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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors influencing the implementation of electronic human resource management (e-HRM) in Bangladesh government organisations. Recent research evidence has shown that e-HRM played a significant role in enhancing the performance of human resource (HR) departments in private sector organisations. While similar practices are expected from government domain, there is no empirical research evidence to support this proposition. Given the significant technological advancements today, e-HRM as a strategic tool has grown to encompass seamless functionality to support organisations in providing tactical capability, reducing cost and continuous service improvement as well as the quality of service delivery. Although several private and public sector organisations have implemented e-HRM, its application within government domain in developing regions is limited. This can be attributed to the bureaucratic nature of public sector organisation, which are often slow to adopt changes.

The study adopts a qualitative and multiple case study research approach.

The findings provide insights into the myth surrounding the lack of and slow implementation of e-HRM among public sector organisation in developing economies but also serve as empirical data for further research.

The low level in the number of public organisations that have implemented e-HRM applications in developing countries may be responsible for the dearth of empirical studies in this area. The dearth of empirical studies and the need to understand the factors that influence the implementation of e-HRM in public sector organisations led the authors to investigate the factors influencing the implementation of e-HRM in public sector organisation.

Findings from two case organisations exhibit that such an approach contributes towards more healthy and robust decisions for e-HRM implementation and specifies that it is acceptable by the case study organisations. The findings from this research can serve as a source of understanding the particular context in which the study was undertaken. Moreover, it should serve as a catalyst for understanding organisations in similar socio-politico and economic context.

This research advances and contributes to the body of knowledge as it examines factors influencing the implementation of e-HRM in Bangladesh public sector organisations and proposes a model for e-HRM implementation in government organisations in developing economies. The e-HRM implementation research presented in this paper extends recognised standards for e-HRM implementation, by bringing together influential factors – benefits, barriers and risks, thus, enabling government organisations in developing nations to produce more vigorous proposals for e-HRM implementation.

This study explores how compassionate managerial leadership style can help to mitigate workplace stressors and alleviate stress experiences among employees — particularly in an extreme situation, such as the current global COVID-19 pandemic. The study's context is Nigeria's banking, manufacturing and healthcare sectors, which have a history of high employee stress levels.

Using a qualitative, interpretive methodology, the study adopts the thematic analysis process (TAP) to draw and analyse data from semi-structured telephone interviews with 10 banking, 11 manufacturing and 9 frontline healthcare workers in Nigeria.

It was found that a compassionate managerial leadership can drive a considerate response to employees' “fear of job (in)security”, “healthcare risk” and concerns about “work overload, underpayment and delayed payment”, which respondents considered to be some of the key causes of increased stress among employees during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

The study is limited to exploring the relationship between compassionate managerial leadership and an organisation's ability to manage employee stress in the COVID-19 situation, using 30 samples from organisations operating in three Nigerian cities and sectors. Future studies may involve more Nigerian cities, sectors and samples. It may also possibly include quantitative combination to allow generalisation of findings.

In order to survive in extreme situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, organisations are forced to take drastic and often managerialist-driven work measures which can trigger high stress levels, low productivity and absenteeism among employees. Hence, organisations would benefit from implementing compassion-driven policies that are more inclusive and responsive to the workplace stressors facing employees.

Employee stress has been widely explored in many areas, including definitions, stressors, strains, possible interventions and coping strategies. There remains, however, a dearth of scholarship on how management-leadership compassion can help to reduce employee stress levels in extreme conditions, such as the COVID-19 pandemic — particularly in emerging economies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between managerialist employment relations and employee turnover intention in Nigeria. The study context is public hospitals in Nigeria, which have a history of problematic human resource management (HRM) practice, a non-participatory workplace culture, managerialist employment relations and a high employee turnover intention.

Based on a qualitative, interpretive approach, this paper investigates the process by which Nigerian employment relations practices trigger the employee turnover intention of doctors using 33 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders in public hospitals.

This study found that Nigeria’s managerialist employment relations trigger the employee turnover intention of medical doctors. Additionally, it was found that although managerialist employment relations lead to turnover intention, Nigeria’s unique, non-participatory and authoritarian employment relations system exacerbates this situation, forcing doctors to consider leaving their employment.

Studies on the interface between managerialism and employment relations are still under-researched and underdeveloped. This paper also throws more light on issues associated with managerialist employment relations and human resources practice including stress, burnout and dissatisfaction. Their relationship with doctors’ turnover intention has significant implications for employment policies, engagement processes and HRM in general. The possibility of generalising the findings of this study is constrained by the limited sample size and its qualitative orientation.

This paper contributes to the dearth of studies emphasising employer–employee relationship quality as a predictor of employee turnover intention and a mediator between managerialist organisational system and turnover intention. The study further contributes to the discourse of employment relations and its concomitant turnover intention from developing countries’ perspective within the medical sector.

Recent gender-related research has focused on how gender affects work–life balance (WLB), particularly whether men and women have similar difficulties balancing work and family demands. However, to broaden WLB research beyond its concentration on employees to a different population, this study investigates the WLB experiences of single student-working mothers.

This article uses a qualitative study using three focus groups to compare Nigerian and British single student-working mothers' WLB experiences and coping strategies or mechanisms adopted in these two contexts.

The findings indicate that, regardless of nationality, single student-working mothers are affected by inter-role conflict, role ambiguity, role strain, role overload and external role pressures, which make achieving WLB a herculean task. Nevertheless, given the different political, economic and socio-cultural landscapes of the two countries, the extent to which the aforementioned factors impact single student-working mothers varies and influences the range of coping mechanisms adopted in the two contexts.

The insights gleaned from this study suggest that there are huge challenges for single student-working mothers in terms of achieving WLB due to their status as students, workers and mothers. Combining these roles negatively affect their WLB and level of productivity and effectiveness, at home, at work and at university. This poses significant implications for human resource structures, policies and practices. The authors suggest that single student-mothers should learn from their counterparts' experiences and coping mechanisms, and that organisations and government should also provide adequate support to help them combine their challenging roles. This would ease the tension associated with combining multiple roles and enhance their well-being and WLB.

The study calls for a re-examination of WLB policies and practices at organisational and national levels to ensure that single student-working mothers are well supported to enhance their productivity and WLB.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of work-life-balance (WLB) challenges for Nigerian female medical doctors. This study focusses on Nigeria, which its peculiar socio-cultural, institutional and professional realities constitute WLB as well as social sustainability (SS) challenge for female medical doctors.

Relying on qualitative, interpretivist approach and informed by institutional theory, this study explores how Nigeria’s institutional environment and workplace realities engender WLB challenges, which consequently impact SS for female doctors. In total, 43 semi-structured interviews and focus group session involving eight participants were utilised for empirical analysis.

The study reveals that factors such as work pressure, cultural expectations, unsupportive relationships, challenging work environment, gender role challenges, lack of voice/participation, and high stress level moderate the ability of female medical doctors to manage WLB and SS. It also identifies that socio-cultural and institutional demands on women show that these challenges, while common to female physicians in other countries, are different and more intense in Nigeria because of their unique professional, socio-cultural and institutional frameworks.

The implications of the WLB and SS requires scholarship to deepen as well as extend knowledge on contextual disparities in understanding these concepts from developing countries perspective, which is understudied.

This study offers fresh insights into the WLB and SS concepts from the non-western context, such as Nigeria, highlighting the previously understudied challenges of WLB and SS and their implications for female doctors.

This study investigates the overarching ideology of work–life balance (WLB) or conflict as predominantly being a work–family affair. Based on a Nigerian study, and using organisational justice as a theoretical lens, it explores perceived fairness in accessing family-friendly policies by managers and professionals who are single and do not have children – a workgroup conventionally ignored in research on WLB.

Relying on an interpretivist approach, the data set comprises of interviews with 24 bank managers and 20 medical doctors working in Nigeria.

The authors’ findings highlight employers' misconceptions concerning the non-work preferences and commitments of singles as well as an undervaluation by employers of their non-work time. Conceptualised as “time biases”, such time is routinely invaded by the organisation, with profound implications for perceptions of fairness. This fosters backlash behaviours with potential detrimental effects in terms of organisational effectiveness.

The study is limited to investigating the WLB of singles in high-status roles, namely banking and medical careers. Future research may examine the experiences of a more diverse range of occupations. The sample comprises heterosexual, never-married professionals, whose experiences may differ from other categories of single workers, such as childless divorced people, widows, non-heterosexual singles and partners who have no children.

In order to avoid counterproductive behaviours in the workplace, WLB policies should not only focus on those with childcare concerns. Inclusive work–life policies for other household structures, such as single-persons, are necessary for improving overall organisational well-being.

The majority of WLB studies have been undertaken in Western and Asian contexts, to the neglect of the Sub-Saharan African experience. Additionally, research tends to focus on WLB issues on the part of working parents, overlooking the difficulties faced by singles.

Does the self-employed nature of entrepreneurs’ business ventures mean that they have perfect boundaries between their work and nonwork lives? Drawing on border theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine entrepreneurs’ work–life balance (WLB) in terms of how they construct and manage the borders between their work and nonwork lives.

The authors adopt a qualitative research approach to enhance their insight into entrepreneurs’ WLB using border theory. The study benefits from its empirical focus on Nigerian migrants in London who represent a distinct minority group living in urban areas in the developed world. Data for the study was collected over a three-month period, utilising semi-structured interviews as the primary method of data collection.

The study’s findings indicate that entrepreneurs prioritise “work” over “life” and reveal that entrepreneurs have little desire for boundaries as they work everywhere, which makes long working hours prevalent among them. Furthermore, the findings bring to the fore the prevalent social anomaly of entrepreneurs preferring to be unmarried, single and even divorced as a result of or associated with the entrepreneurs’ boundaries creation and management.

The extent to which the findings of this research can be generalised is constrained by the limited and selected sample of the research.

Research on human resource management (HRM) in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) or businesses in which entrepreneurs operate is still under developed. The issue of the size and the nature of an organisation (i.e. labour or product market influences, ownership structures, etc.) have profound implications for human resources (HR) structures, policies and practices and the quality of the WLB of entrepreneurs. Research on HRM and entrepreneurship is still evolving. Consequently, HRM in several entrepreneurial business ventures is sometimes (if not often) organisationally fluid and ad hoc. The main implication for this work environment is that there may be little structure in HRM policies and processes to help self-employed entrepreneurs in their ability to comprehensively manage border crossing and to achieve WLB.

This paper provides valuable insights into entrepreneurs’ work/nonwork boundaries, which is hugely influenced by the commodification of time and money. It also enriches work–life border theory and its social constructionist perspective.

Drawing on the emotional labour theory, the purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of cultural orientation on emotion regulation and display processes for service employees.

Based on a Nigerian study where literature is scarce, data were gathered from semi-structured interviews conducted with 40 call centre service agents.

The findings identified three key values around reinforcing social cohesion, anticipated self-curtailment, hierarchy and expressions of servility based on broader societal needs to promote relational harmony when managing customer relations during inbound calls into the call centre.

The extent to which the findings can be generalised is constrained by the limited and selected sample size. However, the study makes contributions to the service work theory by identifying the extent to which communication of emotions is informed in large parts by local culture and seeks to incite scholarly awareness on the differences of emotional display rules from a developing country other than western contexts.

This paper is among the first to focus on the interface between culture and emotional labour from a Sub-Saharan African context.

This study explores the practices of locational flexibility in the Nigerian higher education sector. It examines the realities of remotely organising and managing academics' teaching and administrative workload, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Relying on the interpretative paradigm, the dataset consists of semi-structured interviews with 92 professionals in the Nigerian higher educational institution (HEI) sector drawn from private and public federal government-owned and regional (otherwise known as state government) tertiary institutions.

The study highlights the practices of locational flexibility across the Nigerian higher education sector. Therefore, it underscores the notions of locational flexibility from the perspective of Nigerian academics. It reveals a paucity in the range and usage of locational flexibility options across the Nigerian higher education sector, as well as the factors shaping its implementation and utilisation. Ultimately, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the findings reveal that locational flexibility is predominantly environmentally induced.

This study focused on a salient topic that explores the practices of locational flexibility, particularly in an underresearched context of developing economies, specifically Nigeria. Moreover, the study contributes to the scarce literature on locational flexibility. Additionally, unlike previous studies that are mostly preoccupied with the meaning of the concept and the importance of the practice to employees' work-life balance, organisational flexibility, and overall operational performance, this study underpins the practices, utilisation and barriers to implementing locational flexibility.

In seeking to understand the impact of culture on conflict management (CM), extant organisational management research has, for the most part, confined itself to using the one-dimensional collectivism/individualism model of Hofstede's cultural theory. The purpose of this present study is to extend this knowledge area by adopting the more comprehensive analysis of Hofstede's fourfold dimensional typology – power distance, individualism/collectivism, uncertainty avoidance and masculinity/femininity – as a conceptual lens to investigate how national culture impacts the interpersonal CM of those in leadership positions in higher education institutions. Specifically, this article explores the extent to which cultural values influence the CM practices of university heads of departments (HODs).

Adopting a qualitative approach, 36 interviews were conducted with heads of different departments across a variety of disciplines in selected Nigerian universities.

The study's results conceptualise how underlying cultural norms – promoting paternalism, servility and social relations – influence the conflict-handling strategies adopted by university HODs. It consequently emerged from the thematic analysis that in Nigeria, conflict-handling decisions are shaped by status-based dictates, a normative emphasis on communality, masculine hegemony and religious motivation – as opposed to Western cultures, where these benevolent and integrative values play a far smaller role.

The study focussed on a small group of research subjects. Although the sample is not a sample that enables generalisation, the findings provide theoretical insights into how cultural ascendancy could frame conflict resolutions. This research is especially relevant as it runs in a culture significantly different from the ones that originally were investigated and in which managerial books and mainstream practices emerged and, thus, can contribute to challenge and enhance theory.

The study seeks to advance knowledge of the interface between culture and CM in a sub-Saharan African context where literature is scarce.