Search results

Contemporary early career teacher (ECT) mentoring approaches have largely aspired to shift towards a more non-hierarchic and mutually beneficial learning partnership approach. Such mentoring can be challenging to achieve. We report on a project that sought to further understand how intellectual virtues, such as intellectual courage, open-mindedness and humility, may be mobilised to prepare ECTs and mentors for more collaborative mentoring conversations.

Using qualitative case study research design, we collected data from 31 mentors and ECTs across two states in Australia engaged in professional learning focused on developing mentors’ and ECTs’ understanding of intellectual virtues as a resource for mentoring conversations. Data were generated from online professional learning activities, a questionnaire and field notes from school site visits and thematically analysed.

ECTs and mentors reported an increased self-awareness of their dispositional strengths and limitations and heightened confidence to engage in conversations that were more equal and open. Teachers perceived the deployment of intellectual virtues for mentoring to have personal, relational and learning benefits.

Numerous mentoring studies have espoused the value of mentoring that takes a co-constructivist and deeply relational approach, yet there is limited guidance provided to teachers as to how such an approach may be achieved. This paper innovatively draws on intellectual virtues as a cognitive construct to explore this issue and makes an empirical contribution to understanding how to prepare mentors and early career teachers for non-hierarchical and relational mentoring conversations.

Municipalities have the potential to become models of the circular economy (CE). This paper aims to examine the impact of the municipal council’s characteristics on municipal CE disclosure and promotion.

This paper is based on the resource dependence and upper echelons theories. For a sample of the 100 largest cities in Canada, a mixed methodology is used to code and analyze data and test the hypotheses.

Municipal councillors’ education and experience related to the environment or sustainability are both likely to affect CE disclosure, and their sector membership (public or private) moderates the relationship between CE disclosure and councillors’ experience. This experience may be reinforced by membership in the private sector, which has applied CE principles more extensively than the public sector has. Municipal councils with a greater number of councillors from the private sector appear to perform better in matters of transparency and to disclose more CE information on their public websites.

Municipalities could use the findings to foster their transition to CE by implementing a CE-related training plan for their councillors. A CE-dedicated section on their websites could improve transparency and inform and educate residents about CE.

The public sector could learn from the private sector’s best practices regarding CE.

This paper contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence of the transparency and engagement of municipalities toward CE. The authors extend the resource dependence and upper echelons theories to a new context, that of public organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how chief executive officers’ (CEOs) narcissism impacts firm performance and how this, in turn, affects a CEO’s positive rhetorical tone.

The narcissism score is measured by using an analytical composite score for each CEO based on eight factors. The paper uses textual analysis on a sample of 848 CEO letters of US firms over the period 2010–2019. WarpPLS software, version 7.0 was used to conduct structural equation modeling through the partial least squares because a non-linear algorithm exists between CEO narcissism, firm performance and positive tone, and the values of path coefficients moved from non-significant to significant.

The results suggest that performance partially mediates the relationship between CEO narcissism and positive tone. This indicates that not all the positivity expressed by narcissistic CEOs is opportunism; some of it is indeed driven by better performance. The reported findings indicate that firm performance explains one-quarter of a CEO’s positive words, whereas some three-quarters of the positivity is driven by a narcissistic CEO (i.e. opportunism). A comparison of letters signed by highly narcissistic and less narcissistic leaders reveals that among those letters signed by highly narcissistic leaders, firm performance plays a significant mediating role between narcissistic tendencies and positive tone. However, among those with less narcissistic score, there is no evidence that performance mediates the tone and narcissism. Interestingly, both highly narcissistic and less narcissistic CEOs use positive words and optimistic expressions even when their firms perform poorly or negatively.

The results help shareholders be aware that CEOs may opportunistically use their personal characteristics and language to manipulate them. Data limitations about women CEOs were one of the reasons behind the small proportion of women CEOs in this study, making it low in generalizability.

A comprehensive review showed that none of previous studies examined the more ambiguous relationship between a CEO’s narcissist tendency, the firm’s performance, and CEO rhetorical tone. As one set of studies focused on Narcissism → Performance, and the other one on Performance → Tone, this current study completes the picture with Narcissism → Performance → Tone.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test an integrated model to examine the relationship between work engagement and three facets of perceived job performance (PJP). The authors argue that work engagement might not optimally improve PJP unless it is channelized through information and communication technology orientation.

Data for the present research were collected from higher educational institutes in the northern region of India by using a convenient sampling technique. Results of structural equation modeling (SEM) through AMOS 20 revealed that work engagement facilitates all three facets i.e. task performance, contextual performance and adaptive performance of teaching professionals. Furthermore, SEM results established the partial mediating effect of information and communication technology orientation between work engagement, task performance, contextual performance and adaptive performance.

Findings from present research contribute theoretically as well as practically to job performance and work engagement literature by giving insights to administrators and practitioners on how to improve the overall job performance of teaching professionals by enhancing their engagement and addressing their need for digital know-how.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to study the impact of work engagement and information and communication technology on the three facets of PJP using a diverse sample of 1030 teachers from universities in North India.