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The purpose of this paper is to compare the desired employability skills of business graduates in Syria from the perspective of both higher education policymakers and employers in the private sector.

Interviews were conducted with 12 higher education policymakers and managers from the business sector. Content analysis was utilized to analyse the content of the interviews and the strategic priorities of the higher education sector in Syria.

Results revealed that although higher education policymakers focus more on societal, public and thinking skills for business graduates, the business sector focusses more on individual, private and practical skills. Accordingly, a comparative tool that aligns the two perspectives was developed in the study. The tool, based on the contradicting employability skills, identified four types of business graduates: leader, collective, technical and trainee.

The study is limited by data collected before the current political instability in Syria in 2012. The data were collected only from official documents and interviews with policymakers and employers. Students were not part of the study.

The managerial tool developed at the end of the study will help both policymakers and the private sector to statistically allocate business graduates for better planning. The study provides recommendations to the different stakeholders in the higher education sector in Syria.

Although the majority of the previous literature raises the voices of the business sector, this study is one of the first studies that aligns the discrepant perspectives of the higher education and business sectors. The managerial tool developed in the study is original and usable by policymakers and the business sector, and it is subject to further development.

This paper aims to focus on academics’ in four public universities located in Egypt to explore the effect of narcissistic leadership on affective, continuance and normative commitment approaches with and without the mediating effect of academics’ silence.

The authors used a convenience sampling in which academics were handed a questionnaire form to fill. In total, the authors distributed 280 forms and collected 214 completed questionnaire forms. A structural equation was used to determine the effect of narcissistic leadership on the organizational commitment (affective, continuance and normative) of academics. The same measure was later used to assess the mediating role of the academics’ silence on the aforementioned relationship.

The authors of this paper found that narcissistic leadership positively associates with academics’ silence. Moreover, their perceptions of the narcissism of their leaders alleviate academics’ emotional attachments (affective commitment) and moral obligations (normative commitment) toward their universities, whereas the same perceptions of the narcissism of their leaders have no effect on their continuance commitment. Finally, the authors discovered a significant role for academics’ silence in mediating the negative relationship between narcissistic leadership and their affective and normative commitments.

This paper contributes by filling a gap in leadership, HR management and organization literature in the higher education sector, in which empirical studies on the relationship between narcissistic leadership, academics’ silence and organizational commitment have been limited until now.

Little research into organizational learning in the public sector in developing countries' is known. In this paper, the authors investigated the context of organizational learning in the public banks in Egypt.

An ethnographic field research was employed by spending a month inside each of two public banks in Egypt. The ethnographic experience was operationalised by using direct observations of learning processes, procedures and practices, semi-structured interviews with learning specialists and focus group discussions with bankers. The authors used thematic analysis to determine the main themes in the previous data collection methods of ethnographic approach.

The findings confirmed a lack of clear focus for the organizational learning practices employed by the banks, which highlights issues of seriousness in undertaking and/or tackling organizational learning, and increased doubts in relation to the added value of the different forms of formal trainings bankers participate in. To enhance the culture and maintain effective functioning of formal organizational learning, the authors suggest considering the following three categories of barriers: purpose-related barriers, implementation and evaluation barriers.

Despite the generalisability caveats associated with the organizations studied, the authors believe that this paper contributes to the existing theory of organizational learning as it provides insights and understanding on the purpose, frame, conduct and results of organizational learning in the public sector. More specifically, the study is unique and is different from previous relevant studies as it relies on ethnographical approach in exploring how organizational leaning practices are perceived in public banks in developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to present the authors’ views of university–multi academy trusts’ (MATs) opportunities for future interconnectivity that could support successful partnerships.

The authors developed a matrix of university–MATs partnerships that could help identifying potential scenarios of collaboration between universities and MATs.

Four potential scenarios of collaborations are proposed (board membership, academic supervision, recruitment support and academic support).

Scholars in the field can further investigate the four proposed scenarios in the matrix in future studies.

The matrix will be useful for universities and MATs management for potential cooperation in the future.

The study proposes four scenarios of cooperation between MATs and universities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether females have different perceptions of diversity management and workplace happiness compared to their male colleagues. Furthermore, the paper explores whether diversity management perceptions mediate the relationship between workplace happiness and organisational citizenship behaviour.

A total of 260 questionnaires from a number of public hospitals in Egypt were analysed using both t-test and Structural Equation Modelling.

We found that female physicians perceive diversity management policies/protocols more positively than their male colleagues. Moreover, gender has no or little effect on physicians’ perceptions of workplace happiness. We also found that workplace happiness positively affects physicians’ organisational citizenship behaviour, and finally, diversity management practices can mediate the relationship between workplace happiness and physicians’ organisational citizenship behaviour.

We believe that managers can raise the feeling of workplace happiness among their staff if they maintain some personal relationships with physicians, care about the physicians’ work/life balance, promote after work gatherings, initiate coffee time talks, encourage open communication practices and more.

The paper is based on the argument that although employees might be happy in the workplace through (engagement, job satisfaction, affective commitment), their happiness, however,will unlikely be reflected into a positive organisational citizenship behaviour towards their organisation, except (social exchange theory) they feel or perceive (equity theory) the overall practices of diversity management in that organisation positively. Thus, studying the mediating effect of perceptions towards diversity management is mainly our contribution.

The main aim of the current study is to explore and model the major obstacles that UK universities encounter when developing international partnerships with overseas universities.

Focusing on the obstacles to developing international partnerships, the study results are developed from 24 interviews with senior and very senior university managers from four leading UK universities.

The results indicate that the obstacles to international partnerships for each of the four universities in this study can be grouped into two main categories: the obstacles that are relevant to the process of partner selection, and the obstacles that are relevant to the process of partnership arrangements. The study ends up with a model of obstacles of international partnerships in universities. In terms of strategy evaluation, obstacles related to the partner (whether they are focused or diversified), and obstacles related to the partnership arrangements (whether they are also focused or diversified) identify four quadrants of strategy evaluation: Realistic strategy, Partner‐reevaluation, Arrangement‐reevaluation, and Unrealistic strategy.

The study brings up the difficulties that come from the drivers of international partnerships and the associated problems. Accordingly, it points out from the data a classification of the obstacles confronting international partnerships and further models this classification. The study however does not tackle some related issues such as the positive side of international partnerships. In this regard, a study exploring the outcomes of international partnerships would be of great importance for researchers and for practitioners in the field.

Given the necessity of revising the process of establishing international partnerships by university managers, the model resulting from this study would be of vast importance to university international office directors and other university policy makers.

This study provides a new classification for obstacles confronting UK universities' international partnerships and develops an original model of these obstacles. This model is expected to be useful for both policy makers and researchers. The study is sustaining the series of studies of international partnership strategy for a group of four UK universities implemented by Ayoubi and followed by a paper in ICERI.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of transformational leadership (TL) on organizational commitment (OC) with the mediating role of organizational justice (OJ) in the higher education (HE) sector in Syria.

The data were collected from 502 employees from six HE institutions. Two measures of organizational outcomes were selected for this study, namely, job satisfaction (JS) and OC. Using structural equation modelling (SEM), the authors tested four alternative models to indicate the relationship between leadership and organizational outcomes.

TL has both direct and indirect effects on OC through interactional justice (IJ). TL has an impact on JS through procedural justice (PJ) and IJ as intermediate variables, while transactional leadership (TrL) has an impact on JS through distributive justice (DJ). The three types of OJ have an impact on OC through JS. The authors found that the national culture may not influence the impact of the leader in the current globalization context, as the results were similar to the Western studies.

The findings of the study provide managers of the HE sector with insights into the formations of employees’ fairness perceptions, and with some guidelines for managing employees by documenting OJ to draw positive attitudinal and behavioral responses from employees.

While most previous research has focused on exploring the relationship between leadership and OJ or between OJ and JS in the business sector, the study, however, seeks in addition, to pinpoint the effect of OJ as a mediate variable between the leadership and JS and OC in HE.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on 3 out of 24 business schools in Egypt in order to investigate their talent management practices of academics.

A total of 350 academics were contacted and 245 of them were interviewed in 49 face-to-face focus groups. The interview length for each focus group is about 45 min and is conducted in Arabic, the mother tongue of all respondents. Upon conducting the interviews, the authors used thematic analysis to determine the main ideas in the transcripts.

The authors did not detect any systematic approach for the management of academic talent in the chosen public business schools. Instead, there were irresponsible unorderly procedures undertaken by these business schools in staffing, empowering, motivating, evaluating and retaining those talents. Furthermore, the authors realized an absence of many cultural and technical dimensions like adaptability, consistency and knowledge sharing which may hurdle academic staff desires to do their best effort in teaching and conducting research. Moreover, these addressed academic members narrow perception of the concept “talent” that includes only musical and sports figures – the matter that reflects their lack of understanding for one of the hottest concepts in HR academic and practical arenas nowadays.

The focus is only on a single perspective (academics) and a single area (Upper Egypt) – a matter that neglects a variety of views (e.g. minister of Egyptian higher education and schools’ deans). Additionally, the results/findings of this study cannot be generalized to academic settings in other countries because the data are collected only from public business schools in Upper Egypt.

This paper contributes by filling a gap in HR management, in which empirical studies on the practices of managing talents have been limited so far.

The purpose of this research is to examine the extent to which UK universities' achal international achievements match their strategic intent on internationalization.

Both factor analysis and cluster analysis were applied on data collected from HESA (2001), and on the data collected from the mission statements of 117 universities by the use of the content analysis technique.

The study shows that 74 per cent of UK universities' mission statements include international dimensions. In addition, 48 per cent of these universities are internationally active. Four groups of (international action – international mission) matrixes have been reached. These groups are “international winners group, international actors group, international speakers group, and international losers group”.

This analysis is limited to only four variables taken in a single year 2001. Therefore, future research in this area is encouraged to employ more variables related to internationalization and to apply the analysis on longitudinal bases in order to get results that cover larger range of international aspects and allow observing the matrix development overtime.

The study finishes with a location model which can be used as an important tool by university managers in conducting their international business. This model can also be employed in various sectors other than the higher education sector.

The paper is the first classification carried out amongst UK universities in terms of internationalization. It is also the first of its kind in the higher education management literature in terms of both; the comprehensiveness in dealing with all the three phases of the strategy of internationalization and the nature of data it uses for this purpose.

This paper addresses nurses working in public hospitals in order to find out how gender may affect their perception of both diversity management and organisational inclusion. Moreover, and given the novelty of workplace fun and the lack of research in this field in the context of developing countries, the authors explore the relationship between diversity management and organisational inclusion and explore workplace fun as a predictor of organisational inclusion.

A total of 360 questionnaires were collected from nurses in three public hospitals in Egypt. The authors applied a t-test to identify how gender may affect perceptions of diversity management. Moreover, the authors employed hierarchical regressions to test gender and diversity management as predictors of organisational inclusion and to test whether workplace fun can predict organisational inclusion, too.

The findings indicate that compared to their male colleagues, female nurses respond to diversity management practices more positively. Second, no significant statistical differences in the mean values for female and male nurses were observed regarding their perceptions of organisational inclusiveness. Third, diversity management is positively associated with organisational inclusion for the nurses. Finally, workplace fun mediates the relationship between diversity management perceptions and organisational inclusion.

This paper contributes by filling a gap in human resources (HR) research in the health-care sector, in which empirical studies on the relationship between gender, workplace fun and organisational inclusion have been limited so far.