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This paper aims to provide an interpretative synthesis and critical reflection on the concept of “volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity” (VUCA) and its implementation in tourism and hospitality marketing activities and explain why it is useful and necessary.

This paper is based on a critical reflection research methodology which allows for a synthesis of data from the traditional narrative review and on the authors’ experiences and observations.

The volatile environments in which entities from the tourism and hospitality industry (T&HI) operate necessitate a redefinition of the rules for designing marketing activities. The VUCA concept may serve as the basis for these changes. Its implementation requires specific managerial skills enabling T&HI entities to use an agile marketing strategy. The latter should be based on a flexible and customer-centric approach.

This paper provides a VUCA framework for adapting marketing mix instruments to the rapidly changing hospitality and tourism industry. This paper also offers several useful guides for practitioners on different aspects of VUCA within the industry.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first attempts to reflect critically on the possibilities of using the VUCA concept in marketing by the T&HI and contributes to the discussion about the conditions for its implementation. This paper offers suggestions about the dynamic competencies of tourism and hospitality managers (enterprise and leader oriented), which are essential when designing marketing mix instruments in line with the VUCA concept, and indicates directions for future research.

The environment in which businesses perpetuate their vital existence can be named as VUCA due to its variable, uncertain, complex and ambiguous structure. In the world of VUCA, which is far beyond the classical environmental conditions, the success of the businesses largely depends on the performance level of the staff they employ. The high or low level can be directly affected by the leadership style which the business managers will be exhibiting. Agile leadership type emerges as one of the leadership styles that could be successful in such environmental conditions. For this reason, the main purpose of this section is to provide information about the agile leadership issues that play a fundamental role in the success of businesses in today’s VUCA world, which can positively affect the employee performance and this level of performance, and, at the same time, which could be successful in these environmental conditions. In order to achieve this aim, first of all, the concepts of agile leadership, employee performance and VUCA world are explained. In the following sections, agile leadership and the relationship of this leadership style with employee performance are discussed in the VUCA world spiral.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how companies can achieve business excellence in a highly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment. Within the literature about business excellence, there is a lack of understanding of the impact of today’s high VUCA on achieving business excellence. A new business concept, business excellence in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment (BEVUCA), will be illustrated so as to bridge this gap by considering the overall VUCA influence and the influences of each specific term individually.

The research incorporated a systematic literature review for three knowledge areas, namely: VUCA, business excellence and the management integration of quality and risk. The later knowledge area was reviewed because such diverse management thinking can help to achieve BEVUCA.

The research provided a definition for a new business concept and the systematic literature review identified 18 critical success factors so as to manage and excel under a high VUCA business environment. Finally a conceptual framework was developed for integrating quality management and risk management thinking so as to achieve BEVUCA.

BEVUCA can be used to close the current gap in the body of literature by providing a link between VUCA and business excellence, and hence advancing the discussion in these areas. Additionally, the BEVUCA conceptual framework can be used as guidance in integrating quality management and risk management to achieve the identified critical success factors.

In an article entitled “Identifying and combating organizational leadership toxicity,” authors Watt, Javidi, and Normore (Watt, Javidi, & Normore, 2015) identified and outlined techniques for combating leadership toxicity in Law Enforcement. This chapter extends this work by linking Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA) to toxic leadership. Crisis happens. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), (a term) coined at the Army War College in the early 1990s (Mack, O., Kare, A., Kramer, A., & Burgartz, T. (2015), Managing VUCA world. New York, NY. Retrieved from http://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/2015/12/02/capturing-the-moment-counter-vuca-leadership-for-21st-century-policing/#sthash.IKYJInr4.dpuf), is a sobering new reality for leaders and the organizations they serve. In simple terms, VUCA is chaos. It falls on leaders to understand it, prepare for it, and minimize the disruptive and destabilizing effects of it.

Purpose: Twenty-first-century leaders operate in an unpredictable and complex business environment. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) nature of the business milieu and proved to be a real-life test for organisations and their leaders. It brought challenges and losses at personal, organisational, societal, national, and global levels. Nevertheless, some leaders and organisations thrived during and after the pandemic. This research assimilates leadership lessons from extant literature and real-life cases of leadership successes and failures. The authors aim to consolidate leadership strategies valuable in unpredictable, demanding, and complex times like COVID-19.

Methodology: The research relies on an extant literature review and opinions of four c-suite leaders captured through semi-structured interviews. The study uses content analysis to analyse the primary data collected.

Findings: The present research presents its results as a VUCA Leader Toolkit. It consolidates learnings from real-life case studies, extant literature, business reports, and experts’ opinions. It addresses the gap in existing research on VUCA-suited leadership strategies. The outcome of the present study is a clear, adequate, explicit, and well-defined list of VUCA-necessitated leadership strategies.

Originality/value: The research proves its utility in providing the VUCA Leader Toolkit. The outcomes carry usefulness for both present and future business leaders. The business environment today is ever-changing, complex, and uncertain. This unpredictability, uncertainty, complexity, and fuzziness would proliferate in the coming times. Hence, it is imperative to have a list of leadership strategies that may serve as a ready reckoner for leaders.

This paper aims to revive the old idea of the Learning Organisation by providing a fresh conceptualisation and illustration. The New Learning Organisation is conceptualised, focussing on the common good through responsible action. It is positioned as responding to the VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity, Bennett and Lemoine, 2014) conditions with a VUCA approach to Learning Leadership fostering Institutional Reflexivity and High Agility Organising .

The paper presents a new organisational learning framework – the 8As – Sensuous Organisational Learning framework. It illustrates the operationalisation of this framework in PART II through the educational practices and learning culture of the Norwegian Defence University College, Royal Norwegian Air Force Academy’s (RNoAFA) approach to growing (Military) leaders.

The Sensuous Organisational Learning – 8As – framework illustrates how attentiveness, alertness, awareness, appreciation, anticipation, alignment, activation and agility form an integral part of the New Learning Organisation. Their unique contribution as aspect of a Sensuous Organisational Learning framework is that they explicate how the three principles of Institutional Reflexivity, High Agility Organising and Learning Leadership can be operationalised to serve the common good.

The paper presents a novel way of reviving the Learning Organisation beyond an ideology as a practical approach to responding to VUCA conditions. It introduces a new learning theory and injects a fresh perspective in our understanding of the role and impact of learning in the workplace.

By focussing on Learning Leadership practices that extend previous Organisational Learning frameworks, The New Learning Organisation promoted here focuses on responsible action to serve the common good through Institutional Reflexivity and High Agility Organising.

By focussing on how the common good can be better served, the New Learning Organisation becomes a mantra for social change to identify the higher purpose that social actions must serve.

The need for fresh contributions in the Organisational Learning debate is long overdue. This paper marks a new chapter in Organisational Learning research and practice by demonstrating the value of sensousness as a foundation for improving the practical judgements across professional practices.

The future of human society has to take into account on the one hand, the natural requirements of the society as a whole, and, on the other hand, the influences generated by economic, social, informational factors but also in relation to the environment. Therefore, the future is seen and described in relation to the need to create the conditions for achieving sustainable development goals. The unpredictable evolution and uncertainties of recent years explain the need to include in the decisions of organizations, responsibly applied approaches. In order to achieve and maintain a balance between the interests of various actors on a global scale, it is necessary to practice responsible management, which deals with both the management of current critical issues worldwide, but also in relation to the need to ensure living conditions and the prosperity of future generations. Thus, as an adequate response of companies and organizations of various types to these complex challenges is integrated as a defining element of business strategies a principle of responsible management called social responsibility. This means that, through the elaborated decisions, these companies have to find a way of treatment balanced between the fulfillment of their own financial objectives and the social obligation of the contributions of these entities to the sustainable development of the economy in which they operate. This results, in fact, in the large-scale development and implementation of the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR). On the other hand, the functioning of all companies in the realities of the present times, characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity & ambiguity (VUCA) requires significant efforts and resources on their part, so that, by collecting an important and comprehensive volume of data, there is the possibility of generating reliable forecasts.

This study aims to provide a new vision for investigating the different human resources management (HRM) practices in hotels after the COVID-19 pandemic.

A quantitative research approach was adopted using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling to reveal updated priorities and relations as stated by 504 hospitality employees.

The research approach contributed to highlighting exciting findings, as training and development (T&D) had an insignificant effect on turnover intention (IT) or affective organizational commitment (AOC) following the COVID-19 pandemic; job security (JS) had the highest impact on AOC and compensation had the highest effect on TI.

Individual HRM practices have different strong impacts on employee outcomes. This paper provides human resource directors with realistic and practical implications to boost individuals' AOC and reduces their intention to quit their job in conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity.

This pioneering study reveals the influence of HRM practices in the hospitality HRM systems regarding employee attitudes and behaviors, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides novel theoretical and practical contributions.

This chapter is an in-depth description of a change process when a company in the media industry carries out a major reorientation of its business. Its old product-oriented business model has become obsolete and it turns toward a solutions-oriented business. But that turns out to be a much more complicated process than anticipated.

The chapter provides a lively story about this process: Why did it start to begin with, what are the kinds of critical events, which are the turning points, resistance to change, tensions, how are they managed, etc.

The chapter and the story told serves as an illustration and a representative for many other similar processes.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of some pressing but under-researched aspects of public leadership. Ten propositions about public leadership are set out and these are intended to be thought-provoking and even controversial in order to stimulate researchers to design research which addresses key theoretical and practical questions about leadership in the public sphere. They will also help practitioners navigate an increasingly complex leadership context.

This invited essay uses ten propositions about public leadership, selected from three sources: the leadership literature, the author’s own research and from collaborative research discussions with academics, policy makers and practitioners.

The first proposition argues for distinguishing public leadership from public service leadership given that the former is about leadership of the public sphere. Other propositions concern context; purpose; conflict and contest at the heart of public leadership; leadership with political astuteness; dual leadership; leadership projections; fostering resilience; leadership, authority and legitimacy; and the challenge to researchers to use research designs which reflect the complexity and dynamism of public leadership.

While this essay is primarily addressed to researchers, there are many ideas and concepts which practising leaders will find insightful and useful in their work.

This essay draws on deep experience in undertaking high-quality academic research about public leadership which draws from and feeds into policy and practice. It utilises organisational psychology, public management and political science to create synergies in order to enhance the understanding of public leadership.