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Unions face serious challenges, which raise questions about organizational priorities. An issue important to the recent breakup of the AFLCIO is the priority given political action vis-à-vis organizing. We examine competing theoretical perspectives on the potential relationship between union political action and organizing effectiveness. We present evidence on the scope of union political spending and conduct a preliminary analysis of its correlation with organizing. Our results indicate a negative relationship, but we urge a cautious interpretation. Theory raises substantial doubts about political activity as a motivation for joining a union. We urge more research.

Civil wrongdoings with consequent financial and other loss or damage to employers, employees and third parties may result in the course of various trade union activities. These day to day trade union activities take a variety of forms. The most common ones are inducement of breach of contract, conspiracy, trespass, nuisance, and intimidation. Each of these activities constitutes a tort which, unless the statutory immunities apply, would normally give rise at common law to an action for damages or, as is more frequent, enable the aggrieved party to obtain an injunction.

Scholarly studies on mentoring have mostly focused on traditional mentor–mentee relationships, with little or no emphasis on how institutionalized mentoring activities that include different pedagogical approaches could be used to enhance the professional development of academics. To address this knowledge gap, this article examines how an institutionalized multilevel mentoring program could be used to enhance the professional development of early-career academics and academics in designated groups in a South African university.

The data for the study were gathered from 18 mentees and 2 program administrators using semi-structured interviews. The data gathered were assessed by way of thematic analysis that involved a detailed process of identifying, analyzing, organizing, describing and reporting the themes that were developed from the data set.

The findings revealed that when mentees participate in different mentoring and professional development activities that are structured based on different pedagogies, they can engage in higher-order thinking processes and develop multidisciplinary experiences within an expanded professional learning community. Enabled by the situated learning setting, mentees can negotiate the meaning of their professional practice within a professional community and comprehend the nuanced pedagogical approaches including scaffolding learning used by mentors to shape their career trajectory and guide them to secure promotions.

The current study contributes to the scholarly discourse on situated learning by showing that mentoring could be planned and implemented as a pedagogical endeavor with diverse learning activities and structured as a form of professional development program within a professional community.

Although workers' organisations operated in the early nineteenth century and “…. workers in every trade were becoming very much alive to the necessity for defending their standards”, nevertheless “The first twenty years of the nineteenth century, witnessed a legal persecution of trade unionists as rebels and revolutionists”. The beginnings of modern trade unionism may be traced to about 1850 where a number of craft unions, as for example, miners' and engineering unions, were successful in establishing themselves, and slowly building up their financial resources and thus acquiring sufficient strength to enable them to bargain on almost equal terms with the employer.

This paper aims to investigate the extent to which newly agile organizations followed 2001’s Agile Manifesto, especially in terms of the 12 principles of the agile approach, as included in the Manifesto.

The authors conducted in-depth case studies of groups in three large business organizations that had recently adopted agile. Two researchers spent one day at each site, attending daily standups and conducting interviews with managers, developers and customers.

Across the three organizations, developers were faithful to two agile principles: the primacy of delivering valuable software continually and regular reflections on the process with an eye toward improvement. The developers were uniformly unfaithful to the principle that requires face-to-face communication. Each organization varied in their adherence to the remaining nine principles. Obstacles to faithful adoption included the experience of the organization with agile, the extent to which the industry was regulated and the extent to which developers and customers were physically dispersed.

While past research on agile development is extensive, this paper examines perspectives on the method and its adoption through the lens of the original Agile Manifesto and its 12 principles. The principles were grouped into three broader categories – software delivery, people and process – to provide additional insights and to sharpen the analysis.

This paper aims to propose and test a ten-factor framework of four contexts from technology-organization-environment (T-O-E) theory and unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) to provide insight(s) that complements and extends extant inquiries on technology adoption.

Survey data were collected from small service enterprises with strong operations in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and the mode of sampling was purposive and snow ball, whereas analysis involved structural equation modeling.

The results show that factors in the technological, organizational and environmental contexts have direct statistically significant relationship with adoption; thus, adoption is more driven by T-O-E factors than by individual factors. For individual context, social factor equally was statistically supported, whereas hedonistic drive was not.

The study is limited by its scope of data collection and phases; therefore, extended data are needed to apply the findings to other sectors/industries/countries and to factor in the implementation and post-adoption phases and business to business (B2B) adoption to forge a more holistic framework.

Implicit is that the findings encourage vendors and policy makers to recognize the strength of interpersonal and group relationships in addition to T-O-E contexts in developing investment decisions.

The paper contributes to the growing research on innovation adoption by using factors within the T-O-E and UTAUT frameworks to explain SMEs’ adoption of technologies.

The objective of the study is to analyze the impact of the adoption of the Agile Mindset on the productivity of Agile software development teams in IT enterprises during COVID-19.

A web-based survey is performed with voluntary participants working with the Agile software development professionals with a specific focus on IT enterprises around Pune, India. For this the initial exploratory literature review was performed, to explore the team's behaviors and their response to the crises like the Covid-19 pandemic. Data is collected from the targeted population using the random sampling method. A questionnaire is designed with the help of a five-point Likert scale. All the respondents were analyzed based on their behaviors shown and how adopting to Agile mindset has impacted their productivity during the pandemic. Collected data would be then analyzed using the Smart PLS-SEM methodology.

Findings of the study show that Agile software development teams adopting to Agile mindset are better at responding to crisis and quick to adapt to change as teams adopting the Agile mindset is likely to sustain or even improve their productivity during the crises like Covid-19 pandemic. Adapting to an Agile mindset is important for Agile software development teams during a crisis as a response to changes in the working as well as environmental conditions. This study also shows that by adopting an Agile mindset, development teams are better at responding to the crisis eventually improving productivity.

Research limitations for this study-scope of the study could be extended to the larger population across geographies to have improved insights Productivity Factors like- Efforts Efficiency, Backlog-management Index (BMI), and Weighted Average Productivity (VWP) for team members can be included. More behavioral factors for Agile Mindset can be considered.

Agile software development teams are characterized by collaboration and responsibility. Recent enforcement of pandemic precautionary measures has enforced Agile software development teams to work remotely and maintain social distancing while in the office. It was challenging for most of the working people to adjust to the new working conditions (Yang et al., 2021) However, in IT organizations, adopting the Agile mindset has ensured continuous software deliveries, took ownership, and quickly adapted to the volatile situations, ultimately resulting into the growth in the productivity unlike to that of other sectors of the economy.

In this study, we have analyzed the hypotheses with statistical significance in association with constructs that are in sync with the available literature. Adopting the Agile mindset values has positively impacted the team's behavior resulting in productivity improvement even in the distributed working locations in pandemic situations.

The study highlights that adopting to Agile mindset has positively impacted an Agile software development team's productivity during the Covid-19 pandemic. As environmental conditions during Covid-19 were uncertain and ambiguous and teams were working in distributed and disconnected ways, many researchers have believed that it would have affected the overall productivity. This was turned true for most of the sectors of the economy, however, Agile software development teams have shown positive trends in their productivity, as they have adopted the Agile mindset values and principles, during crises.

This paper explores how leaders identify their roles and selves when they lead change in a dynamic organizational context.

Using a qualitative approach, ten ICT leaders participated in semi-structured interviews depicting their experiences of change. A thematic method of interpretative analysis was used to develop findings, supported by Theory U as a conceptual tool for leadership self-awareness.

Leaders struggle with organizational constraints and boundaries, specifically the complexities that form and limit their leadership underpinned by unrealistic expectations due to the construction of romanticized heroic leadership. While these restrictions lead to feelings of detachment of leaders from their organizations, leadership development exists in the acts of letting go of old behaviors, and welcoming emergence and experimentation by trusting more.

This study may be limited by its small sample and the use of one framework to make sense of the leaders' experience of change. It confirms that change can challenge organizing norms and how leadership is identified.

Despite the feeling of detachment from their organizations, developing greater self-awareness, being open to new ideas and trusting more can bring about better organizational outcomes, which is represented with Theory O as a contribution both for theory and practice.

This study illustrates (1) leaders' inner work or personal experience of change, and (2) how improvement of self-awareness can contribute to the involvement of leaders to the change process. Based on self-awareness, trust and feedback relationship, this study suggests a new practical and conceptual tool called Theory O by advancing Theory U.

Agile project management methods gain increasing attention of practitioners while they often remain neglected by scholarly research. Specifically, there is little known about how performance factors of agile firms differ from those of traditional firms. Scholars argue that these factors often relate to a firm’s human resource management (HRM). This study aims to analyze and compare the HRM architectures in agile and traditional project-based organizations that lead to high firm performance.

The authors apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis on data of 154 project-based organizations of diverse professional service industries in Russia.

This study’s findings suggest that HRM architectures of high-performance agile firms imply a broad use of ability-, motivation- and opportunity-enhancing practices and a high degree of HRM process centralization, while traditional firms adopt more diverse HRM architectures.

Based on this study’s results, the authors stress the importance of ensuring a good fit between a company’s project management approach and HRM architecture. The revealed configurations may also provide guidance for practitioners on designing effective HRM architectures in project-based organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the benefits of the agile project management (APM) framework compared to the traditional waterfall model, and understand how it can help companies add value and gain competitive advantage.

The methodology used was the exploratory qualitative research through a case study of a software project, developed with the support and application of the Scrum framework, in a pharmaceutical industry information technology project.

There were benefits found in the utilization of the agile framework, such as increased motivation and staff satisfaction, better control of requirements and especially higher quality of the delivered system, generating added value to the organization. Additionally, the project allowed the use of features from the first month of the application deployed, enabling a 75 percent reduction in development time, compared to traditional methods. The software development time was four months, 30 percent of what would be the total if the traditional methodology was adopted. Based on the results, the agile framework, especially the Scrum, proved to be a viable option as a project management approach.

Since this research is an exploratory case study, its results cannot be generalized.

The paper provides relevant practical information and experiences to managers interested in implementing APM, as well as those interested in improving the management of projects.

This paper provides a case study with practical implications of using APM, and APM’s benefits and advantages are compared with the traditional waterfall approach. Companies can use this case study to better understand about the advantages and strengths of APM over the traditional approach.