Search results

In the presence of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), due to the social distance restriction, consumers' regular consumption behaviors and patterns have been changing fundamentally. Thereafter, an innovative group buying model has emerged and developed explosively with a specific focus on consumer's location, known as community-based group buying (CGB). The purpose of this paper is to investigate the transfer mechanism of user's trust in dyadic contexts of social and commercial role-playing in the CGB program.

This study adopts an empirical research method, with an online and offline questionnaire survey, a total of 382 responses have been obtained. Then, both descriptive analysis and hierarchical regression analysis are conducted to explore the dual roles of group leader and its corresponding effects on consumers' trust (i.e. emotional trust and behavioral trust) and engagement actions (i.e. purchase and share) in the CGB program.

Results indicate that resident's trust and their perception of group leader's friend role can positively enhance their engagement actions in the CGB programs. Meanwhile, for the purpose of profit maximization, the group leader is more willing to play a friend role in transactions no matter whether the role conflict exists.

Research findings provide some managerial insights for CGB platform on the selection and training of group leaders and the incentive mechanism design.

This study aims to make visible the dynamic nature of leader–member exchange (LMX) in the changing realm of health-care leadership.

The qualitative study used an open questionnaire, which was distributed amongst nursing staff and managers at a Finnish public university hospital.

The participants described partly LMX theory, but the leader-member relationship was also influenced by the organizational culture and the existing management practices. Nursing staff were found to have a more variable and dynamic role in the LMX relationship than has previously been reported. The research therefore provided novel information for the field of health-care research.

The presented research was limited by the content of the data, as the collected single narratives were rather short; however, the fact that a large number of narratives were collected from diverse participants strengthened the ability to reliably answer the research questions.

Although the participants described partly LMX theory, the leader–member relationship is also influenced by the organizational culture and existing management practices; the finding that nurses have more variable roles in LMX relationships in the health-care context was new insight in this field. Therefore, the presented findings can help decision-makers change the current, perhaps antiquated, leadership practices at health-care organizations.

This study provides new insight into the field of LMX research in terms of the important role of nursing staff, the organizational factors that influence the LMX relationship and the dynamic nature of LMX relationships.

This study explores municipal leaders' perceptions on strategic human resource management in their local government organization. Previous studies on companies demonstrate that the top manager's perceptions of the importance of human resource management (HRM) for the organization are reflected in the quality of human resource management and its strategic role. The authors are interested in how leaders in municipalities perceive HRM.

The authors interviewed 30 leaders of Finnish municipalities for this qualitative study focused on municipal leaders' perceptions of HRM. The authors applied a discourse analytical approach in the analysis.

The authors recognized four discourses that frame perceptions of HRM: HRM as a strategic weapon, HRM as an underperformer, HRM as a matter of formality and HRM as a cost generator. In addition, the authors recognized that the discourses reflected leaders' self-positioning in relation to the power to impact issues related to HRM. Shifting between distinct roles demonstrated that municipal leaders' emphasis on HRM and its strategic alignment reflects the power relations in the municipality and the attitudes to the importance of HRM.

This study contributes to the academic discussions on HRM in municipalities and provides views on the municipal leader's role and impact on valuing and investing in HRM. From a practical point of view, the study will increase municipal leaders' knowledge of HRM's impact on the performance of the organization and also of the possible means of HRM.

Over time, the role of followers within leadership discourse has gained greater status, leading to followers being acknowledged as significant actors in the leadership process. This has led to the development of follower-centric leadership studies, as well as the more emergent research area of followership, with followership research having the specific intention to find out about followers from the perspective of followers. In this paper, the authors provide a review of role-based followership approaches, and implicit leadership and followership theories as a basis to build a case for follower implicit followership theories (FIFTs) as a focus area for future research.

The authors conducted a review of seminal and current role-based followership literature, with a specific focus on FIFTs and followership studies conducted within the African context.

Implicit theories have been an area of leadership research that has added much value, and as such could do the same for development of followership research. FIFTs as a research area are nascent and, as such, should continue to be explored in order to expand our understanding of followership.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is one of the first literature reviews to have a specific focus on FIFTs, as well as on followership research conducted within the African context.

Practical wisdom (PW; phronesis), as one of the human virtues, is experiencing a renewal in the contemporary management literature. The aim of this conceptual paper is first, to explore the core practices of managers and leaders in the literature and second, to demonstrate how PW can manifest itself in these practices.

The research follows the interpretivist research philosophy, inductive approach, qualitative method and the theory-building research strategy. The data collection method is a literature review. The practice ecosystem framework is applied to demonstrate the presence of PW in the core practices of managers and leaders.

The paper proposes a practice-based paradigm of management and leadership. From the literature study, envisioning, enabling, energizing, engaging and executing as five fundamental practices are identified.

The most significant literature was selected based on decisions of the author. Therefore, it might be that important sources were overlooked. The paper proposes future research questions, and it calls for an empirical validation of the proposed conceptual model in management and leadership practices context.

The practical implications for managers and leaders are in applying the framework developed in this paper as a tool or guidelines to cultivate PW in their practices. The paper offers implications for management education, traditional educational institutions and educational practitioners because they are the key influencers of wise thinking and actions of future managers and leaders.

The novelty of this paper is in making explicit how the eight features of PW can manifest themselves in the everyday actions of managers and leaders. Applying the practice ecosystem framework for this purpose is an original contribution.

This study focuses on leadership in organizations where big data analytics (BDA) is an essential component of corporate strategy. While leadership researchers have conducted promising studies in the field of digital transformation, the impact of BDA on leadership is still unexplored.

This study is based on semi-structured interviews with 33 organizational leaders and subject-matter experts from various industries. Using a grounded theory approach, a framework is provided for the emergent field of BDA in leadership research.

The authors present a conceptual model comprising foundational competencies and higher order roles that are data analytical skills, data self-efficacy, problem spotter, influencer, knowledge facilitator, visionary and team leader.

This study focuses on BDA competency research emerging as an intersection between leadership research and information systems research. The authors encourage a longitudinal study to validate the findings.

The authors provide a competency framework for organizational leaders. It serves as a guideline for leaders to best support the BDA initiatives of the organization. The competency framework can support recruiting, selection and leader promotion.

This study provides a novel BDA leadership competency framework with a unique combination of competencies and higher order roles.

The purpose of the paper is to report the findings of a synthesis of literature reviews and stakeholder interviews conducted in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The synthesis provides an overview of instructional leadership policy and practice in these six countries.

This paper reports the findings of a systematic literature review, and participant interviews, in six sub-Sahara African countries. The research links to the British Council's initiative to develop instructional leadership in developing contexts, including the six countries featured in this submission.

The findings show diverse policy and practice of instructional leadership in these African contexts. Three have no explicit policies on this important leadership construct, while the others have relevant policy statements but limited evidence of instructional leadership practice.

The research provides an overview of instructional leadership policy and practice in these six countries, but more school-based research is required to develop grounded evidence on whether and how this is practiced. The pandemic inhibited such school-based research in 2020. The study provides emerging evidence of the impact of instructional leadership on school and student outcomes, confirming what is known from international research.

Developing awareness of how instructional leadership can improve student learning, linked to appropriate training, could lead to more effective schools.

The Sustainable Development Goals stress the importance of high quality education for economic and social development. Leadership is an important aspect of quality, and the research reported in this paper shows the potential for instructional leadership to enhance student learning.

This is the first cross-national study of instructional leadership in sub-Saharan Africa.

The purpose of this viewpoint paper is to explore middle leaders' ability to recognise emotions in the context of workplace research, and to propose measures that might support them in their role.

This paper combines a contemporary literature review with reflections from practice to develop more nuanced understandings of middle leadership. This paper applied the Geneva Emotional Recognition Test (GERT) to explore the level of emotional recognition of 86 individuals (teachers to headteachers (equivalent to school principals)).

The preliminary findings suggest that teachers and headteachers have higher levels of emotional recognition than middle and senior leaders. This paper subsequently argues that the task-orientated nature middle leadership compounds an individual's ability to engage effectively in relationship-orientated tasks. This explains why middle leaders scored lower on the GERT assessment. This is further inhibited by the anti-correlation in the brain's ability to deal with the task-positive network (TDM) and default mode network (DMN) processing functions where individuals operate in one neural mode for long periods.

The viewpoint paper proposes a number of implications for middle leaders and suggests that middle leaders should proactively seek out opportunities to be engaged in activities that support the DMN function of the brain and subsequently the relationship-orientated aspects of leadership, for example, coaching other staff members. However, it has to be recognised that the sample size is small and further work is needed before any generalisations can be made.

This paper offers a contemporary review of the role of middle leaders underpinned by a preliminary study into individuals' ability to recognise emotions.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of leadership in management accounting change processes and outcomes.

The paper draws on an ethnographic study in a Southern European company and mobilizes leader–follower relations as a method theory to analyse the observations.

The findings show how a leadership dispute between two top managers can be amplified during the management accounting change process and percolate throughout an organization. The authors identify five contested areas where the role of accounting amplifies the leadership dispute by unfolding its reach to other organizational actors. The leadership dispute can shape and reinforce a fragmented organization, with some organizational members creating convergent leader–follower relations while others divert and fragment with an increased turnover. This amplification can lead to unexpected outcomes of the change process in terms of how and by whom accounting is performed.

The authors propose the study of leadership and followership as an important but, to date, largely neglected theme in management accounting research.

In contrast to the prior management accounting literature, the paper departs from a leadership-centric and role-based approach and employs a co-constructionist and relational approach to leadership and followership to analyse management accounting change. In addition, it applies and extends Alvesson's (2019a) theory on “divergent relationalities” between the presumed leaders and followers. In doing so, the paper also adds to the leadership field by theorizing and integrating the situation of a leadership dispute in this novel theoretical framework.

The purpose of this study was to explore inter-professional clinicians’ perspectives on resident leadership in the context of inter-professional teams and to identify a definition for leadership in the clinical context. In 2015, CanMEDS changed the title of one of the core competencies from manager to leader. The shift in language was perceived by some as returning to traditional hierarchical and physician-dominant structures. The resulting uncertainty has resulted in a call to action to not only determine what physician leadership is but to also determine how to teach and assess it.

Focus groups and follow-up individual interviews were conducted with 23 inter-professional clinicians from three pediatric clinical service teams at a large, Canadian tertiary-level rehabilitation hospital. Qualitative thematic analysis was used to inductively analyze the data.

Data analysis resulted in one overarching theme: leadership is collaborative – and three related subthemes: leadership is shared; leadership is summative; and conceptualizations of leadership are shifting.

Not all members of the three inter-professional teams were able to attend the focus group sessions because of scheduling conflicts. Participation of additional clinicians could have, therefore, affected the results of this study. The study was conducted locally at a single rehabilitation hospital, among Canadian pediatric clinicians, which highlights the need to explore conceptualization of leadership across different contexts.

There is an evident need to prepare physicians to be leaders in both their daily clinical and academic practices. Therefore, more concerted efforts are required to develop leadership skills among residents. The authors postulate that continued integration of various inter-professional disciplines during the early phases of training is essential to foster collaborative leadership and trust.

The results of this study suggest that inter-professional clinicians view clinical leadership as collaborative and fluid and determined by the fit between tasks and team member expertise. Mentorship is important for increasing the ability of resident physicians to develop collaborative leadership roles within teams. The authors propose a collaborative definition of clinical leadership based on the results of this study: a shared responsibility that involves facilitation of dialog; the integration of perspectives and expertise; and collaborative planning for the purpose of exceptional patient care.