This special issue of Skyline Business Journal (SBJ) contains a collection of five extended papers from the 6th International conference on “Managing Business in a COVID-19 ERA: Opportunities and Challenges” to the SBJ journal.

The 2021 virtual Conference was held on 23rd March, 2021 at Skyline University College, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, and attracted a total of 140 regular paper submissions, spanning over numerous active and emerging COVID-19 era topics. The conference program committee selected 138 regular papers to be presented at the conference and published in the conference proceedings.

The five extended papers for this SBJ special issue were selected from among all the accepted papers by the special issue guest editors, based on the relevance to the journal and the reviews of the conference version of the papers. The authors were asked to revise the conference paper for journal publication and in accordance with customary practice to add 30% new materials. The revised papers again went through the normal journal-style review process and are finally presented to the readers in the present form. We appreciate the willingness of the authors to help in organizing this special issue.

The papers in this SBJ special issue mostly cover the main theme on Covid-19 Era. The first paper on “Effect of Tax Avoidance on Accounting Conservatism of Listed Non-Financial Firms in Nigeria,” authors seek to ascertain the effect of tax avoidance on accounting conservatism of listed non-financial firms in Nigeria from a seven years (2014-2020) study period and a population of forty-eight listed non-financial firms on the Nigerian stock exchange.

In the second paper “An Assessment of Private Schools’ Management Strategies amidst Covid-19 lockdown In Nigeria”, authors suggested different strategies for managing schools during lockdown to ensure seamless teaching and learning despite the lockdown and recommended for the private schools to have uniform strategies that can be used to ensure continuous teaching if there is any pandemic in the future and also suggested for online teaching and learning to be integrated into the school curriculum.

The third paper reflects on “Lifestyle segmentation in the context of Covid-19,” authors present Activities, Interests and Opinions (AIO) model to addresses the lacuna that would serve as a prototype that can be replicated on larger samples across countries to understand the impact of a pandemic on lifestyles of people and threw the light on the perspectives people have about them, their work and life.

The fourth paper is based on health care industry in Turkey on “Impact of Organizational Power on Team Cohesion and Team Effectiveness during Covid-19: A Case of Turkish Healthcare Industry”, the authors interviewed 299 supervisors at the Turkish healthcare sector found there is a significant impact of organizational power on team effectiveness as well as team cohesion and it is the responsibility of leaders and supervisors working in Turkish healthcare sector to use the right type of power in order to influence effectiveness and cohesion of teams.

And in the last paper on “Resurgence of MSMEs in Developing Economies during the Covid-19 Fog” This study resorts to various MSME’s in developing countries confronting and combating the difficult time caused by COVID-19 pandemic which can help monitor the evolving business climate to design workable and enforceable policy support for MSME development.

From the five (extended) papers, we observe that the authors is actively engaged in ‘fight’ the crisis to get back to ‘normal’. We hope that the readers enjoy this special issue.



Gouher Ahmed, Conference Chair, 6th International Conference

Editors:
• Naseem Abidi
• Ramakrishna Yanamandra
• Shanmugan Joghee
• Haitham Alzubi
• Salem Aljundi

Skyline Business Journal, Special Issue