Organizational actors face multiple paradoxical tensions that are not only intertwined with one another but also nested across different levels of the organizational hierarchy. Despite their importance, little is known about how such paradoxical tensions are interpreted and managed by organizational leaders. To explore this phenomenon, we conducted semi-structured interviews and collected multilevel data from 38 respondents, including corporate executives, team leaders, and managers in the Pakistani telecommunications sector. Through an interpretive phenomenological analysis of participants’ lived experiences, we developed a multilevel nested paradox model. This model revealed four paradoxes nested both within and across levels: task efficiency and employee well-being, individual interest versus institutional interest, ethics and profitability, and empowerment and accountability. The tensions arising from customer demands, followers’ expectations, and organizational requirements lie at the intersection of the levels occupied by followers, team leaders, and corporate executives. Our model shows that tensions at one level exacerbate tensions at other levels, and through this transmission process, paradoxes generate a constellation of paradoxes. The study’s model suggests that leaders manage these nested tensions by applying a combination of splitting and integration strategies, dynamically sequencing and distributing responses across levels. This study contributes to the underexplored research on paradox multiplicity and deepens the understanding of paradoxes as a meta-theory. We also highlight several important theoretical and practical implications of this research.

Generative artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping business education, presenting both opportunities and concerns for teaching, learning, and assessment. This study reviews how generative artificial intelligence has been addressed in business education research since 2023, with a focus on organisational and institutional implications. Using a scoping review guided by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol, 32 peer-reviewed Scopus-indexed articles published between January 2023 and June 2025 were analysed. Four key themes emerge in the use of generative artificial intelligence: curriculum redesign, teaching practices, assessment integrity, and professional skills. Findings highlight benefits such as enhanced interactivity, personalised learning, reduced workload, greater accessibility, and stronger alignment with industry practices. However, challenges persist, including factual inaccuracies, reduced critical thinking, weakened assessment practices, and ethical concerns. Overall, generative artificial intelligence integration is both transformative and uneven, requiring careful and responsible adoption from an organisational context. The study outlines implications for educators, curriculum designers, and institutional policymakers aiming to develop a future-ready business education ecosystem.

People with disabilities represent a large, underutilized labor force, and while disability employment is increasingly recognized as a strategic human resource opportunity, reports on its value are fragmented. Existing research often emphasizes benefits for firms or employees with disabilities, overlooking other stakeholders and potential accompanying costs. This systematic review synthesizes 45 empirical studies published between 2000 and 2025, examining both benefits and costs across multiple stakeholders, value dimensions, and organizational positions. Findings reveal that most reported values were gain-related and firm-centered. Meanwhile, patterns of intra-stakeholder clustering and inter-stakeholder linkages highlighted the complex dynamics of shared outcomes. Four benefit–cost dynamics were identified, alongside evidence of occupational segregation in low-value job roles. By applying a multi-stakeholder framework, this review advances the human resource management literature, showing how disability employment can be leveraged strategically to create interconnected values, foster inclusion, and support sustainable workforce practices.

The paradox of environmental sustainability is often framed as a trade-off between profit and planet. Mainstream sustainability approaches remain constrained by anthropocentric and reductionist assumptions that treat economy and ecology as separable domains. Guided by Kaupapa Māori (Māori approach) principles, this research explores an alternative relational approach grounded in te ao Māori (Māori world view). Drawing on Kōrero (Māori narrative approach) with 11 participants, analysed through reflexive thematic analysis, the paper develops the Whakapapa–Mauri–Utu Regenerative Cycle. In this framework, Whakapapa (genealogy) establishes non-negotiable governance responsibilities, Mauri (life force) serves as an evaluative indicator of ecosystem health, and Utu (reciprocity) reorients economic activity toward restoration and collective wellbeing. This paper contributes to paradox scholarship by demonstrating that sustainability tensions are reframed when organisations are understood as genealogically embedded within spiritual and ecological systems. Rather than being managed through trade-offs between separable objectives, sustainability becomes a relational obligation enacted through genealogical integrity.

This article aims to provide an overview of family firms and entrepreneurial ecosystems regarding their current trends and future research directions. A systematic literature review was carried out on 37 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters extracted from the Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection databases up to December 2025. By carrying out a coding procedure and thematic approach, we blend the input-process-outcome model with three levels of analysis (i.e., individual, family, and firm). Findings reveal that family firms shape and are conditioned by entrepreneurial ecosystems. At the same time, resource deployment and embeddedness foster knowledge transfer and regional resilience, thus corroborating the co-evolutionary relationship between family firms and entrepreneurial ecosystems. The contribution of this work is threefold: (i) an integrated theory-driven conceptual model; (ii) an inductive thematic map grounded in coded outcomes; and (iii) a future research agenda steering scholars towards novel research directions.

As organizations expand globally, the spatial distribution of top management teams (TMTs) across regions becomes increasingly prevalent. This paper aims to review the diverse literature on the geographic dimensions of teams (collocation, dispersion, and virtuality), and more specifically, the spatial configuration of upper echelons. Several studies explore the composition of TMTs, the diversity of their members, and their influence on firms’ strategic choices. However, the international location of TMT members remains largely overlooked. We conduct a systematic literature review that draws on spatial theory and the upper echelons approach. The results allow the development of a conceptual framework that integrates research related to the spatial dimensions of TMTs. The purpose is to contribute to a better understanding of how the spatial configuration of TMTs influences strategic leadership processes in geographically dispersed organizational contexts. We discuss the implications of this spatial perspective of upper echelons and propose potential avenues for future research.

Protecting biodiversity on the planet through business involvement is a priority for many governments and citizens. To do this requires balancing different social, financial, and ecological objectives with economic output. This editorial questions what is the right way to do this based on considering different forms of capital, such as natural, human, social, manufactured, and financial. This enables renewed interest in the natural environment in terms of business involvement in issues such as climate change and the circular economy.

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence has accelerated its adoption across organizational functions. However, existing reviews often adopt sectoral or technology-focused perspectives, limiting understanding of its implementation within core firm activities. This study addresses this gap through a systematic review of articles published in Web of Science and Scopus up to December 2025, following established methodological guidelines. A total of 160 peer-reviewed articles met the inclusion criteria. Findings reveal convergent patterns of adoption in human resources, marketing and customer services, logistics, and finance. Artificial intelligence enhances analytics, automates routine tasks, personalizes interactions, and supports decision-making. Human resources applications focus on recruitment and workforce planning; marketing relies on predictive analytics and conversational interfaces; logistics improves forecasting and supply chain resilience; finance strengthens risk assessment and process efficiency. The study proposes an integrative conceptual model and research propositions, highlighting cross-functional challenges in governance, organizational capabilities, socio-technical alignment, and responsible implementation.

Transitioning to a sustainable economy requires firms to transform their business models in accordance with circular economy principles. Circular economy scholarship has predominantly examined resource-rich large firms and circular startups, leaving established, resource-constrained small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) underexplored. Facing capability constraints regarding resources, knowledge, and organizational capacity, government policy intervention plays an important role. Through interviews with 15 experts and analysis of seven government programs, we reveal the transition dynamics that shape SME circular engagement and how government intervention can reinforce the optimization of linear business models or facilitate moving toward circular business model transformation.

Affective Events Theory explains how workplace emotions arise from discrete events and shape attitudes and behaviour. Drawing on a phenomenological study of 29 employees and 13 managers working within oversight saturated supervisory contexts in the post–Royal Commission Australian financial services sector, this paper extends Affective Events Theory by examining how affective experience unfolds when accountability is continuous, and discretion is constrained. Across dual-cohort findings, affect was not primarily anchored to identifiable events that resolved over time. Instead, participants described emotion as persistent and cumulative, produced through ambiguity and emotional restraint, and circulating across supervisory roles. Employees reported sustained interpretive effort directed towards reading tone, silence, and procedural communication, while managers described regulating emotional expression to remain defensible under accountability pressures. These findings specify boundary conditions for the episodic logic of Affective Events Theory, by explaining how affect may be conceived as a sustained condition in contexts with sustained oversight, with meaningful implications for workplace attitudes and behaviours and for managerial practice in highly regulated organisational environments where accountability and supervision are continuous.

This study investigates employees’ perceptions of artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace, using data from 1,224 working adults across two samples. Drawing from an extended version of the Technology Acceptance Model, we examine how employees’ trust in AI and their perceptions of AI’s usefulness and ease-of-use at work shape their affective attitudes toward using AI, which in turn influence their intentions to adopt AI in their job. Perceived usefulness and trust in AI predicted employees’ intentions to adopt it at work via affective attitudes toward using AI. The findings for perceived ease-of-use were inconsistent, suggesting potential workplace-specific implications of this pathway. None of the relationships differed by gender, education, or leadership status. The findings bridge the technology adoption and organizational science literature to offer theoretical insights, practical implications, and future research directions for facilitating employees’ intentions to adopt AI at work.

The rise of Generative AI has accelerated the shift toward Industry 5.0, marking a critical transition from the technology-centric focus of Industry 4.0 to a human-centric, value-driven paradigm. While its predecessor prioritized automation and technology, Industry 5.0 integrates advanced human–machine collaboration with social imperatives to create resilience. This study advances current literature by presenting a novel systems-based framework, grounded in systems theory and legitimacy theory, which conceptualizes Industry 5.0 as an interconnected ecosystem rather than isolated pillars. We identify technological adaptation, specifically AI integration, and human-centricity as critical inputs that drive economic, environmental, and social sustainability as systemic outputs. By mapping these interdependencies, the model demonstrates how cohesive components collectively fuel organizational transformation. These findings offer actionable insights for aligning corporate strategies with Sustainable Development Goals, providing policymakers and practitioners with future-oriented pathways to navigate this complex, emerging industrial environment.

Adolescent cyberbullying has evolved into a significant public health and governance challenge in digital environments. This study provides a systematic bibliometric mapping of 1,202 peer-reviewed articles published between 2001 and 2025, examining the intellectual structure and thematic development of the field. By using Scopus for data retrieval and VOSviewer for co-occurrence analysis, the study identifies publication trends, influential contributors, institutional patterns, and six dominant thematic clusters. Findings indicate a sustained growth in research output, particularly after 2015, with a strong concentration on mental health outcomes, victimisation, and psychosocial risks. Emerging themes include minority vulnerability, cyber dating violence, artificial intelligence-based detection systems, and digital prevention strategies. However, governance constructs such as platform accountability, regulatory oversight, and algorithmic transparency remain comparatively peripheral. The study highlights the need for stronger integration of organisational, institutional, and socio-technical perspectives to complement individual-level research and inform coordinated policy, educational, and platform-based interventions.

Traditional leadership theories often portray influence as stable traits or behaviors, yet complex organizations require leadership to be understood as an emergent, feedback-driven process that co-evolves with contextual demands and follower motivation. This study conceptualizes servant leadership as a nonlinear, adaptive process rather than a fixed style, integrating Complexity Leadership Theory with the Job Demands Resources model and Regulatory Focus Theory. Servant leadership is theorized as an enabling mechanism through which shifting job demands and resources are translated into employees’ promotion and prevention orientations, shaping person-job fit, satisfaction, intrinsic motivation, initiative, and experienced responsibility. Using a two-phase longitudinal design, Phase 1 tested simple and serial mediation with structural equation modeling, and Phase 2 employed a cross-lagged panel model to examine reciprocal feedback dynamics. Results support a four-path process in which servant leadership differentially activates promotion and prevention focus and participates in ongoing feedback loops.

The focus of existing research on perceived organizational support (POS) has largely been concentrated at the individual-level, leaving an understudied gap at a higher unit-level of analysis. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the multilevel relationship between employee POS and job satisfaction, emphasizing the moderating role of unit-level POS. We hypothesize, based on POS theory and social comparison theory, that unit-level POS serves as a contextual moderator for the relationship between individual-level POS and job satisfaction. Additionally, at the unit-level, we identify clan culture values and unit-satisfaction as correlates of unit-POS. We test our hypotheses using a Bayesian Multilevel Structural Modeling approach on 45 work units and 317 employees. The results show that at low levels of unit-level POS, individual-level POS is more important for employees’ job satisfaction. We furthermore found support for a positive association between unit-level POS, unit-clan culture, and unit satisfaction. Our results, and their notable theoretical and practical implications, are discussed.

Many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are managed by owners, founders, or small leadership teams. The UK government’s Help to Grow Management Programme (HtGM) aims to improve SME growth through leadership and management skills training to increase firm level productivity. The government’s independent evaluation reports for the HtGM programme show that its aims were broadly met, but there is no empirical research that has reviewed the programme. To address this gap, 46 HtGM programme completers were interviewed on their perception of the HtGM outcomes. Data were analysed using thematic analysis and compared to the government’s evaluation reports. This study’s findings show that a variety of programme activities developed skills, knowledge, and management practices, resulting in improved confidence to lead and drive growth. The analysis adds depth to our understanding how this was achieved from the programme, highlighting the benefits of mentoring, networking and cross-collaboration. Follow-up support is recommended for the growth action plan (GAP).