It also discusses the characteristics of peak mental health, including its transient nature. Predictive factors such as exercise, diet, sleep and social connection will be explored. Regarding the features of optimal wellbeing, the following variables are described: integrity, values, mindfulness, self-compassion, flow and resilience. These variables are considered in an integrated fashion as components, as well as byproducts, of wellness. Hettler’s multidimensional model of wellness is presented at the outset of the chapter, followed by Keyes’ theory of flourishing.

Strengths-based professional development has been associated with positive outcomes in academia and in the organizational workplace. Students pursuing their doctoral degrees in the biomedical sciences in the US are often on graduate assistantships, where they experience an academic component to their training integrated with an employee-like existence. The individual who serves as their academic and research advisor is often their supervisor, who pays their stipend. The traditional training structure poses unique challenges and may be accompanied by stress, burnout and imposter phenomenon. The purpose of this study is to utilize a strengths-based approach to equip students with essential personal and professional skills that build self-awareness and self-confidence further preparing them for their future in the scientific workforce.

The authors developed and implemented a novel strengths-based professional development cohort program for doctoral students in the biomedical sciences at a research-intensive (R1) institution. The program was designed to create a supportive and inclusive space for participants (n = 18) to explore their identity as a student and scientists and to develop and leverage their talents for more effective and strategic use. Program outcomes were evaluated through a mixed methods case study design using a post-program Likert-based survey (n = 10 participants) and participant interviews (n = 13). Explanatory sequential design was used in the interpretation of the findings.

The results show that the program had a positive impact on students’ perceptions of themselves as scientists, as well as on their self-efficacy, self-confidence and interpersonal interactions in the research setting.

This strengths-based professional development program demonstrates immense potential as a model to equip students with self-awareness and a new foundation of essential skills needed to supplement their technical and scientific training for their future careers in the team-based workplace.

This study demonstrates how professional development programming can complement scientific training by equipping students with self-awareness and other lifelong skills to navigate feelings of imposter phenomenon and interpersonal relationships in the team-based workplace.

Although sexual identity disclosure in the workplace can be related to heightened adversity for lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) employees, disclosure can also serve as an avenue for LGB employees to attain additional resources. Much of the work done in today’s organizations is done in team-based structures, making it likely that LGB individuals disclose to members of their work teams. However, very limited prior research has examined the associations of sexual identity disclosure within work team experiences. This paper aims to take a first step in addressing this gap in research on the experiences of LGB employees in the workplace.

This study takes a first step toward addressing this gap by examining the associations between LGB identity disclosure and critical team-specific attitudes and behaviors (i.e., trust in team, commitment to team, conflict with team, withdrawal from team) and the atemporal indirect role of perceived LGB identity support from the team through a cross-sectional survey of 159 employees.

Results demonstrated that perceptions of a supportive LGB team climate atemporally mediated the association between disclosure and relevant workplace variables. Specifically, disclosure of sexual identity to one’s work team is directly and indirectly, through perceived identity support, positively associated with trust and commitment toward the team. Furthermore, disclosure was indirectly, through perceived identity support, negatively associated with conflict and withdrawal from the team. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

The results of this study highlight the importance of perceived identity support when individuals disclosure their sexual orientation in a team context.

Interdisciplinary PhD programs can be challenging as the vital information needed by students may not be readily available; it is scattered across the university’s websites, while tacit knowledge can be obtained only by interacting with people. Hence, there is a need to develop a knowledge management model to create, query and maintain a knowledge repository for interdisciplinary students. This study aims to propose a knowledge graph containing information on critical categories (faculty, classes, dissertations, etc.) and their relationships, extracted from multiple sources, essential for interdisciplinary PhD students. This study evaluates the usability of a participatory-designed knowledge graph intended to facilitate information exchange and decision-making.

The authors used data from multiple sources (such as university websites, faculty profiles, publication and dissertation metadata and crowdsourced data) to generate a knowledge graph in the Neo4J Bloom platform. The authors recruited 15 interdisciplinary PhD students using convenience sampling from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa at various PhD stages to design and populate the knowledge graph. Next, the authors conducted a mixed methods study to perform its usability evaluation. First, the authors engaged the students in a participatory design workshop to identify relevant graph queries. Second, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews to determine the usability of the knowledge graph and rate the queries. Each interview was coded with structural and thematic codes and was further analyzed using sentiment analysis in R programming language.

The usability findings demonstrate that interaction with this knowledge graph benefits PhD students by notably reducing uncertainty and academic stress, particularly among newcomers. Knowledge graph supported them in decision-making, especially when choosing collaborators (e.g. supervisor or dissertation committee members) in an interdisciplinary setting. Key helpful features are related to exploring student–faculty networks, milestones tracking, rapid access to aggregated data and insights into crowdsourced fellow students’ activities. However, they showed concerns about crowdsourced data privacy and accessibility. Although participants expressed the need for more qualitative data in the graph, they noted it helped identify people to talk to about the topics of their interest.

The knowledge graph provides a solution to meet the personalized needs of doctoral researchers and has the potential to improve the information discovery and decision-making process substantially. It also includes the tacit knowledge exchange support missing from most current approaches, which is critical for this population and establishing interdisciplinary collaborations. This approach can be applied to other interdisciplinary programs and domains globally.

This article explores challenges faced by doctoral candidates using grounded theory (GT) in their theses, focusing on coding, theory development and time constraints. It also examines the impact of doctoral committees on GT dissertations, addressing epistemological clashes and the desire for familiarity over novelty.

Drawing from a multilevel autoethnography and related literature, this study offers pragmatic solutions and strategies for a seamless research journey.

Coding, theory development and time constraints pose universal challenges, requiring mentorship for effective navigation. Addressing committee dynamics is crucial for developing novel theoretical frameworks.

The article empowers researchers to overcome GT challenges, delving into various positions within the GT paradigm, fostering transparency and facilitating original contributions to their fields.

Organizational sociology and organization studies have a long history together, while also sharing a proclivity to self-diagnose crises. Instead of taking these assessments at face value, this paper treats them as an object of study, asking what conditions have fueled them. In the case of organizational sociology, there are indications of a connection between rising levels of discontent and community building: self-identified organizational sociologists have progressively withdrawn from general debates in the discipline and turned their attention to organization studies, which, they suspect, has seen dramatic levels of growth at their expense. Organization studies, on the other hand, are still haunted by “a Faustian bargain”: leaning heavily on the authority of the social sciences, business school faculty were able to facilitate the emergence of a scholarly field of practice dedicated to the study of organizations, which they control. However, in doing so, they also set organization studies on a path of continued dependence on knowledge produced elsewhere: notably, by university disciplines such as sociology.

This article explores in a qualitative manner the motivations of women entrepreneurs who start and run ethnic food businesses in London.

Our approach is qualitative and deploys phenomenographical analysis of interview narratives around categories of motivation.

We find that women ethnic food entrepreneurs are driven by a combination of desire for self-actualisation, identity-maintenance and community considerations. We demonstrate that women ethnic food entrepreneurs often go against the logic of the market, and they do so not because they lack other options, but for reasons that have to do with their (self-)identification as women and professionals, their prerogatives as mothers and daughters, their ethnic heritage, their emplacement in urban and global communities and their need to contribute. Our findings enrich understanding of female-led ethnic food entrepreneurship not as a demanding, overall unproductive undertaking for women with no other options, but as a realm of inspiration, community engagement and female-led innovation.

Our main contributions are the qualitative interrogation of perceptions and experiences of identity and difference in urban entrepreneurship from the point of view of our interviewees; providing concrete empirical evidence for it through our sample and proposing an approach to thinking women-led ethnic food entrepreneurship as a vehicle for translating urban superdiversity into social interactions across barriers of difference. We speak to the field of women entrepreneurship studies but specifically to the understudied realm of women-led food entrepreneurship, and to the cross-disciplinary field of (im)migrant entrepreneurship.