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This paper aims to fill gap in the literature and explore policy options for resolving the problems of accountability by framing three research questions. The research questions are (i) whether certain elements of Scott’s (2014) institutional pillars attenuate (accentuate) corporate and public accountability; (ii) whether the presence of ruling party-affiliated enterprises (RPAEs) create an increase (decrease) in the degree of corporate (public) accountability; and (iii) whether there is a particular form of ownership change that transforms RPAEs into public investment companies.

Using a qualitative research methodology that involves term frequency and thematic analysis of publicly available textual information, the paper examines Mechkova et al.’s (2019 forms of government accountability. The paper analyzes the gaps between the de jure and de facto accountability using the institutional pillars framework.

The findings of the paper are three. First, there are gaps between de jure and de facto in all three (vertical, horizontal and diagonal) forms of government (public) accountability. Second, the study finds that more than three fourth of the parties that contested the June 2021 election did have regional focus. They did not advocate for accountability. Third, Ethiopia’s RPAEs are unique. They have regional focus and are characterized by severe forms of agency and information asymmetry problems.

The main limitation of the paper is its exploratory nature. Extending this research by using cross-country data could provide a more complete picture of the link between corporate (public) accountability and a country’s institutional pillars.

Academic research documents that instilling modern corporate (public) governance standards in the Sub Sahara Africa (SSA) region has shown mixed results. The analysis made in this paper is likely to inform researchers and policymakers about the type of change that leads to better corporate (and public) accountability outcomes.

The institutional change proposed in the paper is likely to advance the public interest by mitigating agency and information asymmetry problems and enhancing government accountability. The changes make the enterprises investable, save scarce jobs, enhance diversity and put the assets in RPAEs to better use.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that uses the institutional pillars analytical framework to examine an SSA country's corporate (public) accountability problem. It demonstrates that accountability is a domestic and a (novel) traveling theory. The paper identifies the complexity of resolving the interlock between political institutions and business enterprises. It theorizes that it is impossible to instill modern corporate (public) accountability standards without changing regulatory, normative and cultural cognitive pillars of institutions. The paper contributes to the change management and public interest literature.

Supervisor incivility and organizational gossip are two examples of dark organizational behaviors. Norm of reciprocity theory suggests that employees may develop revenge intentions after exposure to such behaviors while attributing blame to others. This study aims to empirically investigate the mediating effect of blaming others on the impact of supervisor incivility and negative organizational gossip on revenge intention.

Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed to test the measurement model. Structural equation model was used to test the research hypotheses based on data gathered in Turkey from restaurant employees in Mersin Marina selected by convenience sampling. Data set that consists of 239 questionnaires was subjected to CFA.

The findings show that negative organizational gossip and supervisor incivility increase to employees’ revenge intentions, and blaming others mediates the impact of supervisor incivility and negative organizational gossip no employees’ revenge intentions. In addition, blaming others mediates the impact of supervisor incivility and negative organizational gossip on employees’ revenge intentions.

Empirical study has not been encountered related to dark behaviors of (especially gossip, incivility, blame and revenge intention) restaurant managers and employees as a holistic model. Therefore, this paper contributes to organizational behavior literature. Moreover, this paper suggests to restaurant managers for supply to organizational peace.

The purpose of this study is to empirically test the intelligent career framework in a public sector setting in a country with a clientelistic culture to inform human resource management strategies.

Based on a qualitative methodology and an interpretivist paradigm, 33 in-depth interviews were conducted with Greek civil servants before the COVID-19 pandemic. The interview recordings were subsequently transcribed and coded via a blend of inductive and deductive approaches.

Outcomes of the study indicate that in a public sector setting in a country with a clientelistic culture, the three dimensions of knowing-whom, knowing-how and knowing-why are less balanced than those reported by findings from private sector settings in countries with an individualistic culture. Instead, knowing-whom is a critical dimension and a necessary condition for career development that affects knowing-how and knowing-why.

The theoretical contribution comes from providing evidence of the dark side of careers and how imbalances between the three dimensions of the intelligent career framework reduce work satisfaction, hinder career success and affect organisational performance. The practical contribution offers recommendations for human resource management practices in the public sector, including training, mentoring, transparency in performance evaluations and fostering trust.

This study aimed at exploring the differential effects of different corporate governance (CG) indicators on risk management practices in Islamic financial institutions (IFIs) and conventional financial institutions (CFIs) of Pakistan. It also investigated the moderating role of institutional quality (IQ) in shaping the effects of CG practices on financial institutions of Pakistan.

A sample of 57 financial institutions including commercial banks, insurance companies and Modarba companies over the period 2006–2017 is used to carry out the empirical analysis. The authors applied the robust two-step system-generalized method of moments estimator, which is also called the dynamic panel data estimator. They also built the PCA-based composite index of CG and IQ by using different indicators to investigate the moderating role of IQ. They used three proxies for risk taking, five for CG and one for Shari’ah governance. To test the validity of the instruments, they applied the Arellano and Bond’s (1991) AR (1) and AR (2) tests and the J-statistic of Hansen (1982).

The results provided strong evidence that several individual characteristics of CG and the composite index are significantly related to the operational risk, the liquidity risk and the Z-score (a proxy for solvency risk). The results also revealed that IQ significantly and substantially contributes in reducing the level of risks. Finally, the estimation results indicated that the effects of CG on risk management are significantly different at IFIs and CFIs. This differential impact is mainly attributed to the fundamental differences in business models, operational strategies and contractual obligations of both types of institutions.

The findings of this study are important for enhancing our understanding of how CG relates to risk taking in Islamic and conventional financial services industries and how good quality institutions are important for formulating the governance effects on the risk-taking behavior of financial institutions. The findings suggest that a suitable size of board should be chosen to manage the risk effectively. As the findings show that the risk-taking behavior of IFIs differs from that of CFIs, the regulators and international standard setting bodies should tailor the regulatory frameworks accordingly.

This paper is different from the existing studies in four aspects. First, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical investigation in Pakistan, which does the comparison of IFIs and CFIs while examining the impacts of CG on risk management. Second, the paper constructs the composite index of CG by considering several different indicators of governance and examines the combined effect of governance indicators on risk management process. Third, this paper adds to the growing literature on the role of IQ by investigating whether it acts as a moderator between CG structures and risk management and if yes, then whether this moderating role is different for IFIs and CFIs. Finally, the paper builds upon the existing research work on the CG effects for different types of financial institutions by proposing a single regression based analytical framework for comparing the effects across two different types of institutions, harvesting the benefits of higher degrees of freedom and avoiding/minimizing the measurement error.

This paper aims to analyze the implications of orality for management practices in a developing country such as Iran.

This paper relies on the seminal theory of Walter Ong (1982) and a leading line of anthropological research to analyze the implications of orality/literacy for management practices in Iran. The authors first define orality and literacy as distinct modes of communication and examine their conceptual properties. Then, the authors draw on the existing literature to analyze the five main management functions impacted by orality.

The analyses suggest that the predominance of orality in Iran is associated with a wide range of management practices, including short-term or unstructured planning, spontaneous decision-making, fluid organizational structure, the prevalence of interpersonal relations, authoritarian and traditional leadership and behavior-based controlling mechanisms.

While most studies have focused on the impacts of cultural dimensions and economic variables, this paper offers a novel approach to analyzing management practices. More specifically, the paper suggests that in addition to the implications of cultural dimensions and economic variables, the mode of communication, namely, orality/literacy, could have significant implications for management practices.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of political stability on corruption by drawing upon a sample encompassing both developed and developing European and Asian countries.

The dataset, sourced from the Refinitiv database, spans from July 2014 to May 2022. Panel data techniques, specifically pooled estimation and dynamic panel data [generalized method of moments (GMM)] are employed. The analysis encompasses both fixed and random effects models to capture country-specific cross-sectional effects. To validate our findings, we perform a robustness test by including in the investigation four control variables, namely poverty, type of governance, economic freedom and inflation. To test heterogeneity, the dataset is further divided into two distinct subsamples based on the countries’ locations.

Empirical findings substantiate that political stability (viewed as the risk of government destabilization) has a positive and significant impact on corruption in all analyzed samples of European and Asian countries, though some differences are observed in various subsamples. When we take into account the control variables, these analysis results are robust.

This research provided a panel data analysis with GMM, while other empirical methodologies could also be used, like the difference-in-difference approach. However, our results should be validated by extending the time and the sample to a worldwide sample and using alternative measures of corruption and political stability. Moreover, our focus was on a linear and unidirectional relationship between the considered variables, but it would be interesting to test in our further research a non-linear and bidirectional correlation between them. Furthermore, we have introduced in the robustness test only four economic variables, but to consolidate our findings, we plan to include socioeconomic and demographic variables in future studies.

These outcomes imply that authorities should be aware of the necessity of implementing anti-corruption policies designed to establish effective agencies and enforcement structures for combating systemic corruption, to improve the political environment and the quality of institutions and to apply coherent economic strategies to accelerate economic growth because higher political stability and sustainable development determine a decrease in levels of corruption.

At the microeconomic level, the survival of organizations may be in danger from new types of corruption and money laundering. Therefore, in order to prevent financial harm, the top businesses worldwide should respond to instances of corruption through strengthened supervisory procedures. This calls for the creation of a mechanism inside the code of conduct where correct reporting of suspected situations of corruption would have a prompt procedure to be notified of. To avoid corruption in operational procedures, national plans and policies should be developed by government officials, executives and legislators on a national level, as well as by senior management and the board of directors on an organizational level. This might lower organizations' extra corruption-related expenses, assure economic growth and improve global welfare.

A novel feature of our research resides in its broad examination of a sizable sample of European and Asian countries regarding the nexus between corruption and political stability. The paper also investigates a less explored topic in economic literature, namely the impact of political stability on corruption. Furthermore, the study depicts policy recommendations, outlining effective and reasonable measures aimed at improving the political landscape and combating corruption.

Personal influence is one of the most powerful strategies to influence publics’ behaviours. Yet, there is scant attention on how personal influence is leveraged for different public relations purposes in different cultural contexts. This study empirically investigates the presence and use of personal influence among Italian public relations professionals.

A survey was conducted through a self-administrated, web-based questionnaire and was developed from earlier studies investigating personal influence in public relations literature. Survey participants included public relations professionals across public, non-profit and private sectors.

The findings empirically show the presence and regular use of personal influence by professionals from all sectors to cultivate interpersonal relationships. Personal influence is considered a personal resource and used to leverage own influencing power. The findings also document four major manifestations of personal influence, which were named: relational closeness strategy, engagement strategy, expertise strategy and added value strategy.

This study enhances our understanding of personal influence in a specific cultural context and offers strategic insights for international professionals seeking to leverage influence in the socio-political environment of Italy. It also offers elements to improve public relations education and training.

The study offers some preliminary understandings of how Italian professionals leverage their personal influence in their daily public relations activities contributing with empirical evidence to the body of knowledge in public relations.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether and how inter-firm cooperation and firm age moderate the relationship between family ownership and productivity.

We first estimate the total factor productivity (TFP) of a large sample of Italian firms observed over the period 2010–2018 and then apply a Poisson random effects model.

TFP is, on average, higher for non-family firms (non-FFs) than for FF. Furthermore, inter-organizational cooperation and firm age mitigate the negative effect of family ownership. In detail, it is found that belonging to a network acts as a moderator in different ways according to firm age. Indeed, young FFs underperform non-FF peers, although the TFP gap decreases with age. In contrast, the benefits of a formal network are high for older FFs, suggesting that an age-related learning process is at work.

The study provides evidence that FFs can outperform non-FFs when they move away from Socio-Emotional Wealth-centered reference points and exploit knowledge flows arising from high levels of social capital. In the case of mature FFs, networking is a driver of TFP, allowing them to acquire external resources. Since FFs often do not have sufficient in-house knowledge and resources, they must be aware of the value of business cooperation. While preserving the familiar identity of small companies, networks grant FFs the competitive and scale advantages of being large.

Despite the wide but ambiguous body of research on the performance gap between FFs and non-FFs, little is known about the role of FFs’ heterogeneity. This study has proven successful in detecting age as a factor in heterogeneity, specifically to explain the network effect on the link between ownership and TFP. Based on a representative sample, the study provides a solid framework for FFs, policymakers and academic research on family-owned companies.

The purpose of this study is to introduce the concept of workplace camaraderie and to investigate the mechanism through which workplace camaraderie influences incivility at the workplace. The study is explained by taking the sequential mediation of personal biases leading to cronyism and favoritism. Social identity theory is used as the underpinning theory to explain the framework adopted.

Positivism research philosophy followed by the deductive approach is followed to meet the objectives of the current study. In total, 171 employees working in public sector organizations were taken as the respondents to the study. A purposive sampling technique was used to collect the data through self-administrated questionnaires. Path model is used through Mplus to generate the results and test hypotheses.

The results suggested that workplace camaraderie significantly affects incivility at a workplace with the sequential mediation of personal biases leading to cronyism and favoritism.

Although several researchers have studied the link between camaraderie and other employees’ related attitudinal and behavioral outcomes, few have explored the roles of personal biases, cronyism and favoritism in the relationship to incivility. This study thus posits a novel sequential mediation mechanism, based on the social identity theory, through which camaraderie is translated into civil behavior. Moreover, this study adds value by investigating this model in the public sector, where camaraderie can come up with important consequences.

During the past few years, social media has faced the challenge of maintaining its user base. Reports show that the social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter experienced a decline in their users. Taking WhatsApp's recent change of its terms of use as the case of this study and using the push-pull-mooring model and a configurational perspective, this study aims to identify pathways for switching intentions.

Data were collected from 624 WhatsApp users recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk and analyzed using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).

The findings identify seven configurations for high switching intentions and four configurations for low intentions to switch. Firm reputation and critical mass increase intention to switch, while low firm reputation and absence of attractive alternatives hinder switching.

This study extends extant literature on social media migration by identifying configurations that result in high and low switching intention among messaging applications.

The study identifies factors the technology service providers should consider to attract new users and retain existing users.

This study complements the extant literature on switching intention that explains the phenomenon based on a net-effect approach by offering an alternative view that focuses on the existence of multiple pathways to social media switching. It further advances the authors’ understanding of the relevant importance of switching factors.