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This study, informed by the Situational Crisis Communication Theory, aims to suggest two primary response strategies that can be used for effective internal crisis communication during a pandemic situation, such as COVID-19. The effect of base response strategies on employees' perceptions of communication quality, leadership and relational outcomes were investigated.

An online survey of full-time employees in the United States was conducted.

The findings showed that for an instructing information strategy, not all types of information were equally associated with positive employee responses in terms of perceived quality of internal communication related to the COVID-19 pandemic and transformational leadership. Specific information that employees need to know in order to safely perform daily tasks, such as organizational protocols and thorough preparation, seem to be the most needed and desired information. Adjusting information was positively associated with employee perceptions of internal communication quality and perceptions of CEO leadership. Employees' perceived quality of internal communication affected by the base crisis response strategies were positively correlated with perceptions of transformational leadership and relational outcomes (i.e. employee trust in the organization, employee perceptions of the organization's commitment to relationships with employees, employee support for organizational decision-making related to COVID-19).

This study presents important theoretical and practical insights through an interdisciplinary approach that applies the theoretical framework and relationship-oriented outcomes of public relations to public health crisis situations.

The dearth of leadership competencies to transform traditional industries to Industry 4.0 is a barrier to global production. This study explains the deficiencies in leadership competencies that hinder the transformation of traditional industries to Industry 4.0.

Leadership was explained into transactional leadership, digital leadership and Leadership 4.0. Then, the network of relationships between these leadership constructs was plotted in a path diagram to learn the mediating effect of digital leadership.

The results indicate that a lack of digital competencies to coordinate tasks, share information and solve problems in a digitalized environment is the barrier to the transformation.

The findings can be used in human resources (HR) management. In addition, the findings provide evidence to present the contingency theory as a universal theory of leadership.

The study is the first to assess the mediating effect of digital leadership on transactional leadership to explain the changes to strategic leadership due to the emergence of Leadership 4.0.

This study investigates the link between servant leadership and project management effectiveness in developmental projects in non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Further, this study examined the mediating role of conflict resolution and moderating role of organisational culture.

A three-wave survey of 288 non-governmental organisation (NGO) employees was used to evaluate the hypotheses. Hierarchical regression analysis and Hayes' PROCESS macro technique were used for data analysis.

In this study, servant leadership positively affects employee project management effectiveness in developmental projects in NGOs, and conflict resolution mediates the relationship. Furthermore, the results show that organisational culture moderates the positive relationship between servant leadership and employee project management effectiveness. Moreover, the authors investigated the hypotheses via a moderation mediation model. The strength of the mediated link between servant leadership and project management effectiveness (via conflict resolution) depends on organisational culture strength.

Leaders that practice servant leadership care for their employees genuinely and serve them by allowing them to make their own decisions. Every organisation may benefit from this leadership style since it encourages project effectiveness

New empirical data from this study suggests that servant leadership positively and substantially affects employee project management effectiveness in developmental projects in NGOs.

This paper contributes to leadership categorization theory by advocating a new method to surface people's implicit leadership theories. The purpose of this new approach is to simultaneously capture individual difference in how they conceptualize leadership but within a common framework to allow for comparison of within- and between-person effects.

The authors conduct a narrative review of the implicit leadership theory, leadership categorization theory, cognitive mapping and verbal protocol literature with the purpose of surfacing a research method that will overcome the problems of over-simplification and over-individualization in existing methods.

The authors argue that using a combination of cognitive mapping and verbal protocols can capture the idiosyncrasies of individual lay theories of leadership while retaining the ability to compare people's responses through a common framework. The authors provide an example of how this method can be used to elicit people's perceptions of one aspect of implicit leadership theories, intelligence.

This new method will provide a methodology to test the subset propositions advocated by leadership categorization theory. These include the idea that subordinate level implicit leadership theories contain a subset of attributes found in the basic-level implicit leadership theories, that there is attribute integrity in superordinate implicit leadership theories through the levels, and the idea that people define leadership differently depending on the context they are observing.

Whereas previous approaches to surfacing people's implicit leadership theories either heavily constrain their responses with a predetermined generic suite of attributes or are totally open-ended and idiosyncratic, the authors advocate an approach that combines the best of both.

The current study probes the multi-dimensional link between total quality management (TQM) and knowledge management (KM) and investigates how different TQM's dimensions impacts KM processes and how this nexus impacts organizational performance (operational and financial performance) by considering KM as an intermediating variable between TQM and organizational performance.

Six TQM practices are taken from “Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award”, namely leadership, customer focus, strategic planning, human resource management, process management and information and analysis; KM processes include knowledge creation, acquisition, sharing and application and organizational performance comprises operational and financial performance. The researcher put together data from different sized services and manufacturing firms, from small, to medium and large firms located in the United Kingdom (UK).

The results suggested that a positive correlation existed between TQM, KM and organizational performance. KM is also shown to have quite a strong and positive influence on firm operational and financial performance and partially mediates the relationship between TQM and corporate performance. Dimensional analysis indicates that leadership, strategic planning, customer focus and HRM have a significant positive impact on all KM process, while mixed results have been found for process management and information and analysis. The contextual analysis indicates that except for knowledge creation, TQM plays an equally significant role for the majority of manufacturing establishments and services firms.

The present research makes a significant contribution to the scarce literature on the relationship between TQM and KM (mainly at dimensional level), particularly in the context of the UK, and provides a detailed understanding of the relations between different TQM and KM dimensions, and how their relationship impacts on the operational and financial performance of different sizes of manufacturing and services firms.

Highlights

1. Total quality management (TQM) enhances firms' knowledge management (KM) capabilities

2. KM partially mediates the relationship between TQM and firms' performance

3. Leadership, customer focus and process management indicated insignificant impact on knowledge creation

4. TQM and KM are equally important for all sizes manufacturing and services firms

Total quality management (TQM) enhances firms' knowledge management (KM) capabilities

KM partially mediates the relationship between TQM and firms' performance

Leadership, customer focus and process management indicated insignificant impact on knowledge creation

TQM and KM are equally important for all sizes manufacturing and services firms

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether and how transformational leadership affects innovativeness in the supply chain context by addressing the following research questions: (1) Whether transformational leadership might help foster conditions for knowledge sharing and lead to supply chain innovativeness (SCI) in China firms? (2) Does supply base rationalization play a moderating role in the above relationship?

Survey data consisting of 144 valid responses were collected from supply chain innovation and application pilot projects in 55 cities of China. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) confirmed the reliability and validity of measures, and hierarchical linear regression and bootstrapping were used to test all hypotheses.

The results obtained reveal that supply chain knowledge sharing partially mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and SCI. Also, supply base rationalization positively moderates the mediated relationship between transformational leadership and SCI.

Managers and decision-makers of supply chain leader firms who want to enhance their entire SCI to deal with unexpected supply chain disruptions are highly recommended to adopt transformational behavior across the supply chain, as well as to develop the knowledge sharing culture, resulting from transformational leadership. In addition, leading firms should be dedicated to structuring their supply base, keeping it at the right size and complexity.

The present study emphasizes previous results and provides additional evidence that supply chain leaders’ adoption of transformational behavior can reinforce entire SCI through knowledge sharing in light of the disruptions facing supply chains in developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of leadership development programmes, underpinned by Transformational Learning Theory (TLT).

A corpus-informed analysis was conducted using survey data from 690 participants. Data were collected from participants’ responses to the question “please tell us about the impact of your overall experience”, which culminated in a combined corpus of 75,053 words.

Findings identified patterns of language clustered around the following frequently used word types, namely, confidence; influence; self-awareness; insight; and impact.

This in-depth qualitative evaluation of participants’ feedback has provided insight into how TLT can be applied to develop future health-care leaders. The extent to which learning has had a transformational impact at the individual level, in relation to their perceived ability to influence, holds promise for the wider impact of this group in relation to policy, practice and the promotion of clinical excellence in the future. However, the latter can only be ascertained by undertaking further realist evaluation and longitudinal study to understand the mechanisms by which transformational learning occurs and is successfully translated to influence in practice.

Previous research has expounded traditional leadership theories to guide the practice of health-care leadership development. The paper goes some way to demonstrate the impact of using the principles of TLT within health-care leadership development programmes. The approach taken by The Florence Nightingale Foundation has the potential to generate confident leaders who may be instrumental in creating positive changes across various clinical environments.

Studies have shown that teachers' perceptions and expectations of their working environment shape their perceived stress. The present study draws upon implicit leadership theory and builds on the job demands-control (JD-C) model to investigate whether there are differences in the implications of participative decision-making and paternalistic leadership for teachers' perceived stress in the Israeli Arab education system.

Data were collected through validated questionnaires returned by a two-stage cluster random sampling of 350 teachers randomly chosen from 70 Israeli Arab elementary schools. Paternalistic leadership and participative decision-making were considered as group-level variables to lower the risk of common method variance. The proposed model was tested through hierarchical regression analysis. Finally, to test the hypothesis that paternalistic leadership and participative decision-making standardized beta weights were statistically significantly different from each other, their corresponding 95% confidence intervals were estimated via bias corrected bootstrap (1000 re-samples).

The findings indicated differences in the levels of the principal's paternalistic leadership and participative decision-making as perceived by the Israeli Arab teachers. Also, the results indicated that participative decision-making was negatively correlated with teachers' perceived stress beyond the influence of paternalistic leadership.

Examining teachers' working conditions and resources can be important since they affect teachers' perceived stress, which may in turn affects school results in the Arab education system in Israel. This study can contribute to the development of training programs for teachers to improve and adapt principals' leadership practices to the sociocultural context of the Arab education system in Israel.

This study investigates the effect of total quality management (TQM) on customer satisfaction, personnel satisfaction and company reputation.

The study results rely on a structured survey conducted among an extensive sample of Finnish SMEs. In addition to the examination of the relationship between TQM and company performance in terms of customer satisfaction, personnel satisfaction and company reputation, the study takes a view on the possible effects of the industry, the company size and the certified quality system.

The results reveal that two TQM dimensions, namely Customer Focus and Product Management, were related to companies' customer satisfaction, whereas four TQM dimensions, namely Management/leadership, Customer Focus, Personnel Management and Risk Management, were related to personnel satisfaction. None of the TQM dimensions were related to company reputation. The control variables – the industry, the company size and the certified quality system – were not found to affect customer satisfaction, personnel satisfaction or company reputation.

Most previous studies have been based on traditional TQM classification and have not shown the effects of the latest TQM-related dimensions. Compared to previous studies, this work integrates risk management, digitization, system deployment efficiency and stakeholder management into TQM, which has not been implemented in any previous study. The roles of hard and soft TQM factors have been carefully considered in this study; thus, the study does not place too much emphasis on either direction but provides a balanced picture of the performance of the management systems studied. Although there are studies on the effects of TQM on personnel satisfaction, customer satisfaction and reputation, they are based on a much narrower definition of TQM than that in this study. The business environment is constantly changing, but only a few studies have been conducted to extend the TQM approach. This has led to duplication of studies, and the effects of performance-relevant procedures have not been extensively studied in the past as part of TQM. Therefore, the concept of this study brings significant added value to TQM research and returns the TQM concept to the overall level while considering the requirements of the ISO 9001: 2015 and EFQM 2019 quality standards. The study also considers the effects of ISO 9001 certification and EFQM requirements.

This study aims to explore followers’ perceptions of leaders as predictors of performance appraisal (PA) participation and subsequent outcomes. Prior research has acknowledged the role of Leader–Member Exchange (LMX) quality in predicting PA participation. This study sought to add to this literature by investigating the effects of LMX dimensions (loyalty, affect, contribution and respect) and the effect of perceived leader prototypicality on PA participation and subsequent outcomes.

The hypothesized model proposed that the LMX dimensions and leader prototypicality would predict PA participation, and the effect of PA participation on job and reward satisfaction would be mediated through PA satisfaction. Structure equation modeling using maximum likelihood estimation was used to test these hypotheses in a sample of 216 employees at a public utility company.

Although results indicated partial support for the proposed mediated model, they also indicated more complex relationships. Leader prototypicality was related to PA participation, none of the four LMX dimensions had the predicted positive effect on PA participation, though they were differentially and directly related to PA satisfaction and job satisfaction.

Employees’ perceptions of leader prototypicality is important in engaging employee participation in the PA process, and more important to participation than was the quality of the LMX relationship. The extent to which employees participate in and subsequently experience higher levels of satisfaction with the PA process may be a reflection of how employees perceive their leader. And participation in and satisfaction with the PA process lead to increased reward and job satisfaction. Future research should incorporate supervisor perspectives of these relationships and use longitudinal design to better infer causality.

Employee perceptions of leader prototypicality are important for encouraging their participation in the PA process, which has implications for reward and job satisfaction. Therefore, supervisors would benefit from understanding the traits (such as sensitivity, confidence and intelligence) that affect their subordinates’ leadership perceptions, and should be trained on successfully demonstrate those traits. Further, exchange relationships built on loyalty and respect affected PA satisfaction directly, which also positively affected job and reward satisfaction. Thus, supervisors should be trained to build trust- and respect-based relationships with employees.

The results of this study make significant contributions to the understanding of the antecedents of employee participation in and satisfaction with the PA process. The data suggest that the effect of perceived leader prototypicality on job and reward satisfaction is mediated through PA participation. Because implicit leadership theory has not previously been studied in the PA context, this new finding makes an important contribution to the PA literature. Further, by taking a multidimensional approach to LMX, these results indicated that the dimensions of loyalty and respect were related to PA satisfaction directly, but not through PA participation.