Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources最新文献

Leaders' guanxi human resource management (HRM) practices are prevalent in East Asian organizational contexts shaped by Confucian culture. In such settings, leaders often allocate limited resources to beneficiaries with whom they share guanxi, at the expense of victims who lose access to those resources. While prior research has primarily focused on the self-directed consequences of leaders' guanxi HRM practices for victims, much less attention has been paid to the other-directed behavioral responses—particularly from the perspective of interactions between guanxi victims and beneficiaries. Drawing from theories of social comparison and dual-system self-control, this paper develops a theoretical model to elucidate how and when leaders' guanxi HRM practices lead victims to ostracize beneficiaries. Across three studies conducted with Chinese samples, we found that leaders' guanxi HRM practices elicit both contempt (via downward comparison) and envy (via upward comparison) toward beneficiaries among victims, which in turn lead to ostracism of beneficiaries. Moreover, victims' orientation toward superficial harmony was found to weaken the relationship between contempt and ostracism, although its moderating effect on envy-ostracism was not significant. The stronger the victim's tendency toward superficial harmony, the weaker the indirect effect of leaders' guanxi HRM practices on their ostracism toward beneficiaries via contempt. This paper advances the literature on guanxi HRM practices by shifting the focus from intra-individual to interpersonal consequences and provides practical insights for managers to optimize guanxi-based human resource decisions.

This study investigates how collective pay for performance (CPFP) systems, which link employee rewards to team-level outcomes, can unintentionally reduce individual effort. Drawing on relative deprivation theory, we propose that CPFP can foster perceptions of unfair disadvantage when employees feel that their individual contributions are insufficiently recognized. These perceptions, in turn, prompt social loafing as a form of self-regulation. Furthermore, we argue that employees' cultural orientation moderates these dynamics: vertical collectivism strengthens the association between CPFP and relative deprivation, whereas horizontal collectivism weakens it. A three-wave field study involving 312 Chinese employees across 82 teams provided empirical support for these hypotheses. These findings have important implications for management practices in China and other collectivist societies where traditional values coexist with modern organizational practices. This study contributes to the theory on motivation and compensation by identifying the psychological and cultural mechanisms through which collective incentives influence behavior and underscores the importance of designing reward systems that align with employees' perceptions of fairness and cultural values.

Reverse knowledge transfer (RKT) is essential for multinational corporations to benefit from employees' international experience, but repatriates often face difficulties in transferring knowledge gained abroad. Drawing on transposition theory, this study examines how pre-expatriation embeddedness and host organization exposure shape RKT outcomes, and how the presence of peer repatriates moderates these relationships. We conceptualize repatriates as change agents who seek to translate, adapt, and legitimize external knowledge within their home organizations through processes of disembedding, recontextualization, and implementing new practices. Using survey data from 177 South Korean repatriates, we find that pre-expatriation embeddedness and host organization exposure both positively affect RKT, and that peer repatriates strengthen the effect of embeddedness but not exposure. These results advance the understanding of RKT by highlighting the importance of conditions established before expatriation, and they apply transposition theory to identify the mechanisms of legitimacy and adaptation that enable contextual translation.

“Workcation” can be understood as a strategic HR intervention that integrates work responsibilities with vacation, signifying a paradigm shift in the traditional delineation between professional responsibilities and leisure time. Drawing upon the job demand–resource model, this study investigates how and under what conditions workcation experience impacts employee retention within Chinese internet-based enterprises. Analyzing data from 377 employees with prior workcation experience, the findings reveal that workcation has both direct and indirect effects on retention through job crafting. However, perceived compulsory citizenship behavior fails to significantly mediate the nexus between workcation and retention. Moreover, a supportive culture emerges as a critical moderator, amplifying the positive effects of workcation on job crafting while reducing the adverse influence of perceived compulsory citizenship behavior. These results illuminate the strategic significance of leveraging workcation as an innovative and transformative HRM paradigm to address talent retention challenges within the intensely competitive milieu of the Chinese internet sector. The study delves into the intricate mechanisms underpinning workcation, contributing to theory and practice while charting advanced strategies for sustainable organizational success in rapidly evolving professional landscapes.

This study examines the impact of workshop automation on work fatigue among workers in China's manufacturing industry, using data from an enterprise-employee matched survey conducted in Guangdong Province. Contrary to the technology-centered perspective, which suggests that automation should reduce work fatigue by taking over repetitive and physically demanding tasks, our findings show that higher levels of workshop automation are associated with an increased likelihood of work fatigue. Mediation analysis further reveals that, although automation may lower the probability of extremely heavy workload, it also leads to longer working hours and a greater likelihood of regular night shifts. These outcomes may in part reflect employers' efforts to maximize machinery efficiency and workers' limited ability to resist intensified work demands. Based on these findings, this study underscores the importance of social context—particularly the power relations among the state, capital, and labor—in shaping automation's impact on work fatigue.

This paper makes the case for narrative as a powerful qualitative method for understanding careers in their full temporal, contextual and emotional complexity. By foregrounding individual voices over time, life stories reveal how people construct and navigate their careers and lives across varied personal and professional landscapes. We begin by exploring the value of centering individual narratives in career research, especially as traditional linear career paths become less common. Life stories are then situated within broader narrative traditions to clarify their unique contributions. Drawing on a study of 21 employed older women undertaking self- initiated expatriation, we offer a practical, five-step narrative framework for collecting and analysing life and career stories, ensuring a cycle of narrative analysis. This provides methodological guidance for HR and careers scholars seeking to work with deep, narrative data in the careers space. We argue that life stories illuminate the dynamic interplay between self, work and context, offering a richer, temporal and more human-centred lens for understanding contemporary careers and for career development.

Against a backdrop of an international policy agenda advocating for prosocial behavior directed toward workers, Australia introduced new Work Health and Safety (WHS) legislation in 2023 legally obliging senior management and board directors to mitigate worker harm as far as reasonably practicable. The operationalization of WHS is a key function of Human Resources (HR) within workplaces; however, the degree to which safety can be advanced is largely dependent on senior leadership's prioritization—creating complexity and tension. Indeed, there is minimal evidence regarding how HRM might effectively influence the prioritization of WHS by senior leadership, and the degree to which legislative changes may shift attitudes. Against this backdrop, this paper presents exploratory research underpinned by interviews with 43 business leaders and board directors across a range of sectors, as well as five WHS experts, exploring underlying attitudes toward WHS and worker safety. The findings identify that business drivers are more likely to promote change in WHS business practices if they have the knowledge and tools to assist them. Accordingly, from the analysis we propose a multi-pronged approach is required to educate and motivate senior leaders to shift their mindset toward prosocial WHS behavior in line with the international policy agenda and standards. The research also identified a lack of knowledge about educational and monitoring tools, especially for the board of directors, which future policy and implementation practices should address.

This study aims to address the puzzle of why the implementation of high-performance work systems (HPWS) may fail to deliver the expected outcomes. By integrating the process model of SHRM and social information processing theory, we propose that team leaders' HPWS cost-reduction attribution and extrinsic motivation create a gap between their implementation of HPWS and employees' experiences of HPWS, and this gap impedes the effectiveness of HPWS. We test our hypotheses using multisource data from 151 team leaders and their 996 employees in China. The results indicate that when team leaders implement HPWS with higher cost-reduction attribution or extrinsic motivation, team members have weaker collective experiences of HPWS, which, in turn, leads to lower organizational commitment and work engagement. These findings contribute to the HPWS literature by highlighting the significant role of team leaders' attributions and motivations in HPWS implementation, and by explaining why HPWS may not yield the desired results.

Drawing on self-determination theory, this study investigates how perceived supportive human resource (HR) practices influence employee well-being, examining the mediating roles of job crafting and person–organization fit, while accounting for the contextual influence of performance pressure. By doing so, it aims to enrich the literature on HRM's impact on employee well-being. The study employed a survey-based methodology, collecting data from 442 participants recruited through the Credamo online survey panel. Structural equation modeling was used to test the proposed hypotheses. The findings indicate that supportive HR practices positively affect employee well-being, with this relationship being mediated by both job crafting and person–organization fit. Furthermore, performance pressure was found to moderate the mediating effect of job crafting, highlighting the conditional nature of these mechanisms. These results suggest that organizations can enhance employee well-being and job satisfaction by tailoring HR services to individual needs, embedding supportive practices within organizational culture, fostering alignment between employees and organizational values, and recognizing the influence of high-pressure environments on motivation. Unlike prior research, which often conceptualized employee well-being as merely a by-product of performance-oriented HRM, this study emphasizes the direct and positive impact of people-oriented HR practices. Importantly, it demonstrates that even under high-performance-pressure conditions, supportive HR practices can promote employee well-being, offering practical guidance for sustainable organizational development that benefits both employees and the organization.

This study examines how recent employees with autism adapt to their new jobs through organizational socialization. A qualitative and phenomenological methodology and in-depth interviews with employers, supervisors, coworkers, and new hires with autism revealed that (i) colleagues' prior knowledge and experience of neurodiversity, (ii) leadership approaches, and (iii) provision of the hybrid model of individualized socialization and accommodations. The findings underscore the necessity of inclusive organizational strategies to foster workplace neurodiversity and the disparities between public and private sector workplaces in inclusive organizational socialization practices. Furthermore, this study contributes to Organizational Theory and HRM and offers key recommendations for fostering neurodiversity and workplace inclusion through the organizational socialization process from organization leaders, policy shapers and practitioners.