Do smart cities perform better in governing the COVID-19 crisis? Empirical evidence from Indonesian cities

The COVID-19 pandemic has shocked the world due to its pronounced mortality rate, rapid worldwide spread, and profound socioeconomic effects across all societies. As the spearhead of urban policies, local governments play an important role in crisis management during the pandemic. In the context of smart cities, innovative solutions have been required, especially to improve the local government's capacity to manage health crises. This study asks whether smart cities perform better in governing the COVID-19 pandemic. This article focuses on how urban governance impacted cities' performance in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a city-level data set from Indonesia, we constructed a COVID-19 response performance index using principal component analysis that is used in an empirical strategy with quasi-experimental cross-sectional methods to minimize the influence of unobserved covariates and selection bias. This study concludes that smart city status does not have a statistically significant impact on the COVID-19 performance index. We offer three possible accounts based on expert insights, previous empirical studies, and digital upshots on data monitoring and reporting cases. Both theoretical and practical implications can be drawn, thus highlighting the lack of effective integration of technological dimensions into health and urban governance systems in the context of a public health crisis.

Entrepreneurial Leadership and Employees' Proactive Behaviour: Fortifying Self Determination Theory

The prevailing pandemic (COVID-19) has increased socioeconomic problems and caused psychological distress due to work uncertainty, specifically in emerging economies. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in emerging economies have been severely affected. Particularly, work uncertainty is becoming a hindrance towards proactive work behaviour (PWB) that can be improved by an effective entrepreneurial leadership role and proactive personality attribute. Based on fortifying self-determination theory, this research answered the question to what extent proactive personality moderates the relationship between work uncertainty and PWB and strengthens the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and PWB. To empirically examine the study's underlying theoretical framework, respondents were selected from SMEs working in Pakistan from the high-tech industry. Multisource data were accumulated from 420 workers and their leaders utilizing a two-wave, time-lagged research design. Conclusions revealed that entrepreneurial leadership first reduced individuals' work uncertainty, which in turn, led to enhanced proactive work behaviour of employees. Furthermore, the results revealed that work uncertainty mediates the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and proactive work behaviour. Moreover, proactive personality moderates the link concerning work uncertainty and proactive work behaviour, such that this association is significant only when proactive personality is low. Additionally, the moderated mediation analysis indicated that less proactive people, compared with their extraordinarily proactive colleagues, trusted entrepreneurial leadership to be more proactive in the workplace. These findings have important implications to induce PWB among employees.