Manufacturing companies navigate two often conflicting strategic initiatives: Traditional operational excellence and digitalization. While both target process improvements, they differ substantially from each other. Thus, a conscientious approach to the integrated management of both is required. This white paper investigates their integration across three levels: intra-program, inter-program, and individual level. The intra-program level examines the incorporation of digital tools and data within a single operational excellence program. The inter-program level explores the interfaces and potential overlaps between digitalization and operational excellence. Finally, the individual level considers the future ways of working of operational excellence practitioners, with particular focus on the digital skills and competencies they will require. Despite widespread recognition of potential benefits, successful integration remains an ongoing challenge. Companies continue to struggle with organizational silos, technical hurdles, and cultural divides between traditional operational excellence practitioners and digital experts. To fully realize the benefits of digitalization and operational excellence, organizations must adopt an approach grounded in shared goals that align operational and digital priorities, clear dedicated roles bridging both areas, and integrative processes that connect the programs rather than allowing them to run in parallel. Interpersonal relationships play an equally important role, fostering trust and collaboration. When these elements are reinforced by the organizational setup, the combination of digitalization and operational excellence is more likely to move beyond isolated pilots and deliver sustainable value. At the same time, the role of operational excellence practitioners is evolving. No longer solely process experts, they must leverage digital literacy, methodological expertise, and above all, change management skills. Likewise, the digital experts must develop beyond technology embracing process understanding.

A key to a leader's effectiveness lies in their ability to convey information about their traits and abilities to their followers by means of charismatic signaling. The traits followers might signal in turn have, however, not yet been observed. Focusing on one of the most salient and potent nonverbal behaviors and the most valued follower trait in the organizational context, we investigated the potential of eye-directed gaze behavior to signal follower conscientiousness. Using mobile eye-tracking we unobtrusively measured participants' gaze behavior in a naturalistic yet standardized leader-follower interaction. Our findings indicate conscientiousness to shape followers' eye-directed gaze behavior which, in turn, affects observers' impressions of conscientiousness. While other traits were also related to gaze behavior, they were not inferred from gaze. Importantly, more conscientious followers appear to specifically instrumentalize their gaze when speaking and direct it at the leader to support their own arguments. Thus, this study underscores the importance of investigating followers' signaling of their traits and abilities, identifies eye-directed gaze as a potential signal of conscientiousness, and further emphasizes the significance of gaze behavior as a particularly potent social cue in the organizational context.

Purpose-Research on paradoxical leadership, an approach in which leaders exhibit seemingly contradictory yet interdependent behaviors, has gained significant traction in recent years. However, empirical studies on the emotional antecedents and outcomes of paradoxical leadership are rather rare, offering scarce insights into how managers can become paradoxical leaders and how paradoxical leadership affects followers' role-based job performance. To address this gap, this article demonstrates that leaders' positive and negative trait emotions play a pertinent role in being a paradoxical leader and provides evidence that paradoxical leadership has a positive indirect effect on followers' performance through their paradoxical mindset. Design/methodology/approach-This study surveyed 313 subordinates regarding their leaders' trait affect and paradoxical leadership behaviors as well as the subordinates' own paradoxical mindset and performance, using an online questionnaire. We assessed hypotheses using structural equation modeling. Findings-We found positive leader trait affect corresponds positively with paradoxical leadership and vice versa for negative leader trait affect. Paradoxical leadership, in turn, stimulates an increase in role-based job performance through the pathway of followers' paradoxical mindset. Originality/value-Our results contribute to the literature by showing that leaders' emotions are key to unlocking the potential of paradoxical leadership, providing evidence that paradoxical leadership has a positive effect on followers' role-based performance and demonstrating that followers' paradoxical mindset plays an important mediating role between paradoxical leadership and followers' performance.

Payment mechanisms are important factors for the use and diffusion of technological innovation. Nevertheless, there is a lack of knowledge and empirical evidence about the payment instruments and mechanisms used for technological innovation in the inpatient sector across European health care systems. Given this background, this articles discusses the relationships between DRG-based payment systems and technological innovation. Moreover, it analyses available short-term payment instruments for technological innovation and their application across eleven European countries. The article also scrutinizes how technological innovations are integrated into DRG-based payment systems in the long run. We fi nd that long term mechanisms differ with respect to i) the frequency of system updates, and ii) the time-lag to the data used for these updates. Our analysis suggests that one can differentiate between different kinds of short-term payment instruments: on the one hand some countries apply separate payments outside the core scope of DRG-based payment systems. On the other hand countries provide additional payments and cost-outlier funding that operates within the framework or at the margin of DRG-based payment systems. Overall, our analysis suggests that payment approaches in the context of DRG-based pay-ment systems differ substantially across European health care systems. German as well as other European policy makers should pay more attention to the diversity of payment approaches across European health care systems to inform their policy making.