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In this paper, the authors will examine Welch's legacy and aftermaths, both for GE and more broadly within management practice and academic thought. As a complex character, indeed a person of many contradictions, the authors try to avoid polemics in this, instead focusing on his accomplishments and the unanswered questions about his impact.

This paper is a historical case using secondary and published materials to assess the case of Jack Welch's leadership of General Electric over the period 1981–2001.

Welch's proponents suggest he emphasized controlling corporate destiny, being open to new ideas, pursuing quality and low cost, having confidence, a vision founded on reality, a global focus and possessing energy and enthusiasm. However, his short-termist perspective undermined the long-term success of the company and his “win at any cost” mantra predisposed some employees to cutting ethical or environmental corners. As the market capitalization gains evaporated that had been used to justify the “end justifies the means” rationale, little is left of his legacy.

The paper discusses the implications of the GE case for issues associated with corporate governance, financialization and human resource management.

This is a timely reconsideration of the Jack Welch legacy two years after his death. In avoiding polemics and seeking a considered assessment of his positive and negative outcomes, the paper is an important addition to the research on Welch and American management thought.

Drawing on the leader–member exchange (LMX) theory, we examine the role of empowering leadership in employee organizational commitment and the organizational citizenship behavior. Furthermore, we examine if these relationships are explained by factors such as follower trust in the leader and leader authenticity.

We draw on survey data from 153 individuals serving the hospitality industry sector. The data are analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Results show that trust in a leader positively mediates the relationship between empowering leadership and organizational citizenship behavior as well as organizational commitment. We also find a direct association between empowering leadership and the two organizational outcomes. However, we do not find evidence of the moderating role of leader authenticity in empowering leadership and trust in leader–leader relationship.

This paper brings to light the significance of empowering leadership, especially for hospitality workers who often operate in stressful and deeply hierarchical organizational environments. Our study findings provide a pathway for how supervisors should follow an empowering form of leadership annculcate trust in employees for better organizational outcomes. The findings indicate significant theoretical and practical implications and offer recommendations for future research.

The New Zealand city of Christchurch provides a leading example of post-disaster rebuilding in a Central Business District (CBD) area. In its rebuilding programme, the city has given emphasis to the greening of hospitality and traditional retail space through a combination of development of shared pedestrian spaces (with traffic exclusion and calming) and the integration of greening within the streetscape design. This paper aims to assess whether the development of greened pedestrian areas leads to higher retail spending and, thus, retail rental rates.

This study uses pedestrian movement data collected from several CBD locations, as well as spending data on retail and hospitality, to assess relationships between pedestrian movements and spending. This study explores retail spending in greened pedestrian shared spaces, and explores how this differs from retail spending in traditional street areas within the Christchurch CBD.

Spending patterns are location-related, depending on the characteristics of pedestrian space in the selected area. Greened shared pedestrian areas have the highest spending per measured pedestrian for retail and hospitality, whereas traditional street areas have lower spending for retail and hospitality per measured pedestrian, demonstrating the benefits in redeveloped central city areas.

The scope of smart data continues to develop as a research area within urban studies to develop an open and connected city. This research demonstrates the use of innovative technologies for data collection, use and sharing. The results support commercial benefits of greening and pedestrianisation of retail and hospitality areas for CBDs and providing an example for other cities to follow.

Growth optimism, which describes the expected future growth of a firm, is an important but underexplored construct in strategy. This paper aims to assess the planning antecedents of such growth optimism by using a large Australian sample of small enterprises.

The authors use a secondary data set, gathered among Australian small to medium enterprises (SMEs), by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The analysis adopts a regression approach including a mediated and a non-mediated path to explore the direct and indirect effects of strategic planning and budgetary planning and management on expected future revenues.

This paper assesses the implications of concurrent strategic planning and financial management dynamic capabilities on anticipated future revenue growth, an important predisposition dynamic capability. The authors note that this configuration of actions and predisposition aligns closely with the necessary requirements for growth. The findings suggest that firms that use strategic planning and robust budget planning and monitoring processes exhibit higher optimism about future sales growth and firms that effectively configure these planning activities with market development tend to exhibit higher growth and more growth optimism.

In terms of theoretical contributions, the paper strongly supports the formality view in the formal/informal debates associated with effectuation strategies. The authors suggest that appropriate strategic and budgetary planning and control systems act as a counterbalance to organisational confusion and managerial capriciousness, leading to improved confidence among managers and their employees regarding future resource commitments and plans.

The findings of the paper are potentially important for both managers and policy makers. For managers seeking to grow their future sales, planning is shown to be an important antecedent activity. The presence of financial and strategic planning may predispose firms to make important investment decisions that drive future growth. Also, a better understanding of the firm’s current and future strategic and financial position may be evidence of effective firm management, a situation that, in turn, drives growth.

In terms of social and policy implications, the data gathered for the survey by the ABS forms a valuable collection of information in relation to business practices. Australian firms are required by law to regularly report budget plans and outcomes. The research suggests that this data can inform policy initiatives, particularly in relation to programmes that may assist small and young firms to undertake prospective strategic and budgetary planning.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to investigate the particular configuration of strategic and financial planning and anticipated sales growth in the SME context.

This study examines the impact of career competencies (CC) (in the form of personal resources) on sustainable employability (SE) under the tenets of the Conservation of Resources theory. Further, we assess the moderating impact of coworker support and supervisor support (work-related social resources) in this relationship.

Data were collected using survey method from 362 doctors employed in private hospitals in Pakistan. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The results suggests a significant influence of CC on SE. Further, results also reveal that social support received from coworkers moderates the relationship between CC and SE. However, we find that supervisor support does not moderate the said relationship.

This research has clear novelty as SE is a recently defined construct and is still an area with insufficient empirical research. There is increasing interest in identifying the determinants and underlying mechanism of SE. Thus, this study makes contributions to knowledge by investigating CC and social resources as antecedents of SE. This study also offers implications for theory generally, and within the medical practitioner context more specifically.

This paper examines the nexus between input credit access, farm performance and food nutrition in Ghana.

Using a random sample of 239 smallholder rice farmers, we utilized the endogenous switching regression model to address the self-selection issue and estimate the impact of input credit access on farm performance and food nutrition and further analyze the heterogenous impacts.

The results show that socioeconomic (age, education, sex, off-farm activity and farm size), institutional (extension contact and farmer-based organizations) characteristics and location variable significantly influence the decision to access input credit. After adjusting for both observed and unobserved factors, our findings reveal that access to input credit significantly improves rice yield, net profit and food nutrition of smallholder rice farmers in Ghana. Furthermore, results reveal that the effects of input credit access on rice yield, net profit and food nutrition are heterogeneous and subject to farmers’ propensity to access input credit. Specifically, we find that those with a higher inclination to access input credit experience larger positive impacts, indicating a positive selection process.

Access to agricultural input credit is essential for the adoption of modern and climate-smart technologies in agricultural production. However, the persistent lack of access to input credit hampers agricultural productivity and constrains investment in farm input resources in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our study calls for proper targeting of input credit interventions to incentivize the uptake of farm input credit such as improved seeds and fertilizers to improve overall crop production and achieve food security.

The study utilized rigorous econometric methods to analyze the impact of input credit access on smallholder rice farmers' farm performance and food nutrition in Ghana. The findings provide valuable guidance for policymakers and future research on agricultural development in Ghana.

Credit is essential in the farm business because it facilitates the adoption of productive technologies such as irrigation. However, access to credit remains a significant hurdle for sub-Saharan Africa, including Ghanaian farmers. Therefore, the authors assessed credit utilization and the intensity of borrowing by irrigated rice farmers in the Upper East region. In addition, how extension moderates the amount borrowed was analysed.

The multistage sampling approach was used in the study. The Tono and Vea irrigation schemes were purposively selected. Proportionally, 318 rice farmers were sampled from the Tono irrigation scheme and 159 from the Vea irrigation scheme. Cragg's double hurdle and moderation analysis were used.

It was uncovered that gender, age, years of farming, total farm size, rice farm size, contract farming and off-farm employment explain farmers' decision to borrow. On the other hand, the intensity of borrowing was influenced by gender, age, years of farming, rice farm size, contract farming and the number of extension contact. The moderation analysis revealed that extension contact improves the amount borrowed by farmers.

While there are irrigated rice farmers in other regions of Ghana, this study was limited to rice farmers under the Tono and Vea Irrigation schemes in the Upper East region.

This study investigated the moderating role of extension contact on amount borrowed in Ghana. This makes a modest addition to the limited literature on the moderating role of extension and credit access.

This study examines the improvement of rice production in Nigeria through the government’s policy of the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme (ABP). Rationalized by the production theory, the study utilizes quantitative methods such as surveys. The study investigates the influence of ABP on rice production, with particular emphasis on the experiences of smallholder rice farmers in Ebonyi State, Nigeria. The study employed a cross-sectional survey research approach, and the target population comprised smallholder rice farmers in the state who have benefitted from ABP. The study obtained a representative sample of 400 respondents through stratified random sampling. The study adopts the administration of a structured questionnaire with rice farmers in Ebonyi State, Nigeria, as the primary data collection method. Regression was used to test the hypotheses in SPSS version 23. From the findings, the study reveals the need for the ABP, banks and other lending agencies/programmes to train farmers. It shows that modern farming contributes to rice production in Ebonyi State.

Patriotism is often described as the “love of country” that individuals display in the acclamation of their national community. Despite the prominence of this sentiment in various societies around the world, organizational research on patriotism is largely absent. This omission is surprising because entrepreneurs, human resource (HR) divisions, and firms frequently embrace both patriotism and patriotic organizational practices. These procedures include (among other interventions) national symbol embracing, HR practices targeted toward military members and first responders, the adulation of patriots and celebration of patriotic events, and patriotic-oriented corporate social responsibility (CSR). Here, the authors argue that research on HR management and organization studies will likely be further enhanced with a deeper understanding of the national obligation that can spur employee productivity and loyalty. In an attempt to jumpstart the collective understanding of this phenomenon, the authors explore the antecedents of patriotic organizational practices, namely, the effects of founder orientation, employee dispersion, and firm strategy. It is suggested that HR practices such as these lead to a patriotic organizational image, which in turn impacts investor, customer, and employee responses. Notably, the effect of a patriotic organizational image on firm-related outcomes is largely contingent on how it fits with the patriotic views of other stakeholders, such as investors, customers, and employees. After outlining this model, the authors then present a thought experiment of how this model may appear in action. The authors then discuss ways the field can move forward in studying patriotism in HR management and organizational contexts by outlining several future directions that span multiple levels (i.e., micro and macro). Taken together, in this chapter, the authors introduce a conversation of something quite prevalent and largely unheeded – the patriotic organization.