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The COVID-19 crisis presents significant leadership and governance challenges and opportunities for organisations. This is a reflective commentary on how leaders and boards are responding to the crisis.

Drawing on personal experiences as an employee, non-executive director and observing leaders.

That leaders emphasise values and purpose and communicate with clarity, meaning and empathy is paramount. It is organisations which continue to be agile and to adapt and change proactively with “out of the box” thinking who will thrive in the next normal.

The lessons learned from this unique crisis for business continuity and success in the next normal.

An important question is whether lenders perceive politically connected firms as having less or higher default risk, and thus provide them with more or less preferential loan terms compared with non-connected firms. This paper aims to examine the relationship between political connections of corporate board members and cost of debt and loan contracting in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.

The initial sample comprises 288 GCC firm-year observations from 227 publicly listed firms in Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates for the period from 2011 to 2015. It includes all the GCC publicly listed firms, excluding those in the financial, insurance and banking sectors because these entities are subject to different regulations. The ordinary least squares, logit regression and other sensitivity tests have been used to analyse the data and enhance reliability of the results.

This study finds that politically connected firms, particularly those connected through ruling royal family members, are associated with lower cost of debt, greater amounts of loans and longer-term government loans. Therefore, these findings support the prediction that political connections benefit GCC firms in the form of access to favourable terms from both government and commercial banks.

This study contributes to the extant literature by providing insightful analysis using unique political features of the GCC, integrated with agency and resource dependency theories. In particular, this study fills the gap in understanding the nature of loan contracting offered by government and commercial banks in the presence of politically connected boards within GCC setting.

This paper investigates the use of graphs, selection of variables to graph and construction of graphs in prospectuses issued by Australian companies making their initial public offering (IPO) of shares to the Australian capital market. The paper formulates and tests hypotheses concerning selectivity in the use of graphs and distortion in the construction of graphs presented in IPO prospectuses, as well as providing descriptive evidence about the use of graphs in such prospectuses. Results show that firms enjoying improving profit performance are significantly more likely to include graphs of key financial variables in their prospectuses than firms suffering deteriorating profit performance. Thus, similar to studies of graphs in annual reports, evidence of selectivity in the inclusion of graphs is found. No significant relationship is found between performance on the variable being graphed and distortion in the construction of the graph. When the graphs are split between those covering key financial variables and other variables, a significant relationship is found in both categories. For graphs of other variables, a significant positive association is found between performance and distortion. However, the relationship for key financial variables is in the opposite direction to that suggested by impression management. Further analysis identifies significant sub‐period differences in selectivity and distortion which are consistent with the view that the major regulatory and institutional changes outlined in the paper, reduced the extent of selectivity and graphical distortion in the post‐1991 period. As far as we are aware, this is the first study reported in the literature to investigate the use of graphs in prospectuses. The results also have policy implications for the regulatory authority in Australia.

The paper aims to introduce this special issue on LEAD, the research management system under which the papers collected in this issue were produced. The paper explains the background that led to the establishment of the system, presents a short history of LEAD, describes how it is managed, and details the various stages of a typical LEAD “cycle”. It concludes with a brief description of the papers to follow.

Reflective description.

LEAD is a successful collaborative system for organising “action research” in learning and teaching within a business faculty. The papers in this issue serve to demonstrate the system's outcomes.

The paper is essentially descriptive. The described system illustrates one way of organising collaborative research in a university faculty, in this instance focused on research into learning and teaching in a business faculty.

LEAD provides a model for managing collaborative university research, one that could be applied in any university faculty and across different research areas. Apart from illustrating the potential of the system, each of the papers collected in this issue is of interest in its own right, as a study of learning and teaching in a particular disciplinary context.

The LEAD system is a novel way of organising learning and teaching research in a university context.

Prior research has shown evidence of earnings management in financial reports of US and Australian firms changing chief executive officer (CEO). This paper examines whether corporate boards, with certain characteristics associated with strong corporate governance, are effective in controlling any earnings management in the financial reports of Australian firms that change CEOs. Since hiring, monitoring and replacing the CEO are key roles of the board of directors, research in this specific context is considered particularly appropriate. After controlling for contemporaneous and lagged profitability in the year of CEO change, we find evidence of negative unexpected accruals in our sub‐sample of firms where the CEO resigned. For this group, larger boards and a higher proportion of independent directors appear to limit observed negative earnings management. In the case of CEO retirements there is evidence of positive unexpected accruals in the period of CEO change. However, none of the board characteristics show any significant relationship with unexpected accruals. In the period after CEO change, we find no evidence of positive unexpected accruals for CEO resignations and none of the board characteristics show any significant relationship with unexpected accruals. For CEO retirements, our analysis indicates that a higher proportion of executive and affiliated director shareholding goes some way towards counteracting the observed positive unexpected accruals. When lagged unexpected accruals are included in the regression equation to control for accrual reversals, CEO duality significantly increases the already positive earnings management found in CEO retirements in the period following CEO change.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation between the value of executive director share ownership and discretionary accruals.

This study uses a dataset of 1,173 firm‐year observations drawn from 188 Australian listed companies for the period 2000‐2006. The analysis is based on multivariate regression analysis and ordinary least square models were used to investigate the relation between the value of managerial ownership and discretionary accruals. The issue of potential endogeneity is addressed by using a simultaneous equation system.

A negative relation is found between value of managerial share ownership and discretionary accruals at lower levels of value of ownership, which is consistent with the theorised incentive alignment that as the managers commit more resources to their firms, stakeholders impose less contractual constraints specified in terms of accounting numbers and managers make lower accrual adjustments. After a certain level of value of ownership is attained, a positive relations seen, consistent with increased discretionary accrual adjustments associated with stakeholders anticipating managerial entrenchment. Also, it is found that these results are driven by firms with income increasing, as opposed to income decreasing, discretionary accruals.

Shares and options are forming an increasing proportion of executive remuneration that continues to be the subject of much debate amongst regulators and in the media. Showing that the value of share ownership may be an effective internal governance mechanism to help align incentives adds to the debate and has policy implications.

The paper's primary contribution is finding that the value (as opposed to proportion) of share ownership, typically representing a sizeable proportion of managers' undiversified wealth, is a potentially direct driver of theorised incentive alignment and entrenchment effects associated with share ownership.