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This paper aims to identify and fill a gap in the knowledge of the contribution of Henry S. Dennison toward management and organization studies and problematize the assumptions underlying the mainstream understanding of scientific management and human relations.

Primary sources are in the guise of archival papers, as well as published journal articles, books and book chapters; secondary sources in the guise of material about Dennison, as well as interviews with family and friends.

The paper concludes that Dennison made an original and enduring contribution to management theory including, but not isolated to, personnel management, organizational behavior and corporate governance that influenced key thinkers of his times.

Dennison was a practicing manager – in fact, he was the president of (what was) his family company which operates today as Avery Dennison – but he still found the time and energy for active public service and to peripatetically articulate his management “praxis”. The paper reveals that much of Dennison’s thoughts and deeds have much relevance today. Among other issues, in his concern with reducing labor turnover and unemployment, in devising and implementing effective personnel management and in his pioneering work on human motivation, group dynamics, goal congruence, worker empowerment and executive compensation, issues of profound importance to business leaders today can be found.

To date, only piecemeal attempts have been made to chronicle Dennison’s contributions to management and organization theory, but these have been scattered across the social sciences. There has been neither any systematic, consolidated synthesis of his contributions to management and organization studies nor of his impact on the thinking of key thinkers of his times.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between humorous leadership and innovative behavior and the moderator effects of creative requirement and perceived innovation climate, beyond transformational leadership, and leader-member exchange (LMX).

Questionnaire data were collected from 150 employees of various organizations in Germany.

Employees whose leader used humor more frequently reported to be more innovative, when the employees perceived their tasks to require creativity and innovation. Perceived innovation climate did not moderate the relationship.

Different humor styles rather than just positive humor should be investigated in the future. Future research should incorporate multi-level designs and objective data on innovative behavior.

Humorous leadership is an important element of innovation-relevant leadership behavior. Its use may be integrated in broader leadership development approaches.

The study contributes to knowledge on humorous leadership and its relationship to organizational behavior. It enhances theoretical developments by considering the employees’ task and perceived innovation climate as moderator variables. It helps establish humor as a leadership tool beyond constructs such as LMX or transformational leadership.

This paper discusses logistics service providers' (LSPs’) energy efficiency initiatives for sustainable development, both from an evolutionary perspective and based on a framework consisting of actions, processes (i.e. at the operations interface) and services (i.e. at the customer interface).

Following a qualitative research design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with sustainability managers at LSPs and the data were analysed via inductive coding. Based on the results and the literature, the authors developed a maturity model for LSPs' transitions to environmental sustainability.

LSPs' sustainable development occurs via operational processes, services at the customer interface, and actions that support those processes and services. Energy efficiency efforts are characterised by process depth that helps LSPs to align with their customers' energy efficiency improvement processes. While services related to energy efficiency connect LSPs and their customers, actions in support vary depending on the logistics activities in which LSPs participate.

Further research is needed to test and verify the maturity model and to clarify the interdependency of its three dimensions.

By categorising energy efficiency initiatives and proposing a maturity model for LSPs' sustainable development via energy efficiency, the authors have developed a tool for logistics actors to assess their progress towards improved sustainability.

The paper contributes to the literature by providing a three-pillar framework to understand the sustainability transitions of LSPs through energy efficiency. Developing a maturity model using this framework also contributes to the literature with an approach to assess sustainability advancement in the logistics industry.

Several researchers struggle with designing, writing-up and reviewing case study research, but constructing a template for describing and justifying methodological choices is – in contrast with quantitative research – undesirable due to the creative nature of qualitative research. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the multitude of paths to rigorous case study research and promote rigorous case study research in the service community.

Based upon a review of seminal articles and textbooks, different paths to rigorous case study research are identified. Subsequently, these paths are compared with existing practices in case studies in service research published between March 2017 and April 2019.

Seminal articles and textbooks detail different paths to achieve rigor with regard to research purpose, design, data, analyses and write-up. Overall, the most popular paths in the service community are those proposed by Eisenhardt and Yin. Meanwhile, service researchers increasingly challenge the dichotomy between the inductive and deductive logic by choosing an abductive logic. Transparency and reflexivity are the main points of attention among service researchers doing case study research.

By providing insight into the multitude of paths to rigorous case study research along with their popularity in the service community, this paper helps service researchers to balance rigor and creativity when engaging in case study research. Additionally, this paper offers a framework for reviewing case study research in terms of rigor and creativity.

Sustainable purchasing and supply management (SPSM) is a lever of sustainable development for companies and remains an interesting research issue that can be analysed from various perspectives. By considering the polymorphic concept of proximity as a theoretical support, this research studies the buyer–supplier dyad and aims to answer the following question. How does the diversity of buyer–supplier dyad relationships influence the SPSM of direct and indirect purchases within a manufacturing company?

The authors used a qualitative approach founded on a matrix analysis to describe buyer–supplier relationships through the prism of the proximity concept. The field of study consists in a single case with embedded units including a manufacturing company and a sample of 13 suppliers of direct and indirect purchases.

The research reveals diverse combinations of proximities that characterise relationships between a buyer and suppliers of several purchasing categories. This diversity of relational contexts influences SPSM in different ways. The authors highlight three SPSM approaches labelled contractual, relational and embedded and describe practices carried out with suppliers as part of the different relational profiles.

The research is developed in a single perspective. To ensure that it can be generalised, it should be applied in other contexts supported by new case studies.

The research provides practitioners with guidelines on building successful buyer–supplier partnerships in a sustainable view. The authors’ findings aid managerial decision-making by validating the necessity of adapting SPSM depending on buyer–supplier relational situations.

This paper offers an original study angle on buyer–supplier relationships based on a proximity analysis. The authors’ research confirms the variety of sustainable purchasing relationships underlined by the literature and can advance the portfolio approach to sustainable purchasing.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the supply chain leagility proposing all supply chains are leagile with different magnitudes of leanness and agility. A new index, “Deviation from Leagility” (DFL), is introduced, aiming to optimise supply chain design and investigate the relationship between supply chain leagility and firm performance.

The partial least squares (PLS) method was employed to analyse data collected from 299 Australian firms by administering a structured questionnaire.

The results indicate that most companies adopt the leagile supply chain rather than the lean or pure agile design. Furthermore, better business performance is achievable when deviation from a balanced supply chain in which both aspects of leanness and agility are equally embedded is minimised.

The study is limited to a number of constraints that measure leagility; further research is needed to incorporate different aspects of agility.

The findings of this study could provide a guideline for supply chain executives to improve their company’s performance by designing a more balanced leagile supply chain.

This study is unique in its in-depth empirical investigation of modelling of leagile supply chain using a new index, and also addressing: first, the current mismatch between the well-known mutually exclusive strategies (lean/agile); and second, what has later been found when the proposed models were quantitatively tested.

Cross-functional teams engage in developing platform projects which become the basis of many smaller projects. The purpose of this paper is to examine how project teams engage in front-end plan formulation and backend work implementation. This paper shows the critical linkage role of platform product practices.

This study examines the conceptual framework and research model by using a survey questionnaire for the target respondents of product development managers from the USA and Korea. After refining processes, this study determines the items for each variable for the large-scale survey.

Results suggest that when heavy-manager and customers are jointly or separately involved with a project team for the formation of shared team purpose and mission, then there would be differences in terms of information quality, shared team purpose and mission and the project outcomes. If the primary roles of heavyweight leadership and customer involvement are to improve information quality in terms of reduction of uncertainty and equivocality, then the project team is empowered enough to work on the formation of shared team purpose and mission on their own. Platform product practices are a linkage between front-end planning and back-end work doing which guides more specific projects with shared purpose and performance goals.

As the data collection was limited to the USA and Korea, generalizability across diverse contexts requires caution. However, the findings provide meaningful insight on how to manage projects in an environment of increasing complexity and ambiguity.

This study provides interesting insight into how project teams approach platform product development. Based on the empirical test, this study shows how cross-functional teams integrate front-end project plan formulation and back-end project work implementation. This study also presents how heavyweight manager and customer involvement addresses the front-end information challenges and influence platform product practices.

This study empirically tests the role of fuzzy front planning in impacting project team success. In particular, this study highlights the dynamic relationships between heavyweight managers and customer involvement, information quality (i.e. uncertainty and equivocality), and the nature of team purpose and mission which are all crucial for effective cross-functional teamwork.

The study explores the role of dialogic public communication and information quality (IQ) in evaluating the operational performance of donation-based crowdfunding (DBC) tasks. These tasks are primarily used to support disaster relief operations. The authors also test the influence of cognitive trust and swift trust as moderating variables in explaining the relationship between both IQ and dialogic communication with operational performance.

The authors used a primary survey to test the hypotheses. A total of 203 responses were collected from multiple crowdfunding platforms. The authors used archival data from task creators on donation-based crowdfunding platforms, and a structured questionnaire is also used to collect responses. Data are analyzed using Warp PLS 6.0. Warp PLS 6.0 works on the principle of partial least square (PLS) structured equation modeling (SEM) and has been used widely to test path analytical models.

The authors found out that the operational performance is explained significantly by the quality of information and its association with dialogic public communication. The results support the arguments offered by dialogic public communication theory and trust transfer theory in assessing the operational success of DBC. The study also confirms that cognitive trust positively moderates the relationship between IQ and organizational public dialogic communication and operational performance. It is also revealed that the duration of the DBC task has no significant control over dialogic public communication.

The study lays practical foundations for task creators on DBC platforms and website designers as it sets the importance of both IQ and dialogic communication channels. The communication made by the task creator and/or the DBC platforms with the donors and potential donors in the form of timely and appropriate information forms the key to the success of any DBC task. The study also helps task creators choose a suitable platform to improve performance.

The authors propose a unique framework by integrating two theoretical perspectives: dialogic public relation theory and trust transfer theory in understanding the operational performance of donation-based crowdfunding tasks. The authors address DBC tasks catering to disaster relief operations by collecting responses from task creators on DBC platforms. The study uniquely positions itself in the area of information and communication.

Roles and responsibilities of higher education academics (educators) have dramatically changed since COVID-19 outbreak. Considering this, the present study applies servant leadership and social cognitive theories to test three determinants of pedagogical resilience, i.e. servant leadership, professional self-efficacy and workplace thriving. The study also tests moderation of professional self-efficacy between servant leadership and pedagogical resilience.

Applying snowball sampling, time-lagged data were collected on T1 and T2 through survey questionnaire from 205 employees of six higher education institutes (HEIs) in Sindh, Pakistan. For data analysis, the study employed structural equation modeling using SmartPLS.

Results indicate that servant leadership and professional self-efficacy predict pedagogical resilience of educators. Moreover, professional self-efficacy moderates the relationship between servant leadership and pedagogical resilience.

This study has a few limitations. The study was conducted in HEIs of Pakistan, which are non-profit organizations. Given this, generalizability of findings in profit-making organizations is suggested with caution. Cross-cultural and cross-regional generalizability may also be challenging.

Training, coaching and role modeling may improve efficacy of educators, which is vital to pedagogical resilience. Furthermore, servant leadership attributes (i.e. emotional support and empathy) may also enhance resilience. Rolling-out tailored training programs for boosting professional efficacy of existing faculty could be helpful in building pedagogical resilience. Fostering a culture of teamwork through adopting collaborative and state of the art educational technologies could also enhance self-efficacy, which is vital to resilience. This could be done when vice chancellors, rectors, HODs, etc., adopt servant leadership attributes to play their role by navigating a paradigm shift from traditional teaching platforms and physical meetings to digital educational tools.

Post-pandemic educational management necessitates resilient workforce to handle any uncertain situation. Given this, the authors apply servant leadership and social cognitive theory and introduce a novel construct of “pedagogical resilience”. This paper offers unique theoretical contributions and suggests universities/HEIs to adopt servant leadership model and foster professional self-efficacy of educators for boosting their pedagogical resilience in times of uncertainty. Pedagogically resilient educators may be well equipped to adopt venerable pedagogical competencies, and could contribute significantly to the quality of higher education.

Enterprise architecture (EA) aligns information systems with business processes to enable firms to reach their strategic objectives and, when effectively employed by organizations, can lead to enhanced levels of performance. However, while many firms may adopt EA, it is often not used extensively. The purpose of this paper is to examine how performance expectancy (PE) and training affect the degree to which organizations use EA.

The paper employed a survey method to gather data from IT professionals, senior managers, and consultants who work within organizations that have adopted EA. Covariance-based structural equation modeling was used to analyze the research model and test the hypotheses.

The paper found PE to be a significant predictor of EA use. In addition, training is also shown to enhance use of EA while also playing a mediating role within the relationship between PE and use of EA.

The study is limited by the focus only on training as an intervention. Other mediators and/or moderators such as top management support and organization culture may also play an important role and should be examined in future studies. Nonetheless, the study demonstrates the critical role that training can play in facilitating widespread use of EA within organizations.

Widespread use is a critical success factor for organizations that want to gain the maximum possible benefit from EA. To achieve extensive use, the study suggests that organizations that adopt EA should consider implementing a formal and robust education and training program.

This study extends the research on information technology training by examining the role of training as an intervention within the technology acceptance paradigm. The paper also contributes to the literature regarding post-adoption innovation diffusion by demonstrating the efficacy of organizational training in promoting widespread usage.