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In recognising the weakness of trade unions and the lack of an institutional framework designed to enforce employee rights in an African context, the purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which human resource (HR) practitioners are perceived to play the role of employee advocate.

The quantitative data set is derived from a sample of 305 respondents (95 HR practitioners, 121 line managers and 89 employees) from Malawi.

Despite the challenges of the context, HR practitioners are perceived by key stakeholders (including line managers and employees) to be playing the role of employee advocate. Standard multiple regression results indicate that the main factor contributing to the perception that HR practitioners are playing this role is their contribution to “motivating employees”.

The study was conducted in Malawi. Further research is necessary to explore the generalisability of the findings to other contexts.

The findings provide an empirical base for future studies which explore perceptions of the employee advocacy role undertaken by HR practitioners in Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to present the contemporary understanding and emerging structural models of organisational governance of public hospitals in order to provide evidence-based guidance to countries that are reforming their public hospital governance structures in line with best practice.

The paper uses the structural dimension of Cooper, Fusarelli and Randall’s policy model and institutional theory to review the legislative frameworks of four model countries supported by extant literature.

The paper conceptually distinguishes health system governance and organisational governance in the health system. It further visualises the emerging alternative legislative models of organisational governance and a hierarchy of governors applicable to public hospitals.

The paper provides critical knowledge for understanding organisational governance within health system governance framework and develops tools that can be used in reforming institutional mechanism of organisational governance of public hospitals.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of governance reforms also called conceptual innovation for public hospitals in Malawi.

It focuses on the reforms for central and district hospitals. It uses semi-structured interviews to collect data and thematic approach to analyse it.

The results show that the reforms for central hospitals are structurally well characterised as aimed at corporatisation though they are termed as automatisation. The terminological seems not to pose any harm on the direction of the reforms due to the thorough structural characterisation. On the other hand, reforms for district hospitals are vague as such implementation is retrogressive, in that, instead of progressively moving the hospitals towards greater autonomy the opposite is happening.

The paper highlights the significance of characterisation of the intended outcome on the direction of the reforms and proposes a framework to guide conceptual innovation for public hospitals in a devolution-mediated environment.

Sound organisational governance does not occur naturally; it is a product of effective awareness. This study aims to examine the level of governance awareness among public hospitals' governance actors in Malawi.

The study uses semi-structured interviews to collect data that are analysed thematically.

The study found that governance awareness among the actors was low. Although the majority of the actors displayed a broad perspective, they, however, failed to clearly affirm the nexus of the governing organs – hospital board (or its equivalent) and hospital management. Furthermore, most were not aware of the existence of the country's self-regulatory framework for organisational governance. A possible compounding factor to the low level of awareness is their educational background that hardly recognises organisational governance as an essential component of their professional identity.

This is the first study to explore in-depth governance awareness in the context of public hospitals in developing countries. It highlights the need to develop strategies for creating effective governance awareness amongst the actors, which is often overlooked when carrying governance reforms.

The review is based on "Employee advocacy in Africa: the role of HR practitioners in Malawi" by Aminu Mamman, Christopher J. Rees, Rhoda Bakuwa, Mohamed Branine, Ken Kamoche, (2019) published in Employee Relations. This paper aims to concentrate on the degree that HR practitioners are considered as employee advocates within an African context.

Data were gathered from a questionnaire survey given to 305 respondents (95 HR practitioners, 121 line managers and 89 employees) working in private sector companies Malawi.

The results suggest that HR practitioners in Malawi are viewed as carrying out an employee advocate role by line managers, HR managers, and employees. HR managers perceived themselves to be carrying out the role of employee advocate more than line managers and employees. In addition, the strongest perceived element was their contribution to motivating employees.

Therefore, analysis of the importance of the elements that make up the employee advocate role could inform decisions on which elements to include in in an HR model. This paper has contributed to the literature on HR roles in developing countries and supports the use of Ulrich’s model beyond the developed countries where it originated

This paper has contributed to the literature on HR roles in developing countries and supports the use of Ulrich’s model beyond the developed countries where it originated.