International Scientific and Academic Research Publisher

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform the nature of work, yet the extent to which this happens is highly heterodox across workplaces. In this conceptual article, the authors offer a possible answer to this difference: the strategic leadership as a moderator of the relationship between AI adoption and workforce transformation. It integrates both upper echelons theory and dynamic capabilities theory with the job demands-resources model, and it proposes four facets of workforce transformation: skill reconfiguration, job redesign, employment change, and employee well-being. Six propositions follow. AI use has both positive and negative consequences such as skill reconfiguration, job redesign and job insecurity. Top management vision enhances the positive path, while ethical leadership diminishes the negative path. The link between leadership involvement and adoption benefits is curvilinear (too much control is bad) and it is different for each stage of implementation. The authors propose that strategic leadership's moderating effect is more pronounced in situations where resources are scarce, like small and medium-sized enterprises or emerging economies such as Africa. The article adds value to the literature. It does not presume that strategic leadership is always good news as it makes connections between managerial choices and employee experience at various levels of analysis, and extends the debate beyond the current literature on advanced economy countries. It concludes with implications for management and a research agenda for testing the propositions.

A digital platform can reach a large market, but network effects are not always constant. This conceptual paper explores the relationship between platform strategy and sustainable market dominance and argues that network effects buffer it. Based on the dynamic capabilities perspective and network externalities theory, and after an integrative review of studies published primarily between 2023 and 2026, the paper explains the three constructs, compares platform development in China with the rest of Africa and other emerging markets and reviews survey, panel, cross-country, quasi-experimental, case and modelling studies. According to the review, platform strategy is achieved through capabilities that maintain platform flexibility; position durability depends on the strength and direction of network effects, which institutions, demand conditions, and competition influence. If there are negative or low network effects, a large number of users can actually harm the network. No reviewed study considers network effects as a moderator between general platform strategy options and dominance. The paper fills this gap with three propositions and a conceptual framework that does not assume network effects. It concludes with suggestions for managers and regulators, and an action plan to pilot the framework with firm level data from Nigeria.

Imported wheat and other inputs are vital for Nigeria's bakeries, but little is known about how the uncertainty of these prices impact the ability to cope. This study investigates the impacts of perceived inflation uncertainty (input cost uncertainty and output price uncertainty) on bakery firms' organisational resilience in Rivers State, Nigeria, and the moderating effect of leadership credibility on these impacts. The study relied on a cross sectional survey design based on dynamic capabilities theory, real options reasoning and a trust based view of leadership in the bakeries located in five local government areas. There were 270 matched responses, with owners/senior managers rating "uncertainty" and "resilience" and employees rating "credibility of the leader. Hierarchical multiple regression indicated that the input cost uncertainty (β = −0.312) and the output price uncertainty (β = −0.278) both decreased resilience. Leadership credibility, however, had a positive impact on resilience, and did not moderate the negative impact of input cost uncertainty (β = 0.187, p < 0.01). The final model accounted for 39.3% of the variance of resilience. The results indicate that input and output uncertainty are two separate pressures, and that credible leadership helps in the former situation, but not the latter one, where pressure is from what customers will pay. The bakery industry should establish trust with employees, predict input expenses and control input pricing risk; and exchange rate stability should be encouraged by the policy makers.

This study examined the relationship between strategic ambidexterity and sustainable competitive advantage among firms in Rivers State, Nigeria. Specifically, the study assessed how strategic exploration, strategic exploitation and strategic alignment contribute to firms’ capacity to achieve and sustain competitive advantage. The study was anchored on the Dynamic Capabilities Theory and Resource-Based View Theory, while a cross-sectional survey design was adopted. Data obtained from 294 usable responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics and regression analysis. The findings revealed that strategic exploration has a positive and significant relationship with sustainable competitive advantage, while strategic exploitation also has a positive and significant relationship and constitutes the strongest individual contributor among the dimensions examined. However, strategic alignment did not demonstrate a significant independent relationship with sustainable competitive advantage. Furthermore, the combined measure of strategic ambidexterity showed a positive and significant relationship with sustainable competitive advantage, indicating that firms benefit from simultaneously pursuing new opportunities and efficiently utilizing existing capabilities. The study concludes that strategic ambidexterity provides an important strategic pathway through which firms can strengthen their competitive position in dynamic business environments. It recommends that managers develop organizational systems that encourage continuous exploration and innovation while simultaneously improving the efficiency and utilization of existing resources and capabilities.

The accuracy of AI translation technologies can be evaluated along one linguistic dimension at a time, and this article focuses on one such dimension, namely modality. Drawing on a corpus of Chinese electronic instruction manuals and their machine and human English translations, this study conducts a contrastive analysis to examine how AI translation systems process modality and evaluates relevant prior findings. The review proceeds in three steps. It first asks whether mainstream systems provide a dedicated procedure for modality and finds that they do not, so output quality still rests on statistical modelling. It then asks what kind of text a manual is and finds that manuals are organised around the directive function, which makes modal expressions appear frequently, especially imperatives. It finally compares the modal systems of the two languages and finds that Chinese and English do not divide modality in the same way, so a given modal meaning has no fixed formal counterpart. The strength of a marker is therefore a matter for the translator to judge in context. Comparisons of human and machine output have registered modal shifts and over-forceful warnings, but most of them remain commentaries on single examples. The only large-scaled quantitative study dates from the statistical MT era and has not been repeated since. A gap therefore remains. Before translating, current systems cannot establish which functional category a sentence belongs to, whether instruction, caution or prohibition, and so cannot choose modal strength from the range that category allows. By linking modal strength to functional categories, this study offers a criterion for future comparisons and a basis for revising machine-translated output before it reaches readers.