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This paper examines the dark side of mentoring, its far-reaching effects and organizational interventions for navigating it.

Literature review and narrative analysis are adopted to achieve the objective of the paper.

Review of extant literature highlights the multiple consequences of the dark side of mentoring. Recommendations include specialized training interventions, period appraisals of formal mentoring arrangements, zero-tolerance ethical frameworks and employee assistance programmers.

A substantive portion of literature on mentoring has lauded its benefits for career progression and competitive advantage. This viewpoint explores its limitations and liabilities in an organization.

Practitioners and management researchers have chorused the salvific tendencies of spiritual intelligence. Whilst the emergence of spirituality and its derivatives in the workplace is widely acclaimed, the conflict that exists between spiritual ideals and the capitalist ethos of modern organisations raises questions about dark manifestations. This incongruence necessitates the consideration of the misuse of spiritual intelligence.

This paper adopts conceptual lens and theoretical arguments to interrogate the assumption of absolute constructiveness that is accorded spiritual intelligence in its framing and discusses the potential of a dark side.

The dark side of spiritual intelligence is its deployment to achieve self-serving purposes, to harm, rather than to help others. More practitioners and management researchers must acknowledge that spiritual intelligence and workplace spirituality may have dark manifestations and incorporate this reality in the assessment of organisations and the individuals within them.

This exploratory article joins the sparse extant literature on the dark side of spiritual intelligence and workplace spirituality. It contributes to the literature by offering critical insights into spiritual intelligence and the need to integrate the potential for misuse in the existing models.

This paper aims to understand employees’ propensity to blow the whistle in two East African countries. This study develops a model of ethical decision-making (EDM) to assist management in predicting the probability of whistleblowing in Kenya and Uganda. It also seeks to find the moderating effect of perceived retaliation on whistleblowing intention.

This study administers a standardized questionnaire to employees in Kenya and Uganda to measure their perceptions about whistleblowing in their organizations. This study uses partial least square structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses. This study uses four constructs, namely, awareness, judgment, retaliation and likelihood, of blowing the whistle. These constructs are measured with multiple-item scales.

The results show that ethical awareness and judgment significantly increase willingness to engage in whistleblowing in East Africa. However, this study does not find a significant retaliation effect on whistleblowing intention. Instead, this study finds that awareness and judgment mediate between retaliation and willingness to engage in whistleblowing.

This study contributes to EDM topics. It advances the understanding of the whistleblowing concept, the retaliation effect and the reasons to encourage blowing the whistle in Africa. However, this study did not consider cultural factors, such as nationality, patriotism and ethnicity. Moreover, the results are only based on data from Uganda and Kenya and may not apply to other sub-Saharan nations.

These findings are particularly significant for managers and policymakers in East Africa, where fear of retaliation and lack of awareness are the main barriers to whistleblowing. The results may help managers develop human resource practices to include policies to support moral behavior. It may also provide insights to the policymakers to understand the factors that facilitate whistleblowing practices and help them to adopt new strategies or policies to stimulate whistleblowing culture.

This study is one of the initial empirical studies in the East Africa context to explore the EDM predictors and the impact of retaliation on the whistleblowing intention.

This empirical study aims to explore how actors in specific human resource practices (HRPs) such as line managers (LMs) impact employee productivity measures in the context of financial institutions (FI) banks.

This cross-country study adopted a qualitative methodology. It employed semi-structured interviews to collect data from purposefully selected 12 business facing directors (BFDs) working in the top 10 banks in Nigeria and the UK. The data collected were analysed with the help of the trans-positional cognition approach (TPCA) phenomenological method.

The findings of a TPCA analytical process imply that in the UK and Nigeria’s FIs, the BFDs line managers’ human resources practices (LMHRPs) resulted in a highly regulated workplace, knowledge gap, service operations challenges and subjective quantitatively driven key performance indicators, considered service productivity paradoxical elements. Although the practices in the UK and Nigerian FIs had similar labels, their aggregates were underpinned by different contextual issues.

To support LMs in better understanding and managing FIs BFDs productivity measures and outcomes, we propose the Managerial Employee Productivity Operational Definition framework as part of their toolkit. This study will be helpful for banking sectors, their regulators, policymakers, other FIs’ industry stakeholders and future researchers in the field.

Within the context of the UK and Nigeria’s FIs, this study is the first attempt to understand how LMHRPs impact BFDs productivity in this manner. It confirms that LMHRPs result in service productivity paradoxical elements with perceived or lost productivity implications.

Being Igbo is synonymous with being enterprising. This is perhaps the most popular impression that many people have about the Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria. Historical antecedents indicate that prior to colonisation, the Igbo engaged actively in trade and agriculture. However, the events of the Nigeria Civil War (1967–1970) had an indelible impact on the economic activities and achievements of the Igbo. Since then, this ethnic nation has risen from economic ashes, and evidence abound in different commercial spaces across the globe. A critical driver of this economic renaissance is the Igba-Boi/Imu Ahia traditional business apprenticeship model. Founded on the Igbo philosophies of communality, co-prosperity and interdependence, the model is characterised by the transgenerational transfer of entrepreneurial skills and the reproduction of business champions. In this chapter, we assess the centrality of enterprise in the Igbo culture; appraise entrepreneurial activities of the Igbo during the pre-colonial and colonial periods; discuss the consequences of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), as well as the post-civil war economic revival. Specifically, we analyse the processes, opportunities and challenges of the Igbo traditional business apprenticeship. Broad-based recommendations highlight imperatives for sustainability and leveraging across cultures and contexts.