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Product development becomes more complex when co-development involves multiple parties crossing boundaries of functions, companies, countries and even competitors. An interdisciplinary framework is needed to understand the challenges of structuring collaborative work within global product teams – especially in the research arenas of strategic partnerships, product development teams, collaboration, distributed work, organizational learning and new metaphors. The multi-party partnership of the Joint Strike Fighter Program at Lockheed Martin, the largest aerospace program in history, provides an illustration of the complex information-sharing and problem-solving challenges in aligning a large, distributed, global integrated product team in an environment where even connectivity is a challenge. It sets the stage for the innovative management approaches needed to build collaborative climates as well as research directions for the future.

The purpose of this qualitative study is to conduct an exploratory investigation of the impact and sustainability of coaching on career and leadership development of students and later, alumni, in an Executive Master of Business Administration (EMBA) program.

The sample for this qualitative study consisted of 14 alumni of an EMBA program at a private university in the Southwestern US who graduated between January 2012 and May 2019. Eleven alumni participated in the focus groups, and three alumni participated in personal interviews.

The open coding of the data resulted in three emergent themes (personal development by overcoming personal deficiencies, coaching translates to learning about leadership and coaching motivates sustained change) that confirmed the positive long-term effect of coaching as part of an EMBA program.

By participating in an executive coaching engagement, the EMBA students learned a development process that they could repeat for themselves after graduation and transfer to others. In addition, the EMBA students were able to leverage knowledge gained from the coaching experience for the development of others.

While the positive impacts of coaching are well-documented, its long-term impact on EMBA students/alumni has not yet been studied. This study builds on other evaluative studies to identify the benefits of executive coaching.

Though some disaster risk reduction and management (DRRM) abstractions and core concepts may appear transparently obvious to some readers, others might not easily grasp the complexities embedded in them. This chapter focusses on the main arguments connected to DRRM. It unravels some of the complexities that abound in the framing of key disaster risk reduction concepts in literature. This chapter is divided into three parts. The first part focusses on understanding the dynamics of disasters. This part revisits definitions of disasters in literature, how they have been conceptualised in academia and what makes them different from other related concepts such as hazards, crisis, vulnerabilities and emergencies. Furthermore, considering that some impacts of disasters are more obvious than others, it examines some of the less conspicuous relationships between disasters and other phenomena. The second part examines the concept of DRRM in existing literature, highlighting the importance of resilience in DRRM and revisiting key methodological approaches in building resilience among communities. The third part places the concept of DRRM within the African context. It demonstrates the delicate aspects embedded in successful DRRM in Africa amid institutional development and policy issues. This part concludes with the identification of key knowledge gaps in DRRM in Africa. These knowledge gaps identified in the wider literature are used to justify why the chapters in this book and the context covered (sub-Saharan Africa) are of utmost importance in DRRM.

This chapter aims to identify the impact of misbelief and heuristics on the engagement of giggers and customers with gigging organisations. This is of value due to the plethora of gigging opportunities and our lack of knowledge about how and why people choose to take up these opportunities. In addition, the gigs may frequently go unrecorded with payments made through systems such as PayPal which can allow international payments to be made without remittances. This chapter utilises some of the primary evolutionary theories to explore the efficacy and conflict in communications between gigging organisations, their customers and providers (giggers). Those selected are: misbelief in the conscious mind; and heuristics, such as the availability and confirmatory heuristics in the unconscious mind. Misbelief is addressed as a spandrel, and heuristics are discussed through the lens of fast and frugal approaches. Through a text analysis of 77 international gigging organisations, the messages conveyed are assessed against both evolutionary theory and prior research into the gig economy. The findings are that evolutionary psychology provides a useful framework for analysing these messages, as well as aiding understanding of gigging behaviours. HRM practitioners could make use of this form of analysis to support their design of interactions with giggers to ensure clarity on both sides.

The first part of this chapter addresses the history and development of the International Study Association of Teachers and Teaching (ISATT) and its engagement with the global educational community. We provide an account of the context and background against which ISATT developed as well as information about the founders’ orientations and the actions that led to ISATT’s birth. The second part of the chapter uses patterns of topic focus as graphic indicators of the evolution of ISATT’s research interests expressed through publication titles.

The purpose of this paper is to explore employee voice and silence in the mobile telecommunication industry in Nigeria.

An exploratory qualitative case study methodology was employed in this study. Participant selection was done through a purposeful intensity sampling technique, which resulted in 30 employees from two different multinational organizations and an indigenous organization taking part in in-depth interviews.

Findings show the presence of fear of victimization in the Nigerian workplace embellished by the Sub-Saharan culture and the state of the labor market, which resulted in employee silence. The study revealed that the implementation of culturally adapted employee voice mechanisms within organizations in the mobile telecommunication industry in Nigeria promotes employee voice and organizational performance, whereas a lack thereof results in organizational failure.

A limitation is that the purposive sample of employees from three organizations in the mobile telecommunications industry only permits theoretical and analytic generalization.

A focus on the co-creation of a high-performance work environment and the development of a powerful employee value proposition would foster employee voice.

It will enable multinationals operating in Nigeria understand better how to operate employee voice in order to obtain optimal performance from workers in Sub-Sahara Africa.

This paper contributes to the literature on employee/industrial relations by showing that a high-power-distance national culture and a high unemployment rate affect employee voice and silence, which brings to the fore the importance of adequate employee voice mechanisms through which employees express their voice in order to arrive at beneficial individual and organizational outcomes.

Complex collaboration refers to situations where working together effectively across boundaries is critical for complex projects and problems. This work often involves projects of large scope and long duration. The knowledge of a variety of disciplines may be involved. Such projects may cross organizational, national, and/or cultural boundaries. The problem of managing such situations includes ambitious schedules, conflict of cultures and practices, massive amounts of information, multiple languages, and ambiguity of roles and responsibilities. Complex collaboration represents a capability that is essential to effective execution in such situations as new product development, mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, and supply chain management, as well as large government projects. A number of issues emerge in examining complex collaboration, including: unit of analysis, critical relationships, resource development, virtual teaming, key skills, and improvement processes.