Recruiting neurodiverse talent has increasingly featured on the organizational diversity agenda, yet recruitment practices geared toward locating and attracting neurodivergent candidates remain understudied. While research and practice have shown that employee referral is one of the channels through which a significant part of new talent is recruited, little is known about employees' willingness to refer qualified social contacts who are neurodivergent. We address this limitation by investigating employees' willingness to refer highly qualified candidates on the autism spectrum and some conditions under which they are more or less likely to refer such candidates. We explore these aspects in a study of working individuals, using a mixed-method approach. The quantitative analysis shows that disclosure of an autism condition to potential referrers might pose some advantage, in that it increases the likelihood of being referred, but this advantage accrues only to male candidates. Furthermore, cues that hint at the social dimension of the “ideal worker,” commonly used in job recruitment materials, are the strongest deterrent for referrers. The qualitative analysis of the reasons behind decisions to refer sheds light on some mechanisms that might explain these findings.
Supporting neurodivergent-inclusive workplaces is an increasingly important consideration in Human Resource Management (HRM). While a strengths-based approach to neurodivergence has been advocated, empirical evidence regarding the effectiveness of HRM practices that support high-quality employment outcomes for neurodivergent people is lacking. Drawing on a nationally representative sample of over 25,000 people in the United Kingdom, we examine the influence of neurodivergence on multiple employment outcomes, including employment status, underemployment, employment precarity, job tenure, and hourly wages. We theorize and empirically examine how flexible- and homeworking practices moderate the effects of neurodivergence on employment outcomes. Our findings show that neurodivergent people are twice as likely to be in precarious employment and more than 10 times as likely to be in temporary employment compared to neurotypical people. Neurodivergent individuals are also significantly more likely to experience underemployment and have lower employment tenure; however, controlling for other factors, we find no significant differences in hourly wages. We find that flexible working practices can substantially improve employment outcomes for neurodivergent people, raising significant questions regarding the role of HRM in enabling more neurodiverse workplaces. We critically reflect on the implications of our findings for policy, practice, and future research.
Even though, the human resource management literature has highlighted the importance of having employees that are committed to the organization, research on strategic human capital has yet to fully consider how commitment is related to human capital resources. In order to overcome the dominant individual-level conceptualization of commitment and to detail how commitment affects human capital resources, we develop the unit-level concept of commitment capital, which we divide into three levels: affiliative commitment capital, affinitive commitment capital, and absolute commitment capital. These conceptualizations are based on a 10-year case study and incorporate commitment into a strategic human capital framework, thus bridging the current gap between organizational commitment and human capital resources.
Drawing on gender role and gender queuing theories, we employ a multi-stage process model to investigate demand- and supply-side drivers of gender promotion gaps and to explore variations in these gaps across different business units within an organization. Analyzing 9 years of personnel records from a multiunit European bank, we find that the gender promotion gap is influenced by both supply-side and demand-side factors. Specifically, women are less likely than men to express a motivation to change to a new job or move to a different unit within the bank. Those who do express such motivation are as likely as men to be reassigned to new roles, but their moves are less likely to constitute promotions than are men's moves. Furthermore, gender promotion gaps vary significantly within the organization itself. Business units with the most significant gaps are in regions that have fewer available organizational positions to move into, diminishing women's motivation to seek such moves, and have jobs with numerous incumbents, decreasing women's chances to get a new job or secure a promotion upon doing so. This study extends gender role theory by creating a unified theoretical model that incorporates both employee and employer gender role perceptions as drivers of promotions. It contributes to gender queuing theory by demonstrating the theory's relevance to promotion outcomes.
Organizations must excel at what they do well while also learning new ways of operating to achieve long-term success. Work teams may thus find themselves pursuing contradictory objectives to support the organization's strategy. We investigated teams' goal orientation (in)congruence and its impact on task meaningfulness and, ultimately, performance, hypothesizing the potential pitfalls of teams simultaneously pursuing both learning- and performance-goal orientations. Three-wave, multisource data were collected from 109 teams at a large North American mortgage company. In a polynomial regression and response surface analytical framework, team task meaningfulness—and subsequent team performance—was enhanced when teams had greater divergence between their learning- and performance-goal orientations but suffered when both goal orientations were more aligned. Our investigation thus revealed the potential pitfalls of teams simultaneously pursuing both learning- and performance-goal orientations. We discuss the theoretical contributions of the team goal orientation incongruence effect substantiated in this study, as well as implications for practice and future research.