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Businesses have a vast interaction and communication network within economic, sectoral, legal, and cyber systems. This business network shapes their relationships with other businesses which are their stakeholders. Advances and innovations in the digital world are utilized as a tool of conflict for excessive and unfair competition, market penetration, internationalization, sustainability, or having a strategic edge over rivals. Concepts popularized by the pandemic such as virtualization, virtual markets, social media, virtual advertising, and other cyber/digital factors have accelerated and intensified competition between businesses. Within this process, businesses experience intense conflicts stemming from such competition. This would impact businesses' strategies aimed at conflict in the postpandemic period. After the pandemic, businesses can implement strategies of cooperation, show of force, compromise, avoidance, and problem-solving in conflicts. Businesses can also adopt increasing performance and productivity, resolving problems as quickly as possible, developing mutual relationships with other businesses and establishing an environment of trust as principles in a conflict.

The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual frame for scholars who draws on the conflicting logics of the postpandemic university.

This feature paper is based on a systematic review of research and studies conducted in the field of higher education. It illustrates broader trends with respect to how the various elements of contemporary and conflicting challenges present themselves within higher education institutions (HEIs).

A combination of literature review and fieldwork across a broad range of scientific fields presents a potentially powerful means of reducing the gap between research and practice. For this reason, this paper sets out to provide conceptual perspectives as to contemporary and conflicting challenges in higher education.

This paper presents many descriptive results from HEIs in the western world which do not allow for making global inferences toward the entire higher education sector.

The results have a number of implications for the postpandemic university. Among them are that HEIs should not only be more open toward contemporary changes but also embrace previously excluded student populations with their purpose-driven and sustainable orientation toward life.

This paper presents a conceptual contribution to contemporary challenges in higher education as a way of refraining from one-size-fits-all approaches. It demonstrates how institutional positioning and profiling depend on conflicting logics. Consequently, each institution of higher learning needs to address these challenges in line with their strategic, economic and political settings.

The purpose of this paper is to show that histories of how past crises were managed can help us anticipate how today’s public health challenges will permanently change the workplace and at least some aspects of management practice.

This paper reviews prominent public health histories and leadership responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors interpret these accounts of past crises to anticipate the long-lasting effects of the COVID pandemic. This also can be seen as a case study of how public health crises are managed and the effects of that management.

It is likely that several changes will come to the workplace, similar to transformations that happened after past pandemics. Technologies incorporating virtuality will see adoption accelerated. Health behaviors may change, especially in certain cultures or industries. The psychological contract between employees and management may increasingly emphasize autonomy as a prized attribute, again in some cultures more than others.

In looking at past pandemics and public health crises, and the way leaders reacted, one can learn about the potential for current health- and conflict-related events to unfold and alter workplace practices and norms.

In the postpandemic era, organizations have planned a combination of on-site and virtual work to portray the “New Normal”. The authors aim to analyze the effect of virtual team (VT)-building strategies on virtual team performance and HR performance in the “New Normal” context. This study aims to explore the drivers and barriers to VT performance and its contribution to HR performance.

The study utilized the grounded theory approach. Semistructured interviews with 114 VT leaders of national and multinational companies in India were conducted and NVivo 8.0 software was used to analyze data.

VT-building strategies contribute to VT collaboration and subsequently to VT performance. It was found that VT-building strategies catalyze VT collaboration which is impacted by the drivers and barriers of VTs, affecting VT performance and HR performance.

The primary contribution of this work is the development of a framework that delivers important insights to VT leaders, talent managers, HR professionals and academicians.

This study uniquely examines the VT-building strategies and VT performance through the “New Normal” paradigm lens. This study proposes a conceptual model for VT performance and HR performance. It also provides the team-building strategies, drivers and barriers for VT performance. This work offers the roadmap to achieve VT performance and HR performance. This research also contributes to the human resource management literature by discussing the VT performance and HR performance in the “New Normal” paradigm. It provides insights to VT leaders, talent managers, HR professionals and academicians.

Applying the value creation of corporate social responsibility (CSR), this study aims to investigate the direct effect of preventive measures in the postpandemic world on Airbnb consumers’ attitudes toward the host, which may further impact their behavioral intentions. It also examined the mediating role of perceived risk and perceived motives, as well as the moderating role of message strategies and risk tolerance in this process.

A 2 (preventive measures: basic versus enhanced) × 2 (message strategies: promotional social cause message [PSC] versus partake-in-our-cause message [PIOC]) between-subjects factorial design was conducted with a sample of 476 US Airbnb consumers through an online survey. PROCESS macro was used for hypothesis testing.

Results demonstrated that enhanced preventive measures had more positive impact on Airbnb consumers’ attitudes toward the host, which was positively related to positive word of mouth and booking intention. Perceived risk and perceived motives mediated the relationship between preventive measures and attitude toward Airbnb hosts. Positive relationships between attitude toward the host and behavioral intentions were strengthened when PIOC was used than PSC. The negative relationship between preventive measures and perceived risk was enhanced when PIOC was used than PSC. Risk tolerance did not interact with messages strategy to impact the relationship between preventive measures and perceived risk.

The study uncovered the mechanisms by which consumers form their responses toward different safety information of Airbnb accommodations postpandemic and the role of message strategies in the process. It provided implications for the Airbnb platform and hosts in the postpandemic period.

The purpose of this manuscript is to highlight how gamification is transforming recruitment, retention and training to resolve employee engagement challenges in the ever-changing workplace. In collaborating with game industry experts and designers, the authors taught students team leadership skills by demonstrating how to design and play their own original cooperative strategy games. In doing so, students learn what gamification is and how it can be used to train our multigenerational workforce; how designing board games teaches team leadership skills (e.g. communication, conflict management, power, decision-making); and how to develop cooperative strategy game elements (player characters, roles and actions) that motivate engaging gameplay with successful learning outcomes.

In this paper, the authors discuss the practical implications of a three-phase semester-long experiential learning experience, where game design demonstrates to students how employees can work collaboratively together in teams. Students’ developed storylines (i.e. strategic objectives) including motivation challenges, social media communication breakdowns, sabotage, global sustainability and other real-world challenges. In Phase 1, students learn about how companies are using gamification in training high-performing teams. In Phase 2, students play a cooperative strategy game Forbidden Island with their student teams. In Phase 3, students design (and play) their original cooperative strategy game, instructions booklet and build a facilitation guide.

Approximately, 400 students developed 48 original cooperative strategy games that can be used to teach team leadership skills. These student teams designed cooperative strategy board games – in which the entire team either wins or loses based on their control of valued resources and player actions as key decision-making points. The data and feedback indicate that the learning experience helped them practically consider team interdependence in making effective decisions, and in creating creative self-efficacy, resilience and self-confidence in their own leadership voice. In this manuscript, the authors focus on providing an overview and implementation plan for our semester-long experiential learning exercise.

This experiential exercise was implemented from 2019 to 2023 in different learning modalities (face-to-face, hybrid, 100% synchronous online learning) and during challenging times (prepandemic, pandemic and postpandemic learning environments). These varying experiences provided them with a challenge to persevere and learn about their own interpersonal skills and resilience in a creative engaging way with limited resources. Students developed 26 original games during 100% synchronous remote learning due to COVID. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no other business school is working with gaming industry experts and game designers to teach team leadership to this degree during pre- and postpandemic environments.

This study aims to identify the barriers to building supply chain resilience and assess the contextual relationship between them in the Indian micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) sector for the post COVID-19 era.

Barriers to supply chain resilience were extracted from the extant literature and were evaluated using the grey sets and Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) approach from strategic, tactical and operational business perspectives. The responses from experts on the identified barriers were collected through a structured questionnaire. The prominence-net effect results obtained after the DEMATEL application helped identify the most prominent barriers, their net cause and effect, and their correlation with each other.

A total of 16 barriers to resilience, identified from the literature, were considered for analysis. The findings of the study revealed that the lack of flexibility is the most critical causal barrier to building a resilient supply chain. Lack of planned resource management was also found to be an influential barrier. The study also identified the supply chain design, need for collaboration and technological capability as important factors for the MSME sector to focus on.

The study is limited to assessing barriers to the supply chain resilience of MSMEs in India. More extensive research may be needed to reveal the global trend.

The study is significantly important for the MSMEs looking to establish resilient supply chains. Managers can use the findings to identify the weak links in the supply chain for strategic and tactical planning and can take corrective actions.

The study pinpoints the key linkages between barriers that impede MSMEs to make their supply chains resilient and robust to mitigate the impact of future disruptions and adversities. The work may be used by practitioners to further their attention on the significant challenges.

This study investigates whether prolonged durations of work from home (WFH) leads to workplace ostracism (WO), and whether such relationship is moderated by perceived organizational support (POS). The context of this research is based on the post-COVID-19 pandemic period, when most organizations have either recalled their employees back to their physical workplaces, or in other cases employees are relegated to continued WFH or to a hybrid model that combines both in-office and remote work. The importance of this study is the spotlight it brings to employees who feel ostracized from their workplace due the continued practice of WFH.

A conceptual model is developed, by leveraging the conservation of resources (COR) theory. The hypotheses are tested by using cross-sectional survey data collected from 240 employees working in various organizations in the Sultanate of Oman from both public and private sectors. The data are analyzed using R Core Team software.

The findings of the study reveal that WFH does not have any direct impact on WO. However, when POS is applied as moderator, the results indicate that at low levels of POS, the relationship between WFH and WO becomes significant, but not at moderate to high levels of POS.

This study provides insights into how the phenomenon of WFH is likely to influence perceptions of employees in terms of feeling excluded from the organization by being asked to continue to work remotely, while many of their colleagues have returned to their prepandemic workplaces. The implications of the findings are relevant to the growing literature on employee experiences in the realm of emerging work models being introduced by organizations. Among the limitations of this study is the fact that there may be missing mediators that link WFH with WO, and the possibility that such a study if replicated in other cultural contexts may yield different results.

This study presents evidence to managers on leveraging the power of organizational support to ensure that negative emotions among employees such as WO are mitigated.

This appears to be among the first studies that attempts to provide insights into employee perceptions about WO in the postpandemic period, especially with regards to the emerging work arrangements that are primarily based on WFH that are being widely adopted by many organizations around the world. The results of this study provide useful information about how WFH and POS come together to influence emotions of individuals who have been longing to get back to their normal workplace once the social distancing guidelines of the pandemic were lifted.

With the pandemic and digital developments, digital transformation has begun in Human Resources Management (HRM). Applications such as robotic applications, information technology, IIoT, Industry 4.0 have led to a decrease in the need for human resources (HR) and an increase in the need for skilled workers. Along with this need, new-collar, digital-collar, cyber-collar, and metal-collar employee types have been added to the distinction between blue-collar and white-collar. To adapt to Industry 4.0 and to survive the pandemic process, businesses have also met the digitalization process very quickly and almost unpreparedly. In this context, the HRM of the businesses has started to experience digital transformation. With the digitalization of HR processes, digital conflicts have also emerged. Conflict management problems arising from digital transformation and the pandemic process, health problems, and cyber-attacks due to remote working have become one of the most important problems of the digital age. In this chapter, the issue of digital conflicts in HRM is discussed. In this context, first of all, the concept of digital conflict is included. Then, Industry 4.0, information technology and HR, the impact of information systems on digitalization and HR, digital transformation in HRM, opportunities, and threats arising from digitalization, and HR conflict management problems in the COVID-19 pandemic, collar change of employees during the pandemic, possible problems that may arise after the pandemic, future predictions, and strategic principles are mentioned.