Educational institutions exist to serve the goals of the society and the nation. To attain its goals, the any organization requires human resources in different roles and functions to help achieve its goals (Champoux 2011; Greenberg 2011; Tosi, Rizzo, and Carroll 1986) and the educational institution is not an exception. The educational institutions face competitive environment (Richardson, Nwankwo, & Richardson 1995) in the form of shrinking students' enrollments combined with rising maintenance costs, demographic changes, online competition, burdens of accreditation (Hughes and White 2006), that calls upon the critical role played by leadership in making things happen successfully (Al Matrooshi, Singh, & Farouk, 2016; Al Mehrzi & Singh, 2016; Chaturvedi & Gaur, 2009; Gaur, 2006). The 21st century is an era of knowledge economy characterized by continuous renewal of knowledge and skills of human resources (Bozionelos & Singh, 2017; Gaur, Kumar, & Singh, 2014; Singh & Gaur, 2013) to stay relevant and competitive. It is argued that the role of managers in education institution's innovation processes become critical (Lee & Gaur, 2013; Nuruzzaman, Gaur, & Sambharya, 2018) as the educational institutions face competition for resources (Lorange, 2002) like any other organizations across the industry. At the same time, the extant literature asks organizations to find ways and means to leverage the potential of their human resources towards successful achievement of organizational goals (Al Hosani et al., 2017; Budhwar et al., 2018). Therefore, it comes pertinent for organizations to manage change for growth (Al Ali et al., 2017) so as to stay organic through strong emphasis on their processes, systems, and most importantly through acquiring and retaining talented human resources. It is in this backdrop that the Special Issue (SI) on "The Human side of organization" in International Journal of Educational Management was conceptualized and that was well received as I received 56 paper submissions and 11 best papers after reviews and revisions were found suitable for this SI.