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One of the most critical phenomena in modern economics is the potential impact of startups on innovation, economic growth, and employment rates at the regional, national and industrial levels (Sedláček & Sterk, 2017). While startups’ collective contributions are critical, the high-risk strategies they pursue lead to startups’ high failure rates, up to 90% in some industries (Arora et al., 2018; Cantamessa et al., 2018; Marmer et al., 2011), so improving organizational performance is vital to these businesses.- This study examines one critical organizational phenomenon – organizational silence – in Iranian startups. Organizational silence, first introduced in 2000 by Morrison and Milliken, is one of the most significant barriers to performance, growth, and innovation in organizations, where employees become silent consciously, refusing to express ideas, critiques, suggestions, and opinions about organizational operations to influential persons in the organization (Morrison & Milliken, 2000).

Today’s business environment requires leaders to be able to react quickly to the changes that are constantly emerging. Agile techniques help leaders face such challenges and engage the organization in an environment where it can respond flexibly to emerging changes (Fincke et al. 2020; Hitka et al., 2018). Agile people leadership is based on motivating team members while allowing them to communicate with each other and set goals, with each of them involved in decisionmaking and capable of self-management (Salajová, 2020). In the past, people leadership has mainly focused on the individual and his or her relationship with subordinates or successors. The field of leadership has primarily focused on the behavior, thinking, and actions of the leader in a team or organization (Blštáková et al., 2020; Jankelová et al., 2021; Salajová 2020). This paradigm has dominated the field of organizational behavior for decades.

The paper’s aim is, in a broader sense, human resource management in the context of change management. Different groups of individuals manage change differently. Therefore, it is essential, appropriate and expedient to examine the perception of change in the 21st century. Changes are happening more and more frequently due to scientific and technical progress. Changes are part of the life of every single member of society or every organisation. Therefore, a study of this issue must be considered justified. This paper presents the results of research focused on small and medium-sized enterprises. Employees of small and mediumsized enterprises in the study evaluated the effects of possible changes in enterprises from their work and organisation. The article examined in more depth personal perceptions, especially those who have not yet undergone a change. The second group surveyed are- employees who have already passed through the ground in their professional lives.

Businesses today are facing fiercely competitive global environments and firms use widespread mass production of goods and services for lower cost and larger market shares to sustain their survival and growth (Shalley & Gilson, 2017). Therefore, a job design and characteristic of standardization has long been adopted to stifle production variation by individual employees and to maintain output consistency, effectiveness and efficiency (Koval et al., 2019; Luoh et al., 2014; Shalley & Gilson, 2017). Job standardization has long been recognized and shown to be essential for production efficiency and best-practice reasons (Shalley & Gilson, 2017). However, Keeley (1988) maintained that organizations have a fundamental tension between the goal of efficiency and the goal of morality and struggle for a delicate balance between these competing objectives.

Since December 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has spread rapidly on a global scale (WHO, 2021), strongly affecting organizations from all sectors of activity. Employees, in particular (ILO, 2020), have been forced to quickly alter their work behaviors and manner of working, being obliged to abandon commuting to the workplace and resort to large-scale remote working (Nemțeanu et al., 2021a). The pandemic has made its strongest imprint on the sector of services (Fernandes, 2020), for whom teleworking has become ‘the new normal’ (Belzunegui-Eraso & Erro-Garcés, 2020; Nemțeanu & Dabija, 2021). This new context has dramatically altered task performance – employee productivity having been strongly affected due to the time needed to adapt to the new reality and working conditions (Belzunegui-Eraso & Erro-Garcés, 2020).

Business activities’ significance in economies worldwide underscores the importance of studying companies’ operations to determine their managers’ ability to adapt to changes arising from globalization. Business organizations and management aspects, however, include such a wide range of factors needing analysis that these variables must first be defined and the most relevant factors selected. This study sought to deepen the existing knowledge about managers’ preferences regarding the use of communication to generate employee participation in strategic business management processes. This topic is of particular interest in the Canary Islands, which is a complex area from an economic perspective due to its geographical fragmentation and distance from the main production centres that stimulate trade. These islands also depend significantly on external supplies of essential goods and have limited industrial and agricultural sectors but a quite dominant service sector.

During recent decades, with the rise of worldwide competition and globalization, the noteworthiness of recruiting and retaining qualified employees has become an important factor in the success of the education industry (Gong et al., 2018). In other words, managing human resources plays a crucial role in increasing the sustainable competitive advantages of a higher education institute. Such a role is more profound in the education industry due to the direct effect of human resources, which consist of academics, on customers, who are students. Although recruiting highly talented academics is a challenging issue for human resource managers, retaining them within the organization, in the long term, requires high efforts and intention as well. It is quite clear that progress in science and technology improves the human being’s quality of life. Developing knowledge is the main purpose of the higher education system, which will be fulfilled by educating capable scientists. Academics and scholars are responsible for accomplishing this main goal of the higher education systém in universities. Iran is one of the countries which plays an active role in contributing to universal knowledge and technology (Naderi & Safarzade, 2014).

TPeople and especially talented individuals are of remarkable interest for many academics in research (Collings et al., 2019; Meyers et al., 2013; Krishnan & Scullion, 2017). The reason is very simple. Human resources are the most valuable resource a company should have. People are movers of each company and create added value. A high commitment human resources strategy leads to a firm competitive advantage (Collins, 2020). Employees play an important role in forming a competitive advantage for the organization. The role of the employees has become pronounced and significant, and it is no longer conventional. They are responsible for the strategic planning and development of the organization (Chakraborty & Biswas, 2019). Nowadays, firms operate in an environment which is characterized by many political, economic, social, and technological changes (Wee & Taylor, 2018).These changes force companies to transform themselves to gain greater prosperity or to survive (Ocasio et al., 2017; Riviere et al., 2017).

Today, the concept of agile is increasingly associated with the success of companies. It is not only about project management but also elements of agility support success in today’s dynamic business environment. The attitude to agility may vary from generation to generation. At present, Generation Y (also called as Millennials) is increasingly represented on the labour market not only among employees but also in managerial positions. The Millennial generation has now become the largest generational cohort in the workforce. As Millennials become more prevalent in organisations and in management, there is a need to understand how these persons will manage the incoming generation of workers, how Millennials will want to be managed in the future (Crocitto & Youssef, 2003). The aim of the authors is to explore this issue concerning elements of agile management.

In the context of the research on human behaviour, the issue we deal with is the reason why a people’s message is precisely that, and not another one, what forces them to act as they do. Is it an external compulsion – e.g. to escape from danger, or that they want to achieve something – to satisfy some of their needs, interests in hobbies, or because they consider it right and moral? Can a person behave in a way that has no cause, or reason? Although we distinguish between involuntary and voluntary behaviour, human behaviour in the work process is largely influenced by the will, the desire that results from the impact of several motives. The concept of motivation is the internal process, the process of psychological causes of human behaviour. These causes are motives, internal presuppositions, and internal impulses leading to certain target behaviour. The process of motivation is thus the process of activating internal assumptions, guiding human action to a certain goal of their pursuit (Nakonečný, 1992). Motivation can be defined as processes that account for an individual’s intensity, direction and persistence of effort toward attaining a goal (Robbins, 2001).