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In this contribution, we systematically review the extant global leadership literature to identify important bibliometric and thematic patterns in evidence in this evolving field of scholarship. Conceptualizing the phenomenon to include leaders/managers/supervisors who hold global, expatriate, or international positions, we draw out insights accumulated from a total of 327 published articles in key management and organizational behavior journals listed in Scopus. Our analysis proceeds in two sequential phases. Our bibliometric analysis first identifies the most cited articles, most published first authors, country bases of first authors, and frequently publishing journals in this field. This characterizes both the diversity and innovative nature of scholarship in the field. Our thematic content analysis, generated through Nvivo 11, isolates two dominant overarching themes that represent the wellspring for the body of literature, namely global leader development and global leader effectiveness. These themes of development and effectiveness are further explicated through six distinct lenses namely cultural, cognitive, learning, personality trait, social/relational, and political. These lenses are underpinned by a suite of theoretical perspectives encompassing individual, system, and contextual considerations. In combination, these sets of analyses bring added systematics to the field and serve as a point of departure for future inquiry.

The digital transformation calls for new thinking about sociotechnical systems design (STSD) because it has enabled new kinds of work systems to proliferate. We identify a new class of sociotechnical system, called the Platform-STS (P-STS), which complements the existing Industrial- and Knowledge-STSs. The P-STS has distinctive characteristics compared to the other classes because it reaches directly into ecosystems and is, therefore, “distributed,” and because it is governed through market mechanisms rather than hierarchy or clan mechanisms. We introduce a new design principle, redundancy of connectivity, to ground design thinking about the P-STS. We demonstrate why fundamental STSD principles need to be reconfigured, suggest how they might do so, and conclude that socioecological designs and interventions may need to supplant sociotechnical ones.

This chapter presents the e-marketing practices followed by the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in India. It explored the owner-managers perceptions of MSMEs regarding their average expenditures, budget allocations, management, policy, sources of information, return on investment and their desire for formal training on e-marketing activities in future. Data were collected from 253 MSME owner-managers through an e-questionnaire. The researchers found that the majority of the MSME owner-managers allocate a monthly budget for e-marketing initiatives, and they have increased it over the past few years. However, the total expenditure on e-marketing activities is between 1% and 10% of their total marketing budget. These businesses are partly or fully outsourcing search engine optimization (SEO), display advertising and referral marketing, whereas other e-marketing activities are managed in-house. Generally, these MSMEs are not measuring the success of their digital marketing efforts. If they do it, they are not doing it in a professional manner. MSMEs were found to be slow in posting content and engaging their followers on social media. Surprisingly, two-third of the MSMEs that participated in this study did not show any desire to pursue courses in digital marketing. In conclusion, this study puts forward key implications to practitioners as well as to the government agencies that are involved in the promotion of information technology among MSMEs.

Technological development creates technological imperative for organisations. The most recent is dedicated to digital technologies with a strong influence on the way of managing and organising. To gain a better understanding of the latest business practice, the authors use a multilevel perspective and apply the historical analysis method. Specifically, this chapter explores organisational design (OD) of the future through the evolutionary perspective (spanning across the four industrial revolutions) and brings into focus how technological imperatives modified organisational structure, coordination mechanisms and people/job practices. By reflecting on the historical changes in OD practices that happened throughout different phases of industrialisation, the authors analyse how building blocks of digital OD shape managerial and employee behaviours, thus unleashing the performance potential of digital technologies.

The aim of this research is to contribute to the understanding of how commercial diplomats lobby for public procurement contracts. The institutional environment has ramifications for the manner of lobbying and for the practice of commercial diplomacy. This research brings together these streams of literature, and a conceptual model is developed. By means of an in-depth, single-case study, investigating the lobbying activities of EU diplomats in Indonesia, the study aimed to illustrate the model and draw the list of lobbying activities applicable for commercial diplomats. The findings reveal that in a weak institutional development environment, the diplomats focus on informational lobbying and rely heavily on their networks. If the decision-making powers are decentralized, the diplomats target more decision-makers. If diplomats do not have an access to decision-makers then ‘voice’ lobbying is applied. If the decision-makers are not elected, the diplomats do not engage in constituency-building lobbying. The findings illustrate the plausibility of the introduced conceptual model. They also suggest that domestic factors, such as interest in the host country, priority status of the host country and historical bilateral ties can positively influence the lobbying activities of the diplomats as well.