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The paper aims to examine literature on the issues of the pilot shortage in the United States Air Force and the demographic diversity dilemma within the United States Air Force pilot community and how it relates to the National Defense Strategy. In addition, there is an examination of current initiatives designed to combat these issues.

The paper opted for an exploratory review of 90 sources from 2012 to 2023 to examine the pilot shortage and pilot diversity issues within the United States Air Force. Three theories, the theory of generative interactions, the theory of cognitive diversity and the identity theory, were examined in relation to the barriers to the pilot diversity issue.

The paper provides emergent insights from the literature into the growing pilot shortage and diversity disparity found within the United States Air Force pilot community. These issues were associated with many barriers, including geographic disparity, socioeconomic status, culture, education, mentorship and life balance.

The current initiatives examined are new and, as such, warrant future research. In particular, what are the long-term projections for the youth flight programs? An examination of the effectiveness of improving the pilot shortage and pilot diversity within the Air Force should be further scrutinized in the coming years as new cadets enter pilot training after accession.

This paper highlights a need to further study the effectiveness of youth flight programs and other United States Air Force initiatives in improving pilot numbers and diversity.

The purpose of the current study is to explain best practices for attempting humor in the workplace. Research on humor in the workplace has emphasized the use of leader humor but has neglected to provide guidance on how to successfully use humor. This is an important gap because unsuccessful humor attempts are associated with lowered status and disruptive behavior.

This paper summarizes three types of humor theories (i.e. cognitive, social and contextual) and derives principles from these theories that can be applied to improve humor success. Then, the authors apply the understanding of humor to workplace applications, providing suggestions for future empirical research inferred from the humor theories.

Humor attempts are most likely to land (i.e. invoke mirth) when they include a benign violation of mental schemas, societal norms or other expectations or when humor evokes shared feelings of benign superiority in the audience. Humor is less effective in goal-directed situations. Mirth is expected to increase group cohesion, leader trust and organizational identification and mitigate the effects of job stressors. Finally, employee learning and development activities (e.g. onboarding, training) seem like a good place to use humor to facilitate cognitive flexibility.

These suggestions from across psychological disciplines are synthesized to inform best practices for leader humor.

This paper aims to assess the readiness of retail workers to use blockchain technology (BCT) to improve supply chain performance. The assessment was made via a quantitative approach taken using a theoretical framework based on Keller’s motivation model and self-determination theory in the BCT context.

The authors collected data from 567 retail workers from an emerging country through a structured survey questionnaire. The authors tested the hypotheses of the proposed model using Warp PLS 7.0 and controlled firm age, industry type and technological intensity.

Our findings may help firms in making the process of digital transformation inclusive. The authors found that supplier-based attention and motivation through BCT lead to supply chain performance, and that supplier-based satisfaction and trust achieved through BCT positively impact supply chain performance. Further, supplier-based relevance on raw material selection with the higher trust and motivation levels achieved through BCT was found to have a positive impact on supply chain performance.

IT supply chain applications are referred to as “lean” rather than “rich” because they still rely mainly on written and numerical means to present data. When the environment is less ambiguous, then less rich media can be used to facilitate communication. IT supply chain applications allow suppliers to spend time building relationships with other suppliers instead of focusing on administrative tasks, thus enhancing such relationships.

This study can be considered the first to assess retailer readiness to use BCT to improve supply chain performance through the theoretical lens of Keller’s motivation model and self-determination theory.

The study seeks to investigate the quality of metadata associated with the open government data (OGD) portals of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) constituents – Bahrain (BH), Kuwait (KW), Oman (OM), Qatar (QA), Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and United Arab Emirates (UAE).

A quantitative framework, supported by extant literature, is adopted to assess the metadata quality of the six OGD portals of the GCC constituents.

Among the six GCC countries, QA has the most advanced OGD metadata quality followed by KSA, UAE, OM, BH and KW. Furthermore, the OGD metadata quality (MQ) of UAE and OM stand at the same pedestal whereas BH and KW OGD portals are lagging behind.

While the OGD quality has been investigated in extant literature, the MQ of the OGD portals for the GCC countries has not been investigated so far – the present study seeks to plug this gap.