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In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many employees had to switch to remote work. While some adjusted successfully to this transition, others have struggled. Leveraging information systems (IS) to adjust to major exogenous shocks is called digital resilience. The purpose of this paper is to understand what we can learn about employees' digital resilience from externally enforced transitions to remote work.

As digital resilience is challenging to measure, this study uses an embedded mixed methods approach. The authors conducted a qualitative analysis of 40 employees' statements on their remote work experience during the first six months of the pandemic and complemented these findings with scale-based digital resilience scores.

The authors find that employees' digital resilience largely depends on the amount of technical equipment and support they receive from their organizations as well as their ability and willingness to learn how to adequately use and communicate through information and communication technologies. Being self-disciplined and self-responsible positively affects digital resilience, while social isolation threatens it. Organizations can foster digital resilience building by encouraging digital networking, building a digital culture and netiquette, and treating digital resilience as a sociotechnical phenomenon.

This is one of the first empirical studies of digital resilience on a human level. It sheds light on the missing link between IS-enabled resilience and transitions to remote work. Specifically, it provides original insights into its development and manifestation in a remote work context during the COVID-19 pandemic. For researchers, it provides novel guidance on choosing appropriate measurement instruments to capture digital resilience.

The viable system model (VSM) provides a way to understand communication structures in an organization. It gives us a means to visualize and analyze information channels relating the functions in an enterprise, a corporation, or any other kind of organization. At the heart of the VSM is the application of Ashby's law of requisite variety. The resulting models help to analyze and discuss what variety attenuation of operations and what variety amplification of management can establish requisite variety. Many studies and applications show that the complexity management laws described by Ashby and Beer hold, and that managerial, operational and environmental varieties tend to equate. The amplifiers and attenuators, however, should be designed to do so with minimum damage to people and to cost. The purpose of this paper is to determine to what extent the design of amplifiers and attenuators is possible if these are realized based on linguistic communication, and whether this design can be automated in these cases.

The paper uses logical presentation of ideas along with examples from cases. The basic argument is that the design of information channels – amplifiers and attenuators – relies on self‐organizing processes that depend on an operation called linguistic predication.

The paper demonstrates that linguistic predication is not computable based on the model of the Turing machine so that this operation is restricted to be carried out by human agents. In these cases, technology is limited to providing a technical means for communication and social processes.

While there is a large knowledge base of literature in the field of applications of the VSM there is less work providing concepts and guidelines for designing information channels. This paper offers a conceptual and logical argument for their characteristics based on linguistics and philosophy of language.

The purpose of this paper is to identify leadership behaviours that appear to be salient in life science firms and to explain them as Darwinian adaptations to the particular characteristics of that industry.

This work used a pragmatist, inductive, mode 2 research methodology. The method used semi-structured, laddered, qualitative interviews with 23 individuals from 22 firms in the pharmaceutical and medical technology sectors.

The work found four aspects of the industry’s external environment that, collectively, distinguish it from other sectors. Further, it found four leadership behaviours that appear to be strongly characteristic of the industry. Further analysis revealed critical antecedents of these behaviours in the form of micro-foundations. Finally, these behaviours and their antecedents appeared to be a Darwinian adaptation to selection pressures created by the external environment.

The findings of this work are limited to the life sciences sector and do not support generalization beyond this sector. The work has three implications. Firstly, that leadership behaviours can be seen as at least partly sector-specific. Secondly, that the specificity of leadership behaviours appears related to identifiable characteristics of the industry environment. Thirdly, that the principles of generalized Darwinism provide a useful lens for understanding leadership behaviour in this sector.

This work implies that leadership training and development should recognize the specific industry context of the leader and not assume that leadership behaviour is a general, non-specific set of behaviours. Further, the work implies that appropriate leadership can be more readily enabled by paying attention to certain micro-foundations.

This work is original in two ways. Firstly, it addresses the leadership behaviours of the life sciences sector specifically. No previous work has done this. Secondly, it applies generalized Darwinism to the topic of leadership, which has not been attempted previously.

This study aims to unravel the role of teams’ job crafting in translating responsible leadership into their customer relationship performance.

The data were gathered from 87 managers and 608 employees from tour companies. The data analysis was performed via multilevel structural equation modeling.

The results demonstrated that crafting of team tasks played a mediating role for the link of responsible leadership to the team’s customer relationship performance. Task interdependence, outcome interdependence and their interaction attenuated the influence of responsible leadership on collective job crafting.

The results suggest that tourism managers can enhance customer relationship performance of their team through training and development of responsible leadership, encouraging team members’ crafting of team tasks, as well as enhancing outcome and task interdependence.

This research expands the literature by identifying how and when responsible leadership promotes team customer relationship performance in tourism companies.