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This paper aims to illustrate a simple, holistic overview of contingent workforce management.

This paper’s viewpoint outlines benefits and challenges that employers and employees encounter with contingent work arrangements and highlights relevant human resource (HR) practices to effectively manage contingent workforce.

Benefits to employers are cost-effective hiring solutions, filling-up skill requirements, increasing numerical flexibility and diversity and broadened talent pool. Challenges include legal ramifications, hidden costs, confidentiality and security issues, low organisational commitment and productivity. For employees, benefits are working flexibility and financial gain and gaining work experience. Challenges include dependence on economy, irregular work hours, health risks and exploitation and differential treatment by employers. “Value-adding” practices of holistic hiring, onboarding, performance management, workplace training and developing resilient organisational culture can effectively manage contingent workforce.

This paper provides a broader outline of benefits and challenges, both from employers’ and employees’ perspectives, linked with precarious employment. Further investigations on employers’ and employee’s perspectives based on specific types of contingent work arrangements (e.g. temporary agency workers and gig workers) can give in-depth insights.

This paper provides a simplified framework of pros and cons of contingent employment, along with practical HR remedies to manage contingent workforce.

This study aims to examine the adaptive leadership of doctors during COVID-19 to understand the leadership competencies required for adaptive events.

Phenomenology-based qualitative design was used. Data were collected from six doctors from the state of Kerala, India using semi-structured interviews.

Five themes were identified. The first theme, core leadership shows that doctors perceive leaders as educators, learners and social beings. The second theme, adaptive challenges, describes the ambiguous pandemic-related challenges that doctors are facing including, unusual occupational demands, information overload, sociocultural issues and personal intricacies. The third theme reflects that for doctors, adaptive work during the pandemic included – new learning to address unique issues, changing perspectives and establishing and maintaining a safe and engaging workplace environment. The fourth theme describes the adaptive leadership competencies such as regulating distress, providing direction, maintaining disciplined action, fostering collaboration, empowering, understanding organizational linkages, strategic vision and communication skills. The fifth theme elucidates the lacunae in leadership training as perceived by the doctors.

The findings can help in developing and enhancing competency frameworks for doctors’ adaptive leadership.

This is one of the earliest studies to systematically examine components of adaptive leadership for doctors during COVID-19 and identify associated competencies.