Search Results (380)

This study explores how Machiavellian leadership behaviors may become embedded in ethical mentorship relationships and how these dynamics influence trust formation, dependency, emotional ambivalence, and trust erosion within higher education institutions (HEIs). Drawing on destructive leadership and impression management perspectives, this study examines how ethical rhetoric and developmental language may function as mechanisms through which manipulation, reciprocity expectations, and dependency become normalized within organizational mentorship relationships. A qualitative research design was adopted, using semi-structured interviews with sixteen participants employed within multicultural HEIs in the United Arab Emirates. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis to identify recurring patterns related to mentorship experiences, ethical self-presentation, emotional tension, and evolving trust dynamics. The findings revealed five interrelated themes: “The Wolf in a Scholar’s Robe,” where mentors project ethical identities while pursuing self-interest; “Debts That Never End,” reflecting the use of gratitude and reciprocity to create ongoing obligation; “Trust Fractures,” characterized by the erosion of interpersonal and institutional trust following perceived manipulation; “Ambivalence of Gratitude,” capturing the emotional conflict between appreciation and resentment; and “Signals of Dual Image,” highlighting the contrast between public ethical performance and private exploitative behavior. Together, these findings demonstrate how ethical mentorship may simultaneously function as a source of professional support and a mechanism of subtle control. This study contributes to the literature by conceptualizing performative ethical mentorship as a potential mechanism through which manipulative leadership behaviors may become legitimized within academic institutions. It further extends current scholarship by integrating Machiavellian leadership, ethical mentorship, emotional ambivalence, and trust dynamics within an analysis of multicultural HEI environments in the UAE, highlighting how performative ethical leadership may gradually erode psychological safety, relational trust, and organizational confidence. Full article

Timor-Leste, Asia’s youngest nation since its independence in 2002, has been making progress in its education sector. However, these gains have not translated into leadership representation as expected, with women remaining significantly underrepresented in senior academic and managerial roles in higher education. While existing studies highlight the potential of intersectional disaggregated data to enhance the visibility of layered inequalities and inform more targeted leadership interventions, its application in Timor-Leste remains at an early stage. This study examines respondents’ perception of barriers and enablers influencing the collection and use of intersectional disaggregated data, and their association with perceived leadership interventions aimed at advancing women in higher education leadership in Timor-Leste. A survey design was employed, with questionnaires administered to purposively selected academic and non-academic staff across selected universities in Timor-Leste. Data were analysed using descriptive and inferential techniques, including the Kruskal–Wallis test, and Spearman’s rank correlation (ρ). The findings suggest that respondents perceive key leadership interventions to include women’s leadership development programmes, mentorship, mental health support, and establishment of dedicated equality and diversity units Respondents also identified key enablers and barriers influencing the collection and use of intersectional disaggregated data, including staff training in ethical data practices, the use of mixed-method approaches, and the provision of privacy protections, alongside constraints related to data systems, capacity, and leadership support. Spearman’s analysis showed significant associations between perceived enablers and barriers influencing the collection and use of intersectional disaggregated data and perceived leadership interventions. This study contributes to the gender equity literature by providing empirical insights on perceived institutional conditions, reported barriers, enablers and perceived mechanisms through which intersectional data may inform leadership-related interventions in the context of Timor-Leste’s higher education system. Full article

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming how organizations develop human potential, offering scalable and data-driven support for coaching and capability building. This study proposes and validates a conceptual framework for integrating AI into organizational coaching processes to enhance competence development and strategic alignment. AI-supported coaching in this research is treated as an emerging organizational technology whose potential organizational value depends less on model capability and more on governance design, decision rights, and auditable evaluation outputs. Following a mixed-methods, multi-phase design, the research combined a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) with the construction of a layered design architecture in which OSCAR serves as the primary coaching-process scaffold, complemented by KSA for competency specification, Situational Leadership for adaptive guidance, and KPIs for monitoring and governance. The framework structures AI-supported coaching across 10 interrelated phases, from contextual anchoring to review and measurement, while preserving iterative re-entry to earlier phases whenever review evidence, contextual change, or insufficient progress makes adjustment necessary. Prototyping demonstrated feasibility and coherence across models, while the focus group provided qualitative expert feedback on the framework’s clarity, governance needs, and perceived usefulness for competence development. At this stage, however, the KPI structures generated by the framework and the descriptive comparison across AI tools should be interpreted as prototype-level outputs rather than as empirically validated performance measures or evidence of added value over baseline approaches. Because the evaluation relied on two fictional prototyping scenarios and a small expert-oriented focus group (n = 6), the findings should be interpreted as evidence of prototype demonstration and qualitative refinement rather than of real-world effectiveness or organizational impact. The study also does not include a control group or comparison with traditional human coaching, so the added value of the AI-supported framework over alternative coaching arrangements remains a question for future empirical testing. Findings suggest that AI can usefully support organizational coaching by personalizing dialogue, structuring reflection, and generating auditable development artefacts, provided ethical safeguards and human oversight remain integral. The research contributes a preliminarily validated, ethics-informed, and governance-aware framework for AI adoption in organizational coaching and offers practical insights for embedding AI-enabled development in learning organizations. Full article

This study examines how Black women navigate spiritual widowhood and cosmological disinheritance in contemporary America through the biblical figure of Ruth. Employing what I call a critical embodied epistemology (CEE)—a womanist methodology integrating Hortense Spillers’ hieroglyphics of the flesh, Michel Foucault’s genealogical analysis, and Emilie Townes’ ethical reimagination—this article analyzes Ruth’s transgressive movements as a template for sacred belonging beyond State-sanctioned citizenship. Against the backdrop of reproductive rights rollbacks, voting restrictions, and the political rejection of Black women’s leadership, the research reveals how African-descended cosmology offers alternative frameworks for community, covenant, and citizenship. Findings demonstrate that Ruth’s embodied risk on the threshing floor models what I term “faith in the fracture”—an insurgent spirituality that refuses to tether sacred belonging to empire. The study contributes to womanist theology, political theology, and diaspora studies by theorizing sacred citizenship as relational rather than national, and by centering embodied knowledge as theological epistemology. Implications include reconceptualizing belonging for all marginalized communities navigating displacement, State abandonment, and cosmological rupture. Full article

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) routinely invest in servant leadership, a follower-centered and ethically grounded approach to leading, as a driver of project performance. Yet whether servant leadership is necessary for success, or whether strong team dynamics can compensate for its absence, remains unclear. Using cross-national data from 451 NGO project participants and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, we examine how servant leadership, team identification, and team climate combine to produce sustainable project success. Three distinct routes emerge. Two involve servant leadership: one in which leadership strengthens team cohesion (Relational Alignment), and one in which leadership reinforces the team’s evaluative climate (Structured Empowerment). A third route achieves success through strong team identification and team climate alone, without servant leadership (leadership substitution). This pathway carries the highest consistency score, making it the most reliable route to success. Project failure follows a different logic, requiring the simultaneous weakening of at least two conditions rather than any single deficit alone. Career stage also matters: servant leadership alone is sufficient for junior staff, whose team-level resources are still developing, while senior staff exhibit a more heterogeneous success landscape with no dominant pathway. These findings reposition servant leadership as one of several sufficient configurations and offer managers guidance for differentiating leadership investment across organizational levels. Full article

This study examines Responsible Decision-Making (RADM) in AI-enabled sustainability within tertiary education under conditions of uncertainty and complex interdependence. Conventional analytical approaches are limited in such settings because they typically explain behavioural relationships without adequately modelling uncertainty. To address this limitation, the study proposes an AI-driven Decision Support System (DSS) based on a hybrid probabilistic framework integrating PLS-SEM with Bayesian Network (BN) inference. The framework combines structural analysis with probabilistic reasoning in a unified, interpretable system capable of modelling conditional dependencies among decision variables. Data were collected from 713 academic leaders in tertiary education institutions in Saudi Arabia. The model examines the effects of AI-Driven Sustainable Value (AISV), Responsible AI Ease of Use (RAIU), Institutional Sustainability Support (ISS), Ethical Leadership Norms (ELN), Responsible AI Competence (RAC), and AI Risk and Hallucination Awareness (ARHA) on Responsible Decision-Making and Sustainability Impact Performance (GGIP). The results indicate that ELN and ARHA have significant positive effects on RADM, while AISV and RAIU also contribute positively to decision quality. In contrast, ISS and RAC do not demonstrate significant direct effects on RADM. However, ISS shows indirect effects through contextual and cognitive pathways. The findings further suggest that awareness of uncertainty and AI-related risks plays a more influential role in decision quality than technical competence alone. The model demonstrates strong explanatory power (R² = 0.64) and acceptable predictive capability (R² = 0.48). Bayesian inference further indicates that sustainability outcomes improve under favourable institutional and cognitive conditions. Overall, the framework provides an interpretable and scalable DSS that supports scenario-based evaluation and probabilistic decision analysis under uncertainty. The findings are specific to the institutional context examined in this study. Although the framework may have relevance to other organisational environments characterised by uncertainty and complex decision structures, no external or cross-contextual validation was conducted. Therefore, the findings should be interpreted with appropriate contextual caution. Full article

Background: Gender discrimination in sport remains a persistent global issue, reflected in women’s limited participation, leadership representation, media visibility, salary equity, and personal safety. These forms of discrimination also negatively affect athletes’ psychological well-being, mental health, and overall sports experience. Despite growing scholarly attention over the past three decades, a comprehensive quantitative synthesis of this research area has been lacking. Methodology: A bibliometric analysis of 397 peer-reviewed documents published between 1995 and 2026 was conducted using the Scopus database. Data were analysed through the Bibliometric R package 4.2.1 and Biblioshiny interface. Science-mapping techniques including keyword co-occurrence, thematic clustering, thematic evolution, and collaboration network analysis were combined with performance indicators such as annual publication output, leading sources, author productivity, and citation impact. Results: Scientific production increased markedly after the mid-2010s, involving 187 sources and 1106 authors, with rising collaboration and citation influence. Core research themes included gender inequality, leadership exclusion, media representation, harassment and abuse, and structural discrimination in sports systems. Importantly, many of these themes are directly linked to reduced athlete well-being, including increased stress, anxiety, and decreased participation. Recent thematic developments highlighted intersectionality, safeguarding, inclusion, governance, and athlete welfare. Conclusion: Research on discrimination against women in sport has evolved into a multidisciplinary, policy-relevant field. Addressing gender discrimination is essential not only to achieving equity but also to improving athletes’ subjective well-being and long-term participation in sport. However, significant gaps remain, particularly in Global South contexts and intervention-based studies, indicating the need for stronger evidence-driven strategies to advance gender equity, inclusion, and ethical governance in sport. Full article

Tourism and hospitality organisations in remote, highly seasonal Arctic and sub-Arctic destinations face persistent workforce instability, multicultural team dynamics, and well-being risks that threaten service reliability and organisational continuity. Previous research has focused mainly on destination- and community-level resilience, while giving less attention to how resilience is built within tourism organisations through everyday workforce-related practices. This study examines people-centred organisational resilience through a qualitative comparative design in two northern contexts: Iceland and Finnish Lapland. The empirical material comprised semi-structured interviews in Iceland and interviews, organisational documents, and field observations in Finnish Lapland, collected in autumn 2025. The data were analysed using thematic analysis. The findings identify four recurring resilience mechanisms: leadership under seasonal and environmental pressure; employee experience across employment phases; living conditions and belonging; and ethical governance. Here, “mechanisms” refers not simply to broad topics but to organisational processes through which recurring practices support resilience in remote, highly seasonal tourism settings. Together, these mechanisms show that resilience in remote tourism is built not only through operational flexibility or crisis response, but through people-centred organisational practices that support continuity, coordination, safety, and trust across seasons. The study contributes a workforce-centred extension of resilience theory in tourism and offers a comparative account of how these mechanisms operate across two northern tourism settings. Full article

This systematic review synthesises the qualitative literature on Māori leadership to examine how leadership is conceptualised, enacted, and constrained, and what this implies for Aotearoa New Zealand’s health system. Across included studies, Māori leadership is grounded in whakapapa-based legitimacy, tikanga and mātauranga Māori, and collective responsibility for relational, cultural, and intergenerational wellbeing; these foundations persist across “traditional” and “contemporary” settings, with differences reflecting institutional conditions rather than shifts in core values. Interpreting the literature through a Māori cultural lens, the review shows that leadership is often exercised within Crown-dominated organisations where Māori authority is not the default, requiring leaders to navigate multiple accountabilities to iwi and communities, organisational mandates, and statutory obligations. Hybridity emerges as a structurally produced feature of practice, integrating Māori relational ethics with bureaucratic, professional, and governance requirements and ongoing translation work to make Māori priorities legible within institutional systems. Health-sector evidence illustrates how commissioning, funding, and accountability arrangements can limit Māori decision-making, increase leadership burden, and constrain sustainability and leadership pipelines. The review concludes that strengthening Māori leadership in health requires organisational and system change—such as clearer Māori decision rights, resourced Māori-led priority setting, and accountability mechanisms that operationalise equity and anti-racism—alongside targeted research on governance, commissioning, and system design. Full article

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly embedded in organizational processes, questions about its implications for leadership have gained growing relevance. However, the existing literature remains fragmented, often addressing strategy, leadership capabilities, governance structures, or ethical concerns in isolation, without explaining how these dimensions interact to shape leadership effectiveness in AI-driven environments. This study conducts a PRISMA-guided systematic review of 33 peer-reviewed articles to examine how AI-embedded leadership is conceptualized across contexts. By synthesizing findings across strategic, human, and governance domains, the analysis identifies recurring patterns and structural relationships in the literature. The results indicate that effective leadership in AI-intensive settings is not determined solely by technological adoption or digital competencies, but by the alignment between the depth of AI integration in decision-making processes, leaders’ capacity to interpret and oversee algorithmic outputs, and the presence of governance mechanisms that ensure transparency, accountability, and trust. While some studies highlight potential opportunities associated with AI, these remain less systematically developed compared to the extensive focus on challenges and emerging risks. On this basis, the study introduces the AI-Leadership Configurational Framework (ALCF), a multi-level model that conceptualizes leadership effectiveness as the outcome of systemic alignment. The framework integrates previously disconnected debates and provides a coherent foundation for future empirical research on leadership in the algorithmic age. Full article

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality globally, with low-resource settings, including Ethiopia facing challenges due to limited early diagnostic services. AI-powered electrocardiography (ECG) interpretation has the potential to improve diagnostic accuracy, decentralize care, and support timely clinical decisions, but evidence on healthcare providers’ perspectives and adoption determinants is limited. This exploratory descriptive qualitative study employed 31 in-depth interviews with healthcare providers. Healthcare providers (cardiologists, internists, cardiac and critical care nurses, critical care specialists, and general practitioners) were purposively selected through maximum variation sampling from ten hospitals in four regions of Ethiopia. Data were transcribed verbatim, coded inductively, and analyzed thematically. The data analysis identified six themes: perceived benefit of AI-powered ECG interpretation CDSS, trust development, workflow integration, ethical concerns, functionality, and adoption determinants. Participants emphasized AI’s potential to enhance accessibility, consistency, and diagnostic accuracy while reducing subjectivity and unnecessary referrals. Acceptance relied on high accuracy, reliable data, and rigorous validation, with the technology seen as supportive rather than replacing clinicians. Material resources, human resource readiness, and leadership engagement were key factors for adoption. Recommendations included phased implementation, continuous training, and model expansion to ensure sustainability and clinical utility. The AI-powered ECG interpretation CDSS was viewed as a valuable adjunct for strengthening cardiovascular care in Ethiopia, highlighting the need for context-sensitive strategies, ethical safeguards, and multi-level system readiness for successful adoption. Full article

Societal expectations for serious breaches of health and safety legislation that lead to loss of life have changed. The Australian harmonized work health and safety legislation has introduced industrial manslaughter to many jurisdictions across Australia, placing senior leaders at risk of prosecution. This paper examines whether mining construction managers (those involved in the building or maintenance of infrastructure at a mine site) have been adequately prepared, both ethically and practically, to understand how complex socio-technical systems could fail and the role human cognitive architecture plays in such systems. A case study is presented, which adequately highlights tragic outcomes from management inaction. The aim of this perspective article was to critically examine whether there is the need for greater health and safety education for construction managers within Western Australia’s mining construction sector. The analysis argues for the importance of embedding fundamental health and safety education in tertiary curricula and statutory training programs to promote and strengthen a positive safety culture and reduce high-severity incidents. The conclusion of the review is that there is a strong case for giving future mining construction leaders a better introduction to the fundamentals of workplace health and safety during tertiary education. By including work health and safety in their curricula, educational institutions can better prepare students for leadership roles in the industry. Full article

Educational leadership increasingly operates under conditions of uncertainty, ambiguity, and competing demands. The rapid emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in education intensifies these challenges, requiring school leaders to navigate tensions between innovation and ethics, autonomy and regulation, and professional judgment and accountability. This study examines AI integration primarily through the lens of educational leadership, proposing that leadership not only shapes teachers’ perceptions of AI but also strengthens the translation of those perceptions into practice. Drawing on transformational leadership theory and technology acceptance models (TAM; UTAUT2), the study tests an integrative model in which teachers’ perceptions of AI function as proximal predictors of use, while transformational leadership serves as a contextual moderator. Data were collected from 141 teachers and analyzed using correlational and regression-based moderation analyses. Findings indicate that transformational leadership significantly predicts teachers’ perceptions of AI and strengthens the relationship between perceptions and AI use. While leadership does not directly predict AI use once perceptions are accounted for, it plays a critical role in enabling the enactment of professional beliefs in instructional practice. These findings position school leadership as a central factor in understanding AI integration, highlighting leadership’s role as a contextual enabler of educational innovation. Full article

This study examines female microenterprise entrepreneurship in the city of Juliaca, Peru, as a response to structural conditions of poverty, informality, and limited inclusion in public policies. The research aims to understand and interpret the dynamics of women-led entrepreneurship and its relationship with sustainable local socioeconomic development. A qualitative methodological approach based on an interpretive phenomenological design was adopted. Data was collected through in-depth interviews, direct observation, and document analysis with sixteen microentrepreneurs selected through purposive and snowball sampling. The findings reveal that intrinsic motivations (resilience, leadership, and self-fulfillment) and extrinsic motivations (economic independence, access to financing, and education) are key factors in the entrepreneurial process. In addition, entrepreneurial social capital, expressed through family, community, and institutional networks, plays a strategic role in the sustainability of businesses. The results also show that women entrepreneurs actively and significantly contribute to sustainable local socioeconomic development by strengthening local development ecosystems, generating employment, and promoting socially, fiscally, and ethically responsible practices. Despite their role as agents of change and transformation, women entrepreneurs continue to face structural barriers, highlighting the need for public policies with territorial and gender-sensitive approaches to strengthen their impact and sustainability. Full article

This article contributes to current debates around the ethics of using AI in K-12 education by extending an ethical framework based on the constructs of wellbeing, autonomy and justice to examine how AI may differentially impact specific stakeholders. Data about K-12 building and district leaders’ perceptions of AI risks were collected during the 2023–24 school year in Western New York as part of an exploratory sequential mixed methods study, which included semi-structured interviews with a diverse group of 36 K-12 leaders, followed by a survey (n = 160). Survey findings confirm K-12 leaders’ widespread recognition, although at varying levels of concern, of AI risks related to (a) students cheating, (b) students’ other questionable AI uses, (c) educators’ questionable AI uses, (d) increasing inequities due to AI, (e) cybersecurity and privacy breaches, and to a much lesser extent, the (f) potential for job replacement. The ethical analysis reveals major differences in the implications of each of these six kinds of AI risk for the wellbeing, autonomy, and justice of K-12 educators, K-12 students, and society, respectively, as well as tensions between competing needs and values, which in turn call for risk-specific strategies as well as inevitable tradeoffs. A comparison with a study of musicians’ perceptions of AI using the same ethical framework reveals interesting similarities and differences in ethical concerns about AI in different fields, suggesting the value of more cross-disciplinary studies. Full article