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This paper aims to explore how HR leaders can help their managers ditch the traditional command-and-control leadership style and instead adopt an enquiry-led management approach – Operational Coaching^®. This approach helps managers to develop coaching-related behaviours in their day-to-day interactions with teams, to cultivate a culture that is more collaborative, inclusive and innovative with measurable improvements in engagement, productivity and performance.

Responding to the UK’s woeful productivity and employee engagement levels, the Government sponsored a large-scale academic research study (designed, conducted and independently evaluated by the London School of Economics, LSE) to assess the impact of managers learning to use an Operational Coaching^® style of management. Managers in 62 organisations across 14 sectors worked through a learning programme designed to build managers’ confidence in using intentional enquiry as a part of their everyday management style.

LSE proved, statistically significantly, that managers increased the amount of time they spent coaching their team members by an average of 70% and generated a 74 times return on investment. LSE also noted that intervention group organisations indicated a positive sixfold improvement in employee retention than in control group organisations.

When managers learn to use an Operational Coaching^® style of management in their day-to-day work with others, it allows them to learn how to challenge, support and grow the capabilities of their team members in ways that measurably benefit the individual and the organisation. Colleagues are more engaged, recognised and rewarded. As their competency and confidence grows, managers are released from aspects of their to-do lists and are able to invest even more attention towards coaching their team members.

This paper aims to explore the behaviour of city managers in the ongoing context of city leadership in Italy where there are high levels of political, economic and social turbulence.

A survey was administered to 140 Italian city managers, with a response rate of 56%. The main research questions were the following: Who are the Italian city managers? How do they spend their time? Are their actions influenced by political, administrative, management and/or governance-related pressures?

The results depicted Italian city managers as caged leaders. They feel like they are capable of soaring to great heights outside the boundaries of their organisations, but they are constrained by their day-to-day organisational activities.

This paper offers new empirical insights into the different leadership activities carried out by Italian city managers discussing the differences between the time devoted to some activities and the perception of their leadership style.

Large organizations typically mandate that managers attend budget meetings and exchange budget reports with their immediate supervisor and budget staff. We explored whether such organization-mandated budgetary involvement is related to managers’ budgetary communication with their supervisor in terms of budgetary participation, budgetary explanation, and budgetary feedback. Questionnaire data from 148 managers employed by 94 different companies were analyzed with regression. Mandatory budget meetings with supervisor had a positive relationship with all three forms of budgetary communication with supervisor, and mandatory budget reports from supervisor had a positive relationship with budgetary explanation from supervisor. Mandatory budget meetings with budget staff had a positive relationship with both budgetary participation with supervisor and budgetary feedback from supervisor. Mandatory budget reports from budget staff had a negative relationship with all three forms of budgetary communication with supervisor. The results failed to support proposed relationships between mandatory budget reports to supervisor and budgetary participation with supervisor, and between mandatory budget reports from supervisor and budgetary explanation from supervisor. Implications of the results for future research and budgetary system design are discussed.

This study examines the antecedents and dynamics of authoritarian leadership and extends the effects of managers' sleep quality to employee behavior.

On the basis of self-regulation theory, 513 unit day samples were analyzed using cross-level path analysis and a Monte Carlo simulation test.

Managers' sleep quality is positively related to authoritarian leadership and positive emotions play a mediating role. Authoritarian leadership is positively related to employees' counterproductive behavior. Managers' sleep quality affects employees' counterproductive behavior through managers' positive emotions and authoritarian leadership.

Individuals should learn to reduce stress and maintain a positive mood. Organizations should reduce employees' overtime work and work stress and find other ways to improve employees' sleep quality.

First, we considered authoritarian leadership to be dynamic and studied it on a daily basis. Second, we studied the antecedents of authoritarian leadership from the perspective of leaders' states (sleep quality and emotions). Third, we discussed the effect of managers' sleep quality on employee behavior.

McKinsey partners, Bill Schaninger, Bryan Hancock and Emily Field are championing the premise that the need for a fundamental rethink of the role of middle management in today’s organizations is now more urgent than ever.

So what should the new blueprint be for middle management as the crucial link between the executive level and the front line S&L interviewer Prof Brian Leavy asks the authors of Power to the Middle: Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work.

Companies with top quartile management practices can have more than three times the return to shareholders than other companies.

Because of middle managers’ proximity to the front line, they have a helpful, realistic perspective on how new tools like generative AI should be adopted throughout the organization.

The authors found that middle managers deliver the most value to the organization when they can serve as coaches, connectors, talent managers and strategists. For senior leaders to truly put middle managers at the forefront, they must give managers space to grow and the license to manage in a way that works for them and their team.

This study aims to analyze the effect of cognitive load and social value orientation on managers’ preferences when they face with two types of restructuring choices in financially distressed firms: the first belonging to the family of organizational restructuring (massive layoffs) and the second to the family of financial restructuring (debt increases).

The authors investigate experimentally the impact of managers’ cognitive load and social value orientation on the decision to restructure leveraged buyout (LBO) firms in financial distress by using either massive layoffs or debt increases.

By investigating the impact of managers’ cognitive load and social value orientation on the restructuring decision of an LBO firm in financial distress, the research reveals that, on average, cognitively loaded managers prefer massive layoffs over increased debt levels. The massive layoffs seemingly provide a relatively easier way to avoid conflict with influential, residual claimants. In contrast, social value–oriented managers actively avoid massive layoffs and prefer to increase debt.

These results imply that the performance mechanisms emphasized to improve agency relations, for example, in LBOs, have their own limitations during periods of financial distress. This study shows that one of these limits is related to cognitive distortions and personality traits.

In this research, the originality lies in understanding how managers’ internal factors affect their restructuring decision-making, in the case of LBO firms in financial distress.

The retail sector has the largest energy consumption among commercial buildings in the U.S. Although previous studies explored benefits, barriers and solutions for implementing sustainability in various building sectors, research focused on retail facilities has been very scarce. This study aims to explore U.S. facilities managers’ perceptions of barriers that prevented the implementation of energy-efficiency practices in the retail sector. Their perceptions were compared by facility size and facilities management company’s business revenue.

An online survey was distributed to the members of the International Facility Management Association and the author's LinkedIn network. The survey responses were analyzed using descriptive statistical analysis and ANOVA.

Managers from large facilities, as opposed to those from small ones, significantly more agreed that the unavailability of building automation systems, a lack of professional writing skills and a lack of awareness of life cycle cost (LCC) were the barriers. Business revenue did not cause significantly different perceptions of the barriers except for a lack of awareness of LCC and a lack of support from upper management.

This study fills the research gap on energy efficiency in the retail sector by revealing U.S. facilities managers’ perceptions of the barriers to the implementation of energy-efficiency practices in retail stores. This novel study compares perceptions of the facilities managers by facility size and business revenue; this comparison has not been performed before. The study also identified several new barriers to the implementation of energy efficiency in the retail sector.

As part of a national plan to govern professional and organizational development in Norwegian specialist healthcare, the country’s hospital clinics are tasked with constructing development plans. Using the development plan as a case, the paper analyzes how managers navigate and legitimize the planning process among central actors and deals with the contingency of decisions in such strategy work.

This study applies a qualitative research design using a case study method. The material consists of public documents, observations and single interviews, covering the process of constructing a development plan at the clinical level.

The findings suggest that the development plan was shaped through a multilevel translation process consisting of different contending rationalities. At the clinical level, the management had difficulties in legitimizing the process. The underlying tension between top-down and bottom-up steering challenged involvement and made it difficult to manage the contingency of decisions.

The findings are relevant to public sector managers working on strategy documents and policymakers identifying challenges that might hinder the fulfillment of political intentions.

This paper draws on a case from Norway; however, the findings are of general interest. The study contributes to the academic discussion on how to consider both the health authorities’ perspective and the organizational perspective to understand the manager’s role in handling the contingency of decisions and managing paradoxes in the decision-making process.

With the growing concern of various sectors of society regarding environmental issues and the promotion of sustainable development, green technology innovation is generally considered to be conducive to the long-term development of enterprises. However, because of the existence of agency problems, managers may have shortsighted behaviors. Then how will managers' shortsighted behaviors affect enterprises' green technology innovation?

This paper uses machine learning-based text analysis methods to construct a manager myopia index based on the data from A-share listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2015 to 2020. We examine the impact of manager myopia on green technology innovation in companies.

Our study finds that manager myopia significantly inhibits green technology innovation in companies. However, when multiple large shareholders coexist and the proportion of institutional investors' holdings is high, it can alleviate the inhibitory effect of manager myopia on green innovation. Heterogeneity tests show that the impact of manager myopia on green technology innovation is relatively significant in non-state-owned and manufacturing companies, as well as in the electricity industry. Robustness tests demonstrate that our conclusions remain valid after using propensity score matching to eliminate endogeneity problems.

From the perspective of corporate governance, this paper incorporates managers' shortsightedness, multiple large shareholders and institutional investors' shareholding ratios into the same logical framework, analyzes their internal mechanisms, helps improve corporate governance, enhances green innovation capabilities and has strong implications for the implementation of national innovation-driven development strategies and the achievement of “carbon peak” and “carbon neutrality” targets.

The facility management (FM) sector, which is developing rapidly, is making slower progress in Turkey compared to Europe and the USA. This paper aims to research the underlying issues leading to FM practices and offer insights into the implications of FM-related policies, especially for large urban transformation projects.

The study used a mixed-methods research design and collected qualitative data through semi-structured interviews with building/site managers and quantitative data through structured surveys with residents. Forty-nine building/site managers and 660 residents participated in the interview and survey from Turkey’s North Ankara and Dikmen Valley urban transformation projects.

The FM by residents, performed by the managers selected among homeowners, was preferred to the professional FM in Turkey. Education level, age, homeownership and duration of living in the region were associated with selecting FM practices. Cost also had an important place among the selection criteria, and the standard view from the residents was that professional FM would cause a cost increase. However, interviews with building/site managers in North Ankara and Dikmen Valley Urban Transformation areas revealed that a significant part of the problem resulted from insufficient knowledge and experience in FM.

Within the scope of the research, two urban transformation projects in Ankara Province were selected, and the survey was limited to the North Ankara Entrance Urban Transformation Project and Dikmen Valley Urban Transformation Project areas. Although there is a need to improve the understanding of FM in all facilities, built environments and collective buildings, collective buildings in urban transformation areas due to several constraints, those other identified areas are postponed for future study. In addition, collective buildings located in transformation areas differ from others in discussing the social dimension and the impact of management.

Within the scope of the research, two urban transformation projects in Ankara Province were selected, and the survey was limited to the North Ankara Entrance Urban Transformation Project and Dikmen Valley Urban Transformation Project areas. Although there is a need to improve the understanding of FM in all facilities, due to several constraints built environments and collective buildings in urban transformation areas, are postponed for future study. In addition, collective buildings located in transformation areas differ from others in discussing the social dimension and the impact of management.

This study evaluates two different FM approaches: FM by residents and professional FM, implemented in Turkey and identifies the criteria for choosing the FM practice. In addition, both building/site managers and residents evaluate different perspectives on FM. This study is unique because it compares different FM practices in Turkey and the criteria for residents to prefer different FM practices.