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During the lengthy process of PhD studies, supervisory changes commonly occur for several different reasons, but their most frequent trigger is a poor supervisory relationship. Even though a change in supervisors is a formal bureaucratic process and not least the students’ rights, in practice it can be experienced as challenging. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore how doctoral students experience a change in supervisory arrangements.

This study highlights the voices of 19 doctoral students who experienced at least one supervisory change during their doctoral studies.

The findings were structured chronologically, revealing the students’ experiences prior, during and after the changes. In total, 12 main themes were identified. Most of the interviewed students experienced the long decision-making processes as stressful, difficult and exhausting, sometimes causing a lack of mental well-being. However, once the change was complete, they felt renewed, energized and capable of continuing with their studies. It was common to go through more than one change in supervisory arrangements. Further, the students described both the advantages of making a change yet also the long-lasting consequences of this change that could affect them long after they had completed their PhD programs.

The study fulfills an identified need to investigate the understudied perspective of doctoral students in the context of change in supervisory arrangements. A change in the academic culture is needed to make any changes in supervisory arrangements more acceptable thus making PhD studies more sustainable.

This study aims to analyse value co-creation in innovative firms within innovation environments (IEs) in the south region of Brazil from a processual and dynamic perspective, including its antecedents, initiatives and its outcomes in the multiple facets of the firms’ performance.

A qualitative and quantitative multi-method study was carried out with the management and support teams of these IEs, as well as with a sample of 91 companies installed.

The results helped clarify the value co-creation process in IEs of an emerging economy, suggesting under which conditions and how value co-creation practices are performed and its significant role in specific performance dimensions of companies.

The study contributes to companies and IEs within emerging economies to prioritize practices related to the co-creation of value to enhance their results.

In emerging countries, IEs struggle to apply their scarce resources to the development of hosted firms. Having value co-creation as a concept that presupposes the involvement of the beneficiary and other actors to improve the companies’ value proposition, its practice may constitute a valuable ally in this effort. However, the dynamics of value co-creation in such environments, its antecedents and specific outcomes are still unclear.

According to previous research, exit interviews do not fulfil the purpose of generating useful feedback from parting employees. According to signaling theory, they might, however, serve a different purpose: to leave one last good impression on parting employees, and the aim of this study was to test this.

A survey was administered to a sample of 164 German employees.

Consistent with arguments based on signaling theory, those who experienced an exit interview reported more residual affective commitment toward their former employer and less willingness to complain about it, and these effects were mediated by interpersonal fairness perceptions. In addition, the probability of having an exit interview was found to depend on the resignation style of employees.

This new perspective on exit interviews can renew the interest in studying how organizations manage the offboarding process.

This study advises employers to conduct “exit conversations” (as two-way interactions rather than one-way interviews) and to carefully plan the exit phase.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that proposes a signaling theory perspective of exit interviews and that links exit interviews with the literature on resignation styles.

To develop a model that assess the feasibility to telework new product activities.

Literature review of innovation and telework to find criteria relevant to use telework in new product development activities.

The first stage of the model assess the feasibility of telework in new product development activities according to four criteria: importance of teamwork, need of using equipment and laboratories, intensity of data processing, and frequency of meetings. The second stage assess the level of knowledge in each new product development activity. The model analyses the knowledge tasks according to four basic knowledge processes: generation, codification, storage and transfer. The third and final stage assess the distribution of productive work time of new product development employees to obtain groups of new product development activities suitable to be teleworked.

Firstly, to enlarge the taxonomy of variables that define each one of the four basic knowledge management processes included in the model. Secondly, to test empirically with case studies and surveys the working time requirements of knowledge tasks. The number of knowledge tasks included in the analysis could also be enlarged in future studies.

The framework provides an aid to research and managerial application of telework in new product development activities. The methodology developed in the paper may be useful for preliminary analysis of teleworking implementation projects. It may also help to the adoption of information and communication technologies for the company's new development processes.

The adoption of teleworking among knowledge processes arises the question whether teleworking may be used in the company's innovation activities. The methodology proposed in the paper wants to contribute to this topic by developing a framework adapted to the different activities in the new product development process.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of gender diversity (in executive boards and top management) on firm performance. To reconcile the inconsistent and non‐conclusive findings from previous studies, competing curvilinear relationships are theorized between gender diversity on boards and firm performance based on different theoretical backgrounds.

The paper comprises a literature review and development of theoretical propositions.

Curvilinear relationships were developed that may integrate different theoretical perspectives.

This paper provides theoretical support to reconcile the inconsistent and non‐conclusive findings from previous theoretical perspectives and empirical studies by proposing that competing recommendations from theoretical perspectives could be tested through curvilinear relationships.

The propositions provide a strong argument for having more women in top management positions who will be promoted later through the “glass ceiling” to more gender‐balanced boards.

The paper reconciles inconsistent and non‐conclusive findings from studies about gender diversity on boards and firm performance.

In this paper, the authors assume that the matter of a good quality of air will grow in importance in the future, and that it could be a noticeable part of a quality system to be used for communication purposes. The authors propose some synthetic indicators for air quality and discuss them in-depth to provide robust indexes suitable for ranking a set of alpine destinations.

The authors use locally based data on three pollutants with reference to 25 alpine touristic destinations. Starting from hourly data for 62 days of the 2014 summer season for each pollutant, the authors end with a single synthetic air quality index for any locality. The aggregation methodologies are at the core of the paper; in particular, the authors propose a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) function – a well-known tool in Economics – to aggregate the pollutants the authors deal with. Because the degree of substitution among them is unknown, the authors simulate two extreme cases and an intermediate one to rank the localities on the bases of the synthetic air quality index.

All the Alpine destinations the authors considered have – or had in summer 2014 – an excellent open-air quality, and this was a permanent trait of that period. Ranks look robust (stable), as they do not depend significantly on the available options of the techniques the authors used.

The originality of the paper is inherent first in the idea that high quality air can be an issue of interest for touristic goals, especially in the case of mountain destinations, which have all proven to offer an excellent open-air quality. Second, from a methodological perspective, the paper frames dispersed and sectorial approaches into a single flexible one which has the property of being theoretically grounded into the economics mainstream and, at meantime, suitable to deal with some lack of information and research.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of servant leadership on job satisfaction within private healthcare practices.

Criterion sampling has been used to draw a sample of private healthcare practitioners and their employees. The data collected from 241 useable questionnaires have been statistically analysed. Factor analysis and Cronbach’s alpha coefficients have been used to assess the validity and reliability of the measuring instrument, and multiple regression analyses have been performed to test the influence of the dimensions of servant leadership on job satisfaction.

The findings show that private healthcare practitioners display the dimensions of servant leadership investigated in this study. Furthermore, a significant positive relationship between developing others and job satisfaction for both sample groups, but only between caring for others and job satisfaction for the employee sample group, was reported. Acts of humility and servanthood by practitioners were not found to influence job satisfaction.

Educators can use the findings of this study to identify gaps in the leadership training of healthcare practitioners, and healthcare regulators can use the recommendations provided to implement appropriate interventions to ensure that healthcare practitioners fulfil their mandate of practising in an appropriate manner.

This study contributes to the limited understanding of servant leadership among private healthcare practitioners and it provides recommendations on how private healthcare practitioners can improve their servant leadership behaviour.

The authors of this study aim to test a possible turn toward relational, as opposed to agentic, management development program (MDP) content.

The authors performed a content analysis of the literature and qualitative interviews of management coaches/consultants from South Africa and the USA.

In both studies, the authors found more relational than agentic content comprising MDP content. Interviews revealed a predominance of relational strategies and that agentic and relational skills are often interwoven in development efforts.

This work may guide management coaches and consultants to offer clients management development (MD) with a greater focus on relational skills.

Future studies should build on our findings to explore whether leadership may now require more relational as opposed to agentic skills.