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This study examines how the strong emphasis placed on the purposes of budgeting, referring to a comprehensive focus on budgeting, is related to top managers' education and tenure while controlling for their functional positions in their respective firms and ages, as well as several company-specific predictors (information quality, firm size, information technology, importance of profit and strategy).

Survey data were collected from senior managers of large manufacturing firms in Finland and Sweden.

The results suggest that academic business education is positively associated with a comprehensive focus on budgeting, but tenure as well as functional position in the company (Chief Financial Officer (CFO) or not) and age are not. Overall, the company-specific control variables in general and information quality in particular are shown to have greater explanatory power than the top management characteristics analyzed.

This study identifies several empirically supported factors that seem to contribute to a comprehensive focus on budgeting. The effects of information quality, business education, the importance of profit and firm size could be considered in future research.

Academic business education matters more than the other top management characteristics analyzed. If organizations want to make comprehensive use of budgets, they should employ business graduates and be mindful of company-specific variables.

This study is the first to address a comprehensive focus on budgeting and some of its determinants. Future research could investigate a broader set of such determinants in different contexts.

This paper aims to identify ethical challenges of using artificial intelligence (AI)-based accounting systems for decision-making and discusses its findings based on Rest's four-component model of antecedents for ethical decision-making. This study derives implications for accounting and auditing scholars and practitioners.

This research is rooted in the hermeneutics tradition of interpretative accounting research, in which the reader and the texts engage in a form of dialogue. To substantiate this dialogue, the authors conduct a theoretically informed, narrative (semi-systematic) literature review spanning the years 2015–2020. This review's narrative is driven by the depicted contexts and the accounting/auditing practices found in selected articles are used as sample instead of the research or methods.

In the thematic coding of the selected papers the authors identify five major ethical challenges of AI-based decision-making in accounting: objectivity, privacy, transparency, accountability and trustworthiness. Using Rest's component model of antecedents for ethical decision-making as a stable framework for our structure, the authors critically discuss the challenges and their relevance for a future human–machine collaboration within varying agency between humans and AI.

This paper contributes to the literature on accounting as a subjectivising as well as mediating practice in a socio-material context. It does so by providing a solid base of arguments that AI alone, despite its enabling and mediating role in accounting, cannot make ethical accounting decisions because it lacks the necessary preconditions in terms of Rest's model of antecedents. What is more, as AI is bound to pre-set goals and subjected to human made conditions despite its autonomous learning and adaptive practices, it lacks true agency. As a consequence, accountability needs to be shared between humans and AI. The authors suggest that related governance as well as internal and external auditing processes need to be adapted in terms of skills and awareness to ensure an ethical AI-based decision-making.

The purpose of this study is investigating the influence of leadership on work engagement. The definition of leadership is primarily couched in culturally masculine terms (and known as an agentic leadership style) that disfavours women, who are often perceived as being communal leaders who are compassionate and humble. The research gap addressed is whether communal and agentic leadership styles of female leaders have positive associations with work engagement.

A quantitative study was undertaken by applying purposive non-probability sampling and using an online survey with screening questions to ensure the respondent reported to a senior female manager. The survey consisted of reliable and valid Likert scales: agentic and communal leadership styles were assessed using the Agency-Communion-Inventory (AC-IN) scale with 20 questions and the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES-9) with three sub-scales: vigour, dedication and absorption. The 153 usable responses in this study were used to conduct validity and reliability tests and to apply multiple regression to test associations.

Both agentic and communal leadership have a positive impact on work engagement when exhibited by a female. Although agentic leadership had an influence on all the elements of work engagement, communal leadership had a far stronger impact.

Female managers with communal leadership styles need to realise that they have more influence on their employees’ emotional, physical and cognitive connections to their work than female managers with agentic leadership styles. Those with agentic leadership styles need to exhibit a communal style as well, so as to enhance the influence they have on their employees’ work engagement.

Being part of a “learning community” requires that knowledge workers keep themselves informed of developments in their area of expertise. However, as we all know, an information saturation problem exists, not least because of the Internet. Modes of informing are specific to each person’s concerns, as are the topics they want to be informed about. Libraries and information centers have sought to accommodate this need in the past by promoting Current Awareness Services (CAS) and Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI), either through print or electronic means. With the migration of these systems to the Internet, intranet, or corporate portal, it has become the vogue to customize or personalize these access points in accordance with user interests. On the horizon is the promise of intelligent software agents as an additional aid for filtering and retrieving information. This article will argue that librarians need to continue embracing the model principle of CAS, as a tool of relevance, and as a function for remaining visible to their client communities.

Sensing research and application is a major activity at the two European laboratories of Battelle. Jack Hollingum visited both centres to report on advances.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

Work-related stress is a significant occupational health issue. Stress cannot be viewed separately from the perceptual or interpretive act by the individual. Self-efficacy is a personal characteristic that explains a high proportion of variation in the performance of school principals.

The current study examines if the COVID-pandemic is related to burnout among school principals. Additionally, the study analyzes if the self-efficacy of school principals plays a mediating role in the impact that the COVID-19 crisis had on their burnout level. To explore this, the authors used survey data of 981 Flemish school principals.

The findings indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic is related to feelings of burnout among Flemish school principals. In addition, self-efficacy mediated the relationship between the COVID-19 scale and the four core subscales of burnout: exhaustion, mental distance, emotional impairment and cognitive impairment. No mediating effect of self-efficacy was found for the secondary symptoms of burnout, psychological distress and psychosomatic complaints.

This paper emphasizes the importance of school principal's self-efficacy experiences for crisis management. Implications for school leadership training and support are discussed.

Collaborative consumption, such as car sharing, specifically implicates customer-to-customer interaction, which must be regulated by service providers (companies, peers and self-regulating communities), comprising different challenges for business organizations. While in conventional business relations, consumers are protected from undesirable customer behavior by laws, regulations (power) in the context of collaborative consumption are rare, so that trust becomes more relevant. It is the purpose of the study to investigate possible mechanisms to prevent undesirable customers in collaborative consumption.

In between subject designs, samples of 186 and 328 consumers filled in experimental online questionnaires with vignettes. Analyses were made of differences among car sharing companies, private persons and car sharing communities in terms of the power of providers, trust in providers and trust in other users of the shared goods, undesirable customer behavior and consumer–provider relations.

Companies, private persons and self-regulating communities differ in terms of perceived power and trust. Participants specifically perceive mainly coercive power with the car sharing company, but with the private person and the community, reason-based trust in other users is perceived as prevalent. Nevertheless, undesirable customer behavior varies only marginally over the models.

The present study is the first to investigate measures to prevent undesirable customer behavior over different collaborative consumption models. This enables appropriate identification of market segments and tailoring of services. The study identifies opportunities for companies in contrast to private persons and self-regulating communities and, in doing so, provides important stimulation for marketing strategy and theory development.

Although the development of public organisations and the continual enhancement of public services depend on the creative behaviour of public employees, it is uncertain from earlier studies how and when inclusive leadership (IL) affects innovative behaviours (IB). This study aims to resolve the inconsistency in the literature by applying social exchange theory to examine the effect of inclusive leadership on employees’ innovative behaviour, while also examining the mediating role of work engagement and the moderating effect of psychological safety within this relationship.

The research model’s analysis draws from a data set of 200 employee–supervisor dyads. Data was collected from employees across diverse public sector organisations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The results demonstrate that IL indirectly (via WE) and directly has a positive influence on employees’ IBs. This influence is enhanced when employees feel safe and do not have to be concerned about negative consequences.

Our study highlights a less-explored sector, unveiling the motivations behind IB among public sector employees. Moreover, this study provides valuable insights within a non-Western context, offering a unique perspective on the intricate relationship between IL, PS, employee engagement and IBs in the UAE public sector.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a method for evaluating the sustainable performance of corporate boards using the balanced scorecard approach. Also, the paper aims to determine the need and relevance of the proposed method in the evaluation process by testing the differences in the relative importance of the proposed method measures on a sample of the Egyptian manufacturing companies.

Data were collected using a questionnaire list and personal interviews with three different population samples: board members, managers of manufacturing companies and financial analysts in brokerage firms. The Wilcoxon signed rank test was used to test the degree of approval on the related questions, and the Kruskal–Wallis test was used to test the differences among the responses of the three samples.

The results of the statistical analysis indicate that there is a need for companies to have an effective tool to evaluate the board performance, and that the proposed method is a suitable tool for the evaluation. Also, the results indicate that there are differences in the relative importance of the performance measures among the three samples.

The exploratory study focused on a sample of manufacturing companies only. Accordingly, service companies and financial institutions are outside the scope of this research. There was difficulty in accessing a sample of shareholders; instead, this sample was replaced by a group of financial analysts in brokerage firms.

The proposed method adds to the performance evaluation literature with regard to measuring and evaluating the performance of boards. The study provides an empirical evidence of the need to use the balanced scorecard in the board evaluation and its relevance for the evaluation process. It provides a short guide to the most important performance measures to be used in the evaluation process of the company’s board of directors.

Few studies have focused on evaluating the performance of the board of directors using the balanced scorecard. This study is an important attempt to evaluate the sustainable performance of the board of directors using the balanced scorecard by taking into consideration the corporate social responsibility perspective. The proposed board’s balanced scorecard provides a useful tool to evaluate the performance of boards using objective, specific and clear measures.