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This study addresses the pivotal role of digital transformation (DT) in the post-pandemic business landscape, identifying a notable gap in comprehending strategic adaptations and digital communication amidst the complexities of the digital era. It seeks to illuminate practical insights for businesses navigating through DT by intertwining its technological and organizational aspects.

Employing a conceptual approach, this paper synthesizes existing literature and theoretical frameworks related to DT, integrating its technological, strategic and organizational dimensions. It utilizes real-world instances to elucidate the digital era’s practical implications and strategic adaptations. The study also proposes a research agenda that spotlights pressing DT issues, challenges and actionable strategies for businesses.

Despite DT’s inherent complexity, the paper reveals that it is crucial for businesses navigating the contemporary digital landscape. It underscores the importance of strategic adaptations in DT, highlighting their implications on customer experiences and organizational structures amidst the evolving technological and market dynamics. Moreover, it accentuates the significance of effective digital communication strategies in enhancing user experiences and conveying value propositions adeptly.

This paper brings vital aspects of DT impacting modern organizations, offering invaluable insights for practitioners and scholars aiming to comprehend and navigate DT’s complexities. The identified research gaps underscore the necessity for further exploration, aiming to broaden DT’s theoretical and practical facets.

Collegiality is often discussed and analyzed as a challenged form of governance, a form of working that used to function well in universities prior to the emergence of contemporary and modern forms of governance. This seems to suggest that collegiality used to dominate, while other forms of governance are now taking over. The papers in volume 86 of this special issue support the notion of challenged collegiality, but also show that for the most part, nostalgic notions of “the good old days” are neither true nor helpful if we are to revitalize academic collegiality. After examining whether a golden age of collegiality ever existed, we discuss why collegiality matters. Exploring what are often described as limitations or “dark sides” of collegiality, we address four such “dark sides” related to slow decision-making, conflicts, parochialism, and diversity. This is followed by a discussion of how these limitations may be handled and what measures must be taken to maintain and develop collegiality. With a brief summary of the remaining papers under two headings, “Maintaining collegiality” and “Revitalizing collegiality,” we preview the rest of this volume.

Despite the merit of extant studies on career decision regrets, they are not well integrated, are developed at different speeds and differ in focus. Specifically, they do not address an important question about the levels and antecedents of regret arising from choosing entrepreneurship instead of paid employment and vice versa. The authors adopted the regret regulation theory as foundation to examining the moderated effect of entrepreneurial potential (EP) on career choice regret (CCR) among employees and entrepreneurs.

The authors surveyed 721 employees and 724 entrepreneurs from a developing country and applied partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to test the hypotheses.

Employees regretted their career choice three times more when compared with entrepreneurs. However, the authors failed to conclude that the latter had three times better living conditions when compared with the former. EP negatively influenced the regret of being an entrepreneur in lieu of an employee while it positively influenced the regret of being an employee in lieu of an entrepreneur. The perceived opportunity cost of being a higher EP employee was three times greater when compared with that of being a lower EP entrepreneur. The effect of EP on CCR was mitigated or amplified by duration in the career, former career status, decision justifiability, and perceived environment's supportiveness.

The design was cross-sectional, thus, the findings cannot be interpreted in the strict sense of causality.

The authors rely on an important yet often overlooked context of the choice between entrepreneurship and paid employment to test, clarify, and extend the regret regulation theory. The findings have novel human resource management and entrepreneurship policy implications.

This paper aims to propose that a Jesuit education can create leaders who can respond responsibly to modern challenges. It is observed that there remains a lacuna in education due to various reasons that fail to penetrate the hearts and minds of students who come only to earn their degrees. Today’s education fails to give students experiences whereby they can understand the poor and the oppressed. Here, the Jesuit education system offers a road map of how a bridge can be built, which can tie up the two ends of rigorous academic and social concern.

The emic observation was employed to corroborate the claim. The researcher is a Jesuit himself who has personal experience of the culture of Jesuit education and does research in the seminal field. The co-author is a Jesuit-run business school professor who knows Jesuit ethos, tradition and their apostolic thrust.

Frequently students join the educational institute, with their minds fixed on which school could provide them with a passport for better jobs with better pay and perks. Resentment is seen in their attitude when something is talked about the responsibility of taking care of the people at the margins of society. Social involvement and responsibility are seen as work done only by a social worker and activist. Also, it is witnessed that tokenism is considered as sufficient work done by the privileged classes. Against this backdrop, Jesuit education has various policies and protocols to ensure that those who graduate from their schools become leaders with a blend of human values, academic excellence and social conscience.

The underpinning conclusions are to introduce the unique characteristics of the “Jesuit education system”, which gives fresh impetus to renewal, innovation and re-imagination that our academics or industry require during this change of epoch that we experience today, after COVID-19.

Based on the case study of an SME company in the United Kingdom (which we will call SweetStar Cloud), this paper examines the attempts of the company to achieve significant strategic change. The company is attempting to move from being a tradition managed service provider of information services towards becoming a significant influencer in the market for digital services in the UK. As part of a knowledge transfer partnership (KTP), a local UK University has been closely involved in developing this new strategic direction and it is well poised to present and analyse the story. From the use of tried and tested strategic tools, including Porter's generic strategies and segmentation and targeting, the company has also embraced digital-specific approaches for developing partnerships with clients, developing pilot projects and experimenting with its use of social media. At the heart of this research is an analysis of the move from push marketing towards models of attraction. This paper aims to explore how traditional strategic tools are still applicable in the digital era alongside new tactical approaches in the digital sector. This aim has led to an approach to business that is responsible, in terms of moving away from a traditional push-selling model to one of partnership with customers at a strategic level. Strategy in dynamic markets often highlights responsiveness as a key success factor. The ability to respond (a response-ability) requires more agile companies. As SweetStar Cloud has developed its strategy, it has focused in achieving this more effective ability to respond through a more collaborative approach. In this sense, agile response-ability converges with business responsibility, as new abilities in communication, cooperation and trust development become key.

According to the Project Management Institute, 70% of projects fail globally. The causes of project failure in many instances can be identified as non-technical or behavioral in nature arising from interactions between participants. These intangible risks can emerge in any project setting but especially in project settings having diversity of cultures, customs, beliefs and traditions of various companies or countries. This paper provides an objective framework to address these intangible risks.

This paper presents a structured approach to identify, assess and manage intangible risks to enhance a project team’s ability to meet its objectives. The authors propose a user-friendly framework, Intangible Risk Assessment Methodology for Projects (IRAMP), to address these risks and the factors that cause them. Meta-network (e.g., a network of networks) simulation and established social network analysis (SNA) measures provide a quantitative assessment and ranking of causal events and their influence on the intangible behavior centric risks.

The proposed IRAMP and meta-network approach were utilized to examine the project delivery process of an international energy firm. Data were gathered using structured interviews, surveys and project team workshops. The use of the IRAMP to highlight intangible risk areas underpinned by the SNA measures led to changes in the company’s organizational structure to enhance project delivery effectiveness.

This work extends the existing project risk management literature by providing a novel objective approach to identify and quantify behavior centric intangible risks and the conditions that cause them to emerge.

The major purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of openness to change on research publication in higher education institutions (HEI) in Tanzania.

With a sample of 247 academics, a cross-sectional survey design was used and questionnaires were the primary data collection tool. The collected data were tested using mean and standard deviations, and the causal–effect relationship between the independent and dependent variables was tested using simple linear regression.

The findings of this study revealed that openness to change positively and significantly influence research publication in higher education (β = 0.598 and p < 0.001).

The study recommends that HEI should consider openness to change value as one among criteria for hiring academics as well as developing good programs that will help academics develop the academics' self-awareness with regard to what takes for one to be a productive researcher.

This is the first study to examine the influence of openness to change as a personal value on academics’ research publication in Tanzanian HEI. In this instance, the study contributes to the existing literature on the influence of academics' personal values in terms of openness to change on research publication.

The study aims to investigate how personal values (PVS) influence research self-efficacy (RSE) among academics in public universities in Tanzania.

A cross-sectional design was utilized by the study to gather data once through structured questionnaires administered to 247 academic staff from four public universities in Tanzania.

Generally, the results show that PVS positively and significantly influence RSE in universities. Specifically, OPC has β value of 0.284 and p < 0.001, SEFN has β = 0.352 and p < 0.001 and CONS has a β = 0.198 and p = 0.003.

University management should include PVS as among the criteria for recruitment of academic staff, as it determines their confidence in engaging in research.

The findings of this study broaden the applicability of Schwartz human values theory in Tanzania’s universities. Moreover, by carrying out empirical research on the influence of PVS on RSE in developing context such as Tanzania, the study contributes to the body of literature on PVS and RSE.