This paper explores the role and function of charisma in the context of semi-professional eSports teams that aim to enter the professional eSports ranks. The challenges of building a professional career in eSports have been recognized by career development scholars. Semi-professional eSports teams are result-oriented temporary organizations where most interactions among players happen virtually and some occur face-to-face. This research investigates how competitive CS:GO and LoL semi-professional teams are formed, organized and led, and how differently they handle tensions. The role of charisma comes into play as these temporary organizations undergo crises before, during, and after the eSports tournaments. 20 interviews were conducted face-to-face and online with players from various geographical settings. Semi-professional teams were chosen according to their placements in local tournaments. Following the five-year tournament progress and rankings of the researched semi-professional teams in 2020-2025, this paper's findings suggest implications of charisma for temporary organizations' development. Results are applicable to eSports and other result-oriented temporary team environments highlighting the consequences of charisma in temporary teams for broader management and organization theory development.

This chapter explores individual and organizational dimensions of remote and hybrid work with a particular emphasis on IT and media organizations. Working from home enables creating an adaptive space and relates to the processes of continuous change and adaptive learning. However, the level of influence of working from home on developing and leveraging critical capabilities and activities for sustained value varies, depending on a combination of internal and external factors. We identify benefits and challenges of remote working from home and identify as especially relevant factors organizational culture and communication climate on the organizational side and the degree of autonomy and control on the individual side. We also look at both positive and negative examples of socialization into the organization while “working from home” as well as project collaboration and employee engagement tools for remote and hybrid work.

Sweden is known to be one of the most gender-equal societies in the world. Thus, it remains as an enigma why a large discrepancy continues to exist regarding the gender balance in career choice and progression in many professions. Drawing on Hirdman's (1988) theory of gendered systems, in this paper, we explore the role of career resilience in the career progression of women who choose to work in the male-dominated IT sector. We draw attention to how the day-to-day process of practicing career resilience in a gendered workplace tends to evolve as women progress in their careers. Based on an interview study with 50 female IT professionals as well as a discourse analysis of 502 newspaper articles on women in this sector, we develop a process model of career resilience in gendered professions, outlining different coping strategies that allow women to develop and enhance such resilience over time. We conclude the paper by providing some practical recommendations. 

Max Weber coined the concept of charisma in the XIX century by developing it from the Greek 'the gift of grace'. Weberian charismatic authority, alongside traditional authority and legal-rational authority is a sociological construct with broad implications for organizations. This chapter discusses the settings and contexts in which charisma finds itself in organizations and its influence on organizational leadership. By using a narrative literature review, this chapter provides a detailed overview of charisma and charismatic leadership and implications from the perspectives of the classic Weberian sociology and management scholarship. It is argued that charismatic leadership is more effective in organizations operating in chaotic economic and legal environments such as those found in countries transitioning from one form of economy to another. For example, post-Soviet states fall into this category. Second, charismatic leadership impacts organizational decision-making in the companies operating in highly competitive markets and seeking to disrupt the industry. For instance, leaders of tech/media start-ups and media companies such as Elon Musk and Steve Jobs can be described as charismatic. Third, charismatic leadership is found to be impactful in film, art, and media companies not only due to the creative nature of the businesses mentioned above but also because many companies in these fields are project-based. Charisma is a temporary phenomenon, according to Weber. Further studies are proposed to examine the features of charismatic leadership in specific contexts. Given the disruptive nature of work on the global scale, it is argued that more studies into charismatic leadership will shed light on how companies are managed, how leaders' decision-making practices are perceived by employees, and how these practices manifest themselves in different economic and cultural settings.

Digital games and their appropriation for live-streamed events of competitive gaming – the pillars that constitute eSports – experience tremendous growth. This theoretical study advances eSports as a digital media business and a novel context for research on organizations. For this, we systematically reviewed 100 academic articles and specialized international media publications on eSports regarding approaches and understandings of how organizing takes place. In this chapter, we propose a conceptual framework of looking at the eSports industry through identity work, team leadership, and institutional theory. This framework enables us to understand how eSports as a digital media business is organized and how it works at the individual (micro-), organizational (meso-), and industry (macro-) level. This contributes to a reflective appreciation of eSports through giving direction for future studies and by hopefully sparking a curiosity towards using up-to-date concepts from organization studies to frame novel and increasingly digital contexts of organizing in eSports.

This paper examines post-communist managerial ethics during the emergence and transition of charismatic leadership in two privately owned media holdings in Russia and Kyrgyzstan. These media holdings were bootstrapped in the 1990s and 2000s by people without management experience and connections. This paper argues that Weberian charismatic leadership was a necessary leadership style to start a private business for people without links to elite networks. However, once firms establish themselves on the market, charisma fades and yields itself to a legal-rational leadership style. In particular, the paper compares and contrasts the managerial ethics issues arising from the loyalty-based leader–follower relations in the charismatic leadership phase and the legal-rational phase of a firm’s development and maturation. While the legal-rational phase brings positive changes to workload management and employees’ rights for vacation and p/maternity leave, task delegation remains an unsolved issue. Ambiguous career advancement criteria of the legal-rational phase replace rapid career progression of junior and middle managers during the charismatic phase. By examining the dynamics of managerial ethics transformation, this study adds to the literature on post-communist leadership, management and governance. Recommendations are provided for privately owned firms on how to advance managerial ethics to attract and retain qualified talent.

This study explores the roles of female business owners and managers in a transitioning post-socialist economy. It draws on three case studies of media firms founded in the early 2000s and 2010s in Kyrgyzstan by women. Kyrgyzstan is a curious context for management-related gender issues since women are highly literate and highly economically active. Yet, female media business leaders are still uncommon. The women that belong to the first generation of urban business owners seek legitimation. It is particularly acute for the businesswomen that are engaged in cultural production such as media since they are rare birds compared to their female counterparts doing trade and commerce. Kyrgyz female business owners engage in a sophisticated game of being a commercially successful manager, and at the same time, artfully downplaying one's career achievements in front of the social circles. This paper explores women's roles through their education, family and marital status, and class awareness.

Globally, eSports is growing in influence in media. However, it represents a unique phenomenon in the modern mediascape as it is expanding beyond the online digital world and becoming interwoven in the offline, physical world. Jönköping, a mid-sized Swedish city that hosts the DreamHack winter and summer events, provides the setting for how this offline context is being facilitated and shaped to maximize the benefits of eSports’ increasing cultural relevance and value. By conceptualizing the local eSports scene as a market, this article synthesizes 17 interviews with local actors to answer the question: What offline actions do actors engage in to facilitate and shape the local eSports market? This article provides actionable insights from a strategic media management perspective that can enable others to engage with and develop local offline eSports markets to provide a platform for media creation.