In this special issue, we have collected eight articles that offer new points for research on information and communications technology (ICT)-based systems. We focused on the intuitive nature of the relationship between new ICT-based systems and contemporary management, forming an integrative unit of analysis instead of focusing solely on new ICT-based systems and leaving contemporary management as a moderating or mediating factor. This special issue promoted interdisciplinary research at the intersection of new ICT-based systems and contemporary management, including cybernetics systems and knowledge management, service managing and the Internet of things, cloud and marketing management, business process re-engineering and management, knowledge management, and strategic business management, among others.

The COVID-19 has grandly shaken all organizations, creating a complex and challenging environment for managers and human resource management (HRM) practitioners, who need to find ingenious solutions to ensure the continuity of their companies and to help their employees to cope with this extraordinary crisis. Studies addressing the impact of this crisis on HRM are sparse. This paper is a general literature review, which aims at broadening the scope of management research, by exploring the impact of the COVID-19 on HRM. It identifies the main challenges and opportunities that have arisen from this new pandemic and it offers insights for managers and HRM practitioners into possible future organizational directions that might arise from these opportunities.

A management framework (like the Business Model Canvas or SWOT) is a combination of interlinked items that support a particular approach to a specific objective. Various management frameworks are widely used even though their origins, adoption, and value remain vague. Previous research tried to decipher the adoption of these management frameworks, whereas considerably less attention was devoted to the theoretical explanation of the development and value of the frameworks. This paper investigates the nature of management frameworks in particular realms using analogical reasoning between biological and social systems, and mostly draws on memetics, intersubjective reality, and the network effect. By using memetics, the explanations on the origins of well-known frameworks are complemented. Second, the paper shows the role of the network effect in the growing value of a framework until it becomes an intersubjective reality. Finally, such a framework is explained as autopoietic within a particular realm.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relative contributions of the CEO and other (non-CEO) top management team members to firm performance. Using data from ExecuComp, we analyze 2,687 CEOs and 11,501 other top management team (TMT) members, by industry, during the period 2004–2017 using variance decomposition methods. We find that other TMT member effects are important but are smaller than CEO effects. We also find that the effect of new TMT members appointed by the CEO on firm performance is larger than the effect of continuing TMT members and that this differential effect on performance increases with CEO tenure.

We examine the link between firm resources and firm innovation intensity, especially the drivers of innovation and organizational slack. We extend the organizational slack and innovation literature by examining its interplay with CEO power and industry level constraints on that power. We examine the influence of human resource slack, CEO power, and industry concentration on R&D intensity. Our study examines all publicly traded US firms over a 10-year period, giving us over 13,400 firm years to look at. Our results indicate that organizations with excess human capacity do on average show higher investments in R&D. However, we also find that in concentrated industries, where CEOs are less constrained by competitive pressure, powerful CEOs do interfere in this strategic choice and weaken the slack–innovation relationship. Even though CEO's in these situations may have sufficient slack resources, they appear inclined to reallocate such resources to purposes other than innovation.

This study investigates the effects of employees' perceived values-congruence within an organisation affect employees' beliefs about organisational change. Specifically, we investigated the effects employees' perceived values-congruence with their organisation, supervisor and colleagues had on beliefs about an organisational change implementation and tested whether these relationships were mediated by employees' felt trust and perceptions of the quality of their organisations' communication, as suggested by the literature. Data from 251 respondents who had undergone an organisational change within the last 6 months were analysed. Support was found for the influence all three types of perceived values-congruence (i.e. congruence with their organisation, supervisor and colleagues) had on change-related beliefs and strong support was found for the mediation role played by trust and the quality of communication.

This study investigates the connection between employees’ experience of time-related work stress and their job performance, with a particular focus on the mediating role of their propensity to engage in negative gossip and the moderating role of their collectivistic orientation. The results based on multisource, three-wave data from employees, their peers, and supervisors in Pakistani organizations show that an important reason that time-related work stress might diminish job performance is that employees expend significant energy discussing their negative evaluations of other organizational members with peers, possibly as a way to protect their self-esteem resources. This mediating role of gossip is also invigorated by employees’ collectivistic orientation. For organizations, this study identifies a key mechanism – informal conversations with peers about the flaws of others in the organization – by which time-related stress prevents employees from allocating sufficient energy to completing their job tasks, and it reveals that this process is more likely among collectivistic employees.

Based on the five-level model of emotions in the workplace (FLMEW), we present an analysis of emotion and mindfulness at work. The five levels of emotion are: (1) temporal variations in emotion at the within-person level of analysis, which relate to state mindfulness; (2) stable individual differences in experiencing and expressing emotions at the between-persons level, which correspond with trait mindfulness; (3) perceiving and communicating emotions in dyadic relationships at the inter-personal level, reflecting interpersonal mindfulness; (4) emotional processes and leadership at the group level, which are associated with team mindfulness; and (5) and emotional culture and climate at the organizational level, which relate to organizational mindfulness. We provide a definition of mindfulness at each level. We argue that mindfulness tends to be associated with more positive and less negative affective experience at each level. We highlight practical implications and suggest future research at each level.

Drawing on conservation of resources and signaling theories, this research aims to develop a cross-level serial mediation model of branch-level predictors of frontline employees' service performance. Specifically, we examined whether the service-oriented human resource practices bundle (SO-HRP bundle) affects frontline employees' service performance via person–environment fit (P–E fit) and work engagement. Based on a sample of 327 employees and their supervisors across 70 branches of two service corporations in Taiwan, it was found, first, that the SO-HRP bundle and work engagement have a significant positive relationship; second, that person–organization fit and person–job fit was each positively linked with work engagement; and finally, that the SO-HRP bundle sequentially formed a positive link with frontline employee service performance through P–E fit and work engagement. The findings shine new light on the cross-level serial mediation processes whereby employee service performance is enhanced owing to the SO-HRP bundle.

Business process management (BPM) has been the main driver behind company optimization and operational efficiency. However, the digitization era we live in necessitates that organizations be agile and adaptable. Delivering unprecedented rates of automation-fueled agility is necessary to be a part of this digital revolution. On the other hand, BPM automation cannot be done only by concentrating on procedure space and traditional planning methodologies. With the introduction of BPM, where the deployment of BPM with cloud computing has undergone enormous development lately, cloud computing has been considered a particularly active topic of study. Cloud computing points to the provision of dependable computing environments based on improved infrastructure availability and service quality without imposing a significant cost load. This research aims to discover the relationship between technical factors, financial factors, environmental factors, security of the cloud-based information systems, and the agile development of industrial BPM (IBPM). The present study aims to fill this gap and show how partial least squares structural equation modeling (SEM) can be employed in this field. Importance–performance map analysis (IPMA) evaluated the importance and performance of factors in the SEM. IPMA enables the identification of factors with relatively low performance but relatively high importance in shaping dependent variables. The empirical findings showed that four key factors (technical, financial, environmental, and security) positively influence the agile development of IBPM.

Previous corporate governance research has paid little attention to the role of chief executive officer (CEO) labor markets in controlling CEO behaviors because the CEO labor market has been considered inefficient. With the increasing mobility of top executives across firms, however, the potential of CEO labor markets to serve as an external disciplining force has been growing. In this study, we argue that CEOs will be more pressured to engage in desirable behaviors as the CEO labor market becomes more efficient. Using a longitudinal sample of S&P 1500 firms in high-technology industries in United States from 2011 to 2019, we found that CEOs tend to increase R&D investment as CEO labor market supply increases. We also found that the tendency is greater when external CEO succession is more frequent in the market. Our results demonstrate that CEO labor markets have the potential to function as an effective external governance mechanism.

Flexible work practices (FWPs) give employees some control over when and where they work. Using boundary theory and role balance theory, this study proposes and tests a mediation model focusing on how the relationships between FWPs usage and employee outcomes (i.e., wellbeing and turnover intention) are mediated by work−life balance (WLB). It also tests the moderating role of employee age on the relationship between WLB and employee outcomes using socioemotional selectivity theory. The model was tested using survey data from 293 employees of an Australian for-profit organization. The findings indicate that FWPs usage is positively associated with WLB, WLB is positively associated with wellbeing and negatively with turnover intentions, and WLB partially mediates the relationships between FWPs usage and employee outcomes. The results provide partial support that employee age moderates the relationship between WLB and turnover intentions. Theoretical, research and practical contributions are discussed.

Investigations illustrate that the Internet of Things (IoT) can save costs, increase efficiency, improve quality, and provide data-driven preventative maintenance services. Intelligent sensors, dependable connectivity, and complete integration are essential for gathering real-time information. IoT develops home appliances for improved customer satisfaction, personalization, and enhanced big data analytics as a crucial Industry 4.0 enabler. Because the product design process is an important part of controlling manufacturing, there are constant attempts to improve and minimize product design time. Utilizing a hybrid algorithm, this research provides a novel method to schedule design products in production management systems to optimize energy usage and design time (combined particle optimization algorithm and shuffled frog leaping algorithm). The issue with particle optimization algorithms is that they might become stuck in local optimization and take a long time to converge to global optimization. The strength of the combined frog leaping algorithm local searching has been exploited to solve these difficulties. The MATLAB programming tool is used to simulate the suggested technique. The simulation findings were examined from three perspectives: energy usage, manufacturing time, and product design time. According to the findings, the recommended strategy performed better in minimizing energy use and product design time. These findings also suggest that the proposed strategy has a higher degree of convergence when discovering optimal solutions.

In the diversity arena, women and their heterogeneity as visible ethnic minority migrants at work are under researched. Our qualitative empirical research reveals, and compares, how visible ethnic women migrants (VEWM) experience their journey to professional success in Iceland and New Zealand. These island nations rank in the top six of the Global Gender Gap Index, have women Prime Ministers, and increasing demographic diversity. The findings reveal that for VEWM success is a continuous journey with many different challenges. VEWM reject the notion of success as accumulation of things or titles, emphasizing instead how success is experienced. For VEWM in Iceland, success means independent hard work and aligning with other women. VEWM in New Zealand experience success through religion and giving back to the community. These differences are explored and theorized, contributing to an expanding literature of migrant complexities, beyond monolithic representations of gender at work.

The current research examines the combined role of proactive personality and political skill in job crafting and work engagement by integrating the job demands-resources (JD-R) model and trait activation theory. Self-reported survey responses collected from three samples – university students (study 1, N = 363) and panel data (study 2, N = 300 and study 3, N = 206) – were analyzed using the PROCESS macro. Results revealed that political skill strengthened the relationship between proactive personality and work engagement and between proactive personality and job crafting when trait activated. Furthermore, perceived supervisor support did not interact with the job crafting–work engagement relationship with trait activation, suggesting that proactive individuals rely on self-resources to improve engagement when presented with trait-relevant situational cues. The findings extend JD-R theory to offer the interplay of proactive trait and political skill in facilitating overall job crating. JD-R is identified as a contextual condition for trait activation.

This paper examines the role of core self-evaluations (CSEs) in the relationships among emotional demands, emotional dissonance, and depersonalization. Data were collected from a non-random sample of 423 teachers who worked in primary, secondary, and higher education institutions. Results from structural equation modeling analysis showed that CSEs displayed both direct and indirect effects on depersonalization through employees' perceptions and reactions to emotional labor. Specifically, those individuals with more positive CSEs tended to perceive the emotional aspects of their job as less demanding, thus being less likely to experience emotional dissonance and, in turn, depersonalization. This research demonstrated that CSEs play a vital role in explaining employees' reactions to emotional labor and, therefore, their effects should be properly accounted for in future studies. Implications for practice and future lines of research are discussed in this paper.

We revisit predictions about the relationship between gender diversity and firm productivity using data on 1,082 manufacturing firms from six Sub-Saharan African countries: Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Kenya. Recent evidence suggests that a gender-diverse workforce opens up a firm to a vast range of talent, knowledge and perspectives critical to enhancing innovation and problem solving, and thereby, increasing firm productivity. Given the importance of manufacturing for employment and structural transformation in Africa, we test the gender diversity–productivity proposition by exploring structural differences (heterogeneity) across manufacturing firms using the Industry without Smokestacks (IWOSS) classification. We find that while gender diversity promotes firm productivity at lower levels, this effect is displaced with further increases. Our results did not show that IWOSS firms do any better in promoting the diversity–productivity link. Implications of this finding and areas for future studies are also discussed.

Informed by social resources theory, we provide an explanation for how political skill enables employees' access to social resources, notably expressive network resources and developmental feedback granted by supervisors, thereby enhancing their potential for career growth. Employees can further leverage the attained resources to maximize their chances for career growth by exercising ingratiation toward their supervisors. Data from 399 independently matched subordinate-supervisor dyads in Japan partially support our predictions. While supervisor-focused expressive network resources and supervisor developmental feedback account for mediating mechanisms through which political skill could predict career growth potential, the use of ingratiation to further leverage these social resources is rather deemed insignificant. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.