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From a skills theory perspective, we explore the disparity between women's perceived leadership effectiveness and their underrepresentation in a public higher education institution (HEI) in Ghana. We identify the factors limiting women leaders' support and offer locally driven solutions.

A triangulated approach was used to analyse qualitative and quantitative data collected at a public HEI leadership workshop assessing perceptions of women leaders' education, communication, personality, emotional intelligence, skills and support dimensions. T-tests were used to test the perception variables, while thematic analysis elucidated factors contributing to women's underrepresentation in top positions.

The study found positive perceptions of female leadership, which differed among the genders, and the preference for female leaders stems from their perceived skills, abilities and education. However, religious and cultural beliefs perpetuate stereotypes that hinder women's advancement in leadership, which contradicts the skills-based approach to leadership.

Creating local awareness and support is necessary to reduce the fear of criticism and negative labelling from cultural beliefs hindering women from pursuing top leadership positions.

This study fills the literature gap on perceptions of women's leadership from a skills theory perspective. It contributes locally driven solutions to the challenges of underrepresentation of female leadership and women empowerment, providing local insights into female leadership effectiveness discourse.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the character traits and challenges of women leaders in Myanmar within the context of responsible leadership (RL) and aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the dynamics of RL in this specific cultural and social setting. Furthermore, the paper seeks to highlight the unique challenges faced by women leaders, both within organizations and in society at large. Ultimately, the paper intends to advocate for increased awareness and actions that promote gender equality in leadership positions, fostering a more inclusive and supportive environment for women leaders in Myanmar.

This study uses an exploratory qualitative research design to comprehensively investigate the character traits and challenges experienced by women leaders in Myanmar concerning RL. It involves semi-structured interviews with five women leaders selected through convenient sampling. These participants hold leadership positions in various fields, including societal welfare, nongovernmental organizations and social businesses. The interview protocol is designed to elicit rich insights into the participants’ leadership experiences, responsibilities, challenges and perspectives on RL. Data collection involves recording and transcribing interviews, ensuring accuracy and reliability. To maintain participant confidentiality, identities remain anonymous. Ethical considerations are adhered to, emphasizing voluntary participation and the right to withdraw at any point without consequences. Thematic analysis is used to identify recurring patterns and themes in the interview data. Themes related to character traits, challenges faced within organizations and society and potential solutions are derived through an iterative process of data coding, categorization and interpretation.

The study’s findings indicate that women-responsible leaders possess character traits similar to their male counterparts. However, they face unique challenges at the organizational and societal levels in Myanmar. To address these issues and foster the growth of women leaders, spreading awareness is crucial. Awareness programs can educate individuals, organizations and society about the significance of RL and gender equality in leadership roles. Such initiatives create an inclusive environment that supports the development of responsible women leaders in Myanmar.

The original value of this study lies in its contribution to the existing body of knowledge on women’s leadership and the specific context of Myanmar. By examining the character traits of women-responsible leaders and the challenges they face within organizational and societal contexts, this study sheds light on the unique experiences and barriers encountered by women in leadership positions. Furthermore, this study’s original value lies in its emphasis on the need for awareness and action to foster more women leaders in Myanmar. By bringing attention to the organizational and societal challenges faced by women and advocating for change, this study encourages stakeholders, including policymakers, organizations and communities, to address these issues and create a more supportive and inclusive environment for women leaders.

This study aims to investigate the impact of leader’s religiosity on teachers’ organizational commitment and leaders’ virtuous behaviors. Second, it is intended to examine the significant influence of Al-Ghazali’s fundamental virtues – wisdom, justice, temperance and courage – on the level of commitment displayed by teachers in K12 schools.

To analyze this connection, a total of 335 surveys were collected from K12 private schools situated in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The data were then evaluated using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling.

It has been found that leaders’ virtuous behaviors have significant positive effects on teachers’ commitment. Furthermore, while religiosity did not directly influence teachers’ commitment, the virtuous behaviors of leaders played a significant mediating role in this relationship.

This research fills a gap in the literature by exploring the impact of Islamic ethical principles on employee commitment, specifically within the context of K12 education in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. It emphasizes the critical role of leaders’ virtuous behaviors in improving employee commitment.

This article aims to explore the potential of feminist phenomenology as a conceptual framework for advancing women’s entrepreneurship research and the suitability of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to the proposed framework.

The article critically examines the current state of women’s entrepreneurship research regarding the institutional context and highlights the benefits of a shift towards feminist phenomenology.

The prevailing disembodied and gender-neutral portrayal of entrepreneurship has resulted in an equivocal understanding of women’s entrepreneurship and perpetuated a male-biased discourse within research and practice. By adopting a feminist phenomenological approach, this article argues for the importance of considering the ontological dimensions of lived experiences of situatedness, intersubjectivity, intentionality and temporality in analysing women entrepreneurs’ agency within gendered institutional contexts. It also demonstrates that feminist phenomenology could broaden the current scope of IPA regarding the embodied dimension of language.

The adoption of feminist phenomenology and IPA presents new avenues for research that go beyond the traditional cognitive approach in entrepreneurship, contributing to theory and practice. The proposed conceptual framework also has some limitations that provide opportunities for future research, such as a phenomenological intersectional approach and arts-based methods.

The article contributes to a new research agenda in women’s entrepreneurship research by offering a feminist phenomenological framework that focuses on the embodied dimension of entrepreneurship through the integration of IPA and conceptual metaphor theory (CMT).

The purpose of this paper is to describe how first-line managers (FLMs) in home care (HC) reason about the opportunities and obstacles to lead the work according to the individual’s needs and goals.

In this participatory appreciative action reflection project, eight managers within one Swedish municipality were interviewed. The data were analysed using a thematic analysis.

The results showed a polarization between two different systems that FLMs struggle to balance when attempting to lead HC that adapts to the needs and goals of individuals. One system was represented by the possibilities of a humane system, with human capital in the form of the individual, older persons and the co-workers in HC. The second system was represented by obstacles in the form of the economic needs of the organization in which the individual receiving HC often felt forgotten. In this system, the organization’s needs and goals governed, with FLMs needing to adapt to the cost-effectiveness principle and keep a balanced budget. The managers had to balance an ethical conflict of values between the human value and needs-solidarity principles, with that of the cost-effectiveness principle.

The FLMs lack the opportunity to lead HC according to the needs and goals of the individuals receiving HC. There is a need for consensus and a value-based leadership model based on ethical principles such as the principles of human value and needs-solidarity to lead the HC according to the individual’s needs and goals.

Based on self-regulation theory, this study aims to investigate the relationship between authentic leadership and help-seeking behavior, as well as the mediating effect of proactive goal regulation and the moderating effect of leader identification.

We conducted a questionnaire survey on 489 employees from 94 teams and tested our research model through multi-level pathway analysis.

The analysis results suggest that (1) authentic leadership positively relates to employees’ proactive goal regulation; (2) employees’ proactive goal regulation positively relates to their autonomous (dependent) help-seeking behavior; (3) employees’ proactive goal regulation plays an intermediary role between authentic leadership and help-seeking behavior; (4) leader identification positively moderates the influence of authentic leadership on employees’ proactive goal regulation and (5) leader identification positively moderates the indirect relationship between authentic leadership and employees’ help-seeking behavior through employees’ proactive goal regulation.

Based on the findings of this study, organizations should foster authentic leadership in workplace to promote employees’ help-seeking behavior. In addition, managers should also attach importance to proactive goal regulation in promoting help-seeking behavior and leader identification in enhancing the positive influence of authentic leadership on employees’ proactive goal regulation.

This study finds that proactive goal regulation plays a key mediating role between authentic leadership and help-seeking behavior, and reveals the role of leader identification in reinforcing the positive impact of authentic leadership on help-seeking behavior.

This paper draws on African anti-colonial thought and Black consciousness to propose critical conscious leadership (CCL) as a decolonising leadership approach appropriate for pursuing emancipation, social justice and innovation in a new African university.

I utilised the method of critical discourse analysis to study Ihron Rensburg’s language as he reflected on his leadership at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). The study engaged with Rensburg’s writings and texts on his account of leading the merger and transformation of UJ. The primary text draws from his book “Serving Higher Purposes” (2020).

Through the construction of CCL, the paper proposes alternative tenets for leading transformation towards a new African university. CCL grounds a decolonised and pluriversal new African university’s character premised on a consciously revitalised alternative thinking that will carry the communitarian spirit of Africa in knowledge production, dissemination and consumption in humanising all and serving the greater good. And it operates within the dialectical tensions of the social and economic purpose of higher education (HE), African and global relevance, African and Western paradigms, excellent performance and attainment of social justice.

The proposed CCL offers an alternative leadership approach that responds to the call to “Dethrone the Empire” by centring Blackness in HE leadership, which is crucial for authentic transformation and decolonisation.

Sport organizations hold substantial ideological power to showcase and reinforce dominant cultural ideas about gender. The organization and portrayal of sporting events and spaces continue to promote and reinforce a hierarchical gender binary where heroic forms of masculinity are both desired and privileged. Such publicly visible gender hierarchies contribute to the doing of gender beyond sport itself, extending to influence gender power relations within sport and non-sport organizations. Yet, there has been a relative absence of scholarship on sport organizations within the organizational sociology field. In this paper, we review findings of studies that look at how formal and informal organizational dimensions influence the doing and undoing of gender in sport organizations. Subsequently, we call for scholars to pay more attention to sport itself as a source of gendered organizational practices within both sport and non-sport organizations. We end with suggestions for research that empirically explores this linkage by focusing on innovative theoretical perspectives that could provide new insights on gender inclusion in organizations.

Employee participation in budgeting enhances motivation and commitment, leading to better performance by enhancing ownership. Within Iraqi higher education institutions (HEIs), the current investigation delves into the influence of participative budgeting on managerial performance. Drawing upon goal-setting theory, this study discerns budget goal commitment as a mediating variable while also examining directive leadership as a moderator in the dynamics of this association.

The current study used partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) using SmartPLS 4.0. 373 questionnaires were collected from managers in Iraqi public universities, with 58.37% responding.

The findings show that budget goal commitment partially mediates the connection between budget participation and managerial performance. Furthermore, the results showed that directive leadership increases the positive associations between budget goal commitment and managerial performance.

This study expands the existing literature by shedding light on the mediating role of budget goal commitment and the moderating influence of directive leadership. It also enriches the discourse in management accounting by providing a more elucidation of how employee involvement in the budgeting process enhances managerial performance.

The purpose of this study is to scrutinize the connection between creativity and innovation in the context of public healthcare. This is achieved by applying the theoretical concept of employee-driven innovation (EDI) to explore employees’ perceptions of their creative engagement in innovation processes, as well as to capture the managerial implications of setting up such processes in the sector.

A critical discourse analysis (CDA) is applied as a methodological lens to capture the interaction between the macro-level production and meso-level distribution of innovation discourse (top-down), and the micro-level perception of, and response to, the same (bottom-up). This study is based on a qualitative approach and is set in the public healthcare system of the Autonomous Province of Trento, Northeast Italy. In total, 26 semi-structured interviews were conducted with 22 healthcare professionals. For triangulation purposes, observation and document analysis were also performed.

The findings of this study reveal that tensions are present between the macro-level discourses and the meso-level strategies around innovation, and the micro-level perceptions of employees’ creative engagement in innovation processes. Healthcare professionals’ creative efforts are not easily recognized and supported by top management, which in turn does not receive a framework of reference in policies acknowledging the importance of human skills and creativity in innovation processes.

That this is a single case study implies a limitation on the generalizability of its results, but the results may nevertheless be transferable to similar empirical contexts. Therefore, a multiple case study design would be preferable in future studies in order to study EDI strategies and policies across various types of organizations in the public sector. Moreover, apart from CDA, other theoretical and methodological lenses can be applied to investigate the interaction between top-down organizing and bottom-up responses to innovation.

This study contributes to the EDI literature by providing a more integrative understanding of EDI in the public sector, demonstrating the importance of scrutinizing the interactions between employees and top-level management.