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Establishing a more sustainable built environment is an increasing global concern for the construction industry. Despite the intrinsic and extrinsic obstacles the stakeholders face, huge efforts are required to transition to a smooth, sustainable construction (SC) practice. This study identifies and discusses cogent obstacles to SC in developing nations.

The Preferred Reporting Item for systematic reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) approach was employed to establish research work in SC for developing countries. The databases used were Scopus and Web of Science. Meta-analysis of keywords was analysed thematically. The initial broad search returned 8,420 publications which were filtered and reviewed in-depth to fit the aim of the study, produced only 21 relevant publications from the years 2000–2021.

The four identified themes of obstacles to SC in developing countries are as follows: construction professional training and education, clients' attitudes and awareness, construction industries' culture and capacity and governments' regulation, policies and economy. The key barriers identified from the meta-analysis include inadequate training and education amongst construction professionals, poor execution of sustainability ethics, poor populace attitude towards sustainability, poor awareness and understanding, dearth of precise data and integrated study and inappropriate priorities about sustainability.

The originality in this study are themes drawn from millennium development goals (MDGs) and sustainable development goals (SDGs) publications related to SC. Consequently, the final framework presented a holistic approach to surmounting the established limitations and aided recommendations for future studies. Thus, setting a background for developing strategies to overcome the limitations and further attain sustainable development (SD).

With the recent increasing relevance of sustainability, multinational enterprises are faced with divergent stakeholder demands and persistently shifting priorities. This study aims to examine stakeholders’ perceptions of the sustainability performance of a gold mining subsidiary in Ghana.

Using a purposive sampling technique, the authors interviewed managers and employees of the case enterprise, officials of regulatory institutions and host community members on their perceptions of the case enterprise’s sustainability performance. The authors triangulated the opinions expressed by these stakeholders with data from annual reports. The data were analysed through the lens of stakeholder theory.

The authors found that while members of the host community and the regulatory institutions were keenly interested in the case enterprise’s social and environmental activities, they perceived their performance as unimpressive, considering the economic benefits derived from the mining operations. On the contrary, the managers and employees of the case enterprise were satisfied with their environmental compliance and social intervention programmes, even though the company’s economic position had declined. The authors submit that the variations in the sustainability performance perceptions among the stakeholders are due to the lack of a deeper understanding of the other stakeholders’ expectations.

To equitably satisfy diverse stakeholder expectations, the study highlights the role of stakeholder collaborations in understanding the expectations of more salient stakeholder groups such as community members and employees, as well as the lesser salient groups such as academics. It also demonstrates the fluidity of sustainability and its benefits in designing a consensual sustainable management strategy. This implies that managers of the case mining enterprise make the necessary efforts to meet the diverse stakeholder needs while attaining their primary objective of creating wealth for shareholders.

Compared to advanced economies, studies on sustainability performance in emerging economies are limited. Nonetheless, these limited studies leave out stakeholder perceptions, focusing more on quantitative performance indicators. Using thematic and content analyses, the authors investigate stakeholder perceptions on the sustainability performance of a case mining subsidiary operating in Ghana. The study focused on Ghana because it is ranked with South Africa as the top two producers of gold in Africa. Nonetheless, unlike South Africa, Ghana faces more sustainability challenges from the mining sector due to weak institutions in enforcing sustainability standards.

This paper aims to propose a multilevel framework of fashion consumer ethics that unpacks how ethical consumers publicly express their identity through sustainable fashion (SF). The author explores SF’s cognitive, relational and contextual dynamics, highlighting how attitude–behavior (A-B) gaps might impede consumers’ ethical identity and social image alignment.

The framework theoretically reconstructs fashion consumer ethics by integrating social intuitionism, social representation theory and the public sphere. This theorizing process sheds light on fragmented attempts found in previous research to understand how ethical consumers express their self-identity and socially represent their image through SF, avoiding A-B gaps.

The theoretical propositions suggest how ethical consumers’ self-concept is expressed at the cognitive level, leading to ethical commitment toward self-associated fashion brands; social image is manifested at the relational level, giving rise to consumers’ ethical engagement in SF; and ethical consumers’ self-verify their identity-image alignment in the public sphere, thus addressing A-B issues.

The sociopsychological approach suggests a novel understanding of ethical consumers’ individual and social representation through SF consumption. The framework interprets SF as an “aesthetic of existence,” co-constructed collectively and symbolically expressed publicly. As a result, the proposed model combines different theories to introduce new causal mechanisms and constructs of ethical consumers’ cognition, sociological relations and public spheres.

Competitiveness is an important personality trait that has been studied in various disciplines and has been shown to predict critical work outcomes at the individual level. Despite this, the role of competitiveness in groups and teams has received scant attention amongst organizational researchers. Aiming to promote future research on the role of competitiveness as both an adaptive and maladaptive trait – particularly in the context of work – the authors review competitiveness and its effects on individual and team stress and Well-Being, giving special attention to the processes of cohesion and conflict and situational moderators. The authors illustrate a dynamic multilevel model of individual and team difference factors, competitive processes, and individual and team outcomes to highlight competitiveness as a consequential occupational stressor. Furthermore, the authors discuss the feedback loops that inform the different factors, highlight important avenues for future research, and offer practical solutions for managers to reduce unhealthy competition.

This case examines critical ethical accounting practice issues surrounding a request for proposal for audit services at Aviary Corporation based on a real Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement action. Audit and tax partners at Western Accounting Firm, a large international public accounting firm, used confidential information obtained from the company’s Chief Audit Officer to modify their proposal for audit services. In response to their actions, the Securities and Exchange Commission fined the auditing firm, the partners, and the Chief Audit Executive. The authors used publicly available information and adopted fictitious names to develop a teaching case that instructors can implement in a variety of accounting and ethics classes to increase students’ understanding of professional codes of conduct and independence guidance.

We examined the impact of a leadership support training intervention implemented prior to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on support behaviors specific to COVID-19 during the pandemic. Primary intervention targets (i.e. family-supportive supervisor behaviors and sleep leadership behaviors) were explored as mediators between the intervention and supportive COVID-19 leadership behaviors.

A cluster randomized controlled trial intervention was implemented with service members and their supervisors in the Army and Air National Guard throughout 2017–2019. Follow-up survey data were collected after the intervention, including during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Direct and indirect intervention effects were tested.

A pre-COVID intervention targeting leader support for family and sleep health had a direct effect on leader support specific to the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, sleep leadership, but not family-supportive supervisor behaviors, mediated the intervention effects on supportive COVID-19 leadership. These findings suggest that certain leadership training interventions can transfer across knowledge domains and time.

Findings from this study demonstrate that training leaders on support behaviors improves their ability to support employees during the COVID-19 pandemic and may translate to crisis leadership in other contexts.

We examined the long-term effects of an intervention that was implemented approximately 1–2 years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic on leadership support behaviors specific to the pandemic. Our findings contribute to the leadership, training, and organizational intervention literatures, and have implications for how leaders can support employees during crises.