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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.

This paper aims to explore the implications of algorithmic management on careers and employment relationships in the Nigerian gig economy. Specifically, drawing on labour process theory (LPT), this study provides an understanding of the production relations beyond the “traditional standard” to “nonstandard” forms of employment in a gig economy mediated by digital platforms or digital forms of work, especially on ride-hailing platforms (Uber and Bolt).

This study adopted the interpretive qualitative approach and a semi-structured interview of 49 participants, including 46 platform drivers and 3 platform managers from Uber and Bolt.

This study addresses the theoretical underpinnings of the LPT as it relates to algorithmic management and control in the digital platform economy. The study revealed that, despite the ultra-precarious working conditions and persistent uncertainty in employment relations under algorithmic management, the underlying key factors that motivate workers to engage in digital platform work include higher job flexibility and autonomy, as well as having a source of income. This study captured the human-digital interface and labour processes related to digital platform work in Nigeria. Findings of this study also revealed that algorithmic management enables a transactional exchange between platform providers and drivers, while relational exchanges occur between drivers and customers/passengers. Finally, this study highlighted the perceived impact of algorithmic management on the attitude and performance of workers.

The research presents an interesting case study to investigate the influence of algorithmic management and labour processes on employment relationships in the largest emerging economy in Africa.

This study explored the challenges academics faced with work structures during the COVID-19 pandemic and their implications for their work–life balance (WLB).

Relying on the interpretative paradigm and the qualitative research method, the dataset consists of semi-structured interviews with 43 academics in the United Kingdom.

This study’s findings indicate that academics in the UK experience issues around increased boundary permeability between work and nonwork domains and role overlap, which engender the transfer of negative rather than positive spillover experiences and exacerbate negative consequences to the well-being of academics. ICTs also reinforced gendered work-family boundaries and generated more negative work–life/family spillover for women than for men.

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) need to address ICT-related health issues through better work designs and HR initiatives that respond to the health requirements of academics. Policymakers should be futuristic and ensure comprehensive work–life policies for academics, which are necessary for humanising overall organisational well-being.

Although COVID-19 challenges are common to all workers, the experiences and effects on specific workers (in this case, UK academics) within specific national jurisdictions play out differentially, and they are often experienced with different levels of depth and intensity.

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.

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.

Given the limiting conditions of the gender roles confronting professional working women and drawing on spillover theory, the purpose of this paper is to explore the experiences of work-life balance with an emphasis on the causes of the imbalances, perceived stress, and coping techniques experienced by female medical doctors in an African context – Nigeria, a geographical location that is considered under-researched.

The qualitative data is based on one-to-one in-depth interviews with 52 Nigerian female medical doctors.

Based on the findings of the thematic analysis, it is clear that time squeeze, as a well-known factor in the medical profession, exacerbates negative work-home interference. However, other themes, such as patriarchal proclivities and task-pay disparity, that affect female doctors but are rarely considered in studies on work-life balance also emerged as sources of stress and work-family conflicts, leaving these doctors to devise individual coping methods as mitigating strategies.

The study relies on a limited qualitative sample size, which makes the generalisation of findings difficult. However, the study contributes to the limited literature on the implications of stress and work-family incompatibilities facing women in a society that is not particularly egalitarian, with an extremely pronounced culture of masculine hegemony that is contrary to western cultures. The article unveils the socio-cultural difficulties of the work-life demands facing women specific to the Nigerian society and experienced with a different level of intensity.

The majority of the research on work-life balance has been undertaken in western countries and has focused on various professional groups and organisations, including the health sector. Nevertheless, work-life balance is a novel concept within the Nigerian work environment, where female medical doctors, as a professional group, are rarely studied. The article also provides valuable insights into the macro-contextual features influencing the work-life balance of Nigerian professional women.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of new product on growth of emerging businesses (EBs) through sales volume and market share.

The study surveyed 137 EBs in Kwara State. Two hypotheses were formulated and tested using correlation and regression analyses.

Results show that service industry is dominant among EBs while the manufacturing industry trails. Many EBs are aware of the complexities of new product, its development and contribution to increasing sales volume, market share and ensuring competitive advantage with apparent infrastructural deficiencies. Test results show that there is a significant positive relationship and effect on sales volume and market share.

Encouraging EBs to step up and focus on improving product/service portfolio to transform their fortune is explored giving focus to the benefits of increasing sales volume and market share.