Purpose – The article analyzes the challenges Slovak businesses and organizations are facing in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting human resource management solutions they apply.
Design/methodology/approach – The authors present a part of their research conducted in six Central Eastern European (CEE) countries. Based on timely data, the article presents socioeconomic characteristics of Slovakia and the results of the research “HRM Challenges in Times of the Covid-19 Crisis” conducted among employers in Slovakia. The survey method encompassed 247 Slovakian organizations.
Findings – The year 2020 was an extraordinary one for businesses, governments, and individuals alike. According to the results of this research, Slovak organizations were not prepared for the Covid-19 crisis. Respondents who had a pandemic action plan at the time of the breakout were hardly found. Measures taken to preserve human health directly impacted the way how work is done and organized. This poses significant challenges for both employers and employees. In general, small organizations used cost and staff reduction tools. On the other hand, some of the respondents, mainly large organizations have been using future-oriented solutions, e.g. organizational development.
Originality/value – In this research the authors analyzed the experiences of a Central European country, namely Slovakia. However, the experiences gained and collected here can be useful in the international arena as well.

Purpose – This study aims to explore how and why self-discrepancy affects materialism and impulsive buying and the extent to which subjective well-being mediates the relationship between self-discrepancy, materialism and impulsive buying.
Design/methodology/approach – The authors have tested the hypothesis with a convenience sample (N 5 434) from Lithuania. Descriptive analysis, principal components analysis (PCA), serial mediation hypothesis tested with model 81 from regression-based path analysis modeling tool PROCESS Macro for IBM® SPSS® Statistics 24.7 statistical software.
Findings – The serial and parallel mediation analysis results indicated that greater self- discrepancy was related to poorer life satisfaction, which was related to greater materialism centrality, which promoted greater impulsive buying. Also, the greater the self-discrepancy, caused more occurrence of negative affect, which relates to increased materialism happiness, which triggers impulsive buying. Self-discrepancy was negatively associated with the frequency of positive affect, which was positively related to materialism, which stimulates
impulsive buying.
Research limitations/implications – The study was dominated by younger respondents. The survey was conducted during the lockdown of the Covid-19 virus pandemic.
Originality/value – There is little empirical evidence to support the reasoning behind why self-discrepancy predicts a higher degree of materialism, which increases impulsive buying. This study suggests the mechanism of how subjective well-being affects relationships of self-discrepancy on materialism and impulsive buying.

Purpose: The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted the lives of people and organizations, including supply chains (SC). Therefore, this study aims to explore concepts, methods, and tools for managing SC during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Methodology: The main research methods were systematic and grey literature reviews, supported by 5W2H and 20/80 methods.

Findings: Three research gaps were identified, supported by concepts, methods, and tools for managing SC during the Covid-19 pandemic with other related findings.

Limitations: Short research horizon because the Covid-19 pandemic started two years ago, which precluded us from performing full results verification.

Implications: This study updates and enriches supply chain management theories, especially regarding resiliency, disruption, and risk SC management. One of the fifteen research criteria was related to applied concepts, methods, and tools, which thus can be used by SC managers to implement them into practice.

Originality/Value: Compared to the literature review, a systematic literature review is performed according to a structured procedure. This comprehensive study will enable researchers/managers to understand the problem and prepare measures against the pandemic in SC.

Purpose: One of the regulatory responses to the 2008 financial crisis was to internalize the costs related to banks’ distress by introducing bank levies. More than 23 European banking sectors have been confronted with the new levy regime imposing the additional tax on banks’ balance sheet.

Methodology: This study analyzes the effect of the levy introduction on banks’ profitability, credit activity, and on their business models. More importantly, we confront two different levy regimes – one imposed on banks’ assets and the other on liabilities – to assess their differential impact. A generalized least squares regression with a random effect is performed on a data sample of Hungarian and German credit institutions from 2005 to 2015.

Results: The results show that levy introduction weakened banking sectors in terms of their profitability as well as their lending activity. Even though banks try to compensate for the cost of the levies by passing some of the costs on to the customers and restructuring their operations to limit the tax burden, we find that these activities are not sufficient to offset the whole tax burden. We also note that while the asset levy has a more severe effect on banks’ profits, the liability levy severely affects banks’ lending due to lower interest margin resulting from higher cost of funding.

Findings: Our research results provide important conclusions for regulators, especially during turbulent periods such as the COVID-19 pandemic to strengthen the banking sectors by considering the levy suspension.

Purpose: Managers of healthcare organizations must be much more dynamic and agile to survive in a competitive environment. Administrators, managers, and leaders in healthcare organizations must meet both patients’ and staff’s needs, expectations, and requests at the maximum level in order to create organizational agility. What counts among these responsibilities is the use of operational competitive capabilities at the highest level and being organizationally agile? In this context, this study determines the relationship between the operational competitive capabilities of healthcare organizations and organizational agility and examines the mediating role of organizational agility between operational competitive capabilities and organizational performance in healthcare organizations in Turkey.

Methodology: The data was collected from the 220 managers of health organizations in Turkey through questionnaires, which were analyzed with the SPSS 26 and AMOS 26 programs.

Results: The findings revealed a positive relationship between operational competitive capabilities of managers and between organizational agility and organizational agility, which have a full mediating role between operational competitive capabilities and organizational performance in healthcare organizations
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Conclusion: Today’s healthcare organizations’ managers face such important problems and unexpected developments as adapting to a rapidly changing environment and struggles to avoid uncertainty. Therefore, the managers must use their operational competitive capabilities at the highest level and be organizationally agile to maximize their organizations’ performance and survive in this highly competitive environment.

Purpose: This study aims to explore the role open data assumes in social innovation initiatives that combat the effects of Covid-19, in which quantitative information about these projects is complemented with the analysis of open data innovation capabilities.

Methodology: A mixed methods approach is adopted. Initially, quantitative data regarding the number of innovative projects is extracted from the OPSI framework. Then, in a second phase, qualitative data from each project is explored to explore the open data innovation capabilities offered by each initiative.

Results: The results reveal that most social innovation initiatives focus on the area of data visualization dashboards and open datasets. However, some projects address other areas, e.g. hackathons, service availability, and tourism information.

Implications: Covid-19 profoundly affects the lives of people and businesses, and open data can assume a determinant role in mitigating these effects and improve information transparency and collaboration between public and private entities.

Originality/Value: This study is relevant for the establishment of supportive public policies that promote the emergence of open-data-driven initiatives to mitigate the effects of Covid-19 in several areas such as the economy, education, and leisure.