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This paper aims to find an answer to the questions: To what extent is the implementation of responsible management education (RME) perceived to be adequate for developing responsible leadership skills among business school students? How should it be used effectively to guarantee such an outcome?

The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 management educators working at three public business schools. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the collected data.

The findings show that the implementation of RME alone is not adequate to ensure the development of responsible leadership skills among students in business schools. However, management educators do perceive it as a considerable step towards that outcome if accompanied with internship and training opportunities to exercise and observe how social roles and activities are practiced in business, not-for-profit and civil society organisations.

This study is a pioneering attempt to address the relationship between RME and developing responsible leadership skills among students in non-Western business schools.

This study aims to answer the following question: Why might home-based work duties be perceived by female academics as extreme?

We employed a qualitative research method through semi-structured interviews with 33 female academics from three public universities selected from amongst 26 public institutions of higher education in Egypt. Thematic analysis was subsequently used to determine the main ideas in the transcripts.

We find that the sudden implementation of home-based work makes the academic duties of female academics extreme. Moreover, the following four factors help explain the extremity/intensity of the home-based work of female academics: mental and physical fatigue resulting from WFH, the inability to adequately meet family commitments when working from home (WFH), poor resources for home-based work and reduced ability to focus on the obstacles facing them in their academic career.

This paper contributes by filling a gap in human resources management and higher education in which empirical studies on female academics WFH and extreme academic duties have been limited so far.

This paper aims to theoretically answer the question: why might business schools in Egypt fail to develop responsible leaders?

The author starts by discussing modernization theory (Lipset, 1959) – which highlights the idea that the more educated people there are in a given society/nation, the more calls for democracy, social citizenship and social justice will be launched – to address the strong association between the quality of business learning and the development of responsible leadership norms. Moving forward by focusing on the theory of education (Dewey, 1916) and institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983), the author finds the main conditions needed to develop responsible leadership norms among business school students.

The author identified the following three necessary conditions: implementing responsible management education, sustaining management learning and ensuring that a purposive hidden curriculum is well-planned in business schools. The author sees these as the main priorities for developing responsible leadership skills among business school students in Egypt and similar post revolution countries.

This paper contributes by filling a gap in responsible leadership, public administration and higher education literature, in which conceptual studies on the role of business schools in post-revolution periods and conflict zones has been limited until now.

The purpose of this study is to test whether the prediction of firm performance can be enhanced by incorporating nonfinancial disclosures, such as narrative disclosure tone and corporate governance indicators, into financial predictive models.

Three predictive models are developed, each with a different set of predictors. This study utilises two machine learning techniques, random forest and stochastic gradient boosting, for prediction via the three models. The data are collected from a sample of 1,250 annual reports of 125 nonfinancial firms in Pakistan for the period 2011–2020.

Our results indicate that both narrative disclosure tone and corporate governance indicators significantly add to the accuracy of financial predictive models of firm performance.

Our results offer implications for the restoration of investor confidence in the highly uncertain Pakistani market by establishing nonfinancial disclosures as reliable predictors of future firm performance. Accordingly, they encourage investors to pay more attention to these disclosures while making investment decisions. In addition, they urge regulators to promote and strengthen the reporting of such nonfinancial information.

This study addresses the neglect of nonfinancial disclosures in the prediction of firm performance and the scarcity of corporate governance literature relevant to the use of machine learning techniques.

This paper aims to identify why hotel employees in the Egyptian context accept the extreme job duties resulting from hosting too many mega sporting events and what outcomes they experience as a result.

The empirical data is based on semi-structured interviews with 36 hotel employees working in reservations, front desk and events management roles in four 4-star hotels located in Cairo, the capital of Egypt. Thematic analysis was subsequently used to determine the main ideas in the interview transcripts.

The findings show that hotel employees accept the extreme job duties resulting from hosting mega sporting events for the following four reasons: linking pay with performance, difficulty finding alternative jobs, proving their occupational identity and being subject to patriotism. Furthermore, this paper highlights that the engagement of hotel employees in extreme work conditions during such mega-sporting events might be detrimental to their mental health, resulting in increased cronyism and gender bias among them.

This paper is a pioneering study to specifically investigate how hosting mega sporting events influences the extremity of work conditions for hospitality sector employees. Prior studies (to the best of the authors’ knowledge) have not theorised and empirically analysed this specific topic, especially in under-researched settings, such as developing countries in the global south.

This paper aims to explore how female academics use cronyism to cope with the lack of emancipative support resulting from their intense teaching and research duties, poor representation at senior administrative levels and their exhausting familial commitments.

Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 32 female academics working full-time at four public universities in Egypt.

The findings showed that the low action resources (considering their unreasonable teaching loads, research requirements and supervision engagements), emancipative values (the unfair representation of female academics at senior administrative levels) and civic entitlement (universities not serious about promoting gender equality) are perceived by female academics as a lack of empowerment that necessitates their adoption of cronyism as their main coping strategy. Moreover, in male-dominated societies, female academics who do not have the power to shape their work-related status tend to use undesirable behaviours such as cronyism to mitigate the negative consequences of the shocks they encounter.

This paper contributes by filling a gap in human resources management in which empirical studies on the relationship between cronyism, emancipation and career shocks have been limited so far.

Through addressing female academics in four public universities in Egypt, the author of this paper aims to answer the question: How do female academics cope with the career shock resulting from the spread of COVID-19?

The author used a qualitative research method through semi-structured interviews with 32 female academics from four public universities selected from among 26 public institutions of higher education in Egypt. Thematic analysis was subsequently used to determine the main ideas in the transcripts.

The findings assert that the following three strategies: heroism, cronyism and temporalism are used by female academics in the Egyptian context to cope with the career shocks they feel during the time of COVID-19. The findings assert that female academics try to reassert their professionalism in their academic duties and familial obligations even after the spread of COVID-19. Moreover, they tend to use forms of cronyism behaviour to alleviate the effect of the career shock, mostly via hypocritical phrases. Furthermore, the thought that COVID-19 is a temporary stage helps female academics to actively accept their challenging new work conditions.

This paper contributes by filling a gap in human resources management and higher education in which empirical studies on the career shock of female academics have been limited so far.

The aim of this paper is to find out why women artisans in Peru avoid the sole ownership of their enterprises while preferring to work in associations.

The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 28 women artisans in Peru during their participation in a fair organized by the Peruvian Ministry of Culture in Lima (Peru). Thematic analysis was subsequently used to develop the main themes and sub-themes of the study.

The authors of the present study have found that women artisans in Peru choose to work in associations instead of via the sole ownership of their enterprises because of the following three categories of motives: contextual (low operational cost of family-owned associations, more compliance with the surrounding institutional context), cultural (commitment to parenting, experiencing less marginalization, zero responsibility, and greater work flexibility) and marketing-related motives (eliciting more social support, guaranteeing more invitations to participate in artisanal fairs).

This paper contributes by filling a gap in the literature on artisan entrepreneurship in which studies on women artisans in Latin American contexts and why they choose to work in associations have been limited so far.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how cronyism is employed by some married female faculty to secure workplace rights and privileges.

A qualitative research design is employed and interviews were conducted with 32 female academics working at four different universities.

The narrative demonstrates the gendered use of cronyism at work – pre-COVID-19, during which female academics had to work full-time and be present on school campuses, and after COVID-19 pandemic, when academic working conditions changed due to the lockdown of university campuses and the reliance on remote online protocols to fulfil academic duties. The paper shows an increased use of cronyism as a mechanism to reduce heavy workloads. This type of cronyism is known as the expectation of mutual favour cronyism, which means that benefits are exchanged between a female academic and the chair of her department and/or the school rector, but the interests of the university they work in are not taken into consideration.

Virtually, no research exists on the sociocultural determinants of nepotism that undermine the professional performance of female academics at work. The authors draw on social exchange theory and the norm of negative reciprocity to identify the conditions under which social capital is undermined. The results have important implications for theory, practice and future research.

Drawing on social exchange and street-level bureaucracy (SLB) theories, the authors of the present paper seek to identify how public banks in Egypt strategically manage their frontline employees to maintain high performance even during periods of economic uncertainty.

The empirical sample comprises semi-structured interviews with 28 frontline employees working in 4 public banks. The authors used the Gioia mechanism to analyze their data.

The authors identified job-related (discretionary power of bank employees, nature of banking jobs and hiring elite individuals for banking jobs); learning-related (continuous learning of bank employees, spread of MBA programs and resilience of bank employees) and context-related categories of factors (career support and more financial rewards during economic uncertainty) that explain the stability of the performance of the frontline bank employees addressed in this study despite the economic uncertainty their country is passing through.

Given the findings of the present paper, the authors propose that the administration of the addressed banks maintain the policy of providing training opportunities to their employees. However, such training should pay more attention to issues such as crisis management, customer-employee engagement and the mental health of employees during crises, among others. Second, as dissatisfaction is very high with other public sector organizations in Egypt, their top management should try to learn from public banks, follow the best practices and collaborate with them to improve their service offerings to the citizens. Finally, for global financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund who are involved in rescuing Egyptian economy should incorporate strategic human resources management implementation in public sector organizations in their recommendations, along with economic reforms package.

This paper contributes by filling a gap in the literature on strategic human resources management and economic uncertainty in which empirical studies of the association between them, particularly in the context of North African countries such as Egypt, have been limited so far.