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The purpose of this paper is to examine the underperformance problem of four UK-based small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from management's and employees' perspectives in order to advance knowledge on a neglected area in small business and management studies.

Based on performance management's theoretical frame of managerial/entrepreneurial, market shaping and system-wide resource (re)organisation and the microstories obtained from 85 surveyed employees and managers, the data are analysed using an interpretivist paradigm.

The key findings of the study highlighted the adoption of tough performance implementation measures by management, the development of learning initiatives, the adaptation of roles, the redefinition of what a performing employee meant and three areas for performance improving in all four SMEs. This study reveals the crucial role of personal, conversational agency and implementation attributes, which are neglected aspects in current performance management in small firms.

The drawbacks of the study centre on the limited nature of the survey sample and the fact that it is solely based within the UK. This suggests that the findings are not to be generalised to other contexts.

The study identifies key employee and management behaviours, attitudes and lived experiences that need to fundamentally change in order to resolve the four SMEs' underperformance. In addition, an innovative environment encouraging inter-departmental agency collaborations and grassroots implementation are needed to effectively and holistically revive the four companies' performance.

The study's results highlight the impact of manager/entrepreneur/employee relations on the social aspects that could either facilitate or hamper micro- and macro-level performance. It is therefore critical that owner entrepreneurs are mindful of the impact that their actions/activities and practices could have on the social lives of their employees and partners and on the ultimate bottom line of business success or failure.

Studies focussing on small businesses' underperformance in the UK are a rarity. The paper advances the traditional performance management literature by proposing employee learning and skills' developmental as non-tangible resources to complement managerial attempts. In addition, a “can do” attitude and a more holistic, organisational and individual approach to performance resolution is proposed to fill the performance implementation and theoretical gap faced by academics, employees, managers and owner entrepreneurs.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate small- and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) internationalisation from an emerging market perspective. It explores and applies human resource management (HRM) processes to small businesses’ internationalisation efforts in order to ascertain the extent to which human- and technology-oriented barriers to internationalisation can be better understood and their processes better managed by SMEs.

The data collection and analysis involved a mixed method technique so as to identify the two dominant barriers faced by SMEs at the employer and employee levels. By using primary survey data obtained from 212 Bangladeshi SMEs, a partial least square based structural equation model was successfully validated and its development enhanced the comparison of processes involved in managing people and technology-type barriers.

The research results highlight the importance of HRM processes in the proper management of both human and technology-type barriers, which are equally as significant to SMEs’ internationalisation.

The results highlight the urgent need for governments in emerging economies to prioritise SMEs’ internationalisation and to dedicate resources and processes in order to effectively optimise economic and social dividends. The practical, theoretical and methodological implications of the paper raise opportunities for further research in SMEs’ internationalisation and people management processes and practices as well as new policy guidelines.

The examination of the link between humans and technology is a much under-represented area in developing countries and the actual contribution of effective HRM processes in the context of SMEs’ internationalisation is missing. Applying HRM processes to these aspects serves to deepen the knowledge of small businesses’ internationalisation efforts and the contributed model enhances professional practice and theory development in these disciplines and in emerging economies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of preferences when small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are confronted with the practical problems associated with implementing frequent and large-scale changes to their working policies and practices. This paper aims to alleviate some of the concerns as claimed in positioning and change agency theory by introducing “preferential role positioning” to organizational change.

This study uses a qualitative case study approach and change agency and positioning theories to find out the extent to which staff and management experienced the practical difficulties and challenges and what resolution actions they took. Eighty-five semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2004/2005 and 2011 with the staff and management of four SMEs in the UK. An interpretative analysis was conducted on the case data in the tradition of Husserl and Schutz. In the first set, participants were asked to elucidate the difficulties faced in their roles and how these were experienced whilst the second focused on impacts and strategies. Three independent researchers reviewed and interpreted the qualitative data and helped with the coding and thematization.

This paper's main results are based on the data's three stages showing how SME members chose to deal with the practical difficulties namely “new structures and procedures” (stage 1); “new ways of communicating” (stage 2) and “new collaborations” (stage 3). The combination of the stages' aspects led to the emergence of “preferential role positioning” as the study's theoretical contribution to the gap on preferences in organizational change research.

The eighty-five interviews from UK-based SMEs constrained the sample size thereby limiting the number of questionnaire categories asked. The findings and their analysis cannot be generalized to non-SMEs that seek to address similar difficulties.

Managers need to be aware of the adverse impacts of using draconian, top-down disciplinary and punishment measures/structures as a way to implement change. Other practical lessons include the fact that managers should contextualize people's anxieties, dissatisfaction, resistance and disengagement as a platform from which social knowledge can be generated with all change agents in order to resolve implementation challenges in the longer term. Staff developed the ability to deal with some practical issues such as navigating through the new departmental structures, new working procedures and new ways of talking with management and with each other to implement change more successfully.

The social value of the findings demonstrates that preferences can be imported from other social science disciplines into Organizational Studies to show the value of what people can contribute and how they choose to do so (i.e. via what discourse, using what types of interactions and capabilities to do so). In addition, the results show that management need to consider employees in their plans as they try to implement change firstly to facilitate greater interaction and success, secondly to minimize implementation difficulties and thirdly as a recognition that there are multiple change agents and multiple role-enacting positions in developing sociological knowledge that can be of value.

This study's three-stage approach has shown that a successful implementation and management of change in SMEs should also include a bottom-up recognition of the difficulties, adversities, conflicts and tensions and a resolution to deal with the structural and communicative constraints via dialogue and “preferential role positioning”.

Despite some academic recognition that leadership is particularly significant in reshaping the oil and gas industry’s contributions to global economic development and the sustainability of global energy supplies at affordable prices (Sharma et al., 2022), the attendant problem of how the industry’s leadership contributes towards the preservation of global environment and the maintenance of ecosystems’ balance, among other sustainability challenges, remains an academic lag. This calls for the urgent need for oil and gas companies to practice effective sustainable leadership approach at multiple organisational levels to address global environmental, economic and social challenges.

This paper adopts an interpretivist/constructivist philosophical stance, where findings have been extracted from in-depth thick descriptive qualitative research in Bahrain oil and gas industry. Companies operating within Bahrain oil and gas industry were identified as the unit of analysis. Empirical data are gathered through semi-structured interviews from senior management and analysed using thematic analysis. This paper is structured as follows: introduction, contextualisation of the UNSDGs in the oil and gas industry, literature on network leadership, research methods used to gather and analyse data from Bahrain oil and gas industry findings, contributions, limitations and trajectories for further studies.

The study’s participants argued that the emergence of transformational and Sustainable Network Leadership is essential to successfully and sustainably implementing the UN SDGs. In other words, the Sustainable Network Leadership is a contribution to the single, leadership competences approach of previous scholarship (Weber et al., 2022; Kumalo and Scheepers, 2021) partly because it evolves around the notion of positioning different network and change actors based on their capacity to lead, exchange their knowledge, effectively communicate the need to comply with SDGs and the skills to establish high density within a complex network of actors.

This study recognises its limitations in the sense that it is based on the single context of Bahrain oil and gas, and data were collected from senior management and executives only. Gathering data from a broader swathe of employees may have provided greater levels of leadership and organisational member nuances in both single and collective differences of leadership attributes.

Transformational and Sustainable Network Leadership provides a new construct in the perception (the “what”), instrumentalisation (the “how”) and theoretical re-conceptualisation of leadership within organisational change settings needing radical rethink for sustainable and successful change. The practical implications of transformational and Sustainable Network Leadership expose the way a variety of highly challenged organisational change contexts are interconnected to highlight not only their different sets of challenges but also their opportunities and the resolution mechanisms they present for organisational leaders and staff alike.

This paper identified the single, leadership competence approach as the dominant discourse in organisational change, leadership studies and presented an alternative collective set of leaders’ attributes. The less utilised network leadership concept was drawn upon to contribute network leadership attributes as a way of addressing the challenges faced by Bahraini oil and gas company leaders. Therefore, this study contributes to both network leadership, transformational leadership by expanding both domains to include organisational transformation and the leadership-of-risky change. This was done by identifying attributes and characteristics of Sustainable Network Leadership, then showing their significance as an approach to successfully and sustainably implementing the UNSDGs.

This paper specifically aims to examine how (via which activities, methods and capabilities) organizations’ management deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems to address underperformance. Five mitigation strategies/recommendations are introduced to manage the challenges and facilitate greater efficacies in changing organizations.

This paper conceptually synthesizes 47 articles, thematically reports and critically analyzes the AI–HRM–managerial decision-making relationship in changing organizations and discusses the impacts.

The results highlight three significant challenges and opportunities for changing organizations: (1) job performance challenges, (2) organizational performance challenges and HR and (3) collaborative intelligence opportunities.

The paper’s originality lies in addressing the current lack of a theoretical framework guiding HRM and AI experts on the managerial and strategic capabilities needed to address underperformance and their impacts in facilitating collective efficacies in human–AI collaboration in changing organizations. By further capturing an innovative HR Framework’s (1) human, (2) AI, (3) employees’ well-being, (4) jobs and (5) organizational performance, and its five key managerial recommendations/strategies, this paper develops two concepts: “technological servitization” and “re-ontological in-securitization” to advance theory in Managerial Psychology regarding the unintended/paradoxical consequences of managements’ AI-driven organizational performance interventions, including meaninglessness in organizations.

This paper's purpose centres on advancing the current financialisation strategies within digital transformation (DT) through a rebalanced synthesis of both financialisation and people/centric, non-financialisation strategies of the DT field. Based on empirical data from Bahrain's energy sector, a new framework on People-centric, Sustaining Network Leadership is developed, capturing DT's human values deficit and proposing a new model on financialisation and non-financialisation strategies showing ‘how’ and ‘why’ DT is implemented in contemporary organisations.

This study conducted a mixed methodology of narrative interviews, case studies and reviewed significant contributions from the DT, leadership and change management debates. A total of 26 operational and high-level leaders from Bahrain, 8 top energy companies and Braun and Clarke's 6-phase analysis were combined to form four empirical thematic bundles on ‘how’ and ‘why’ leaders adopted financialisation and non-financialisation strategies to resolve organisational sustainability issues in an Arabic context.

Four sets of findings (bundles 1–4) highlight participants' financial and structural understanding when implementing DT initiatives, the different leadership styles ranging from authoritarian to network leadership, the socio-economic, political and cultural ramifications of their practices and the urgency of staff reskilling for organisational resilience and strategic sustainability. Based on the eight energy cases and interviews, a new values-driven, People-centric Sustaining Network Leadership Model is developed to show a more effective and efficient use of financial and non-financial resources when organisations implement DT initiatives in efforts to resolve global energy sustainability problems.

Leadership, change management, DT, energy and environmental sustainability is a huge area of scholarship. While new studies emerge and contribute to this growing body of knowledge, this investigation has focused on those that significantly highlight how to make effective use of financialisation and non-financialisation resources. Therefore, all the literature on the topic has not been included. Although this study has filled the non-financialisation gap in current DT studies, a further rebalancing of the financialisation versus non-financialisation debates will be needed for theoreticians, practitioners and policy makers to continue addressing emerging and more complex socio-economic, political and cultural issues within and beyond organisations. Limitations are the study's focus on the Bahrain energy sector and the limited sample of 26 leaders.

The study provides practitioners and policy makers with an approach for the successful implementation of DT initiatives in the oil and gas sector. For academics, this study provides empirically unique and interesting thematic bundles, insightful analyses into leadership, organisational change, digital transformation and network leadership theories to develop an innovative and creative People-centric, Sustaining Network Leadership Approach/Model on the practical barriers, implications/impacts of various leadership styles and potential solutions via a socio-cultural values-based alternative to the current financialisation discourse of DT.

While there is a growing body of literature on DT, Leadership and Organisational Transformation and Change, there is a dearth of scholarship on the human-orientated strategies of DT implementation outside of western contexts. A contemporary and comprehensive, empirically evidenced analysis of the field has led to the development of this study's People-centric, Sustaining Network Leadership model which frames, captures, synthesises and extends the dominant cost-minimisation rhetoric of DT discourse to include a shared set of leadership practices, behaviours, intentions, perceptions and values. This helped to reveal the previously missing ‘how’ and ‘why’ of DT’s operational and strategic implementation.

People-related factors are very significant barriers for the internationalisation of large and small firms. Although the literature has identified a number of steps that SMEs need to take to increase their resilience in international markets, a study that identifies both the resilience and non-resilience barriers for SME internationalisation has not been undertaken in the scientific fields Human Resource Management and International Business. This paper aims to examine resilience and non-resilience barriers faced by SMEs in a developing country. In addition to the resilience literature, they examine non-resilience and combine its characteristics with resilience barriers from the Bangladeshi context.

Quantitative data analysis technique is used in this study to identify the impacts of these resilience/non-resilience issues’ internationalisation of SMEs both from micro and macro levels. This study has used primary data collected through the questionnaires from 212 Bangladeshi SMEs. Based on the data, this study has developed and validated partial least square-based structural equation model to assess the impacts of resilience factors on the internationalisation of SMEs with particular attention to entrepreneurial attractiveness.

It has successfully framed resilience vs non-resilience barriers of the internationalisation of SMEs as a second-order hierarchical reflective model and found that internationalisation of SMEs is significantly influenced by the resilience factors where language and related socio-cultural issues are marginally more significant.

A couple of limitations include the following. First, concentrating on resilience and non-resilience serves as a limitation as the authors could have had resilience vs other categories such political, economic, legal and technological barriers. Second, they have mainly used cross-sectional data by using the survey method. This study could have been better served had they also tried to combine the use of qualitative analysis as attempted elsewhere.

Practically, this study researched in an area which was neglected and under-reported by existing studies. Its exploration showed that it has potential to contribute significantly to the policymakers and implementers, as it comprises SMEs and emerging countries. It has been noted in the literature that these economies and firms are less capable to conduct research independently, as they are resource-constrained.

The results reveal that both resilience- and non-resilience-related barriers are significant to SMEs internationalisation. However, if policymakers were to give priority to any one of these, they should give marginally more priority to resilience-type barriers compared to the non-resilience barriers to internationalisation.

To date, studies on resilience have concentrated on identifying challenges faced by firms and what types of behaviours are required by individual members so as to enhance survival. However, there are no studies so far on identifying or even modelling both resilience and non-resilience barriers within the context of SMEs internationalisation in developing countries. This study combines resilience and non-resilience factors in a model to find out their contribution especially in the under explored area of non-resilience from a Bangladeshi contextual perspective that seeks to encourage international entrepreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the high failure among African entrepreneurs post-2008 financial crisis. It evaluates the evidence of actual and perceived disadvantage and endogenous and exogenous factors affecting black and minority ethnic businesses.

The research is based on an interpretivist frame which uses a dialogic methodology. It uses in-depth interviews. The researchers framed discussion questions so as to invite the participants to articulate directly their experiences for the benefit of the readership, other existing African businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs.

The findings from the interviews with 20 leaders of “dead” businesses indicate the impact that place, people and poverty have on business failure and identify reasons for African business failure rates compared to other minorities. This study reveals that culture, an often understated variable, is critical in understanding the deeper reasons for the under-performance of African small entrepreneurs and its impacts on individual and collective lives.

Recovery solutions ought to be formulated from participants’ call for diversification, inter-cultural learning and integration as potential remedies. The research addresses the socio-economic problems encountered by owners of “dead” businesses. Policymakers and financial organisations ought to pay heed to the skills and resources that minorities offer as part of remedies for future enterprises.

Studies on failed African businesses are under-represented in the literature. This study identifies the important role of culture on the failure of small businesses owned by African migrants in the UK. It highlights the significant socio-economic and situational barriers that they navigate in quest for recognition and cultural integration through business endeavours.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds his/her own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

It is perhaps the most difficult, hard to predict stage in the development of a small-to-medium sized enterprise (SME) when they take the success they have achieved at home and try to replicate it in foreign markets. The transition can, of course, go wrong in a number of ways – there is simply no demand for the products and services being offered, or the price is too high, advertising doesn’t reach the right audiences, or demand cannot be fulfilled. Indeed, there are so many ways it could go wrong that it must be one of the most dispiriting steps SMEs try to take in their growth curve when they realize that they are unable to transplant the success they have had in their home market.

This paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.