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We investigated the relationship between personality and managerial assessment center (AC) dimensions, emphasizing age’s moderating role within volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity (VUCA) simulations.

We analyzed 327 managers and applied the AC method, examining areas like social skills, problem-solving, management and goal striving, openness to change, employee development using the VUCA framework.

We assessed personality metatraits through a questionnaire based on the circumplex model (CPM; Strus, Cieciuch, & Rowinski, 2014), identifying four bipolar metatraits. Results highlighted passiveness and disharmony as negatively correlated with all managerial AC dimensions, with passiveness adversely affecting social skills and problem-solving.

Age’s moderating role emerged as pivotal in the relationship between personality and managerial AC dimensions, especially in specific VUCA contexts. This underscores age’s influence on the interplay between personality and managerial efficacy, suggesting varying predictive capabilities across age groups. The research illuminates the complexities of these relationships, spotlighting age’s nuanced impact.

Being acquainted with both lean and action learning in theory and in practice, this study finds that the theoretical complementarity of these two research streams has traditionally been underexploited. In this conceptual paper, this study aims to advance the theoretical understanding of lean by exploring the complementarity of lean thinking and action learning leading to a proposed integrated theory of these two research streams. Target audience is the operations management research community.

By deliberately adopting a process of theorising, this paper explores, reflects upon and combines individual experiences of researching, teaching and engaging in lean and action learning as operations management scholars.

Having taken a gemba walk through the literature and practices of lean and action learning, this study views and notices a systematic and complementary relationship between the two domains. The overlapping theoretical and practical complementarities of lean and action learning suggest that these two research streams are ripe for synthesis into an integrated theory. This finding provides an opportunity to (1) progress towards an integrative design of interventions leading to more sustainable lean system adoptions and (2) add new depth to our theoretical explanation of the success and failures of lean system adoptions.

This paper contributes an original integrated theory perspective on lean and action learning.

This article focuses on the assessment of entrepreneurship competence by selected vocational teachers in Italy. The exploratory research question addresses the extent to which entrepreneurship assessments are competence based, and the research seeks to identify fully fledged assessment programmes with both a formative and summative component, and the use of assessment rubrics. It also explores the extent to which entrepreneurship competence is referred to in school documentation and later assessed, and the tools and strategies used for such assessment.

This case study is part of a larger European research project promoted by Cedefop; in Italy it focused on six selected vocational IVET and CVET programmes and apprenticeship schemes. It used a wide range of instruments to ensure triangulation and multiple perspectives: analysed policy documents and undertook online interviews with experts and policy makers. At VET providers' premises it deployed: analysis of school documents; observations of learning environments; interviews and focus groups with (in schools) teachers, directors and vice directors, learners and alumni (in companies) instructors, company tutors and employers, apprentices and alumni.

Assessment tasks were rarely embedded within fully fledged assessment programmes involving both formative and summative tasks, and assessment rubric for grading. Most of the time, entrepreneurship programmes lacked self-assessment, peer assessment and structured feedback and did not involve learners in the assessment process. Some instructors coached the students, but undertook no clear formative assessment. These findings suggest institutions have a testing culture with regard to assessment, at the level of both policy and practice. In most cases, entrepreneurship competence was not directly assessed, and learning outcomes were only loosely related to entrepreneurship.

One limitation concerned the selection of the VET providers: these were chosen not on a casual basis, but because they ran programmes that were relevant to the development of entrepreneurship competence.

At the policy level, there is a need for new guidelines on competence development and assessment in VET, guidelines that are more aligned with educational research on competence development. To ensure the development of entrepreneurship competence, educators need in-service training and a community of practice.

So far, the literature has concentrated on entrepreneurship education at the tertiary level. Little is known about how VET instructors assess entrepreneurship competence. This study updates the picture of policy and practice in Italy, illustrating how entrepreneurship competence is developed in selected IVET and CVET programmes and apprenticeships.

Research reveals that the built environment graduates are not matching the needs of the 21st century construction industry. Evidence shows that the built environment academics (BEA) struggle to reskill and upskill to meet the industry's demand. Studies about Nigeria's BEA's perceived barriers in meeting the 21st-century industry demands are scarce. Thus, the paper investigated the perceived barriers and measures to improve BEA in Nigeria's 21st-century world of teaching. The outcome intends to enhance teaching practices and increase employability in the built environment disciplines.

Data were sourced from elite virtual interviews across Nigeria. The participants were well informed about Nigeria's built environment education and the possible barriers hindering 21st-century teaching from improving employable graduates in the built environment professionals (BEP). The researchers adopted a thematic analysis for the collected data and supplemented the data with secondary sources.

The study shows that BEA needs to improve BEA's teaching mechanism. Improving BEA will enable the built environment graduates to meet the minimum standards expected by the 21st-century industry. Findings categorised the perceived 22 barriers facing BEA into internal stakeholders-related barriers, external stakeholders-related barriers, and common barriers. Also, findings proffered practicable measures to improve BEA in the workplace via improved industry collaboration and technological advancement.

The research is restricted to the perceived barriers and measures to improve BEA in 21st-century teaching in Nigeria via a qualitative research design. Future research should validate the results and test the paper's proposed framework.

The paper confirms that the BEA requires stakeholder collaboration and technological advancement measures to improve teaching in the 21st century, leading to enhanced employability graduates. The paper would stir major stakeholders, especially BEA, and advance the quality of employable graduates in the Nigerian built environment professions.

The thematic network and proposed framework could be employed to stimulate Nigeria's BEA for better service delivery. This intends to create an enabling environment that will enhance stakeholders' collaboration and technological advancement for the BEA to produce better employable graduates in the 21st century.

In the context of debates on the role of social partners in shaping anti-crisis policies, the article explores the developments of social dialogue in Poland following the outbreak of the pandemic. The central research question is whether the crisis has helped to revitalise social dialogue or has it further revealed its weaknesses that were apparent before it.

The paper is based on the combination of literature review and the analysis of primary data derived from 22 expert interviews with the representatives of trade unions, employers and ministries collected in 2020–2021 in four essential industries (education, health care, social care and logistics).

The analysis suggests that the pandemic led to reinforcement of “illusory corporatism” in Poland, deepened mistrust among social partners and triggered a shift to informal channels of influencing policymaking. The weakness of the social partners and the strong position of the right-wing populist government meant that fears of recession and a health crisis were insufficient to develop “crisis” corporatism. While business interests were represented better than labour in policymaking, limited labour-friendly outcomes have been achieved as a result of workers’ mobilisation and unilateral decisions of the government rather than tripartite social dialogue.

Based on original empirical research, the article contributes to the discussion on the impact of the crisis on social dialogue under patchwork capitalism. It points to the role of strong governments and informality in circumventing tripartite structures and the importance of essential workers’ mobilisation in response to the lack of social dialogue.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse data literacy in the new Digital Competence Framework for Citizens (DigComp 2.2). Mid-2022 the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission published a new version of the DigComp (EC, 2022). This new version focusses more on the datafication of society and emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence. This paper analyses how DigComp 2.2 defines data literacy and how the framework looks at this from a societal lens.

This study critically examines DigComp 2.2, using the data literacy competence model developed by the Knowledge Centre for Digital and Media Literacy Flanders-Belgium. The examples of knowledge, skills and attitudes focussing on data literacy (n = 84) are coded and mapped onto the data literacy competence model, which differentiates between using data and understanding data.

Data literacy is well-covered in the framework, but there is a stronger emphasis on understanding data rather than using data, for example, collecting data is only coded once. Thematically, DigComp 2.2 primarily focusses on security and privacy (31 codes), with less attention given to the societal impact of data, such as environmental impact or data fairness.

Given the datafication of society, data literacy has become increasingly important. DigComp is widely used across different disciplines and now integrates data literacy as a required competence for citizens. It is, thus, relevant to analyse its views on data literacy and emerging technologies, as it will have a strong impact on education in Europe.

This paper aims to classify journal papers in the context of hybrid quality function deployment QFD and multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods published during 2004–2021.

A conceptual classification scheme is presented to analyze the hybrid QFD-MCDM methods. Then some recommendations are given to introduce directions for future research.

The results show that among all related areas, the manufacturing application has the most frequency of published papers regarding hybrid QFD-MCDM methods. Moreover, using uncertainty to establish a hybrid QFD-MCDM the relevant papers have been considered during the time interval 2004–2021.

There are various shortcomings in conventional QFD which limit its efficiency and potential applications. Since 2004, when MCDM methods were frequently adopted in the quality management context, increasing attention has been drawn from both practical and academic perspectives. Recently, the integration of MCDM techniques into the QFD model has played an important role in designing new products and services, supplier selection, green manufacturing systems and sustainability topics. Hence, this survey reviewed hybrid QFD-MCDM methods during 2004–2021.

Entrepreneurial trait and behaviour approaches are used to identify differing entrepreneurial profiles. Specifically, this study aims to determine which entrepreneurial competencies (ECs) can predict entrepreneurial action (EA) for distinct profiles, such as male versus female, start-up versus established and for entrepreneurs within different age groups and educational levels.

The research was conducted using a survey method on a large sample of 1,150 South African entrepreneurs. Chi-squared automatic interaction detection (CHAID) algorithms were used to build decision trees to illustrate distinct entrepreneurial profiles.

Each profile has a different set of ECs that predict EA, with a growth mindset being the most significant predictor of action. Therefore, this study confirms that a “one-size-fits-all” approach cannot be applied when profiling entrepreneurs.

From a pedagogical standpoint, different combinations of these ECs for each profile provide priority information for identification of appropriate candidates (e.g. the highest potential for success) and training initiatives, effective pedagogies and programme design (e.g. which individual ECs should be trained and how should they be trained).

Previous work has mostly focused on demographic variables and included a single sample to profile entrepreneurs. This study maintains much wider applicability in terms of examining profiles in a systematic way. The large sample size supports quantitative analysis of the comparisons between different entrepreneurial profiles using unconventional analyses. Furthermore, as far as can be determined, this represents the first CHAID conducted in a developing country context, especially South Africa, focusing on individual ECs predicting EA.