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The purpose of this paper is to provide an integrative review of coaching research from different contexts (e.g. athletics, executive coaching, project management and sales), delineate professional sales coaching from other developmental activities and develop a research agenda for stimulating research on professional sales coaching. Professional sales coaching is considered an important sales force developmental program by both sales practitioners and researchers. Yet, research on sales coaching remains fragmented in the extant literature.

An extensive literature review of extant research and theoretical perspectives on coaching as well as insights gathered from exploratory, in-depth interviews of ten sales managers were used to develop the research agenda.

The review and research agenda identify a number of sales coaching-related topics that warrant further research. Specifically, the research agenda addresses salesperson characteristics, sales manager and coach characteristics, selling organization characteristics, sales coaching approaches, nature and effectiveness of the sales coaching process and, finally, outcomes of sales coaching. For each topic, extant research, relevant insights from exploratory interviews and directions for future research are discussed.

This paper is the first integrative review of coaching-related research in the sales literature. It offers an updated conceptualization of sales coaching and identifies opportunities for future research.

Informal knowledge sharing interactions (IKSI) are of particular value for innovation projects. This is especially true for unplanned IKSI, because they are even more likely to provide non-redundant knowledge and new perspectives than planned IKSI. Seminal studies have shown that the formation of unplanned IKSI can be explained on the basis of spatial structures. Strictly speaking, however, these studies only explain unplanned encounters. Whether unplanned IKSI result from these unplanned encounters, though, cannot be satisfactorily explained on the basis of spatial configurations alone. The purpose of this paper is to tackle this explanatory gap by unraveling the fundamental social processes by application of the symbolic interaction theory.

For this purpose, the formation of 132 IKSI on innovation projects from three research and development departments of large companies was recorded in detail using a combination of diaries and interviews. The data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis.

The analysis reveals that IKSI cause symbolic costs (image damages), and that these costs vary between types of social situations. Because actors anticipate situation-specific costs, their propensity to initiate IKSI can be explained in terms of the situations in which they encounter one another. Furthermore, the analysis reveals six particularly relevant characteristics of situations and further elaborates the basic argument by analyzing their functioning.

The paper complements previous explanations of unplanned IKSI by opening up the social processes underlying their formation.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the currently experienced benefits and obstacles for enhancing facilties management (FM) with the currently available technological enablers.

This paper presents an integration of several studies conducted to identify the current benefits and obstacles of mobile technology as perceived by the Finnish FM professionals. The main intentions of the study were: to describe the current technological enablers for the utilisation of mobile technology at FM settings; and to interview the FM professionals on their perceived benefits and obstacles of the utilisation of the currently available technology.

The change of practice to support the exploitation of mobile technology is emergent. The findings of the empirical part include the currently feasible mobile solutions and their perceived limitations. The experiences benefits are discussed and critical success factors are nominated. The perceived benefits are mostly related to improved resource efficiency and quality control. The essential success factors and remaining obstacles are discussed.

The empirical part is limited to Finnish settings, but the observations are likely valid in several other developed countries as well.

The change of FM practice to benefit from the exploitation of mobile technology is emergent.

The paper gives experience‐based suggestions for both demand and supply sides of the service procurement to gain the feasible benefits and avoid the currently hindering obstacles, as the paper provides insight of the current and future tools for the mobile aspects of FM. The findings are relevant for the service providers and operators as well.

The purpose of this paper is to show what we have learned from the recession.

This paper indicates areas of change which need to be made. How to better manager people, particularly with a more diverse workforce, how to manage change, how to deal with uncertainty, and using the opportunity to align and engage the managers as a result.

With the heightened levels of concern amongst top business leaders, now is the time to again raise the game of talent management.

Although there is still much fire fighting going on in many businesses and we are not out of the woods yet, now is the time to start to stand back more and think strategically.

The purpose of this paper is to verify the proposition by the University of Illinois, Urbana‐Champaign (UIUC), that their return on investment (ROI) formula developed for academic libraries and based on hard facts is broad enough to be used throughout the world for ROI studies in academic institutions/libraries. It further aims to verify that UIUC's methodology is adaptable enough to work in other academic environments as well.

The methodology developed by UIUC (an ROI formula developed for academic libraries based on grant proposal applications and citations) has been “copied” and thereby adapted to enable it to be used in an academic environment in Europe/Germany.

The methodology developed by UIUC was adaptable enough to be used in a German academic environment for calculating the ROI of a University library. However, the methodology was sometimes complicated and therefore simplified for this and possible further studies. Likewise, the ROI formula was very complex and this study found that it was possible to simplify it as well for further use.

There was difficulty in gathering all the information necessary for conducting such a study in Germany as grant proposals contain sensitive data that people are unwilling to display. Further, it was noticeable that German statistics on funding were unable to provide the necessary data without further enquiries, despite the German law that public institutions are obliged to disclose funding information.

Previously no one else has tried to verify the methodology for an ROI study developed by UIUC. This study gives evidence that UIUC was right in claiming that their ROI formula developed for academic institutions/libraries may be used for any academic library in the world. Further, this study shows how the formula and the methodology may be adapted to fit individual academic environments.

Performance in virtual teams, which faces cultural and demographic differences, is a relevant phenomenon that has been widely investigated in recent decades, but with opportunities in exploring other levels of analysis as individual and project. This current research aims to understand how multicultural virtual teams affect individual, team and project performance.

The authors conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) and bibliometric analysis to capture 273 papers from the Web of Science (WoS) database using a snowball approach. In a second approach, the authors selected 130 papers to conduct a content analysis.

The authors presented a longitudinal overview regarding the adoption of virtual teams in project management (PM) literature. A conceptual framework was proposed to explore the relationship between multicultural virtual teams and performance with three levels of analysis: individual, teams and project. The authors contributed with research hypotheses to be explored in future empirical studies not only at the team perspective but also at the project and individual levels. The thematic analysis suggested that the literature focus has shifted from hard to soft aspects faced by virtual teams. Social identity/categorization theory was the most prominent theory in this body, but it is not fully explored in PM literature. Other opportunities of future studies are to understand the impact of cultural diversity, the sense of belongingness, the project life cycle and the development of a knowledge management program.

The authors developed a 3-level conceptual framework for future empirical studies and demonstrated that cultural differences are mainly approached at the national level in the literature, bringing suggestions for future empirical research.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the crisis of the business profession and the role that management education can play in renewing business management. It is argued that unless future managers demonstrate that they serve the common good in their daily practice, the legitimacy and moral standing of the business profession remain questionable.

The paper presents the Masters in International Management Program of CEMS – Global Alliance in Management Education as a pioneering example of developing reflective and responsible managers.

The future manager is defined as a reflexive practitioner who is committed to environmental sustainability, exercises social responsibility, works with sensitivity toward gender and diversity issues, harmonizes information and communications technologies with processes and organizational culture, applies holistic perspective in problem solving, cooperates with social and political actors, and is engaged in progressive entrepreneurship.

The paper shows that responsibility can be successfully integrated into a global management education curriculum.

Organizational processes that create conditions to facilitate employee innovativeness have become topical due to the constant demand for organizations to renew themselves. Research shows that human resource management (HRM) practices can been used to create such conditions, but also the important complementary role of organizational trust has been highlighted in this context. In particular, earlier studies have mostly focused on the concept of interpersonal trust. However, impersonal trust (the individual employee’s expectations about the employer organization’s capability and fairness) has recently been suggested to be an equally or even more relevant facilitator supporting the effect of HRM practices on organizational innovativeness. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The hypotheses were tested with two large-scale quantitative studies from the forestry and information and communication technology industries in Finland. Structural equation modelling (with LISREL) was used to test hypothesis.

This study shows that effective HRM practices indeed facilitate organizational innovativeness, and that this effect is partially mediated by impersonal trust in the organization. This result contributes to the existing literature and practice of HRM and the management of organizational innovativeness.

Future studies could include also interpersonal trust in order to study trust-innovativeness linkage. The study also examined this phenomenon only in Finnish context and this sets some limitations to the generalizability of the results. In addition, single respondents were used to assess all the variables used in the study. Further studies could improve on this by utilizing more objective measures of organizational innovativeness.

The results suggest that organizations should pay attention to designing HRM practices so that they facilitate the building of impersonal organizational trust. In order to improve innovativeness through organizational trust, it is crucial to develop an organization-wide HRM system, since practices that are inconsistently used can lead to unwanted or inefficient results. Strategic and managerial actions related to HRM could increase employees’ trust in the organization and subsequent conditions for providing continuously innovative solutions.

The authors add to the literature by identifying the connection of HRM practices to contributing to behavioural, process and strategic innovativeness through the mediation of impersonal trust. To the best of the researchers’ knowledge, this is one of few studies and the first systematic large sample study that examines impersonal trust and its relationship between HRM practices and different types of organizational innovativeness.

Online labour markets (OLMs) have recently become a widespread phenomenon of digital work. While the implications of OLMs on worker well-being are hotly debated, little empirical research examines the impact of such work on individuals. The highly competitive and fast-paced nature of OLMs compels workers to multitask and to perform intense technology-enabled work, which can potentially enhance technostress. This paper examines the antecedents and well-being consequences of technostress arising from work in OLMs.

The authors draw from person–environment fit theory and job characteristics theory and test a research model of the antecedents and consequences of worker technostress in OLMs. Data were gathered from 366 workers in a popular OLM through a large-scale online survey. Structural equation modelling was used to evaluate the research model.

The findings extend existing research by validating the relationships between specific OLM characteristics and strain. Contrary to previous literature, the results indicate a link between technology complexity and work overload in OLMs. Furthermore, in OLMs, feedback is positively associated with work overload and job insecurity, while strain directly influences workers' negative affective well-being and discontinuous intention.

This study contributes to technostress literature by developing and testing a research model relevant to a new form of work conducted through OLMs. The authors expand the current research on technostress by integrating job characteristics as new antecedents to technostress and demonstrating its impact on different types of subjective well-being and discontinuous intention. In addition, while examining the impact of technostressors on outcomes, the authors consider their impact at the individual level (disaggregated approach) to capture the subtlety involved in understanding technostressors' unique relationships with outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how remote working has been carried out during the first wave of the pandemic in Italian SMEs, representing at the same time an organizational challenge and an excellent opportunity for individual and organizational learning.

This paper involved 60 Italian SMEs of various sectors and 330 employees: 217 clerks (average age 42) and 113 managers (average age 48) belonging to different functional units and with a different education backgrounds. Two different questionnaires, one addressed to clerks and one to managers/executives who coordinate the remote working activity, were prepared and sent. This paper investigates the issues of perceived productivity, technological preparation, coordination, programming and control with specific attention to how the participants faced the remote working experience from the learning point of view.

Before the pandemic, Italian SMEs did not feel the necessity to adopt a structured policy on remote working. The COVID-19 emergency has forced them to consider that working remotely is possible and can produce benefits and positive results for what they learned in terms of autonomy, motivation and trust, to the detriment of physical presence, which is not as fundamental to ensure productivity.

While large, formalized and structured companies encountered modest difficulties being already technologically and culturally prepared for remote working, the big challenge was that of SMEs, who found themselves obliged to adopt it. This paper examines how Italian SMEs lived and evaluated the switch to a new work organization and turned it into an occasion for workplace learning.