The COVID-19 pandemic posed many challenges for organizational survival across the world. Innovative capability became a key force in meeting such challenges and was most evident in Egypt's banking sector. This paper explores, through semi-structured in-depth interviews with six general managers of multinational banks operating in Egypt, what innovation competences may enable organizational improvisers, or bricoleurs, to challenge, change, and achieve innovation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results were analyzed through the lens of Senge's five disciplines of learning organizations (Senge, 1990), with a particular consideration for the role of improvisation, and found that personal mastery is the dominant principle and is linked to achieving innovation in organizations. Within this element, the analysis also suggests that improvisation emerges from creativity, past experience, intuition, and distinct triggers, and that innovation competences appear as complementary elements of an organization's behavior, encapsulated as a form of bricolage when challenges arise and resource constraints prevail. The results suggest that a set of practices and strategies could be applied by general managers to meet the challenges they face involving constraints, such as a shortage of human resource, and that improvisation can form one of their key innovation competences. Contribution/Originality:This study contributes to the existing literature by advancing the conversation on this topic through introducing the concept of the bricoleur as a vehicle to enhance innovative capability and introduce new and novel thinking to the challenges that banks face, as well as to the underpinning theory around Senge's learning organizations. INTRODUCTIONA market environment that is open, challenging, malleable, ambiguous and, in general, complex, can result in continuous pressures of time which challenge traditional settings and calls for improvisation (Eisenhardt, 1997;Levallet & Chan, 2013). Organizations that respond quickly can benefit from opportunities to achieve competitive advantage (Tanriverdi, Rai, & Venkatraman, 2010), which, as Cunha & Clegg (2019) would claim, "render[s] the capacity to learn especially valuable -hence the importance of the notion of the learning organization" (p. 238). In such unpredictable environments, pre-prepared plans often do not comply with the traditional perspective of 'doing' and improvisation is the alternative. Our paper explores this concept in the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The research investigates the role of managerial competences (MC) and knowledge dynamics for effective knowledge transfer (EKT) influence of managerial and communication skills on the management of MNEs hotels in a competitive host country, of most previous studies estimating the call for competences rather than the genuine owning of these among managers and practitioners. This article sheds the light on a great number of promising activities to utilize inter/intra-organizational KT. Specifically, the managerial communication competences model operates as an initial toolkit for managerial decision-making when facing severe competition in the host country in terms of utilizing, communicating, or seeking to apply the best internal/external KT practices.

The purpose of this research is to provide new insights into the moderating effects that enable an MNE operating in Egypt to learn to attract, motivate, transform and develop its high-potential local employees for reverse adaptation so as to fit a global mind-set elsewhere in the organisation’s global positions. The methodology uses semi-structured story-based interviews to explore the significance of moderating effects and practices of absorptive capacity and reverse adaptation in Hi Tech in Egypt. The findings reveal the interrelated components that lead to reverse adaptation and how continuous management development is intermediated by learning and well-bonded reciprocity of relationships, amid continuous management development, transformation, and reverse adaptation. This virtuous cycle acts as an integrated adaptation learning loop that supports the process of transformation. The findings refute the linearity of the absorptive capacity model as the transformation stage does not appear to mediate the model but precedes other steps within it. Moreover, it was concluded that the model did not end in achieving the competitive advantage phase. Instead reverse adaptation, as a by-product, acted as a trigger for knowledge acquisition. The originality here is based on a greater understanding of the moderating effects that mediate the relationship between reverse adaptation and the transformation stage of absorptive capacity theory. This allows awareness of how, in the case of the Hi Tech in Egypt, the global mindset is delivered and offers valuable contributions to theory and practice. As reverse adaptation is a nascent multidisciplinary phenomenon for research, the paper also suggests a research agenda for researchers in the area of international management.

This paper investigates the process and strategies used by a pharmaceutical MNE in Egypt to acquire, assimilate, transform, apply and protect its knowledge for the purpose of achieving innovation. The analysis is conducted through the lens of absorptive capacity theory and based on seven interviews with key stakeholders to explore how knowledge protection practices and supporting mechanisms were applied to achieve innovation and organizational effectiveness., Thematic analysis reveals that Knowledge infrastructure capabilities constitute the backbone of knowledge processing capabilities, supported by other constituents such as appropriability regime mechanisms, the role of management (HRM), knowledge management approach, knowledge hiding, and the absorptive capacity. The study concludes that successful knowledge management is a byproduct of integrating knowledge infrastructure capability with processing capabilities, and mediated by knowledge hiding mechanisms and strategies. The findings offer a valuable empirical perspective from a pharmaceutical MNE operating in Egypt and provide new insights into the nature of the intermediating influences of knowledge management processes that lead to innovation and superior organizational performance.