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Effective and flexible organizational models have become an avenue for driving smallholder competitiveness in the agricultural sector. However, little is understood about the processes by which resource-constrained actors deploy their organizational networks to generate and retain value in rapidly changing agrifood environments. This study examines the moderating effects of business contingencies on the interplay between organizational relationships and the resource-based performance of small-scale farmers in a developing country.

The authors propose a novel conceptual framework grounded in the relational view, netchain and contingency theories. Cross-sectional data obtained from 330 maize farmers in rural Zambia were analyzed using variance-based structural equation modeling, which involves mediation-moderation analysis.

The results show that all relational networks – vertical, horizontal and lateral – positively mediate the effects farm resources and social capital have on farmers' performance. However, these effects change depending on the predominant agency situations. Specifically, asymmetric power from customers and reputable competitors weakens the positive effect of closer horizontal relationships on business performance, while the positive effect of tighter informal vertical relationships on farmers' performance weakens under conditions of high affective trust. Moreover, the gender-based multigroup analyses highlight variations in the contingent relational view of men- and women-headed households.

The study relies on cross-sectional data from one agribusiness sector in Zambia, thus generalizations should be cautious.

The uniqueness of this study lies in the proposed theoretical framework and new empirical insights, which extend the scope of the relational view to small-scale farming households in developing countries.

This paper studies the Digital Service Innovation (DSI) concept by systematically reviewing earlier studies from various scholarly communities. This study aims to recognize how recent advances in DSI literature from different research streams complement and can be incorporated into the growing digital servitization literature to define better and understand DSI.

After systematically identifying 123 relevant articles, this study employed complementary methods, such as author bibliographic coupling, linguistic text mining/textual analysis and qualitative content analyses.

This paper first maps the intellectual structure and boundaries of the DSI-related communities and qualitatively assesses their characteristics. These communities are (1) Innovation for digital servitization, (2) Service innovation in the digital age and (3) Adoption of novel e-services enabled by information system development. Next, the composition of the DSI concept is examined and depicted to comprehend the notion's critical dimensions. The findings discuss the range of theories and methods in the existing research, including antecedents, processes and outcomes of DSI.

This study reviews, extends the understanding of origins and critically evaluates DSI-related research. Moreover, the paper redefines and clarifies the structure and boundaries of the DSI-concept. In doing so, it elaborates on the substance of DSI and identifies the essential themes for its understanding and conceptualization. Thus, the study helps the future development of the concept and allows knowledge accumulation by bridging adjacent research communities. It helps researchers and managers navigate the foggy emerging research landscape.

This study aims to examine how leadership identity manifests at the individual and collective levels within a relational training context among a group of multicultural higher education students.

This is a case study and examines the interactions among eight multicultural students through the theoretical lens of leadership identity development (LID) theory.

The main findings of this study suggest that LID manifests through an open will and intensifying motivation to the collective impulse of achieving shared goals through nurturing the collective cognition to integrate diverse perspectives and a broadening view of leadership as a collective capacity for co-creation and generativity.

Although the paper builds on a case study with a limited number of participants and the ability to generalise its findings is partial, the study may provide practical applications for training leadership in other collaborative contexts and supporting it at the individual and collective levels.

The LID theory and LID model have been applied simultaneously to a training lab to examine how LID manifests among a multicultural group of higher education students. The lab emphasises a participatory leadership-oriented pedagogy.

This paper reviews what has been written on leadership development from the leadership-as-practice (L-A-P) perspective, which views leadership as emerging in everyday activities and interactions of a collective in a specific context. This paper aims to deepen the theoretical understanding of how leadership can be learned and developed from the L-A-P perspective.

An integrative literature review was undertaken to review and synthesise what has been written on the topic in journal articles and scholarly books.

The importance of the context and the practices that are embedded in it is the most central aspect affecting leadership development from the L-A-P perspective. This places workplace leadership development centre stage, but several papers also showed that leadership programmes have an important role. Not only collective capacity building is emphasised in the papers, but the importance of individual-level leader development is also recognised.

The contribution of this study is twofold: First, it brings the currently fractured information on L-A-P development together to enhance theory building by providing a synthesis of the literature. Second, a conceptual framework is constructed to show how the L-A-P perspective on leadership development can take both leadership development at the collective and individual levels into account, as well as the learning that takes place either inside or outside the workplace. This study’s results and framework show that the development has its own specific purpose and suggested methods in both levels, in both learning sites.

Leaders are role models and through social influence processes, they shape the behaviour of their followers. We build on social learning, social identity and person-environment (P-E) fit theories of leadership to explore the association between leaders’ and followers’ resilient behaviours.

In a three-wave, multisource study amongst 269 Dutch leaders and their followers, we investigate the mediating role of coaching in the relationship between leaders’ resilient behaviour and followers’ resilient behaviour and the moderating role of regulatory focus in this mediation path.

Our results show that coaching is a key relational vehicle through which leaders’ resilient behaviours shape employees’ resilient behaviours, and this indirect association is stronger for employees scoring low on promotion focus. In addition, our results show that resilient employees attract more coaching from their leaders, which further strengthens their resilient behaviours.

Existing studies have shown the occurrence of trickle-down effects of various leader behaviours, moods and work states on those of their followers. However, it remained obscure whether leaders’ resilient behaviour could trickle down to followers’ as well. Our study shows that such a link indeed exists and that coaching is a relational vehicle that embodies two key mechanisms to (1) foster social learning through behavioural entrainment and contagion and (2) facilitate support provision through which leaders promote resilient behaviour in their followers.

This article focuses on the leadership development of young adults. The topic is of significant importance as leadership identity tends to form early in life, and its long-term implications contribute to leadership formation. The objective of this study was to gain insights into how leadership is constructed in young adults and how it is manifested in their preferred leadership identity.

This research was approached from a constructivist perspective, utilizing discourse analysis. The authors conducted a study involving 24 written essays by young individuals with a business background, in which they shared their early leadership experiences. Drawing upon a modified life story interview structure, the authors meticulously analyzed the content.

The authors identified eight discourses clustered into two groups according to the types of leadership orientation: toward oneself and toward others. The discourses in the toward oneself group consist of leadership as taking responsibility, leadership as courage, manifesting personal strengths and as a role/status. The toward others group includes discourses approaching leadership as balancing directivity, coordinating and organizing work, personalized approach and as performance management.

The major methodological limitations stem from the qualitative design per se. The findings based on qualitative data have limits in generalizing.

The authors' findings have practical implications for educators. The authors propose the utilization of critical self-reflection on early leadership experiences and self-narration as effective tools in nurturing and developing young leaders.

This paper underscores the importance of educating young leaders, as they can create a positive impact on their subordinates and society as a whole. By providing them with leadership skills, the authors initiate a chain reaction of influence that extends through different levels of leadership, leading to significant social change.

The authors' originality and contribution to the literature on leadership development lies in showcasing the diversity of perspectives on leadership among participants sharing a similar background and developmental stage. This holds valuable implications for educators working with this cohort.

The impact of frontline robots (FLRs) on customer orientation perceptions remains unclear. This is remarkable because customers may associate FLRs with standardization and cost-cutting, such that they may not fit firms that aim to be customer oriented.

In four experiments, data are collected from customers interacting with frontline employees (FLEs) and FLRs in different settings.

FLEs are perceived as more customer-oriented than FLRs due to higher competence and warmth evaluations. A relational interaction style attenuates the difference in perceived competence between FLRs and FLEs. These agents are also perceived as more similar in competence and warmth when FLRs participate in the customer journey's information and negotiation stages. Switching from FLE to FLR in the journey harms FLR evaluations.

The authors recommend firms to place FLRs only in the negotiation stage or in both the information and negotiation stages of the customer journey. Still then customers should not transition from employees to robots (vice versa does no harm). Firms should ensure that FLRs utilize a relational style when interacting with customers for optimal effects.

The authors bridge the FLR and sales/marketing literature by drawing on social cognition theory. The authors also identify the product categories for which customers are willing to negotiate with an FLR. Broadly speaking, this study’s findings underline that customers perceive robots as having agency (i.e. the mental capacity for acting with intentionality) and, just as humans, can be customer-oriented.

This study investigates how asset specificity, relational governance and firm adaptability relate with supply chain integration (SCI), considering selected food processing firms (FPFs) in Uganda.

This study applies a quantitative research methodology. This research draws on a sample of 103 FPFs that have been selected from a population of 345 FPFs located in Kampala district. Hypothesis testing was done using Smart PLS version 3.

Asset specificity has a significant positive relationship with SCI, and firm adaptability partially mediates this relationship. Also, there is a full mediation impact of firm adaptability on the relationship between relational governance and SCI.

This study focused on perceptual measures to get responses from managers on the level of integration with key suppliers and customers, yet firms deal with a number of suppliers and customers.

This study contributes to existing literature on SCI by applying the transaction cost theory. The study focuses on the influence of asset specificity, relational governance and firm adaptability on SCI in the food processing sector. Literature on relational governance in supply chain using the transaction cost theory remains scanty. Few studies have also focused on firm adaptability as a mediator in the FPS with specific focus on Uganda, yet the sector is highly faced with uncertain events. The uncertain events in the sector and in developing countries call for adaptive strategies. Additionally, this study is the first to use firm adaptability to mediate the influence of asset specificity and relational governance on SCI more so in a developing country like Uganda where the FPS is one of the most important in the economy.

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.

As a consequence of global changes, the landscape of immigration is changing. This brings opportunities for researching more nuanced aspects related to immigrant entrepreneurship in new contexts. The purpose of this paper is to establish the extent to which Africa-to-African immigrants leverage their social capital and human capital towards improving the success of their entrepreneurial ventures.

First-generation immigrant entrepreneurs within the Johannesburg area in South Africa were surveyed (n = 230). Instrument validity and reliability was first established, and then the hypotheses were tested using multiple regression analyses.

Hypotheses are supported insofar African immigrant entrepreneurs in South Africa rely on their structural and resource-related dimensions of social capital to achieve entrepreneurial success. Furthermore, human capital in terms of both work experience and entrepreneurial experience was found to be a significant predictor of entrepreneurial success.

There is value in developing policies that promote African immigrant entrepreneurs with higher levels of human and social capital. These African immigrants have the potential to increase the national skills base and knowledge required for successful entrepreneurship development in South Africa.

While both human capital and social capital have been associated significantly with the generic entrepreneurship literature, this paper provides an empirical contribution by focusing on the relevance of these constructs in the context of immigrant entrepreneurship from an African emerging market perspective.