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Purpose: This paper aims to conceptualize and discuss empathic organizational culture and leadership along with organizational implications. Design/methodology/approach: The authors reviewed literature to conceptualize empathic organizational culture and leadership. They referred to Hofstede's organizational culture concept and studies on empathy to explore how leader-follower relationships are influenced by a leader's empathic disposition. Findings: Organizational leadership is instrumental in shaping employee performance. While work design, culture, peer support and resource accessibility are discernible, leadership style, control and others are covert. Leaders' empathic attitudes and dispositions can positively influence organizational functions for improved performance. This review suggests that organizational culture should support growth, proper functioning and effective coordination between employees for improved organizational effectiveness. Research limitations/implications: The authors conducted searches in leadership and management journals to help conceptualize leaders' empathic disposition. Future researchers may explore other bodies of literature and the cultural demographic differences in exhibiting empathic leadership and its effectiveness. Researchers can explore how empathic culture relates to job motivation, satisfaction and commitment. The authors suggest that future research may explore how employees' and supervisors' behaviors and interactions can create an empathic organizational culture. Practical implications: The authors identify the characteristics in an empathic leader to articulate the role of empathy in leadership. Alignment between person, group norms and organizational values is more important than the existence of culture. Originality/value: Empathy is studied by researchers from various disciplines. Similarly, employee well-being has received attention from organizational researchers from many fields. However, researchers have given inadequate attention to conceptualizing an empathic organizational culture and its interrelationship with leadership. The authors offer a more positive perspective to the leader-member exchange (LMX) research by describing how leaders can sustain positive relationships with employees rather than the purely transactional exchanges that characterize LMX.

Purpose: This paper aims to review organizational studies literature and related fields to explore the parallel between organizations and organisms in dealing with change. Design/methodology/approach: The authors reviewed the literature to explore organizational change theories. Additionally, they referred to biological studies to explore the connection between organizations and organisms. Findings: To cope successfully with change, organizations need to be aware of the critical, vulnerable points that may endanger their survival. These vulnerabilities can arise from external or internal factors or both. Organizational leaders, being aware of these criticalities, can act swiftly to deal with threats while keeping an eye on available opportunities. Research limitations/implications: Future research could be conducted on understanding the elements of biological transformations through an in-depth study focused on species that have undergone frequent mutations and adaptations. It is hoped that HRD researchers, especially organization development (OD) theorists and practitioners, can build upon the ideas presented in this article. Practical implications: The review and analysis can open doors for HRD practitioners to seek a better understanding of biological transformations, while enabling them to borrow ideas to be used in leading organizational change and design successful organizational change. Originality/value: In this paper, the authors selected organizational theories to outline parallels between organizations and organisms to emphasize what organizations can learn from the success of organisms changing over billions of years. Thus, this paper uniquely contributes to HRD literature by encouraging OD researchers to conduct more interdisciplinary research. Most importantly, this paper contributes to understanding the underlying theories in HRD/OD.

Purpose: Managerial coaching has been popularized as a way of motivating, developing and retaining employees in organizations. Yet, there has been a lack of empirical studies to examine the linkage between managerial coaching and its potential impact on employees. This study aims to investigate the interrelationships among managerial coaching, employees' personal learning and organizational commitment. This study also attempts to revise an existing instrument for measuring coaching skills in organizations created by McLean "et al." (2005) to assess managers' coaching skills. Design/methodology/approach: Data analyzes were based on 187 employees of a top global technology organization headquartered in the USA. The existing instrument for measuring coaching skills was revised and confirmed through a series of efforts including expert reviews, pilot tests and assessing its reliability and validity. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the relationships among managerial coaching skills and employees' personal learning and organizational commitment. Findings: This study identified five dimensions of managerial coaching skills and validated the revised instrument measuring coaching skills in organizations. It also demonstrated that managers' utilization of managerial coaching skills had a direct effect on employees' learning and organizational commitment and impacted employees' organizational commitment through personal learning. Originality/value: This study examined the interrelationships among managerial coaching and employees' personal learning and organizational commitment in organizations. In doing so, this study unveiled the process of how managers' coaching affects employees' development and attitudes at work. This study also identified five coaching skills as a tool to assess the level of managerial coaching.

Purpose: This study aims to explore how career self-efficacy shapes an individual's career decisions and how learning and development interventions, including participation in education abroad, might play a role in career choice. Design/methodology/approach: The authors used the following databases to review the literature on career self-efficacy: Academic Search Premier, Education Resources Information Center and ProQuest. The following key search terms were used in the search: career self-efficacy, career choice and education abroad. The titles of the identified articles were first reviewed for relevance, followed by the abstract, before further review for inclusion suitability. Findings: Findings suggest career self-efficacy plays a vital role in career decision-making, generating interests and deciding career goals. By improving career self-efficacy among college students, career interests can be reshaped. Findings evidence a relationship between education abroad and career competencies and career development. Research limitations/implications: The review offers an invaluable pathway to breed ideas and thoughts about research in the career self-efficacy domain. While education abroad itself may be a useful intervention in the development of a student's career self-efficacy, among other characteristics and skills, a further empirical study is necessary to determine the extent to which this is true. Using or creating an accurate scale for the measurement of career self-efficacy among undergraduate students is critical to determine a reliable and valid measure, as is controlling for potential differences in self-efficacy between students who self-select for high impact endeavors such as education abroad and those who do not. Practical implications: Noting that practices in international education support collaboration between career services offices and study abroad offices, the authors point to the importance of interventions that intentionally and explicitly incorporate the career self-efficacy construct. Originality/value: Findings evidence a relationship between education abroad and career competencies and career development, through research examining connections to career self-efficacy and education abroad is noticeably scarce. The paper explores the above relationship.

Technology and its applications have had a significant impact on human resource development (HRD), and they will continue to do so at an ever-increasing speed. We used our a priori opinions and experiences to identify application areas. We then searched, within each of our identified areas to find published sources, including journals, blogs, and websites, to describe the application areas that have impacted, and will impact, HRD. Areas identified and described include authoring, performance management and coaching, personalisation and continuous learning, analytic metrics, robotic continuous improvement, employee engagement and autonomy, employee wellbeing and life balance, attrition reduction, simulations, digital dialogues, communities of practice, credentialing, soft skills development, and ethics. Given the extensive impact on HRD, practitioners must be ahead of the wave of change. Further, academic programs must assess their curricula and make modifications so graduates of their programs will be well prepared to meet the demands of the marketplace. While a critique of these applications of digitalisation and AI is important, that is not the purpose of our article; we limited ourselves to describing the applications only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Commission will reinforce the value of adult training through an evaluation of the impact of actions. Among the existing options in evaluating the impact of actions, training transfer is crucial in determining the degree to which the learning acquired during training is used at work. We validated a predicting transfer model in the Spanish Public Administration (SPA) by analyzing, through structural equation modeling (SEM), results of the application of the Factors for Predicting Transfer (FPT) questionnaire applied after the training, and the Scale of Efficacy (CdE) applied four months after the training (n = 726). Although satisfaction and motivation to transfer were not related to transfer, content relevance and accountability were. This study widens the traditional contexts of the study of training transfer and provides valid and reliable empirical data on transfer embedded in a new context, the Spanish Public Administration. This can help further develop the field of international human resource management (IHRM) by exploring transfer in different cultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We developed a research model to explore the direct and indirect influences of top management support of an organization's environmental performance in the Vietnamese electric power sector. Results from a survey of 203 senior managers were used to test the hypotheses. The analysis showed that top management support directly influenced both green training and environmental performance. The results also provided evidence for the mediating effect of green training on the link between top management support and environmental performance. The implications of the results for theory and practice are discussed. We concluded with limitations and suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of family-supportive supervisor behaviors and organizational climate on employees' work-family conflict, job satisfaction and turnover intentions. Design/methodology/approach: To examine the causal relationship, the longitudinal panel data of the work, family and health study were used, using the data of 664 respondents who participated in surveys from all four time-points at two Fortune 500 information technology (IT) companies. Findings: The results of the data analysis suggested that family-supportive supervisor behaviors have a minimal, but statistically significant, impact on work-to-family conflict and organizational work-family climate. Moreover, work-to-family conflict minimally mediated the relationship between family-supportive supervisor behaviors and employees' turnover intentions. An organizational work-family climate had a small, but statistically significant, mediating effect between family-supportive supervisor behaviors and job satisfaction/turnover intentions. Practical implications: This study has practical implications by noting that relying on only individual managers' roles or training managers to be family-supportive may not be enough to improve family-oriented organizational culture, work-life balance and job-related outcomes. Originality/value: Using a longitudinal mediation model, the authors examined the effects of family-supportive supervisor behaviors and how those behaviors impact other variables over time. Despite the expectation of such an impact, the authors found minimal effects among variables. This study is valuable because it can stimulate future research to advance the theoretical and practical understanding of family-supportive supervisor behaviors to help determine why the study found that it had very little impact on both work-family conflict and a family-friendly organizational climate to increase employees' satisfaction to continue to work.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to validate two scales, the factors predicting transfer (FPT) and the effectiveness questionnaire (CdE), in the Spanish Public Administration (SPA). Design/methodology/approach: The FPT was administered at the end of the training, and the CdE four months after training. Participants had attended one of the 62 trainings offered by the SPA. With 1,457 participants, exploratory factor analysis (EFA; n = 728) and confirmatory factory analysis (CFA) (n = 729), randomly assigned, were performed on the FPT, and CFA (n = 726) was applied to the CdE. Findings: A 30-item and four-factor solution emerged for the FPT through the EFA, which was confirmed by a good model fit through the CFA. A seven-item single-factor solution was confirmed for the CdE. Measurement invariance for the mode of instruction and gender was accepted for both instruments. Research limitations/implications: Further research should be done in a more heterogenous sample that includes private organizations, different sectors and sizes. In the human resource development (HRD) field, these results suggest, in line with previous research, the existence of underlying constructs of factors of transfer that migrate across cultures. Practical implications: The potential use of the FPT is the diagnosis of factors of transfer, and for the CdE, evaluation of the transfer of interventions at the behavioral level. The instruments are suitable for research and practice that compares online and in-class training. Originality/value: The study performs the first rigorous analysis of measurement instruments to evaluate factors that predict transfer in Spain.

Purpose: This study aims to examine the relationship between having a learning organization (LO) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and the moderating role of team-oriented culture on this relationship. Design/methodology/approach: Using 516 respondents from diverse industries in West Malaysia, the authors tested the psychometric properties of the three variables. Findings: LO positively influenced OCB. Team-oriented culture moderated the relationship between having a LO and OCB. Originality/value: This study helps explain how to achieve a LO in a context of high power distance and collectivist culture such as Malaysia. This study also highlights the importance of the anticipated synergistic effects of a LO and team-oriented culture in promoting OCB.

This phenomenological study examined the lived experiences of Lutheran college presidents leaving the presidency. The purpose of this research was to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of former college presidents who were associated with Evangelical Lutheran Churches in America (ELCA) colleges. Research on university and college presidents has focused mainly on those who lead large universities or small community colleges. The themes and meanings that emerged in this research are discussed in light of three phases: pre-exit, exit, and post-exit. The results of this research include significant and meaningful lessons learned by these former presidents that may be helpful for current and future college presidents. Implications for practice and future research are provided.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the experiences of first-generation college graduates in the USA, as they transitioned from higher education into employment in the private sector. First-generation college graduates are from families in which neither parent had a bachelor's degree. Design/methodology/approach: This paper used phenomenology to gain an understanding of the transition experiences of first-generation college graduates employed within the corporate sector. Findings: First-generation status influences the experiences of students beyond college and limits their awareness of and access to graduate employment. Lack of college education in the family affects the graduates' career decision-making, familiarity with corporate culture and expectations, preparedness for the corporate sector and restricted access to people with the ability to ease their entry into the sector. These translate into transition outcomes such as starting at entry-level positions not requiring a college degree, delayed access to graduate-level positions, having to engage intentionally in additional efforts to reach graduate-level positions and potential to be discriminated against during the recruitment process, albeit unintentionally. Research limitations/implications: Is first-generation status yet another structural contextual factor that influences career decision self-efficacy? Is the influence of FG status common across sectors? Longitudinal studies need to be conducted across sectors, regions and countries. Practical implications: There is a need to sensitize faculty and career service staff to career-related challenges of first-generation students and for programs and policies that increase awareness of these students regarding professional environments and expectations. There are social justice implications for recruitment strategies and overcoming discrimination. Originality/value: This paper explored first-generation college graduates' experiences, an issue hitherto not explored in depth.

Purpose: This paper aims to explore informal learning experiences among employees working in South Korean small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with fewer than 100 employees. This study specifically seeks to understand the characteristics of informal learning in Korean SMEs and culturally sensitive contextual factors that shape informal learning. Design/methodology/approach: To understand the complex, holistic nature of the phenomenon, the current study used a phenomenological qualitative approach. Eighteen full-time employees working at South Korean SMEs in knowledge-intensive industries were interviewed. Data were analyzed using Moustakas's phenomenological analysis. Findings: The findings emerged from the field data revealed four characteristics of informal learning in South Korean SMEs: absolute reliance on informal learning; rapid/immediate learning and application; relationship/client needs-based learning; and extensive trial and error. The current study also identified South Korean SMEs' unique organizational context (i.e. a family-like atmosphere, one employee-multiple tasks, passive investment in employees and the absence of systems) and Korean culture (i.e. Gab-Eul relations and chemyon) that drive the emergence of SMEs' informal learning characteristics. Originality/value: Very little empirical research has been conducted to explain how informal learning actually occurs and why such learning patterns have emerged in South Korean SMEs. The findings of this study have a profound impact on practice and academia, as it unveils characteristics of informal learning in SMEs, the unique cultural context in which Korean SMEs operate and how these characteristics impact the learning process.

South Koreans work the longest hours in the world's developed countries. The current body of knowledge is built on western culture and does not sufficiently explain working hours in the South Korean context. Considering the differences between cultures and the cultural influence on employees and organizations, it is useful to understand the experiences of long working hours in South Korea. This phenomenology investigated the perceptions of 16 South Korean employees about their working hours and how individual and organizational contexts, influenced by national culture, are related to long working hours. We found that participants were, to some extent, positive about their long working hours. The factors that influenced working hours included individual affirmative attitudes, group cohesiveness, power dynamics, and ineffective routines and systems. We discovered that the working hours were rooted in both individual and organizational behaviors that are driven by the national culture. Our study contributes to HRD research and practices that incorporate social contexts and provides culturally effective interventions to promote well-being in the workplace.

Human resource development for regional strategic industries is an emerging emphasis for the development of industries that have growth potential. This article identifies competencies and expertise levels needed by port and logistics industry personnel, a sector that has growth potential in Busan, South Korea. The research consisted of expert interviews to develop a competency survey. Six competency clusters and 16 sub-competencies were developed. This research was useful in the development of an educational program and suggests ways in which regional human resource development (RHRD) can be used. (Contains 4 tables.)