This paper explores diverse conceptualizations of leadership, emphasizing its profound impact on individuals and organizations. Leadership’s influence on followers’ daily lives, necessitating adaptation to modern complexities. Various theories offer distinct perspectives: distributed leadership emphasizes shared expertise. While charismatic leadership focuses on vision alignment. Authentic leadership promotes ethical climates, while Emotional Intelligence theory emphasizes emotional competencies. Ethical leadership underscores moral conduct. Five Domains Leadership highlights talent management and strategy execution, while Leadership Transition Theory discusses dynamic changes. Other theories include direct/indirect leadership, entrepreneurial leadership, and leader-member exchange. Participative leadership explores decision-making styles, and situational leadership aligns styles with follower maturity. Trait and behavioral theories focus on inherent traits and learned behaviours. This review underscores leadership’s complexity, offering insights into its diverse conceptualizations and practical implications across contexts.

Employee retention is a critical concern for organizations in today’s dynamic labor market. This paper introduces a novel framework, integrating “absolute potential of the employee” and “risk associated with leaving the employee”, to address this challenge. Findings from the study suggest that this framework can effectively assist organizations in strategizing retention techniques. The research methodology employed an exploratory research design and collected data from 576 employees across various sectors. The results indicate significant implications for organizational risk assessment and employee retention strategies.

The Nigerian Civil Service faces ongoing challenges in optimizing employee commitment, which is fundamental for efficient service delivery and societal progress. Hence, this paper focuses on the mediating effect of job satisfaction on talent engagement and employee commitment in the Nigerian Civil Service. The study adopted a quantitative approach, which allowed for a survey design to be adopted. A sample of 198 middle- and lower-level managers in the civil service was used. Questionnaires were used for data collection, and SmartPls 3.9 was used for data analysis. The result showed that talent engagement significantly predicts employee commitment and that job satisfaction is a good mediator in the relationship between talent engagement and employee commitment in the Nigerian Civil Service. The findings suggest that creating an engaged workforce through talent engagement can have a positive influence on employee commitment within the public sector, which can result in improved public services and contribute to overall societal development.

Effective small and medium enterprise (SME) leadership demands creative solutions to ensure organisations survive and thrive during the turbulent times that COVID-19 continues to bring. This paper explores how SME leaders (in micro and small organisations) prioritise and access the skills and development needed to provide effective and sustainable leadership to organisations, focusing on the role of resilience and the benefits it provides. Participants were selected through purposive and snowballing sampling. Online surveys and semi-structured interviews were conducted and provided qualitative data that contributes to an understanding of the role of resilience and the view of participants as to what is needed to effectively respond to a dynamic environment. Evidence shows that SME leaders prioritise learning and development opportunities that provide demonstrable benefits throughout the organisation. Building business resilience remains a fuzzy concept; however, viewing resilience as a multi-level construct offers benefits when designing and delivering development opportunities. It has been found that networking, partnerships, and relationship building promote resilience and may offer a solution to how to embed resilience building into development opportunities that SME leaders value and wish to engage with. This article contributes by illustrating and exploring leadership development within SMEs during a period of unexpected and untested uncertainty. The pandemic caused major shock waves within business communities, and SMEs were significantly affected. The research is limited in that it is expected to be a once-in-a lifetime event, and as such conditions may not be replicable, learning opportunities for other ‘shock’ events are possible. The findings of this paper have relevance to practice in that, while the event may be one-off, shocks to the business environment are not.

Military leadership is currently an extremely popular and important aspect of managing human resources in difficult, changeable, and unpredictable conditions. The solutions used in modernly managed, well-organized, subsidized, and ethically militarized systems become a point of reference and a model for organizations that encounter perturbations in the management of the organization’s human resources. The most important of them are certainly the sense of trust of subordinates in their superiors and the leaders’ responsibility for the level of staff development. The aim of the research undertaken was to verify the thesis that can be formulated in this affirmative sentence: “A modern commander should be honorable, self-confident, and have the ability to influence his subordinates and shape friendly interpersonal contacts in the group he reports.” The literature search in the field of leadership and questionnaire research were aimed at answering the main research question: “What mental properties and behavioural features should characterize a responsible leader in military organizations?”. The work uses the diagnostic survey method, and the interview was conducted using a multi-factor survey questionnaire on a 30-person study group consisting of professional soldiers aged 25–40. The adopted age range of the study group corresponds to the period of active military service, from the age of graduation to the year of termination of active military service. The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire is composed of two scales, creating a total of 37 randomly ordered statements in the form of single-choice questions. To analyze the distribution of answers, ranks were used to assess the degree of their compliance with the respondents’ beliefs. Based on the conclusions from the conducted research, we have grounds to believe that professional soldiers expect their leader to be helpful to their subordinates and to ensure that the soldiers are motivated to act and perform their tasks. An important behavior that is expected from the commander is the desire to have a common mission in achieving the goal. Based on the research results, it was found that an undesirable feature is the inconsistency of commanders when pointing out the mistakes of their subordinates, who do not devote interest and time to learning how to avoid mistakes and to improve the competence of their subordinates.

The aim of this paper is to consider the mental and physical wellbeing of employees through a lean-inspired People Value Stream lens. Poor well-being is a major cause of reduced productivity for organisations and a drain on healthcare services. We develop a conceptual approach as to how the interrelated spheres of mental and physical health might be dramatically improved through the lean, proactive intervention of employees. This requires the creation of a self-reliant wellness approach by focusing on an individual's meaning and goals and their consequent overall wellness and motivation. This involves assessing their mental and physical ‘flow’ during their career and how individuals can take control of their own wellbeing with the support of their team and wider organisation. Attention to this flow will help employees achieve what they want more quickly and effectively, with consequent benefits to their team and the organisation. We show how this can be achieved from a conceptual point of view and with a practical example. This is the first flow to be considered in detail within the People Value Stream approach. This provides a framework to completely rethink mental and physical wellbeing from the viewpoint of the individual rather than the organisation.