ABSTRACT Paternity leave shifts work‐life policy from accommodating women's caregiving to legitimizing men's involvement in care. We examine how this is experienced in male‐dominated workplaces and interpreted by those around leave‐takers through interviews with fathers who took extended paternity leave in French finance organizations, and other stakeholders at work (colleagues, HR representatives, top managers) and at home (life partners). Following an interpretivist, context‐dependent approach, we find that participants associated paternity leave with changes in social relations, connectedness, and concern for collective well‐being. We theorize that, under certain conditions, these changes may coalesce into relational and collective experiences aligned with social cohesion beyond the workplace. We further theorize two pathways. In a transformative cycle, paternity leave may disrupt descriptive and injunctive gender norms, and experiences aligned with social cohesion occur. In a maintenance cycle, established norms persist, and such experiences largely do not arise. These divergent pathways depend on the favorability of nested contextual conditions: meso‐ (policy design, top management engagement, organizational climate) and micro‐ (manager, peer support), within the macro‐context of a male‐dominated industry. The study extends work‐life policy research beyond individual and organizational outcomes and identifies conditions under which paternity leave may challenge gendered divisions of labor within and beyond organizations.
ABSTRACT Research on human resource management (HRM) has generated influential frameworks for explaining the relationships between HR practices and organizational outcomes. Existing accounts offer less insight into how the frameworks informing those practices acquire meaning, authority, and practical traction in organizational settings. We conceptualize this as a gap between theory‐as‐design and theory‐in‐use and develop ethnographic theorizing as a mode of examining the use‐life of selected design‐oriented HRM frameworks. Our contribution is twofold. First, we specify how sustained immersion, temporal depth, embodied co‐presence, and relational obligation enable researchers to follow frameworks as they are enacted and negotiated. Second, we develop three recursively related analytic moves for theory development— Complement, Complicate, and Reframe —through which ethnographic evidence can elaborate, qualify, or revise existing theoretical accounts. We demonstrate this approach through two ethnographic studies of HR analytics in different organizations. The comparison shows how legitimacy work, identity negotiation, and meaning‐making shaped the enactment of data‐driven HRM in these settings. The paper thus offers a structured approach for studying how established HRM frameworks operate in use and for assessing when situated evidence warrants changes to their constructs, relationships, or boundary conditions. In addition, we discuss implications for HRM theory, research design, and practice.
ABSTRACT Underneath headlines that decree organizations are increasingly abandoning or rolling back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in response to anti‐DEI pressures, we argue that how organizations are doing this warrants further focus. While the strategy literature speaks to tactics for addressing institutional pressures, missing in the study of how organizations address anti‐DEI pressures is consideration of how HRM systems impact and are impacted by such action. Incorporating a strategic human resource management (SHRM) view, we offer three approaches—all of which are substantiated with evidence from contemporary organizations—that range in the extent to which organizations resist or embrace anti‐DEI pressures. The common thread linking these approaches is that each one moves beyond an oversimplified emphasis on “alignment.” We do not advocate misalignment per se but underscore how the nuances embedded in each approach reflect the intentionality of organizations and how they consider contingencies (i.e., external alignment) and configurations (i.e., internal alignment) in proactively adapting HRM systems in response to anti‐DEI pressures. In advancing these views, we develop an agenda to drive future empirical research addressing the intersection of DEI backlash and HRM.
Digital visibility has become a central organizing condition in digitally mediated work, reshaping how employees are recognized, evaluated, and connected. In this conceptual paper, we theorize digital visibility as a sociomaterial HRM condition that simultaneously enables recognition and generates performative pressures. Anchored in relational cohesion theory, we develop the Digital Visibility-Belonging Paradox concept to explain why the same visibility infrastructures that make employees more observable may also weaken the relational foundations of belonging. We distinguish between authentic belonging and simulated belonging to show how digital visibility can simultaneously support felt recognition and relational connection while encouraging employees to display connection, availability, and engagement through digitally visible cues. We further identify cognitive, emotional, and structural mechanisms through which visibility shapes these divergent trajectories, as well as organizational and system-level boundary conditions that influence whether visibility supports relational connection or intensifies performative availability. The paper contributes to HRM scholarship by repositioning visibility governance as a relational and humanistic responsibility in digitally mediated work.
With expanded access to remote work, employees are spending a greater share of their time working from home. As a result, work and family demands increasingly intersect during the workday, creating more opportunities for interruptions from family members. Drawing on boundary theory, we argue that family-to-work interruptions differ from interruptions that originate within the work domain because they require employees to navigate a cross-domain role transition involving distinct expectations, relationships, and role demands. To advance our understanding of the affective consequences of family-to-work interruptions, we leverage affective events theory to examine the effect of daily family-to-work interruptions on negative affect at the end of the workday and, in turn, emotional exhaustion in the evening. Importantly, we assess the role of individuals' general perceptions of family-to-work conflict and schedule autonomy as cross-level moderators. We find that the positive effect of daily family-to-work interruptions on end-of-workday negative affect is stronger for individuals with higher overall perceptions of family-to-work conflict and with lower schedule autonomy. Finally, post hoc analyses suggest that gender further shapes these relationships, with the moderating effect of family-to-work conflict emerging only among women and the moderating effect of schedule autonomy being substantially stronger for women than for men.
