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This study aims to investigate the impact of digital leadership (capabilities, experience, predictability and vision) and green organizational culture on firms' digital transformation and financial performance. Additionally, the research aims to evaluate the mediating role of digital transformation in the relationship between digital leadership and firms' financial performance.

A purposive sampling technique was employed to identify and select individuals with relevant expertise and experiences in the field of digital transformation. A total of 164 responses were collected, and the questionnaire was designed based on a five-point Likert-type scale. The data were analyzed using SmartPLS 4 (Statistical Software for Structural Equation Modeling).

The findings indicate that digital leadership capabilities, experience, predictability and vision do not directly impact firms' performance. However, there is an indirect influence on firms' performance through digital transformation. While both digital transformation and green organizational culture (GOC) positively influence firms' financial performance, GOC, leader predictability and leader vision positively influence digital transformation. The results confirm that digital transformation mediates the relationship between capabilities, experience, predictability and vision and firms' financial performance.

The study highlights that strategic capabilities can enhance value-added processes during digital transformation, contributing to sustainability in the digital era. Overall, this research significantly advances both theoretical understanding and practical applications in the context of digital leadership and its impact on firms. Limited digital transformation stages among Malaysian firms impact the research, with some entities cautious about data disclosure and having limited cooperation with researchers. Gathering data from diverse sources would have strengthened the findings and methodological rigor of this multilevel study. Despite these limitations, the research offers fresh insights into the role of GOC, different facets of digital leadership and their influence on digital transformation and financial performance. This enhances existing knowledge and challenges assumptions of the transformational leadership theory (TLT) framework.

The study opens the door to further research into distinct leadership components and their effects in a similar context. By highlighting the positive influence of capabilities, experience, predictability and vision on digital transformation, it expands the theoretical and empirical scope in the realm of digital leadership. These findings encourage critical examination, refinement and evolution of TLT, providing insights for leaders and managers as they navigate digitalization, financial performance and digital leadership within organizations. In an era of digital transformation, leaders play a central role in building a psychologically safe environment and nurturing digitally skilled teams capable of managing technological changes. Leaders should possess the digital capabilities, experience, vision and predictability necessary to drive digital transformation, mitigate potential threats and adapt to the dynamic digital landscape.

These findings support government initiatives to accelerate digitalization and Industry 4.0 implementation. Collaboration between the government and private organizations is essential to create policies and practices that facilitate broad participation in digital transformation programs. Policymakers must adopt a proactive approach to address issues related to Internet accessibility, trade barriers, financing access and resource reallocation. These policies aim to ensure a high-quality and affordable digital infrastructure, cultivate trust in digital technologies and equip organizational leaders with the necessary digital skills.

This research provides valuable insights for practitioners to enhance firms' digital transformation. As a practical contribution, this study’s findings can inform how firms can better manage their key digital leadership resources and GOC to foster digital transformation and improve their financial performance.

Despite the growing interest in the study of authentic leadership, there is little empirical evidence of the consequences of this type of leadership for companies. On the other hand, the mediating variables that may explain these results have not been explored in depth either. Although the academic literature suggests, from a theoretical point of view, that these leaders could favour innovation, little has been studied from an empirical perspective. This study aims to try to cover these gaps.

The main goal of this study is to analyse the mediating effect of organisational learning capability in the relationship between authentic leadership and innovation success. Considering a sample frame of 263 Spanish companies, this study tested the proposed hypotheses through structural equations.

The results provide empirical evidence of the positive effect of authentic leaders to promote organisational learning capability. In addition, this study confirms the positive effect of organisational learning capability on innovation success. Finally, organisational learning capability mediates the relationship between authentic leadership and innovation success.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to empirically study the effects of authentic leadership on organisational learning capability and innovation success.

This paper conceptualised the distinctive capabilities system and tested its relationship between small and medium enterprise (SME) non-financial and financial performance, encompassing leadership and learning orientation as mediators, moderators and moderators’ mediators.

The research design is exploratory, quantitative and cross-sectional. The study employed partial least squares path modelling for testing the direct, mediation and moderation effects, and, for testing moderated mediation, the author adopted PROCESS analysis. Before testing the hypotheses, a confirmatory factor analysis procedure was applied to the measurement model validity test.

Our empirical findings confirm that (1) learning orientation has a positive and significant implication as a moderator between the distinctive capabilities system and SME performance; (2) the distinctive capabilities system has a significant relationship with leadership and learning orientation, and leadership has a significant relationship with learning orientation and (3) the distinctive capabilities system has no direct impact on performance. These findings suggest that, by nature, the distinctive capabilities system has an indirect impact on SME performance, which must be understood as a consequence of living “far-from-equilibrium” and being forced to learn and adapt to come up with better market configurations.

This study intends to contribute to the existing literature in three ways: (1) it proposes the distinctive capabilities system definition; (2) it highlights the system’s features and benefits that make it a core construct for SMEs surviving and thriving and (3) it shows the causal relationship between the leadership capability and learning orientation and the distinctive capabilities system and performance.

Given the important role of change capability for organizational development and competitive advantage, the purpose of this study is to clarify the influences of transformational leadership (TL) on organizational change capability (OCC) via mediating roles of two specific aspects of trust in leadership namely disclosure-based trust and reliance-based trust.

Structural equation modeling is applied to test the degree of influences of TL and employee trust on OCC via empirical data collected from 376 participants in 115 small and medium firms in China.

The results show the positive and significant impacts of TL and aspects of employee trust in leadership on OCC. It indicated that disclosure-based trust in leadership has a greater influence on change capability in comparison with the effect of reliance-based trust in leadership. Especially, the findings have shown the evidence supporting the mediating mechanism of aspects of employee trust in leadership between TL and OCC.

This study provides the practical initiatives that highlight the importance of applying TL style to build and improve the trust of employees in their leadership for fostering OCC.

The paper has significantly advanced and deepened insight of how transformational leaders nurture employee’s specific shades of trust in leadership for fostering OCC. The valuable findings of this study contribute to enriching the theoretical basis of organizational behavior and change management, and can be used to analyze and explain the relationships between TL, employee’s trust in leadership and organizational capability for change.

The study explored the experiences of undergraduate students during a semester-long, leadership development internship course offered at a large research university in the southern United States. The researchers employed qualitative content analysis to examine sixty-five student internship portfolios and identify the leadership capabilities that students applied and/or developed as part of the internship. Students identified self-awareness, growth, project planning, team management, and adversity management as the main leadership capabilities used during their internship experience. Results also indicated that students expanded their concept of leadership and built leadership self-efficacy. The study provides preliminary support for including a leadership internship within the curriculum to support student leadership development.

Organisational resilience and digital maturity both explain how some organisations are better able to cope with unexpected disruptions. However, research exploring the relationship between these two concepts, and their role in addressing exogenous shocks, remains sparse. This study first aimed to compare digitally mature SME retailers’ organisational resilience with that of digitally less mature SME retailers and then investigate further how their digital maturity impacted their response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors adopt an explanatory two-phase mixed-method research design, with online surveys from 79 SME retailers in South Africa, followed by interviews.

Digitally mature SMEs exhibited higher levels of organisational resilience, specifically with respect to situational awareness, management of keystone vulnerabilities and adaptive capacity. The authors also demonstrate that digital leadership is a greater driver of organisational resilience than digital capabilities.

The authors suggest ways for SME retailers to develop their digital maturity, particularly their digital leadership, to increase their organisational resilience.

This paper makes a case for SME retailers to focus on building their digital maturity to better cope with and learn from unexpected events. In particular, digital maturity is positively associated with SME retailers’ innovation and creativity and their devolved and responsive decision-making.

In this study Bandura’s (1986) self-efficacy concept was extended to the leadership studies domain. The literature was reviewed to support the proposition that high leadership self-efficacy was a necessary, though not sufficient, factor contributing to leadership performance. Also, antecedents of leadership self-efficacy were identified based upon self-efficacy theory. Leadership self-efficacy was found to predict leadership behavior and distinguish leaders from non-leaders. Further, prior leadership experiences predicted leadership self-efficacy judgments. Finally, women reported significantly lower leadership self-efficacy than men. Implications for leadership education practices and future research are discussed.

In a non-equivalent control group design 280 student volunteers participated in a an examination of the impact of a leadership training on the development of leadership self-efficacy perceptions among trainees. The training was designed to present multiple exposures to four kinds of efficacy information Bandura (1997) proposes influences the self-efficacy estimate. One-half of the group completed a 15-week undergraduate leadership class while the other half completed various undergraduate psychology classes. Pre- and post-training measures were collected. The results showed the training group perceived having experienced more leadership related efficacy information than the control group. A test for main effects of training indicated no significant change in LSE. Those participants’ low in initial LSE showed a significant increase in post-training LSE. The greater plasticity of individuals low in LSE suggests the practical utility of leadership training on trainees’ LSE is influenced by their pre-training LSE.

The Women in Leadership Development (WLD) Initiative is a year-long, multifaceted co-curricular leadership development opportunity created to support the unique developmental needs of emerging women leaders. WLD was intentionally designed around the context of second-generation gender bias with a firm grounding of research and theory on gender and leadership.

Organized around three leadership pathways – leadership training, leadership coaching, and leadership support networks – WLD brings together the best practices of leadership development in combination with feminist pedagogy and critical perspectives to foster meaningful and impactful development of women leaders.

This paper describes the design of the initiative and how each leadership pathway supports the leadership development journey for emerging women leaders. It provides a model that is impactful as well as foundational, for undergraduate women’s leadership development.

Women leaders, in particular, can benefit from leadership development that takes gender into account (DeFrank-Cole & Tan, 2022a; Ely et al., 2011).

Digital transformation shapes industries and influences the forms of collaboration between companies. This study aims to investigate digital business strategy as a key to facilitating collaboration beyond organizational boundaries.

The study focuses on the connection between digital business strategy and collaboration performance. The authors identify five types of digital business strategy elements based on the literature: development, objectives, resources, management capabilities, and digital leadership. The authors then studied the implications of these elements for collaboration performance using a survey. The study’s empirical data were collected from manufacturing and service companies, and 202 valid responses were received. The implications of the research elements were tested through regression analysis, which included the moderating effects of digitally enabled performance measurement.

The theoretical research framework identifies digital business strategy as a key determinant of collaboration performance, thus advancing the understanding of how companies can utilize digital business strategies and achieve enhanced collaboration performance. The results also show that the effect of digital business strategy on collaboration performance may be moderated by digitally enabled performance management.

The results suggest that management capabilities associated with digital strategy are a crucial element in positively influencing collaboration performance. Further, digital strategy-related resources can be better managed with digitally enabled performance measurement system, which is reflected in improved collaborative performance. Thus, companies should invest in management capabilities and connect their digital business strategies and performance measurement systems to develop collaboration in digital transformation.

The study is among the first to translate an empirical understanding of the digital transformation of small and medium-sized companies into a conceptual framework of a digital business strategy.