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Skilled workers are crucial for an organization’s success, and managing, retaining and attracting them is vital in long-term. This study aims to explore talent management practices in the Finnish restaurant industry and to align workers' expectations with the real-world experiences of their work to reduce turnover and enhance job satisfaction.

The study adopts a mixed methods approach, including a survey and interviews with workers and managers to gain insights into their expectations and experiences of work. The study considers themes for designing and implementing effective talent management procedures.

This study highlights the importance of employees' experiences of their work conditions, leveraging positive emotions and fair utilization of temporary agency work (TAW). Understanding the different work preferences of generational cohorts and addressing the challenges associated with owner disengagement and TAW can also contribute to attracting and retaining talent in the restaurant industry.

Skilled workers have often been portrayed as targets that need to be managed, with insufficient consideration given to their preferences, needs and expectations. With the findings of this study, companies can establish mutual understanding with their employees and attract diverse talent.

Talent management in higher education institutes is an underexplored topic. Only a small portion of talent management publications is focussed on describing talent management in higher education institutes. In this chapter, we give an overview of the most important topics in the talent management literature in general and link it to what is known about these issues in higher education. It discusses the definition of talent and talent management, the talent management process and the multilevel outcomes of talent management, the fairness and justice issues related to talent management and the importance of embedding the analysis of talent management in its broader organizational and institutional context. In the final part of this introduction chapter, we will explain how the talent management topics are discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book.

This final chapter of this book highlights and critically discusses some specific issues concerning talent management in the context of higher education raised in the chapters of this book. It recapitulates the transition higher education is going through. This transition started decades ago but was boosted by the movements of Open Science and Recognition and Rewards. It leads to a reorientation on the conceptualization of academic performance and subsequently also on the meaning of talent and talent management in academia. It points to a shift from an exclusive and performance orientation on talent, to an inclusive, developmental approach to talent management or a hybrid form. Yet, Thunnissen and Boselie state that there is a talent crisis in academia, and this crisis urges the need for more innovative ways of developing and implementing talent management practices. This chapter ends with some recommendations for further talent management research and practice.

Job satisfaction is essential in understanding turnover intentions. Previous studies reveal that highly educated hospitality employees generally have lower levels of job satisfaction, indicating that the antecedents of job satisfaction may be different from hospitality managers and frontline employees. This study compared the different antecedents of job satisfaction for housekeeping managers and employees.

This study used a mixed-methods approach for a two-part study. The researchers recruited housekeeping managers for the exploratory survey. The results of open-end questions helped us build a custom dictionary for the text mining of comments from Glassdoor.com. Finally, a multilinear regression of themes from housekeeping employees’ ratings on Glassdoor.com was conducted to understand the antecedents of job satisfaction for housekeeping managers and employees.

The results of the exploratory survey indicated that the housekeeping department has an urgent need for organizational support and training. The text-mining revealed organizational support impacts both managers and frontline employees, while training impacts managers more than employees. Finally, the regression analysis showed compensation, business outlook, senior management, and career opportunity impacted both groups. However, work-life balance only influenced managers.

With a large number of employees at low salaries, housekeeping departments have a higher-than-average turnover rate for lodging. This study is among the first to compare the antecedents of managers’ and frontline employees’ job satisfaction in the housekeeping department, extending Social Exchange Theory. It provides suggestions for the housekeeping department to decrease turnover intentions.

Conflict and violence are the main drivers of globally escalating humanitarian needs. Local grassroots initiatives are pivotal in distributing humanitarian supplies in the acute response phase until more established humanitarian aid organizations can enter. Nevertheless, scant research exists regarding the role of grassroots associations in providing humanitarian assistance during a military conflict. The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of grassroots associations and identify important themes for effective operations.

This paper adopts a case-study approach of three Ukrainian grassroots associations that began operating in the immediate days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The findings are based on analyzing primary sources, including interviews with Ukrainian volunteers, and are supported by secondary sources.

Grassroots associations have local contacts and a contextual understanding of population needs and can respond more rapidly and effectively than large intergovernmental agencies. Four critical themes regarding the operations of grassroots associations emerged: information management, inventory management, coordination and performance measurement. Grassroots humanitarian response operations during conflict are challenged by personal security risks, the unpredictability of unsolicited supplies, emerging volunteer roles, dynamic transportation routes and shifting demands.

Grassroots responses are central to humanitarian responses during the acute phase of a military conflict. By examining the operations of grassroots associations in the early months of the 2022 war in Ukraine, the authors provide a unique perspective on humanitarian logistics. Nonetheless, more inclusive models of humanitarian responses are needed to harness the capacities and resilience of grassroots operations in practice.

Operational risks can cause considerable, atypical disturbances and impact food supply chain (SC) resilience. Indicatively, the COVID-19 pandemic caused significant disruptions in the UK food services as nationwide stockouts led to unprecedented discrepancies between retail and home-delivery supply capacity and demand. To this effect, this study aims to examine the emergence of digital platforms as an innovative instrument for food SC resilience in severe market disruptions.

An interpretive multiple case-study approach was used to unravel how different generations of e-commerce food service providers, i.e. established and emergent, responded to the need for more resilient operations during the COVID-19 pandemic.

SC disruption management for high-impact low-frequency events requires analysing four research elements: platformisation, structural variety, process flexibility and system resource efficiency. Established e-commerce food operators use partner onboarding and local waste valorisation to enhance resilience. Instead, emergent e-commerce food providers leverage localised rapid upscaling and product personalisation.

Digital food platforms offer a highly customisable, multisided digital marketplace wherein platform members may aggregate product offerings and customers, thus sharing value throughout the network. Platform-induced disintermediation allows bidirectional flows of data and information among SC partners, ensuring compliance and safety in the food retail sector.

The study contributes to the SC configuration and resilience literature by investigating the interrelationship among platformisation, structural variety, process flexibility and system resource efficiency for safe and resilient food provision within exogenously disrupted environments.

In a rapidly shifting market, organizations seek more diverse and innovative employee development interventions. Yet, these initiatives may have limited impact without employees’ engagement. This conceptual paper aims to propose self-leadership as a value-added strategy for promoting both individual and organizational development.

The authors conducted a conceptual analysis with three case examples. The cases were purposefully selected, aiming to comprehend how the concept of self-leadership has been applied within organizations and to identify real-life examples where self-leadership has been adopted as an organizational strategy.

This study demonstrates that self-leadership plays a significant role in facilitating human resource development (HRD) initiatives. Specifically, the authors illustrate how self-leadership interventions in companies empower individuals to take charge of their development, aligning personal and organizational goals. When effectively applied, self-leadership strategies positively impact HRD practices in the areas of training and development, organization development and career development, yielding benefits for both employees and employers.

This study addresses knowledge gaps in the emerging field of self-leadership in HRD by providing three companies’ examples of how self-leadership can add value to HRD. The findings offer unique insights into the synergy between self-leadership and HRD, benefiting academics interested in this line of inquiry and HRD practitioners seeking innovative approaches to employee and organizational development.

This research aims to explore whether or how organizations adopt people analytics (PA), its value and potential socio-technical factors that can enable or hinder PA projects by disrupting and reshaping human resource management. We do this by focusing on the Italian context.

We conduct a scoping review of data collected between 2018 and 2022 via Google Alerts (GA), a content change detection and notification service that is gaining popularity in scholarly research.

Our findings suggest that the diffusion of PA applications in Italy, especially those of a descriptive nature, is growing. Most of the existing PA applications are positioned in a positive technocratic light, envisioning the value of PA for both employees and organizations. The value for the latter appears to be direct, while the value for employees is realized through organizational initiatives. The findings also suggest that while enablers can vary between PA application types, the barriers, especially technological and environmental, are generic for both descriptive and predictive/prescriptive PA applications.

Theoretically, we propose a framework for analyzing PA applications, their values, enablers and barriers. Methodologically, we present and describe in detail a novel approach, drawing on GA that can be used to study PA in specific contexts. Practically, our study serves as a helpful point of reference for managers planning or implementing PA in Italy, for benchmarking PA in Italy over time and for comparative international studies.

This paper aims at understanding how automotive firms integrate customer relationship management (CRM) tools and big data analytics (BDA) into their marketing strategies to enhance total quality management (TQM) after the coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

A qualitative methodology based on a multiple-case study was adopted, involving the collection of 18 interviews with eight leading automotive firms and other companies responsible for their marketing and CRM activities.

Results highlight that, through the adoption of CRM technology, automotive firms have developed best practices that positively impact business performance and TQM, thereby strengthening their digital culture. The challenges in the implementation of CRM and BDA are also discussed.

The study suffers from limitations related to the findings' generalizability due to the restricted number of firms operating in a single industry involved in the sample.

Findings suggest new relational approaches and opportunities for automotive companies deriving from the use of CRM and BDA under an overall customer-oriented approach.

This research analyzes how CRM and BDA improve the marketing and TQM processes in the automotive industry, which is undergoing deep transformation in the current context of digital transformation.

This study investigates the impact of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and knowledge management (KM) on firm performance (PERF), as well as the mediating role of KM in the EO–PERF (EO-PERF relationship). In particular, this study aims to explain the impact of KM on the relationship between the EO dimensions and PERF; dimensions are risk-taking (RT), innovativeness (IN) and proactiveness (PR).

This study uses structural equation modelling and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) methodologies to explore target relationships. The sample consists of 150 small furniture manufacturers operating in Poland (out of 1,480 in the population).

The study findings show that KM partially mediates the IN–PERF relationship. Furthermore, fsQCA reveals that KM accompanied by IN is a core condition that leads to PERF. Moreover, the absence of KM (accompanied by the absence of RT and IN) leads to the absence of PERF. In addition, the results show that all the variables examined (RT, IN, PR and KM) positively impact PERF.

This study explores the role of KM in the context of EO and its impact on PERF in the low-tech industry. The study uses simultaneously two methodologies that represent different approaches in the search for the expected relationships. The findings reveal that KM mediates the EO-PERF relationship.