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The purpose of this study is to review the overall trends in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) research in the management field.

We performed a scoping review to comprehensively understand how DEI research has been conducted and to inform future research and practices in the management field. We reviewed 725 articles published from 1976 to 2022 in SSCI-indexed management journals. We examined publication profiles (number of articles and research focus), publication tendency (journals and years), chronological publication trends, work environments (traditional vs remote/virtual work settings) and dimensions of DEI, including age, gender, race and culture.

We identified six common DEI research themes: (1) DEI management and practice, (2) perspectives on DEI, (3) team/group diversity, (4) DEI conceptualization, (5) leadership for DEI and (6) DEI climate. Finally, discussion, implications and recommendations for future research are presented.

Our research provides a comprehensive outline of the DEI research and suggests future directions to contribute to and advance knowledge on DEI in the management field.

We examine how leaders can become more self-aware in one graduate program that helped students develop their leadership competencies and become more accurate in their self-assessment of those competencies.

The Master of Science in Executive Leadership and Organizational Change program was created in response to the challenge of developing and accessing leaders in emotional and social intelligence competencies.

The analysis of student self-assessments and assessments by others at the beginning and end of the program provided the data for our research, showing empirical evidence of leadership development and improvement.

The study examined students in one program at one university so the generalizability of results is not clear. We have no way to rule out other experiences students had during the two-year period. We chose a single approach to measuring accuracy of self-assessment, future research may compare the results from a variety of approaches to this measurement issue.

We describe the program that helped students develop leadership competencies, develop the self-awareness necessary to take action as a leader and calibrate a more accurate self-assessment of leadership competencies over a two-year period.

We demonstrate how one leadership development program can help all students become more accurate in their self-assessments. We do not need different development programs to help one group of leaders gain confidence and another for leaders who are overly confident. An educational curriculum can foster transformational learning that enables ongoing leader development (Petriglieri, Wood, & Petriglieri, 2011). Academic programs can create experiences that help students develop and increase their self-awareness so that they are confident enough to put their learning into action. Like effective leadership development programs (Van Velsor, McCauley, Ruderman, & Ruderman, 2010), management education programs can incorporate assessment, feedback and support so that students become the effective and outstanding leaders the world needs.

There is a need for higher education to produce graduates who are motivated to transfer learning into the workplace. Motivated graduates are work-ready and associated with increased performance. Presently, the research field around motivation to transfer learning by students in higher education is not clear and is inconsistent.

This scoping review provides an overview of the characteristics of the literature, including key concepts, recommendations and gaps based on eight published articles on the motivation of students in higher education to transfer learning.

The results reflected a research field, which focused primarily on the influence of specific factors, namely student characteristics, educational design, the workplace environment, and on higher education students' motivation to transfer learning. The lack of a shared conceptual definition of motivation to transfer learning in higher education appears to influence the description of the results from the included studies. Most of the previous studies applied rigorous research designs.

This seemingly stunted research field related to higher education students' motivation to transfer learning needs to be amplified to influence the development of work-ready graduates from higher education. Approaches towards including all elements of motivation, expanding to other fields in higher education, including low-income countries, may be a proximal step in enhancing the trajectory of this research field.

The purpose of this study is to empirically test how problem-solving lean practices, along with leaders as learning facilitators in an action learning approach, can be transferred from a production context to a knowledge work context for the purpose of becoming a learning organization while enhancing performance. This is important to study because many organizations struggle to enhance efficiency in the short term while still trying to be long-term learning oriented (i.e. learning organization development).

The authors draw on theory on learning interventions to show how lean practices for problem-solving can foster learning and help an organization to become adaptive. This study’s subject is a non-production department of 100 employees at the LEGO corporation. The authors applied survey results from a natural experiment lasting 18 months between a pre-measurement survey and a post-measurement survey. The results were compared to a control department of 50 employees who were not exposed to the lean practices intervention. The authors’ focus was on the individual level as individuals have different perceptions of lean practices, performance, and learning.

Using repeated-measures tests, difference-in-difference regressions analyses, and structural equation models, the authors find that a package of contemporary lean practices for problem-solving, along with leaders who function as learning facilitators, significantly improved learning organization dimensions while also enhancing efficiency and quality and that learning organizations positively mediate the relationship between the lean intervention and quality-related performance, while efficiency is directly affected by the lean interventions. Data from LEGO's key performance indicators (KPIs), benefit trackers, on-site observations and more than 40 interviews with managers provided results that were consistent with the survey data. A detailed description of the lean practices implemented is provided to inspire future implementations in non-operations environments and to assist educators.

The authors contribute to the learning literature by showing that a learning-to-learn approach to lean management can serve as an active and deliberate intervention in helping an organization becoming a learning organization as perceived by the individual organizational members. The authors also add to the lean literature by showing how a learning approach to lean, as used by LEGO, can positively affect short-term efficiency and quality and create a foundation for a longer-term competitive advantage (i.e. a learning organization) in a non-production context. By contrast, most of the lean literature streams treat efficiency separately from a learning organization and mainly examine lean in a production context.

The extant literature shows three research streams on lean, learning, and performance. The authors built on these streams by trying to emphasize both learning and efficiency. Prior research has not empirically tested whether and how the application of problem-solving lean practices combined with leaders as learning facilitators helps to create a comprehensive learning organization while enhancing performance in a non-production context.