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Mentoring has been increasingly used in educational development to facilitate transfer of knowledge from programs for higher education teachers to their pedagogic practice. However, studies are missing which would critically assess the outcomes of mentoring in programs for university teachers. The purpose of this paper is to systematically review existing research on mentoring in the context of educational development in higher education.

Using a careful search strategy, 17 relevant scholarly sources were selected and analyzed to document the results of mentoring at individual, departmental and institutional levels.

Among the striking findings was the lack of clarity or definition surrounding mentoring and similar terms, coaching and tutoring and the lack of methodological rigour in many studies. However, those methodologically more advanced studies suggest that mentoring can become a valuable component of educational development programs. As reported by previous research, mentoring can: enhance university teachers’ cognitive abilities, beliefs and attitudes; improve the effectiveness of teaching; increase teachers’ capability to research teaching and learning; enhance mentoring skills; and improve the overall teaching climate at universities.

Categorization of different types of outcomes of mentoring in educational development can help the practitioners engaged in introducing or re-designing educational development programs with a mentoring element.

This is the first systematic review of the studies discussing the process, value and outcomes of teacher mentoring to improve pedagogical practice at the university level.

At a time when secondary vocational education is implementing competence‐based education (CBE) on a large scale, to adapt to the needs of students and of the labour market in a modern society, many vocational schools have recognised that interdisciplinary teacher teams are an important condition for this implementation. In order to provide students with the right competences for the labour market, different subject teachers should work and learn together and, by doing so, should be able to develop changes and improvements to ensure the effective implementation of CBE. In spite of the appeal of forming teacher teams in vocational education, studies on this subject show that teams in educational settings are not easily implemented. This paper aims to address this issue.

In this study, 28 managers from a Vocational Education and Training (VET) college in The Netherlands were interviewed in order to find factors that are related to effective team functioning. The authors choose to rely on a qualitative approach, because there has hardly been any empirical validation of factors that are related to effective team functioning in a vocational education context. In order to determine what factors influence team effectiveness, the results from the interviews have been related to what is known about team effectiveness from the literature.

By relating the results from the interviews to what is known about team effectiveness from the literature, a framework for future research on team effectiveness in schools is provided. In line with the organisational and psychological literature on team effectiveness, the managers distinguished several aspects in their definition of team effectiveness. Moreover, the findings of the study highlight the importance of the development of task interdependence, transformational leadership, and group efficacy for producing effective teams in education.

Although teams and team functioning have been the focus of researchers from different disciplines and have been studied from different perspectives, studies on the conditions that support or limit the successful implementation of teacher teams in vocational education are still scarce. The results of this study are expected to provide a deeper understanding of the mechanism that underlies the ability of teacher teams in vocational education to function effectively.

The purpose of this paper is to get deeper insight into the complex nature of the relationship between team learning conditions, team learning behaviours (TLBs) and innovative work behaviour (IWB) by considering and combining different neglected aspects in research.

A questionnaire was filled out by 593 vocational educators of 117 interdisciplinary work teams in vocational colleges in Germany. Correlations were calculated and structural equation modelling at two levels was conducted.

The results indicate that TLBs, especially team reflexivity and boundary spanning, relate positively to IWB. Furthermore, team structure, task interdependence and group potency relate positively to TLBs. It means that TLBs can be fostered by establishing these team learning conditions and, thus, IWB can be fostered.

The main limitation of the study is that the data collection was cross-sectional. Longitudinal studies are required to capture the dynamic character of team learning and to identify causal relationships.

It is important to make all employees in vocational education aware of the importance of TLBs especially of team reflexivity and boundary spanning.

This study provides practical implications for organisations to foster IWB and indications for a better understanding of the relationship between team learning conditions, TLBs and IWB considering and combining different neglected aspects such as examining TLBs separated in one study.

Competent clinical teachers are essential for clinical teaching. According to the literature, coaching can contribute to improved levels of reflection and better performance of clinical teachers. By engaging in a dialogue about coachee's teaching behaviour, coaches can stimulate reflection of novice teachers. This study aims to gain insights into the effectiveness of coaching processes in which experienced clinical teachers act as coaches for less experienced teachers.

A case study was conducted in a Dentistry Faculty of a University Medical Centre in The Netherlands. Semi‐structured interviews with nine coaching couples were conducted.

The findings indicate that only one coaching couple succeeded in using coaching as an effective tool for stimulating reflection and the performance of the beginning clinical teacher. Instead of discussing and analysing coachees' teaching behaviour, the other couples merely discussed the knowledge and experience of the coach.

This study provides insight into the pitfalls of collegial coaching, and discusses various factors that might affect coaching such as a hierarchical relationship between coach and coachee, the academic climate, the personality of coach and coachee, and finally the importance of using the right coaching model.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of transformational leadership on employee’s innovative work behavior, and the mediating role of motivation to learn, and the moderating role of task complexity and innovation climate on the link between transformational leadership and innovative work behavior.

A questionnaire, designed as a self-reported survey, was distributed to full-time employees and their respective supervisors working in 35 firms (services and manufacturing sectors) in Pakistan. Data were collected from 338 employee–supervisor dyads. The hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling.

Results showed that transformational leadership had a positive impact on employees’ innovative work behavior and motivation to learn mediated transformational leadership–innovative work behavior link. The study further showed that task complexity and innovation climate moderated the relationship between transformational leadership and employees’ innovative work behavior.

Based on the premises of interactionist perspectives on individual innovation, this study integrated multi-level variables to investigate leaders’ influences on followers’ innovative work behavior. This study contributed to the existing literature by providing empirical evidence on influence of transformational leadership on employees’ innovative work behavior as well as the impact of both individual and organizational level variables.

The close connection among transformational leadership, motivation to learn and innovative work behavior suggests that transformational leadership traits among managers are important to enhance employees’ innovative work behavior. Organizations should pay attention to creating a climate that is supportive of innovation and encourage individuals to learn new knowledge and skills, and provide employees with opportunities to use their acquired knowledge and skills.

This paper contributed to leadership and innovation literatures and provided insights into how the practitioners could use an appropriate leadership style to enhance innovative work behavior among employees. The study adopted a distinct model comprising five variables to investigate innovative work behavior from a multi-level perspective, i.e., motivation to learn and innovative work behavior at the individual level, task complexity at the unit level and innovation climate and leadership at the organizational level. This integrated model of using predictors from multiple levels supported the theoretical assumptions that innovative work behavior resulted from the interaction of individual, group and organizational level factors.

The relationship between managerial coaching and team performance may be mediated by team reflection because coaching is often thought to lead to reflection, which has been found to lead to improved performance. In contrast, this relationship might be moderated by team reflection, because poorly reflective teams are more likely to depend on coaching than highly reflective teams. The purpose of this paper is to test these rival hypotheses.

The authors employed a longitudinal survey method at two points in time in two long-term care organizations. Team members were asked to rate the level of managerial coaching and team reflection. Team managers were asked to evaluate team performance.

Team reflection turned out to be a moderator and not a mediator in the relationship between managerial coaching and team performance. Only the performance of poorly reflective teams benefits from managerial coaching.

Excessive coaching of highly reflective teams may be a waste of the energy and time of both managers and teams and may even harm team efficiency. Therefore, team managers would be wise to estimate the team’s level of reflection in order to adjust their coaching interventions accordingly. Future research should explore how managers can be supported in making a valid assessment of the team’s reflective capabilities and in adjusting their coaching interventions accordingly.

This paper sheds light on the relationship between managerial coaching and team performance by testing contradicting explanations regarding the role of team reflection.

The purpose of this paper is standardize and provide a multidimensional measure for assessing human resources competencies (HRCs) scale.

The data collected in this study were 2018 from the 234 people selected from 603 managers and experts in human resources of selected firms existing in the Yazd Industrial Town randomly. Based on the model of HRCs designed by Ulrich et al. (2008), a questionnaire was developed to assess HRCs. Internal consistency and split-half methods were used to obtain the reliability of the instrument. Content validity and construct validity of the instrument were also assessed through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

This paper elucidates a key scale for assessing HRCs including three dimensions: knowledge business, functional expertise and managing change. Also, results revealed that two items were then dropped from the questionnaire as they were unreliable, and a final 31 items were extracted to form the scale for assessing HRCs. The coefficients for Cronbach’s α and split-half were 0.963 and 0.947, respectively. In EFA, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin test yielded optimal 0.962, and Bartlett’s test was statistically significant. Additionally, three factors with eigenvalues higher than 1 explained 63% of the total variance. Hence, CFA confirmed the results from EFA too. Moreover, the model proved to enjoy a good fit.

The scale is useful for both researchers and practitioners. Also, the scale provides researchers with a sought-after conceptualization of HRCs.

Consequently, considering that the validity and reliability indices of HRCs were estimated to be desirable, the authors believe that the developed questionnaire can be used as an appropriate scale for measuring HRCs in future research.

Our economies are rapidly evolving toward being primarily service-driven, with information and communication as fundamental drivers for the service deployment. Strategic choices are increasingly driven by other parameters than the traditional goods-driven industrial type of economies. In this paper, the major drivers for making strategic choices in a competitive service economy are examined. It is shown how the competition in services based on information and communication technology (ICT) is competence-based. Competition aims at bringing additional value through services, but may also deploy specific techniques to stop value from leaking in particular business processes. Value creation and prevention of value leaks cannot just rely on the traditional material-based techniques, which are grounded in the strong tangible nature of the traditional economies. Today ICT-based services involve creative combinations of technologies, resources, and assets to answer as well as anticipate the growing demand for flexible solutions that create sustained added value. In this paper, the particular role of imperfections in service systems is explored, extending the well-known theories of information imperfections. Imperfections are not always solved but are sometimes even maintained in favor of sustained competitive advantage. Various ways to realize service rent are discussed with extensive examples. The concluding part of the paper points to some crucial service configuration issues, including the need for a sufficient degree of corporate-wide standardized service components and interfaces to address the growing demand for agility in competence-driven markets.

Three distinct trends are evolving that characterize the challenges facing corporate planners in managing language as a corporate asset. These are the evolution of the knowledge economy, the globalization of business and economy, and the increasing diversity of the workforce. These trends call for attention to the role language plays in the creation of intellectual and organizational capital. Linguists have been hampered by their inability to model how linguistic conditions affect economic processes. They have long attempted to assess the economic value of language as a commodity, but with little success. The purpose of this article is to describe language as an asset, and argue that recent advances in decision sciences have sufficiently removed the deficit in theoretical and empirical research that challenged the linguists.

Drawing an analogy between language and currency, this article identifies the functions that language must perform in terms of exchange, accounting and storage of information, knowledge and know‐how.

Factors that contribute to the value of a language are discussed through comparative analysis of these functions from the perspectives of linguists, economists and decision analysts. Based on the Social Judgment Theory, the article develops a judgment‐analytic framework for the assessment of the value of a language.

Concluding that the corporate and community planning perspectives are divergent, the paper identifies the direction for future research to inform formulation of language policies. The value of a language may be affected by the degree to which the language is used in the demographic community defining an organization's strategic environment, the investment in the language relative to other available languages, demand for the language as a commodity within the organization's strategic community, and so on.

With such conception of language, corporations can begin to think in terms of a portfolio of language assets much in the same way as it thinks of portfolio of financial currency assets.

This research aims to develop an approach to assess the reliability of integrated construction supply chains via an integrated model of building information modelling (BIM) and the lean supply chain (LSC). It reflects the synergistic workflow between BIM and LSC as a novel approach to improve the reliability of construction projects.

This research evaluates the reliability of the BIM-LSC approach through a combination of entropy theory, set pair analysis (SPA), and Markov chains (EESM). An exploratory survey was conducted to collect data from 316 industry professionals experienced in BIM and LSC. Subsequently, multiple cycles of calculations were performed with indirect data inputs. Finally, a reliability evaluation index is established for the BIM-LSC approach and potential applications are identified.

The results show that the EESM model of BIM-LSC developed in this study can handle not only supply chain reliability evaluation at a given state but also the prediction of reliability in supply chain state transitions due to changing project conditions. This is particularly relevant to the current environment of the construction project, which is characterised by an increasing level of complexity in terms of labour, technology, and resource interactions.

Future research could consider the accuracy and validity of the proposed model in real-life scenarios with by considering both quantitative and qualitative data across the entire lifecycle of projects.

The research offers a model to evaluate the reliability of the BIM-LSC approach. The accuracy of BIM supply chain reliability analysis and prediction in an uncertain environment is improved.

The BIM-LSC reliability evaluation and prediction presented in this study provides a theoretical foundation to enhance understanding of the BIM-LSC in the construction project context.