Editorial, Volume 42 Issue 2: Introducing Issue 42(2) of the Irish Journal of Management

As editor-in-chief of the Irish Journal of Management, I am delighted to share another issue of the journal. An important strength of this journal is its interdisciplinary selection of academic scholarship from researchers across the globe, and this issue is no different. In times of hyper uncertainty with international conflicts and political instability, learning from different disciplines, theories and perspectives is increasingly salient. The value of academic freedom to research diverse phenomena that are of interest to different readers and audiences remains core to the academic profession. Within business and management studies, many sub-disciplines abound, and it is through navigation and negotiation of the research foci of other disciplines, that the potential of a future of interdisciplinary research projects and collaboration opportunities can take on a sharper focus.

Since the last issue, the Irish Academy of Management enjoyed a very successful annual conference in the University of Galway in August 2023. Guest editors of the Irish Journal of Management are currently working on the next special issue which focuses on “Enterprise Education: The Path to Entrepreneurial Mindsets”, and which is shaping up nicely. This current issue draws together papers that consider the Learning and Development profession’s many paradoxical tensions, female academic leadership, crisis leadership, mental illness disclosure in the workplace, and the move toward product teams in the agile software industry. Each of these original contributions are outlined a little further, next.

The first paper in this issue is from Thomas Garavan who puts forward the paradoxical tensions faced by Learning and Development (L&D) practitioners in organisations. In his paper, “Learning and Development Practitioners in Organisations: Organising, Belonging, Learning and Performing Tensions”, Garavan shares his review of the literature on the learning and development (L&D) role in organisations using the lens of paradox theory. Organising extant literature in this domain around four paradoxes (organising, belonging, learning and performing), the paper considers the tensions faced by L&D practitioners and their related responses. Future research opportunities in the L&D domain and practical implications for L&D professionals are offered.

The second paper in this issue of the journal is by Patrick J. Buckland, Chris O’Riordan and Felicity Kelliher. Their paper, entitled “What do I do? A Categorisation of Informal Leadership Activities Among Female Professors”, explores the informal leadership activities of female academic professors. Drawing on social identity theory, this paper positions female professors as academic leaders. Their study highlights the informal leadership activities undertaken by the female professoriate which influence the social mission of universities and the wider academic community beyond metrics and individual research objectives.

Continuing in the leadership domain, the next paper in this issue is by Christina Nizamidou and is entitled “Lessons in Crisis Leadership from 9/11: Delineating the constituents of Crisis Leadership and their utilization in the context of Covid-19”. This paper focuses on three specific cases to present the nuance and intricacies inherent in leadership during times of crises. This paper specifically examines three leaders during the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 in the United States: Rudolph W. Giuliani, mayor of New York City at the time of the incident; Howard W. Lutnick, president, chairman, and chief executive officer (CEO) of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald (CF); and Robert Scott, president and chief operating officer (COO) of investment bank Morgan Stanley (MS). Drawing on archival data and secondary sources, it explores how these leaders became role models of crisis leadership, and have thereby contributed to the evolution of the field of crisis leadership. The study shares the importance of both personal qualities and leadership behaviours that manifested for the exemplar leaders in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It also considers the case analyses that were undertaken in light of the more recent global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The next paper is “Mental health disclosure in the workplace – An interpretative phenomenological analysis of the employee experience”, and was written by Niamh Kavanagh and Margaret Heffernan. In their paper, the authors adopt a qualitative research approach and utilise interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to unpack the reasons concerning the disclosure (or not) of a mental health illness in the workplace. Similar to the previous paper, Kavanagh and Heffernan’s work also draws upon three exemplars. However, in this paper, three in-depth interview cases were conducted and analysed using IPA. The study finds that the decision to disclose a diagnosis of mental illness (MI) is complex and multi-faceted. With this knowledge and a better understanding of the subjective concerns of individuals pertaining to their respective MI-disclosure at work, better informed and more supportive workplace policies and practices could be instigated.

While the final paper in this issue remains in the workplace context, the focus moves toward a consideration of team groupings within the agile software development industry. Torstein Nesheim’s paper, “Deprojectification of agile: The new orthodoxy of long-term product teams”, considers how agile management thinking in software development is centred on long-term product teams rather than on group formations based on projects or project managers. This paper contributes to extant literature by documenting the changes from project to product teams and by identifying and examining aspects of such agile structures in an empirical study of two cases in Norway.

All in all, the five papers presented in this issue of the Irish Journal of Management showcase management scholarship and research on important topics in our interdisciplinary domain of business and management studies. Happy reading!

Dr Marian Crowley-Henry

Maynooth University School of Business, National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Editor-in-Chief, The Irish Journal of Management