Human Resource Development Quarterly最新文献

Workplace coaching is an established, proven personal development intervention relied on by human resource (HR) practitioners to improve individual growth and organizational performance. Numerous studies underscore coaching efficacy. However, in most coaching studies, there is a bias toward positive coaching experience. This points to a missed opportunity in understanding the nuances of negative coaching experiences and its effect on HR development (HRD). To address this limitation, we identified 13 instances from a sample of 357 coachees where organizational coaching was experienced as predominantly negative. Content analysis of the interviews revealed three main themes: mismatched expectations (getting off to a bad start); suboptimal relationship dynamics (lack of trust and perceived coach incompetence); and disruptive organizational influences (hidden agendas). Findings interpreted through the lens of HRD and working alliance theories reveal deep hidden dynamics of how negative coaching experiences could destroy organizational trust, amplify cultural mismatches, and affect employee career trajectories, negatively impacting several HRD objectives on both individual and organizational levels. On a theoretical level, the findings empirically underscore the need for an extend working alliance theory that includes the organization as a distinct construct in the coach–coachee dynamics, and shows the dual positive and negative leveraging effect of coaching on HRD objectives. Practically it points to the essential need for HR practitioners to be more closely and proactively involved in organizational coaching initiatives and we offer a number of practical suggestions to help HR avoid the potential detrimental long-term negative effects of unsuccessful coaching.

This study explores the role of human agency in shaping the hopeful career state (HCS) of nurses in Oman during the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilizing the enhanced critical incident technique (ECIT) and integrating Albert Bandura's three modes of agency (i.e., personal, proxy, and collective), this study aimed to identify helping and hindering factors affecting Omani nurses' HCS during the pandemic, while uncovering their wishes. Sixteen nurses from Oman's public healthcare sector were interviewed. The top three helping factors were family support (81.3%), support from leaders and senior colleagues (56.3%), and multidisciplinary team collaboration (43.8%). The most frequently reported hindering factors were lack of equipment, supplies, and infrastructure (100%), shortage of nurses (56.3%), and increased workload (50%). The top three wish-list items included specialized hospitals for infectious diseases (62.5%), training and staff development (43.8%), and more nurses (31.3%). Through force-field analysis, we delineated the agents and modes of agency at play, offering insights for targeted Human Resource Development (HRD) interventions. This study contributes to the HRD literature by illustrating the dynamic interplay of agency factors in crisis conditions. The findings highlight the need for HRD practitioners to develop multilevel interventions that foster personal, proxy, and collective agency to support healthcare workers' HCS during crises, providing a foundation for future strategies in healthcare and beyond.

Organizational and societal transitions require workers to upskill and reskill their expertise within and across the boundaries of their current domain(s). This may also require them to materialize their renewed expertise in novel settings in interaction with stakeholders who hold different expectations regarding their know-how and contributions. To stay employable, workers need to deal with shifting expertise needs by creating beneficial outcomes for themselves and their stakeholders, as captured by the so-called flexpertise concept. Thus far, expertise research left largely unaddressed how workers adapt through intra-individual changes over time and social interactions in naturalistic settings in which they encounter various new expertise needs. To increase our understanding of the dynamic nature of workers' adaptation processes, we conducted a Group Model Building study with HR/D practitioners. Through this structured group facilitation method, these practitioners cocreated a dynamic process model, based upon their varied experiences in practice regarding the flexpertise phenomenon. The newly developed model portrays how workers make balanced decisions to adapt, go through loops of learning-by-mistakes and -successes, and ultimately turn their new know-how into outcomes, with or without impact, leading to new adaptation cycles. Furthermore, the practitioners defined leverage points where HR/D practices can stimulate individual adaptivity. This GMB study may set the agenda for future expertise and employability research and provides the foundation for designing bundles of HR/D practices to foster flexpertise.

Based on criticisms and recommendations in the literature made particularly in the last decade, this study focuses on the basic assumptions of transformational leadership (TL) theory such as “follower transformation,” “conceptual differences between the sub-dimensions of TL” and “performance beyond expectations.” In this regard, it hypothesizes that while individualized consideration and idealized influence sub-dimensions of TL affect followers' perceptions about the quality of their relationships with their leaders, the inspirational motivation and intellectual stimulation sub-dimensions are mostly motivational (i.e., person-organization fit and self-efficacy), and that these sub-dimensions enhance follower performance (i.e., organizational citizenship behaviors and task performance) through these specified mechanisms. It also hypothesizes that the quality of leader-member exchanges moderates the influences of the motivational aspects of TL on follower performance. These hypotheses were tested and confirmed by analyzing the data from 222 leader–follower pairs from the private security sector. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed and suggestions for future research are provided. This article hopes to motivate future studies to clarify the TL theory and to further support its development.

Based on an integration of meta-theoretical perspectives on the “too much of a good thing” effect with psychological demands and resources theories, we propose and test nonlinear relations between the percentage of time people work from home and a variety of important work-related outcomes (i.e., professional isolation, work from home satisfaction, work from home self-efficacy, work performance, job satisfaction). Then, also based on resource theories, we explore whether and how certain work from home resources (i.e., previous experience working from home, appropriate technologies to facilitate working from home, dedicated workspaces) buffer these nonlinear relations. Data on working from home were provided by n = 994 employees in Germany across 32 monthly measurement waves between April 2020 and December 2022. Our results support the general idea that the percentage of time people work from home has nonlinear associations with a variety of important work-related outcomes. However, only in a few cases (i.e., work performance, job satisfaction) do these relations take the form of inverse U-shapes that would be indicative of “too much of a good thing.” Our exploratory analysis suggests that, in several cases, work from home resources can buffer these nonlinear associations. These findings have implications for the continued development of meta-theoretical perspectives on “too much of a good thing” and for employees' and organizations' attempts to make working from home a positive and productive experience.

The unprecedented complexity of today's business and working environment increases the need for leaders and employees to learn new skills, be adaptable, and open to embracing change. New abilities and mindsets emerge, and their evaluation is challenging. This research utilized an exploratory sequential mixed methods design to develop and provide a preliminary validation of a scale measuring individual differences in learning agility (LA) at work. The measure has been tested in Central-Eastern European countries, Italy, and Egypt. Results showed satisfactory reliability and nomological validity. The final scale of 11 items provides HRD researchers and practitioners with a reliable and concise tool suitable for investigating individual differences in LA across different job roles and positions. The scale has been tested in a cross-cultural setting and is available in English, making it especially appropriate for multinational contexts.