PurposeA key challenge facing organizations today is sustainability in economic, environmental, and social arenas. The purpose of this paper is to examine flexible work arrangements (FWAs) a source of social sustainability.Design/methodology/approachDrawing from theoretical explanations of social sustainability, the authors explored opportunities and challenges of FWAs as social sustainability in the American workforce.FindingsWhile FWAs allow organizations to “sustain” their workforce, diverse employees face challenges in accessing them, particularly across dimensions of gender, race, and class. The paper offers guiding principles for organizational leaders, including making flexibility an organizational norm, better understanding employees' lives outside of work, and creating metrics of social sustainability.Research limitations/implicationsTo extend knowledge on FWAs as a source of social sustainability, researchers should focus beyond managerial, professional, and mostly White women in America. What can be learned about employees of color, of lower socioeconomic levels, and those in location‐dependent jobs? What can be learned from companies and countries, who are leaders in providing flexible options?Practical implicationsGiven the potential for FWAs to minimize tensions from conflicting demands of work and life, efforts to employ FWAs should be directed at the entire organization. This paper discusses the differential impact of FWAs across different groups of women and questions current organizational responses.Originality/valueThe paper expands the understanding of social sustainability to include an organization's human resources by examining the use of FWAs for diverse women, and by offering suggestions for practitioners and researchers interested in social sustainability.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between leaders’ expressed traits and their impact on their country’s COVID-19 outcomes. Some leaders are over relying on masculine traits and dismissing feminine traits. An alternative – androgynous leadership – supports leaders in drawing from the full portfolio of behaviors. Design/methodology/approach This paper has a theoretical approach using an extensive review of the literature. Findings Leaders can take a number of actions to fully embrace androgynous leadership. These actions include building a diverse “tempered” team, communicating with respect, recognizing the impact of framing and moving from autopilot to realizing their best androgynous self. Research limitations/implications Research limitations include a critique of Bem’s framework as outdated and dichotomous; a categorization of feminine, masculine and neutral behaviors that is determined by the authors; and a focus on leadership style that does not take other dimensions, such as health-care systems, into account. Practical implications The authors propose that an “androgynous” leadership style has been used effectively by some political leaders around the globe in the COVID-19 crisis. The COVID-19 context has provided a laboratory for developing and building competence as androgynous leaders. Social implications The mental capacity to look at a situation, pause and explicitly select effective behavior is necessary, but oftentimes, it is not put into practice. By not drawing from a larger portfolio of androgynous behaviors, the opportunity for leaders to their best work is missed. Originality/value There is an acknowledgement of the benefits of the combination of masculine and feminine leadership traits. There are also clear recommendations supporting leaders in developing their androgynous leadership skills.

In 2006, our School of Management began the serious path of assessing both the "hard skills" (such as accounting, finance, and strategy) and the "soft skills" (such as leadership, team work, and ethics) of our MBA Program. The data generated from examining the "soft skills" that we want students to learn within our Organization Behavior courses quickly noted performance gaps between what the faculty hoped our students were learning and what students demonstrated that they knew. In this article, we will describe our assessment methods in detail, exploring three methods of assessment that we developed to assess "soft skills", specifically: using a commercially available 360-degree instrument, building our own instrument based on well-established theory, and reaching out to experts. We share how we transformed various course-embedded deliverables into useable data and how we "closed the loop" and changed the curriculum within our MBA Program. We provide processes and instruments that could be used by other institutions struggling to make measureable (assessable and actionable) any of their own soft-skill MBA competencies.

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Over the past decade, practitioners and scholars have struggled to explain women's career choices. The current language, including "opting out," "on and off ramping," and "mommy track," is not only inadequate but assumes a deviation from an accepted norm. We challenge the relevance of the paradigm against which women are being judged, namely, the psychological contract that exchanged lifelong employment for "work is primary" commitment. Given organizations' evolving need for agility, organizations no longer offer job security. We propose that, in response, women are rejecting the outdated career model based on stable employment and instead are enacting an updated "we are selfemployed" model. Being at the leading edge of career self-agency, women face a double bind that is exacerbated by persistent socialized gendered schemas. We explore the shift in career paradigms, what organizations and women have done to date, and the implications in addressing the double bind going forward.