PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate whether females have different perceptions of diversity management and workplace happiness compared to their male colleagues. Furthermore, the paper explores whether diversity management perceptions mediate the relationship between workplace happiness and organisational citizenship behaviour.Design/methodology/approachA total of 260 questionnaires from a number of public hospitals in Egypt were analysed using both t-test and Structural Equation Modelling.FindingsWe found that female physicians perceive diversity management policies/protocols more positively than their male colleagues. Moreover, gender has no or little effect on physicians’ perceptions of workplace happiness. We also found that workplace happiness positively affects physicians’ organisational citizenship behaviour, and finally, diversity management practices can mediate the relationship between workplace happiness and physicians’ organisational citizenship behaviour.Practical implicationsWe believe that managers can raise the feeling of workplace happiness among their staff if they maintain some personal relationships with physicians, care about the physicians’ work/life balance, promote after work gatherings, initiate coffee time talks, encourage open communication practices and more.Originality/valueThe paper is based on the argument that although employees might be happy in the workplace through (engagement, job satisfaction, affective commitment), their happiness, however,will unlikely be reflected into a positive organisational citizenship behaviour towards their organisation, except (social exchange theory) they feel or perceive (equity theory) the overall practices of diversity management in that organisation positively. Thus, studying the mediating effect of perceptions towards diversity management is mainly our contribution.

Purpose-This paper focuses on 3 Egyptian public business schools in an attempt to explore the effect of inclusive/exclusive talent management on the organizational downsizing of academics and the mediating role of responsible leadership. Design/ methodology/ approach-A total of 330 academics were contacted and given a set of questionnaires. After three follow ups, a total of 240 responses were collected with a response rate of 72.73 percent. Multiple regressions were employed to show how much variation in organizational downsizing can be explained by inclusive/exclusive talent management and responsible leadership. Findings-The findings highlighted a very weak statistical association between academics' inclusive talent management and organizational downsizing, whereas a strong statistical association has been discovered between exclusive talent management and organizational downsizing. Statistical analysis showed that responsible leadership has no role in mediating the relationship between inclusive/exclusive talent management of academics and their downsizing. Research limitations/ implications-The authors have focused on only 3 Egyptian public business schools, the matter that may limit opportunities to generalize the results of this study to private business schools and other faculties in Egypt. Future research could use a double source method. Practical implications-By preparing a set of academic competences, business schools will be able to classify their academic staff into talented and non-talented, and accordingly they can initiate their tailored downsizing strategies. Furthermore, undertaking a responsible strategy of downsizing, which includes and is not limited to justifying the need to decrease academic staff numbers to guarantee postredundancy care practices for laid-off academics may alleviate many of the negative psychological, societal and economic consequences of downsizing. Originality/ value-This paper contributes by filling a gap in HR management and higher education literature, in which empirical studies on the relationship between talent management and academics' organizational downsizing have been limited until now. This may create better research opportunities for cross-disciplinary papers that should be done by HR, higher education and leadership scholars.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of transformational leadership (TL) on organizational commitment (OC) with the mediating role of organizational justice (OJ) in the higher education (HE) sector in Syria. Design/methodology/approach The data were collected from 502 employees from six HE institutions. Two measures of organizational outcomes were selected for this study, namely, job satisfaction (JS) and OC. Using structural equation modelling (SEM), the authors tested four alternative models to indicate the relationship between leadership and organizational outcomes. Findings TL has both direct and indirect effects on OC through interactional justice (IJ). TL has an impact on JS through procedural justice (PJ) and IJ as intermediate variables, while transactional leadership (TrL) has an impact on JS through distributive justice (DJ). The three types of OJ have an impact on OC through JS. The authors found that the national culture may not influence the impact of the leader in the current globalization context, as the results were similar to the Western studies. Practical implications The findings of the study provide managers of the HE sector with insights into the formations of employees’ fairness perceptions, and with some guidelines for managing employees by documenting OJ to draw positive attitudinal and behavioral responses from employees. Originality/value While most previous research has focused on exploring the relationship between leadership and OJ or between OJ and JS in the business sector, the study, however, seeks in addition, to pinpoint the effect of OJ as a mediate variable between the leadership and JS and OC in HE.

In this paper we investigate why responsible management education (RME) should become a necessity in Egyptian public business schools. A total of 80 academics from three universities were contacted and interviewed in six different focus groups. Three types of motives were identified from the interviews: extrinsic local, intrinsic school and extrinsic global, which inspired academics to believe in the importance of implementing RME in their business schools. Most respondents consider implementing RME is crucial to rebuilding their schools' legitimate and ethical role. Focusing only on academics rather than the executives of the selected business schools, is perceived to be a limitation. Moreover, addressing only public business schools and excluding private ones may limit the authors' ability to generalize results. Thus, the authors of this paper invite researchers from the fields of cultural diversity, CSR, sustainability and higher education (HE) to collaborate in producing more interdisciplinary and/or trans-disciplinary papers on the same topic. Future researchers may seek to investigate the perceptions of management in the addressed business schools. Replicating this study with private business schools in Egypt may be considered another research opportunity. The educational authorities need to develop a framework for implementing and assessing RME in public business schools. This paper contributes by filling a gap in HE management, responsible leadership, and sustainability literature in which empirical studies on RME and the responsible practices of academics have been limited so far.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to focus on 3 out of 24 business schools in Egypt in order to investigate their talent management practices of academics. Design/methodology/approach A total of 350 academics were contacted and 245 of them were interviewed in 49 face-to-face focus groups. The interview length for each focus group is about 45 min and is conducted in Arabic, the mother tongue of all respondents. Upon conducting the interviews, the authors used thematic analysis to determine the main ideas in the transcripts. Findings The authors did not detect any systematic approach for the management of academic talent in the chosen public business schools. Instead, there were irresponsible unorderly procedures undertaken by these business schools in staffing, empowering, motivating, evaluating and retaining those talents. Furthermore, the authors realized an absence of many cultural and technical dimensions like adaptability, consistency and knowledge sharing which may hurdle academic staff desires to do their best effort in teaching and conducting research. Moreover, these addressed academic members narrow perception of the concept “talent” that includes only musical and sports figures – the matter that reflects their lack of understanding for one of the hottest concepts in HR academic and practical arenas nowadays. Research limitations/ implications The focus is only on a single perspective (academics) and a single area (Upper Egypt) – a matter that neglects a variety of views (e.g. minister of Egyptian higher education and schools’ deans). Additionally, the results/findings of this study cannot be generalized to academic settings in other countries because the data are collected only from public business schools in Upper Egypt. Originality/value This paper contributes by filling a gap in HR management, in which empirical studies on the practices of managing talents have been limited so far.