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The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of board characteristics (board size, board independence and duality) on the performance of takaful insurance providers with distinguishable muamalah contracts (wakalah and hybrid) moderated by ownership concentration.

The sample consists of 30 takaful insurances. The authors divided it into two subsamples: 18 insurance companies using wakalah contracts provided by Southeast Asia and 12 insurance companies using hybrid contracts provided by the Gulf Cooperation Council over the period 2010–2020. For data analysis, the authors used the partial least squares path modeling method.

The results show that the larger the board of directors and the higher the number of independent directors, the greater the takaful performance in both the wakalah and hybrid subsamples. Nondual functions improve the takaful performance in both the wakalah and hybrid subsamples. The results also reveal that a highly concentrated ownership structure positively (negatively) moderates the relationship between board size and takaful performance in the wakalah (hybrid) subsamples. Moreover, highly concentrated ownership insignificantly (negatively) moderates the relationship between independent directors and takaful’s performance in the hybrid (wakalah) subsample. Furthermore, a highly concentrated ownership structure insignificantly (negatively) moderates the relationship between the nondual structure and takaful performance in the wakalah (hybrid) subsample.

This study contributes to the understanding of the moderating role of a highly concentrated ownership structure between the characteristics of the board of directors and the performance of takaful insurance, which applies wakalah and hybrid contracts. In addition, this study contributes to takaful insurance by determining the appropriate board characteristics that must be adopted to achieve oversight and improve performance. Regulators should appreciate this contribution to the formulation of suitable approaches for efficiently supervising takaful insurance activities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the Shariah governance mechanisms of takaful insurance and their impact on its financial performance.

The effect of Shariah governance mechanisms on financial performance is analyzed over 2012–2018 on a sample of 11 takaful listed insurances in the Middle East region. Using multiple regression models, four hypotheses addressing Shariah governance mechanisms are tested.

The findings generally reveal that Shariah governance has an impact on the financial performance of takaful insurance. The Shariah Supervisory Board (SSB) size, the members’ reputation and their qualifications are the main determinants of financial performance for listed takaful insurance.

This paper includes two main limitations that may affect the accuracy of the finding. First, the results are restricted to the Middle East region and may not be generalized to other regions. Second, the sample is dominated by UAE, i.e. 4 takaful insurances out of 11.

Both Shariah governance and regular governance have an impact on the financial performance of takaful insurance. Yet, the effect of Shariah governance is more robust. To improve its financial performance, takaful insurance should expand the size of the SSB, hiring reputable scholars and recruit doctors in Islamic economics.

This research studies takaful insurance, unlike the majority of other works that have focused on Islamic banks.

The modern construction industry is highly competitive and cost driven, with tangible adversarial relationships between projects' contractual parties at individual and organisational levels; there are conflict of interest as people to survive. Accordingly, team leaders on construction megaprojects (CMPs) in multinational engineering organisations strive to survive in such competitive markets. The research’s aim is to investigate relationships between team leaders' tenure and management styles towards professional subordinates on CMPs and elaborate how corporate governance can optimally address this conflict of interest and adversarial relationships.

The research methodology adopted processes of inducting theory using case studies. A qualitative approach was adopted as a primary data collection and analysis source. It involved case studies through primary data collection in semi-structured face-to-face interviews with 38 professional subordinates (interviewees) to discuss impacts of team leaders' tenure on their management style (a five-team leader, case studies). The research methodology is based on building theories from case study grounded theory research methodologies.

The research introduced the notion that team leader survival syndrome is pronounced and evidenced by adversarial reactions towards new or experienced professional subordinates where team leaders perceive professional subordinates, especially at senior technical levels, as potential risks that jeopardise their positions and employment survival possibilities. The syndrome is proven based on real-life case studies; it is constant, tangible and serious disorder of attitudes and behaviours. Longer tenure stimulates and accelerates these phenomena and syndrome, with 58% of team leaders exhibiting such syndromes. Optimum employee tenure is between 7 and 10 years. Corporate governance provides good resolution practices.

The research implications are useful to construction industry and academia. However, the analysis is limited to the case studies considered in Canada and Qatar. Due to small sample size for both case studies and respondents to the questionnaire survey, it is recommended for future exploration to expand the scope of research to larger sample size and various demographic and geographical locations.

Corporates should acknowledge the presence of team leader survival syndromes. They should thoroughly investigate sociopolitical relationships behind it and seek to understand consequences on professional subordinates. Corporates should also adopt a 360-degree feedback system; they should limit trust given to team leaders in this regard to responsible trust, to eliminate manipulation. Team leaders are perceived as being not always truthful and misrepresent capabilities and performance of their professional subordinates to senior managers. Corporate governance holistic multidimensional perspectives are required to provide resolutions of team leader survival syndromes.

The research has discovered a phenomenon that team leaders on CMPs in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) organisations, prompted by virtue of long tenure in corporates or by power of their managerial level in organisations, perceive their professional subordinates, especially senior technical employees, as potential risks. It is thought promoting them would put their own positions and security of tenure at risk. Hence, team leaders act adversarially, to enhance their own survival prospects. This research introduced the novel team leader survival syndrome and introduced analyses, practical implications and recommendations.

The importance of modeling digital leadership in quickly digitizing countries, like the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is inevitable for building leadership capabilities to lead, engage and motivate remote employees in the digital environment. Using Blake and Mouton Grid, the current study examines the behavioral approach used by the leaders from both public and private sectors while managing their workforce digitally in the period of the pandemic, when 70% of the workforce worked remotely for the first-time in the region.

An online survey was conducted by the managerial employees working in different firms using self-administered questionnaires and adopting the snowball sampling technique. In total, 476 respondents participated in the study from both the Emirates of Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

The analysis using IBM SPSS and Smart PLS software reported that 9 out of 10 leaders positioned their digital leadership style well above the middle-of-the-road management style (5,5) oriented towards team management (9,9); with 7 out of 9 displaying high team management leadership style, while managing remote workers. However, millennials displayed higher task orientation when compared to generation-x leaders, who concentrated more on their relations with the workers.

The findings have implications for practitioners in technology driven regions. Also the results highlighting the task-oriented approach of millennials digital leaders have implication for owners and board of directors of the firms that seniority is not the only credible approach for leadership positions.

The study reveals the behavioral styles beneficial for digital leaders to develop their leadership capabilities and increase their effectiveness while managing the workforce digitally. Black Mountain Grid and its two-dimensional leadership matrix has been found to be a useful conceptual approach for understanding digital leadership behaviors, and based on study findings, recommendations have been provided to effectively improve its utilization for leading teams. The findings have implications for practitioners in technology driven regions as well as digital leadership field scholars.

This article aims to analyze the way the leader acts in the development of collective competencies (CC) of fashion work teams, seeking to demonstrate ways in which the leader can collaborate for the development of the collective work.

With a qualitative approach, this paper carried out a case study strategy having the Creation Center of a fashion group from Santa Catarina, Brazil as a research object. Data collection took place through semi-structured interviews and participant observation with 36 employees from 6 work teams from 5 clothing brands.

Our findings make it clear that the leader influences the CC development of fashion work teams. The leader's role becomes essential for directing and developing his team, seeking to encourage participation and cooperation between team members to achieve the objectives and expected results. It was considered that the CC development could be associated with how much the leader represents his team and contributes with guidelines that emphasize the collective and the people and teams' development. The leader who makes the cooperative relationship feasible, encourages effort and promotes cohesion and teamwork tends to collaborate with actions that foster CC development.

From a theoretical perspective, it is the first study to analyze empirically the relationship between leadership and CC. A model with 18 guidelines was developed, divided into six determining factors (activity dynamics, team composition, individual characteristics and dispositions, team integration, communication and physical structure) that demonstrated the way the leader collaborates for the CC development. For the fashion industry, this study demonstrates elements capable of assisting collective creativity and the development of fashion collections.

This paper evaluates the value and necessity of greater equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in Canadian fire departments. Rather than focussing on changing hiring practices, the paper seeks to highlight how leadership can implement a culture of EDI that will encourage all people to participate.

From a leadership perspective, this paper aims to show how EDI can improve firefighter teamwork and job performance whilst satisfying moral obligations to better represent Canadian communities. Strategies and their limitations for communication and culture change are discussed.

Leaders of Canadian fire departments can utilise organisational change models focussing on improved communication techniques and models to implement cultural changes needed to allow for more EDI. Specific recommendations based on business research into culture change, communication and EDI are outlined.

Recommendations to fire department leadership for cultural changes and communication are provided. Further, strategies and reasoning for why inclusive departments are more effective are given.

Creating a more inclusive culture in fire departments will lead to an increase in applications from people who have not typically applied in the past.

There has been little research or recommendations on increasing EDI in Canadian fire departments through cultural changes. Most existing literature is vague and tends to focus on hiring practices over an analysis of internal culture. This article provides analysis of best business practices and applies those to the cultural context of fire departments to promote culture change.

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.

Several factors and forces in school-level leaders' work can heighten emotions and incite emotionally charged situations. Challenges that heighten school-level leaders' emotions are related to systemic factors, people factors and personal factors. The extent to which each of these different factors influence the emotional experiences of school-level leaders, and whether that influence ends up being positive, negative or neutral, is contextual in nature. The systemic factors include encountering barriers when advocating for students, managing an intensified and expanding workload, working within disorienting policy contexts, and receiving a lack of support from their employer. Changes in school-level leaders' work and workload due to the COVID-19 pandemic that heightened emotions and emotional labour are also considered when discussing the systemic factors. People factors evident in the literature include workplace conflict, gendered power relations and crises and tragedies in the school community. The emotional labour inherent in school-level leadership comes to the forefront when considering the impact of these people factors on emotions at work because school-level leaders are tasked with making decisions that can have an immense impact on peoples' lives. Personal factors discussed in this chapter surround a school-level leader's individual emotional intelligence abilities and media attention directed towards them.

Organizational culture (OC) is not only a key factor in the development of organizational performance but also an important source of employee orientation toward a better understanding of organizational goals. This study aims to analyze the influence of two individual factors on OC: (1) the competencies of employees and (2) perceived leadership behavior. The study also focuses on how the relationship between individual factors and OC differs between public and private organizations.

In this study, data were collected through a survey, and a structural equation modeling approach, partial least squares structural equation modeling, was used to highlight the proposed direct, mediated and moderated relationships. The sample comprises 1,284 respondents, representing both public and private sector organizations.

Based on the results, the employees' competencies positively and significantly influence the hierarchical and market orientation of OC. Additionally, the perceived leadership behavior positively and significantly influences the adoption of all four types of cultural characteristics (i.e. clan, adhocracy, market and hierarchy).

The results are of great benefit to organizations who may become more aware that employees' skills and how employees perceive leadership behavior can significantly influence OC.

These findings make an important contribution to understanding how the characteristics of each type of OC can be influenced by certain behaviors, skills and perceptions and how those relationships may be shaped by the organization's ownership.

This study aims to identify an antecedent that hinders knowledge sharing, namely, the perceived climate of Cha-xu. Based on the social exchange perspective, the authors propose a theoretical model that links the perceived climate of Cha-xu to employee knowledge sharing. This model focuses on the mediating role of two types of trust (vertical and horizontal trust) and the moderating role of task interdependence in influencing the mediation.

Using a sample of 509 Chinese employees, this study carried out a survey on an online platform. This study developed a structural equation model and tested the moderated mediation hypothesis by using Mplus 8.0.

The results showed that two types of trust act as mediators in the relationship between the perceived climate of Cha-xu and knowledge-sharing processes. The mediating effect of horizontal trust is stronger. Most significantly, findings show that this mediated relationship is contingent on the level of task interdependence.

This paper provides evidence for distinguishing vertical trust and horizontal trust in the field of knowledge management. From a managerial perspective, this study identifies traditional cultural factors for hindering knowledge-sharing processes within Chinese organizations.