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The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of stakeholder integration and project complexity on information technology (IT) projects in Kenya. The following research question guided our inquiry: what is the influence of project complexity and stakeholder integration on the performance of IT projects in Kenya?

To advance the current understanding of the effect of stakeholder integration and project complexity on IT projects, multiple regressions were used to predict how project complexity and stakeholder integration influence project performance. Both government-funded and privately funded IT projects from a developing country were examined.

The study found that any project’s complexity and stakeholder integration levels offer a distinctive contribution to its success. Theoretically, the study contributes to linkages between stakeholder integration and project complexity concerning IT project performance. Through the adoption of actionable research and theoretical elaboration, we have shown that the successful execution of IT projects is driven by the successful integration of stakeholders and monitoring the level of complexity at each phase of the project.

The findings of this study add to the burgeoning literature on the performance of IT projects and come with several managerial implications as well. It brings to the fore the concept of stakeholder integration as an essential element of project success. The findings suggest that the inclusion of stakeholder integration into corporate decisions, strategies and policies can be an asset to the production of sustainable competitive advantages needed during the implementation of IT projects in government entities and organisations. As shown in this study, all the above require a collaborative platform allowing for data sharing among diverse stakeholders to ameliorate distrust or lack of information.

Through a feminist lens, the study explores women’s experiences of entrepreneurial leadership in the UK and how the women manage competing and contrary patriarchal and individualism discourses and associated discursive paradox.

This study follows social constructionism and Feminist Standpoint Research approach, providing space for women to voice and contextualise lived experiences from multiple standpoints. The study comprises five cases of women entrepreneurs in IT, law, construction, beauty and childcare, using a two-stage semi-structured interview process analysed through discourse analysis.

This study provides new insights into the entrenched patriarchal socio-cultural context for women entrepreneurial leaders in the UK. The competing discourses provoke a discursive paradox, which dominates and oppresses women. This is managed through a process of discursive blending, blurring and merging contrary discursive expectations. The women use the individualism discourse to obscure patriarchy’s domination and as a resource to resist patriarchal gender power relations. To blend the discourses, the women use particular tactics: engaging in patriarchal bargains, such as “dressing not to impress”; can sidestep and manoeuvre these bargains and can utilise “patriarchal advantages”, turning gender oppression into benefits by “working it positively”.

This study addresses the lack of research interrogating patriarchy in the Global North and the absence of understandings of how women entrepreneurial leaders manage the competing and contrary discourses of patriarchy and individualism, which actively shape their experiences. The study illuminates the significance and increasing requirement for feminism to disrupt the ever-increasing power of patriarchy in entrepreneurship.

Effective safety communication facilitates the sharing of relevant knowledge that helps to improve safety behaviours, such as superior hazard identification and compliance. This study aims to explore channels by which construction companies can effectively communicate health and safety (H&S) among communities of their operations.

Based on a quantitative research approach, this study addressed the knowledge gap through a cross-sectional survey of 250 contractors (comprising 155 building and 95 road contractors) involved in various projects in the Ghanaian construction industry. These contractors were selected by using a stratified simple random sampling technique. Data obtained from the survey was analysed through descriptive (i.e. frequencies, mean and standard deviation) and inferential (i.e. exploratory factor analysis) statistical analyses.

The findings from the mean scores revealed that all the 12 communication channels identified in the literature, confirmed through piloting and examined by the respondents, were important channels through which construction companies can effectively communicate H&S amongst communities of their operations. The exploratory factor analysis revealed a clustering of the 12 channels of communication into 5 components: “safety demonstration in the community”; “social media”; “mass media”; “community engagement”; and “opinion leaders”.

This study offers construction project managers the means of managing one of the major stakeholders of a construction project (the community). It provides an actionable opportunity that can be leveraged strategically to integrate community members into projects to promote synergy and local content inclusion while gaining a peaceful atmosphere to achieve their project goals.

Practically, this study provides construction project managers with a means of managing one of the major stakeholders of a construction project (the community) and also demonstrates the integration of community members into projects to promote synergy and local content inclusion. This would give construction organisations a peaceful atmosphere to accomplish their project objectives.

The social implication of this study is that the study offers society a means of creating safer Ghanaian communities by offering them the knowledge of identifying hazards and avoiding risky behaviours, creating a good safety atmosphere in these communities.

This study presents construction organisations with a unique opportunity to transfer and share novel external knowledge within a different social system (the community). It contributes to the state-of-the-art knowledge in H&S communication by providing channels through which H&S can be communicated in a developing country such as Ghana.

This study uses a job-demand resource perspective to test a conceptual model in which psychological contract breach has a negative relation with job performance (adaptivity and proficiency) through perceived job insecurity. Further, it has also been proposed that higher levels of role conflict will strengthen the impact of psychological contract breaches on job performance through job insecurity.

Two-wave data were collected from 449 working adults from the retail sector with managerial occupations in Chile. The moderated mediation models were tested through SPSS macro (developed by Preacher and Hayes, 2004).

The findings supported the hypotheses; first, psychological contract breach negatively influences job performance through job insecurity; and second, role conflict moderates the indirect relationship in a way that lower levels of role conflict buffer the relationship between psychological contract breach and job performance through job insecurity (versus higher levels of role conflict).

This study has practical and theoretical implications. On the one hand, it establishes how and when psychological contract breaches might harm individual job performance. On the other hand, it can be a guide to managers and employees who can find evidence about how harmful a breach of employees’ psychological contract can be.

The literature on copycat packaging has developed intermittently over a 30-year period, resulting in a divergent and fragmented body of knowledge. This paper aims to synthesise the extant literature to highlight the main developments in the marketing, legal and design fields and, in doing so, contributes to a holistic understanding of the research area and suggests directions for future research.

A systematic literature search retrieved 5,862 articles, and after filtering against explicit criteria, 49 studies were reviewed. These articles were subsequently evaluated and interpreted, producing a synthesis of current research.

The constructs of copycat packaging, including similarity-related concepts, consequences of copycat packaging and mitigating approaches, have been reported across three disciplines of marketing, legal and design, each having its own distinct focus but nonetheless sharing overlapping themes.

This review discusses future directions and proposes a framework of research themes relating to brand enhancement for online purchasing, measurement of brand confusion, reinforcing design features and approaches to mitigating copycat practices.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first systematic review of the literature on copycat packaging. It brings together the latest thinking on copycat packaging and identifies distinct research issues to be addressed in future studies.

This paper aims to understand how immigrant entrepreneurs use digital opportunities to overcome the liability of newness and foreignness and how an immigrant's ethnicity can be digitally performed as an asset in business.

The study adopts an inductive multiple case study approach using social media content. The data consist of over 3,500 posts, images and screenshots from Facebook, Instagram and the webpages of seven successful Vietnamese restaurants in Sweden. Grounded content analysis was conducted using NVivo.

The findings suggest that digitalising ethnic artifacts can mediate and facilitate three digital performances that together can turn ethnicity from a liability to an asset: (i) preserving performance through digital ethnicising, (ii) embracing performance through digital generativitising and (iii) appropriating performance through digital fusionising. The results support the introduction of a conceptual framework depicting the interwoven duality of horizontal and vertical boundary blurring, in which the former takes place between the offline and online spaces of immigrant businesses, and the latter occurs between the home and host country attachment of the immigrant businesses.

This study responds to calls for understanding how immigrant entrepreneurs can overcome the liability of foreignness. It offers a fresh look at ethnicity, which has been seen in a negative light in the field of immigrant entrepreneurship. This study illuminates that ethnicity can be used as a resource in immigrant entrepreneurship, specifically through the use of digital artifacts and digital platforms.

The economic, financial and social crisis has heightened researchers' interest in the importance of organizational sustainability and resources (e.g. work engagement and psychological capital) for performance. Despite some studies demonstrating the significance of resources, such as work engagement and psychological capital, for workers’ performance, there is limited knowledge regarding the role of organizational sustainability practices (OSP) in the relationship mentioned above. Therefore, this study drew upon the social identity theory to conceptualize and test the mediating role of work engagement in the relationship between OSP and performance (both task and adaptive). Based on the conservation of resources theory, it was hypothesized that a worker's resource – psychological capital – would moderate the indirect relationship between social responsibility practices and performance (both task and adaptive).

To test the proposed model, 304 adults participated in a two-wave study.

The results supported the hypotheses, revealing that OSP had a positive and significant relationship with task and adaptive performance, occurring through work engagement. Furthermore, the indirect relationship between OSP and performance task and adaptive through work engagement was moderated by psychological capital, such that the relationship became stronger for workers with lower levels of psychological capital.

The relevance of this research lies in its ability to identify the conditions and mechanisms in which corporate social responsibility initiatives are most effective, thereby enabling a more nuanced application of these practices across different sectors and organizational cultures. This study's theoretical and practical implications may assist organizations in devising strategies for implementing social responsibility practices to enhance their outcomes.

The study aims to explore the impact of National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) enrolment on farm investments in a developing country setting. We classify farm investments into (1) soil and land investments and (2) hired adult labour.

This study used data on 5,883 farm households from the sixth round of the Ghana Living Standard Surveys (GLSS), which is nationally represented data at the household level. The data also includes a Labour Force Survey module. The sample frame was divided into a primary and secondary sampling unit, with interviews taking place in 1,200 enumeration areas (EAs). The estimation of impacts was carried out using ordinary least squares (OLS) estimations and addressed endogeneity concerns using propensity score matching (PSM) and instrumental variable (IV) estimators.

The study finds a strong positive association between the NHIS enrolment status of farm households and investments in agricultural land and soil health improvement. Precisely, farm households who are enroled in the health insurance system tend to invest about 32% more in soil and land improvement activities and 30% more in hired farm labour than households who are not enroled in NHIS.

The overall evidence from our study suggests that instead of high investments in fertilizer and other input subsidy programmes in Africa, sustainable smallholder agricultural investments can be achieved if concerns and issues of farmers’ health coverage are adequately addressed.

This is one of the first papers that have explored the impact of NHIS in developing countries on farm investments.

This study aims to assess the effects of risk perception and management subject satisfaction on consumers' online meal food safety self-protection behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study uses 742 questionnaires collected via a two-stage online survey conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, between December 2021 and January 2022. The entropy method, descriptive statistics, ordered logit model, stepwise regression models, interaction terms and decentralization method were used in the quantitative analysis. Respondents’ written responses to self-protection behavior were categorized into five groups.

Less than half of consumers were aware that online food products carry the risk of SARS-COV-2 (44.48%). Between 30 and 40% of consumers took insufficient or no self-protection measures. Risk perception significantly and positively affected self-protection behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. Consumers' management subject satisfaction has a positive moderating effect on risk perception, with the moderating effect of the satisfaction of online retailers being significant at the 5% level. Risk perception significantly and positively influences consumer self-protection behavior in provinces not affected by the pandemic.

The findings stress the benefits of synergistic interventions by consumers and management subject to food safety measures and the inclusion of tailored interventions during events threatening public health to effectively address food safety. The study offers valuable insights contributing to the improvement of public health outcomes, customer trust and service quality within the online food delivery industry.

The construction industry is an industry which has gained notoriety when it comes to both physical and mental health problems. Compared to other industries, the construction sector has a higher prevalence of many stressors and mental health concerns. This calls for mechanisms to cope with these concerns. One coping mechanism propounded to help cope and adapt in the face of pressures and challenges is “Mental Toughness (MT)”. While mental toughness has been widely studied in various fields, there is a paucity of comprehensive research examining its significance among construction professionals. Thus, the motivation of this study is to establish the mental toughness characteristics among construction professionals in Ghana.

The construction industry is an industry which has gained notoriety when it comes to both physical and mental health problems. Compared to other industries, the construction sector has a higher prevalence of mental health concerns. One coping mechanism propounded to help cope and adapt in the face of pressures and challenges is “Mental Toughness (MT)”. While mental toughness has been widely studied in various fields, there is a paucity of comprehensive research examining its significance among construction professionals. Thus, the motivation of this study is to establish the mental toughness characteristics among construction professionals.

the study's findings revealed 13-factor model characteristics of mental toughness with 43 variables for mentally tough performers in the construction environment. These 13-factor models include Pressure Management (PM), Motivation (M), Emotional Intelligence (EI), Interpersonal self-belief (SB), Tough Attitude (TA), Job-related self-belief (SBB), Ethical Values (EV), Commitment (C), Focus (F), Optimism (OP), Expertise and Competence (EC), Imagery Control (IC) and Resilient (R).

The outcome of this study has significant practical implications for various stakeholders. For construction professionals the identified factors provide valuable insights into the psychological attributes and behaviours that contribute to mental toughness among construction professionals. Understanding these characteristics can empower professionals to develop strategies for coping with stress, maintaining focus, and fostering resilience in challenging construction environments to achieve optimum performance levels consistently.

The originality of this study's findings stems from the fact that it is among the first to provide greater insight into mental toughness characteristics considered by professionals (quantity surveyors, construction managers, engineers, project managers, architects, estate managers) in the construction industry.