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This study aims to broaden understanding of customer helping behaviour in the banking environment and provide strategic direction for much-needed further research regarding its role and management within the customer service journey.

Gift-giving literature was further explored to identify plausible characteristics of customer helping behaviour in the banking environment.

Customers’ acts of helping could be complex in nature and may involve multiple actors, including customer helpers, gatekeepers, and other members of customer helpers’ networks. Moreover, customer helpers and their helping networks may operate in both offline and online environments, in various stages of the service experiences, and ultimately in the customer journeys. Furthermore, the help customers provide to other customers could be framed by socially constructed arrangements that seem to be (1) dynamic in nature, (2) comprising of joint efforts by multiple actors, and (3) within diverse and interlinked helping environments. Accordingly, several research implications for the banking environment are identified.

Key to services in the banking environment may be the complex and synthesised helping systems among customers that evidently could affect product adoption, use, and customer loyalty of customers receiving help throughout the service experiences and customer journeys. Accordingly, guided by gift-giving literature, the current paper sets the research agenda.

A charity’s core purpose is legally mandated and delivery thereof is not a corporate social responsibility (CSR) activity which, by definition, is voluntary in nature. Any CSR activity not required by law should be “incidental” and be an outcome of a core purpose/object and not a focus of activity. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to address the lack of research into voluntary CSR activities conducted by charities so that charities might have a clearer operating platform and do not involuntarily contravene legislation.

This was an exploratory investigation using purposive sampling of senior leaders in UK charities. This study uses a case study approach to identify pragmatic areas of concern and also identify practical actions.

The conventional hierarchical ordering of Carroll’s CSR pyramid (1991) for profit-focussed organisations were found to be inconsistent with those for charitable organisations which were: ethical, legal, economic and philanthropic/voluntary/incidental.

This was an exploratory study and would benefit from further investigation.

Corporate social responsibility actions undertaken by charities need to be carefully evaluated to ensure that they comply with the core charitable purpose or are incidental.

Many employees in charities are motivated by social justice; however, they need to be cautious that they do not exceed the core purpose of the charity.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no research was identified which has addressed the fundamental issue of charities’ core purposes and the extent to which charities might legally undertake CSR activities.

This study delves into how perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness impacts consumer attitude and intention to adopt digital technologies in Ghana.

We utilized covariance-based structural equation modeling with a dataset consisting of 204 respondents to evaluate the model. The analysis was conducted using R (version 0.6–12).

The results confirm that both perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness are key predictors of the intention to adopt technology. Additionally, factors such as attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control also play a significant role in influencing adoption intent. Notably, the research indicates that perceived ease of use not only impacts peer influence among consumers, but also shapes their confidence in effectively using the technology. Furthermore, in contrast to previous studies, this investigation suggests that while perceived behavioral control impacts behavioral intent, it does not predict attitude in the Ghanaian context. The study advocates for development of user-centric technologies, promotion of digital literacy and cultivation of a digital culture.

Our use of a single country data restricts generalizability of the study. For a more comprehensive and profound understanding, we recommend a broader study across multiple sub-Saharan African countries with a mixed method or qualitative approach.

The significance of this research lies in its original contribution to the field in providing crucial insights for governments and industry players. It sheds light on factors influencing user readiness to adopt technology and makes a substantial contribution to the ongoing discussion on digital technology adoption in literature.

This paper is one of the first studies to examine specificities, including limits of mindfulness at work in an African organisational context, whilst dealing with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It specifically addresses the role of organisational and managerial support systems in restoring employee wellbeing, social connectedness and attachment to their organisations, in order to overcome the exclusion caused by the ongoing pandemic.

The study uses a qualitative research methodology that includes interviews as the main data source. The sample comprises of 20 entrepreneurs (organisational leaders) from Ghana and Nigeria.

The authors found that COVID-19-induced worries restricted the practice of mindfulness, and this was prevalent at the peak of the pandemic, particularly due to very tough economic conditions caused by reduction in salaries, and intensified by pre-existing general economic and social insecurities, and institutional voids in Africa. This aspect further resulted in lack of engagement and lack of commitment, which affected overall team performance and restricted employees’ mindfulness at work. Hence, quietness by employees even though can be linked to mindfulness was linked to larger psychological stress that they were facing. The authors also found leaders/manager’s emotional intelligence, social skills and organisational support systems to be helpful in such circumstances. However, their effectiveness varied among the cases.

This paper is one of the first studies to establish a link between the COVID-19 pandemic and mindfulness limitations. Moreover, it is a pioneering study specifically highlighting the damaging impact of COVID-19-induced concerns on leader–member exchange (LMX) and team–member exchange (TMX) relationships, particularly in the African context. It further brings in a unique discussion on the mitigating mechanisms of such COVID-19-induced concerns in organisations and highlights the roles of manager’s/leader’s emotional intelligence, social skills and supportive intervention patterns. Finally, the authors offer an in-depth assessment of the effectiveness of organisational interventions and supportive relational systems in restoring social connectedness following a social exclusion caused by COVID-19-induced worries.

This study attempts to elucidate the role of key influencers impacting the student decision-making process of enrollment for higher education in India from the lenses of Stephen Covey's theory on circles of life.

A sample of 556 students of Delhi NCR, India was selected based on a multi-staged sampling method. PLS-SEM was subsequently applied for statistical data analysis.

This quantitative finding voiced the relationships among the constructs in the proposed theoretical framework, i.e. Stephen Covey's circle of life theory. Additionally, it tinted the crucial role of “College attributes” in reconnoitering the relationship dynamics between key influencers (Circle of Influence and Circle of Concern) and student college choice (Circle of Control).

The present study incorporates only the first-year student population of undergraduate management courses in private universities from Delhi NCR, India limiting the generalization of findings substantially.

The study garners the attention of education policymakers on the cognizance of the role played by parents and cohorts in driving the student's decision-making process of college choice under the circle of influence.

This study is pioneering research disseminating a comprehensive outlook of the circle of life theory of great Stephen Covey engrained upon a compendious conceptual model which enlightens the landscape of the decision-making process of student on enrollment under the influence of key influencers.

Circular economy advocates innovations that upcycle wastes in the food supply chain to generate high added-value materials. These innovations are not only disruptive and green but also they are often initiated by startups, leading to the emergence of novel open-loop supply chains connecting actors in food and non-food sectors. While earlier research has highlighted the need to seek legitimacy for disruptive innovations to survive and grow, little is known about how these innovations occur and evolve across sectors. This paper aims to elaborate on this mechanism by exploring the function of the circular economy as a boundary object to facilitate legitimacy-seeking strategies.

An exploratory multiple-case research design is adopted and features food waste innovation projects with multi-tier supply chains consisting of a food producer, a startup and a buying firm. The study is investigated from the legitimacy and boundary object lenses.

The findings proposed a framework for the role of a boundary object in enabling legitimacy-seeking strategies for novel food waste innovations. First, the interpretative flexibility of the circular economy affords actors symbolic resources to conduct manipulation strategy to achieve cognitive legitimacy. Second, small-scale work arrangements enable creation strategy for the new supply chain to harness moral legitimacy. Finally, pragmatic legitimacy is granted via diffusion strategy enabled by scalable work arrangements.

This paper provides novel insights into the emergence of food waste innovation from a multi-tier supply chain perspective. It also highlights the key role of the boundary object in the legitimacy-seeking process.

The detrimental effects of increased workloads and high-stakes accountability that impact on teachers’ job satisfaction and wellbeing have been well documented in the international literature (Holloway et al., 2017; Perryman et al., 2011). This chapter will explore the factors which influence staff mental health and wellbeing in schools. The authors unpack issues of burnout, job satisfaction and teacher attrition. The authors consider the concept of teacher resilience by situating resilience within a socio-ecological framework. Specifically, the authors draw on Greenfield’s (2015) model of teacher resilience. The authors draw on our own research to explore the relationship between staff wellbeing and student wellbeing (Glazzard & Rose, 2020). In addition, the authors consider the specific issues related to the wellbeing of school leaders.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the roles of employee experience and top management commitment in the relationship between human resource (HR) records management culture and HR records privacy control in organisations in Ghana.

Structural equation modelling was used in analysing the data. Following the specification of the model, three main types of analyses were carried out. They were reflective measurement model analyses to test reliability and validity; formative measurement model analyses to test redundancy, collinearity, significance and relevance of the lower-order constructs; and structural model analyses to ascertain the explanatory and predictive powers of the model, significance of the hypotheses and their effect sizes.

The study confirmed that communication, privacy awareness and training and risk assessment are dimensions of HR records management culture. Concerning the hypotheses, it was established that HR records management culture is related to HR records privacy control. Also, the study showed that employee experience positively moderated the relationship HR records management culture has with HR records privacy control. However, top management commitment negatively moderated the relationship HR records management culture has with HR records privacy control.

Organisations committed to the privacy control of HR records need to ensure the retention of their employees, as the longer they stay with the organisation, the more they embody the HR records management culture which improves the privacy control of HR records. For top management commitment, it should be restricted to providing strategic direction for HR records privacy control, as the day-to-day influence of top management commitment on the HR records management culture does not improve the privacy control of HR records.

This study demonstrates that communication, privacy awareness and training and risk assessment are dimensions of HR record management culture. Also, the extent of employee experience and top management commitment required in the relationship between HR records management culture and HR records privacy control is revealed.