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The purpose of this paper is to meet Dr Joyce Shaffer, PhD, ABPP, Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Washington.

This case study is presented in two sections: a positive autoethnography written by Joyce Shaffer, followed by her answers to ten questions.

In this positive autoethnography, Shaffer shares her life story and reveals numerous mental health and positive aging recommendations and insights for us to reflect on.

This is a personal narrative, albeit from someone who has been a clinical psychologist and active in the field of aging for many decades.

A pragmatic approach to aging is recommended. According to Shaffer, “those of us who can recognize the beat of the historical drummer can harvest the best of it and learn from the rest of it.”

Positive aging has strong social implications. Shaffer considers that it is not only about maximizing our own physical, mental, emotional and social health but also about maximizing that of others, to make our world a better place for everyone.

Positive aging can be experienced despite adversity. As Shaffer says, “Adversity used for growth and healed by love is the answer.”

Rural and community banks (RCBs) provide financial services to small enterprises in rural and sub-urban areas. The purpose of this paper is to examine their financial performance through a case-specific evaluation of a small bank situated in the northern part of Ghana.

The authors employed a triangulation method comprising relative ratio analysis, bivariate and generalized method of moments (GMM) techniques for the evaluation of the audited annual financial statements of the bank covering a period of 15 years.

The relative ratio analysis show that the bank's financial performance has generally been above the average of the rural banking industry. The bivariate analysis indicates that although the loans portfolio is positive, it is not properly fitted. That is, some of its loan portfolio deviates from the path of expectation. The GMM analysis indicates that its financial performance is significantly influenced by liquidity management, bank capital and size which have enhanced its expansion and intermediation to rural households and microenterprises. However, an increase in the government treasury bill rate has a declining effect on the bank’s profitability.

The findings have significant policy implications for the management and supervision of RCBs. RCBs should deal with the spillover effects of the banking and MFIs’ crisis by educating and re-assuring their customers of their financial integrity. Most importantly, they differentiate their services from the other financial institutions within the space of the rural financial architecture.

Majority of research into this area has focused heavily on large commercial banks. This research adds value to the literature by re-focusing the searchlight on the financial performance of small banks.

This paper aims to understand how these competencies gained will help human resource (HR) leaders become more strategic about when and how to use global mobility for talent development.

In this paper, the author defines the construct of cultural agility and describes the theoretical mechanisms through which employees can gain cultural agility through culturally novel situations such as global mobility. Cultural agility enables individuals to work comfortably and effectively with people from different cultures and in situations of cultural novelty. People with cultural agility have task-management competencies (cultural minimization, adaptation and integration), self-management competencies (tolerance of ambiguity, resilience, curiosity) and relationship-management competencies (humility, relationship building and perspective taking).

This study aims at focusing on the development of cultural agility, this paper focuses on four cascading features of a culturally novel experience that can help individuals gain this competence: (1) the level of cultural novelty in the experience, (2) the readiness of an individual for that level of cultural novelty, (3) the individual's level of awareness of the cultural norms and values inherent in the culturally novel experience and (4) the level of social support offered to that individual to learn how to understand and respond in that experience.

Each feature is discussed, concluding with the implications for future research and practitioners in global mobility and talent development.

In this contribution, we systematically review the extant global leadership literature to identify important bibliometric and thematic patterns in evidence in this evolving field of scholarship. Conceptualizing the phenomenon to include leaders/managers/supervisors who hold global, expatriate, or international positions, we draw out insights accumulated from a total of 327 published articles in key management and organizational behavior journals listed in Scopus. Our analysis proceeds in two sequential phases. Our bibliometric analysis first identifies the most cited articles, most published first authors, country bases of first authors, and frequently publishing journals in this field. This characterizes both the diversity and innovative nature of scholarship in the field. Our thematic content analysis, generated through Nvivo 11, isolates two dominant overarching themes that represent the wellspring for the body of literature, namely global leader development and global leader effectiveness. These themes of development and effectiveness are further explicated through six distinct lenses namely cultural, cognitive, learning, personality trait, social/relational, and political. These lenses are underpinned by a suite of theoretical perspectives encompassing individual, system, and contextual considerations. In combination, these sets of analyses bring added systematics to the field and serve as a point of departure for future inquiry.