Human Resource Management Journal最新文献

In this article, we introduce the special issue on conceptualising the nexus between macro-level ‘turbulence’ and the worker experience. We discuss ‘turbulence’ as economic, political, social, technological, and environmental crises occurring in the macro-environment and affecting the world of work. We argue that human resource management plays a critical role in supporting not only the organisation, but also workers, to navigate through macro-level events. Based on the contributions included in this Special Issue, we suggest a novel framework that situates and expands the role of the Human Resources (HR) function in contemporary organisations by proposing a new role, the Proactive Carer. We argue that the debates around the role of HR and HR professionals have so far been too narrow and internally focused. It is time to expand this role to be externally facing, proactively monitoring the macro-environment for significant events, anticipating any significant changes for workers, and designing interventions to minimise any negative impact. We conclude by highlighting avenues for future research.

An increase in gender diversity activities and a greater societal awareness of inequality issues have led to an unprecedented focus on gender diversity management (GDM) in multinational companies (MNCs). Despite GDM efforts in MNCs, female expatriates continue to be under represented in global mobility and are still missing as an explicit target group in MNCs' GDM endeavors. Despite the evidence for gender-related challenges concerning expatriation, global mobility does not account for gender when it comes to policy considerations. Accordingly, based on 31 in-depth semi-structured interviews, we seek to explore why female expatriates continue to be underrepresented in international assignments. We find that the relation between a company's global mobility management and its respective GDM is, in most cases, nonexistent. We also discover that MNCs utilize a gender-blind approach that is shaped by stereotypes which favor the selection of male employees in global mobility.

Bloom and Van Reenen (2007) have suggested an index of best management practices capturing three broad areas: monitoring, targets and incentives. However, it is an open question whether the functioning of these practices depends on contextual factors. From a theoretical viewpoint, the management practices involve both productive and dysfunctional effects. We hypothesize that the relative strength of these effects depends on the industrial relations climate. Works councils help management practices live up to their potential by building long-term employer-employee cooperation. Our empirical analysis uses panel data from the German Management and Organizational Practices survey to examine this hypothesis. Applying a reformulated version of the Mundlak estimator, we disentangle short-term and sustaining productivity effects of the management practices. Our results show that the incidence of a works council specifically strengthens the sustaining productivity effect of the practices.

The link between academic theory and the professional practice of human resource management (HRM) is often tenuous and disjointed. The “gap” between theory and practice is damaging to academics and practitioners. On the one hand, academic research is often highly theoretical and methodologically complex. On the other, HR professionals tend to oversimplify advice on “how to solve” HRM “problems” and they may conduct research lacking rigor and nuance. Insofar as a bridge can be built between HRM theory and practice, significant benefits exist for both parties. Mick Marchington exemplified this bridge. His commitment to pluralism wrought significant influence on the professional practice of HRM through highly readable and practically useful theory. We look to Marchington's work to draw lessons on how we can better bridge theory and practice for the enrichment of academics and practitioners. We develop a framework contrasting “academic esotericism” with “practitioner reductionism.” We then propose a third way: “industry-engaged academic research.”

Machine-learning algorithms used in personnel selection are a promising avenue for several reasons. We shift the focus to applicants' attributions about the reasons why an organization uses algorithms. Combining the human resources attributions model, signaling theory, and existing literature on the perceptions of algorithmic decision-makers, we theorize that using algorithms affects internal attributions of intent and, in turn, organizational attractiveness. In two experiments (N = 259 and N = 342), including a concurrent double randomization design for causal mediation inferences, we test our hypotheses in the applicant screening stage. The results of our studies indicate that control-focused attributions about personnel selection (cost reduction and applicant exploitation) are much stronger when algorithms are used, whereas commitment-focused attributions (quality enhancement and applicant well-being) are much stronger when human experts make selection decisions. We further find that algorithms have a large negative effect on organizational attractiveness that can be partly explained by these attributions. Implications for practitioners and academics are discussed.

ChatGPT and its variants that use generative artificial intelligence (AI) models have rapidly become a focal point in academic and media discussions about their potential benefits and drawbacks across various sectors of the economy, democracy, society, and environment. It remains unclear whether these technologies result in job displacement or creation, or if they merely shift human labour by generating new, potentially trivial or practically irrelevant, information and decisions. According to the CEO of ChatGPT, the potential impact of this new family of AI technology could be as big as “the printing press”, with significant implications for employment, stakeholder relationships, business models, and academic research, and its full consequences are largely undiscovered and uncertain. The introduction of more advanced and potent generative AI tools in the AI market, following the launch of ChatGPT, has ramped up the “AI arms race”, creating continuing uncertainty for workers, expanding their business applications, while heightening risks related to well-being, bias, misinformation, context insensitivity, privacy issues, ethical dilemmas, and security. Given these developments, this perspectives editorial offers a collection of perspectives and research pathways to extend HRM scholarship in the realm of generative AI. In doing so, the discussion synthesizes the literature on AI and generative AI, connecting it to various aspects of HRM processes, practices, relationships, and outcomes, thereby contributing to shaping the future of HRM research.

In the strategic HR literature, current empirical results on the relationship between HR practices and employee wellbeing are mixed and contradictory. Based on the job resources and demands model and the fine-tuned challenge-hindrance demands framework, we propose that an important reason lies in the lack of attention paid to the different characteristics of HR practices. HR practices can serve as either job resources or challenge demands to employees, thereby having differential effects on the psychological, physical, and social dimensions of wellbeing. We integrate a measure of challenge demand (including time pressure and workload) as a mediator to further reveal how these different categories of HR practices influence employee wellbeing. Using structural equation modeling in a dataset of 4823 individual workers from a National Workplace Survey of Employees conducted in Ireland, we find that job resource HR practices are positively associated with all three dimensions of wellbeing both directly and indirectly, while challenge demand HR practices are positively associated with psychological wellbeing but negatively associated with physical wellbeing and social wellbeing primarily through the mediating effect of time pressure and workload. These findings point to important variable relationships, reinforcing the need to untangle the HRM employee wellbeing relationship beyond aggregated and uniform HRM-wellbeing assertions.

Mick Marchington's contributions to the field of human resource management (HRM) was considerable through his leadership, teaching and research. In the research arena he made significant contributions to the topics of employee voice, participation, and involvement as well as the future of work. A common thread to his research concerned humanising management and HRM through a pluralist value system. In this article we summarise his key contributions.

Independent professionals represent a highly skilled contractual based workforce. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework that explains the career construction mechanism of independent professionals. Specifically, we theorize that their boundaryless career orientation favorably influences the perception of their marketability via their involvement in career construction activities. Additionally, we elucidate the intervening role of their career competencies, physical and psychological mobility in augmenting or dampening perceived marketability as a career outcome. Differing to traditionally employed professionals, we argue that independent professional careers can be better explained conjointly, rather than separately, by boundaryless career theory and career construction theory. This paper has practical relevance in highlighting the significance of career construction activities by independent professionals for achieving positive career outcomes while pursuing a boundaryless career.

Using a behavioural approach, we investigate how Chief Executive Officer optimism, defined as a personality trait where a person has optimistic beliefs about the outcome of future events, influences corporate employment decisions. Using data of publicly traded firms in the U.S. from 1995 to 2017, we show that firms with optimistic CEOs have higher employment growth and exhibit less pronounced employment sensitivity to declining sales than firms with non-optimistic CEOs do. We also find that the impact of optimistic CEOs on employment decisions is larger in financially constrained firms. We deal with potential endogeneity issues with the entropy balancing method, propensity score matching and two-stage least squares regression. Our findings have important implications for the design and implementation of Human Resource Management policies.