Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to answer two questions. What is the impact of ethical leadership on followers’ creativity and organizational innovation? What are the mechanisms through which ethical leadership influences creativity and organizational innovation?Design/methodology/approach: Considering a market-oriented criterion to measure organizational innovation, the data were collected from 322 small-sized information technology firms working in Pakistan. Multilevel modeling and hierarchical regression analyses were used to explore the direct and indirect effects of ethical leadership on creativity and innovation, respectively.Findings: The results show that ethical leadership is an important predictor of both individual and organizational creativity. For the individual level, the results of multilevel modeling indicate that there is a positive link between ethical leadership and employee creativity. Furthermore, ethical leadership affects employee creativity through knowledge sharing and psychological empowerment. At the organizational level, the results reveal that ethical leadership is positively associated with organizational innovation directly.Practical implications: The findings imply that ethical leadership is an important tool to promote creativity and for the advancement of innovation for developing countries as well as for newly developed industries.Originality/value: This study is first to highlight the role of ethical leadership for organizational innovation. The main contribution of the study is to explore creativity as potential mediator for ethical leadership–organizational innovation nexus; where a market-oriented criterion is taken as proxy of organizational innovation.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explain the link between national business system (NBS) and innovation decisions at the firm level by offering sequentially ordered sense-making mechanisms that enable the formation of firm-specific knowledge repositories and knowledge-processing capabilities. Design/methodology/approach This study engages in an extensive scale development effort to collect representative data about the NBS in the Pakistani setting, complemented by relevant validity and reliability tests. The overall theoretical model was tested on 214 firms by means of a structural equation modeling approach, using partial least-squares algorithms. Findings The results statistically supported the role of firm-level knowledge repositories (intellectual capital) and knowledge exploration and exploitation capabilities (absorptive capacity) as sequential mediators in the association of NBS and firm-level innovation. Besides, bridging networks of lateral ties among Pakistani businesses are found to be more effective than bonding networks of vertical ties in encouraging radical innovations. Originality/value This study significantly extends the literature about the NBS approach. It provides specific sense-making mechanisms (i.e. priming, triggering and editing) about how abstract institutional templates constituted at the business system level are translated into firm-level actionable sets by the help of intangible resource repositories and processes that guide knowledge exploration and exploitation.

This study examines the employees' perception about adoption of AI and its impact on their career attitudes. The author examines how employees perceive AI and its effects on career anxiety, while career insecurity mediates the relationship. The research conducted hypothesis testing using smart-PLS. Data was collected from employees in Pakistan's services and manufacturing sectors. This study shows significant positive correlations between employees' perception of AI and career anxiety. This research also indicates that career insecurity is a pathway that elucidates the employee's perception about the adoption of AI and career anxiety. This study demonstrates that AI has a significant influence on employees ' motivation and also affects employees' decisions regarding their careers.

This Study investigates the moderating effect of career centrality on the relationship between employee perception about AI and career anxiety among employee in the service and manufacturing sectors. Using data collected from both industries and analysed with Smart PLS, the results reveal that career centrality significantly reduces the negative impact of AI on career anxiety, supporting both proposed hypotheses. These findings underscore the importance of fostering career centrality to enable employees to better adapt to AI-driven changes and mitigate psychological risks across diverse organisational contexts.

This Study investigates the moderating effect of career centrality on the relationship between employee perception about AI and career anxiety among employee in the service and manufacturing sectors. Using data collected from both industries and analysed with Smart PLS, the results reveal that career centrality significantly reduces the negative impact of AI on career anxiety, supporting both proposed hypotheses. These findings underscore the importance of fostering career centrality to enable employees to better adapt to AI-driven changes and mitigate psychological risks across diverse organisational contexts.