Digitalisation is reshaping the organisation of labour through algorithmic systems that govern work with minimal human involvement. While a growing literature examines these systems in Global North contexts, their operation within politically centralised and institutionally fragile environments remains insufficiently understood. This study investigates how algorithmic management intersects with authoritarian labour regimes to restructure worker voice. Drawing on a critical thematic analysis with 41 gig workers in Turkey, the analysis identifies a layered process in which voice is structurally foreclosed, psychologically internalised, and informally reassembled under constraint, extending theory on algorithmic governance and worker agency in authoritarian settings. The findings highlight the risks that opaque digital management systems pose for dignity, accountability and democratic oversight in contemporary HRM and labour policy.
Red tape exacerbates job demands by creating hindrances that undermine public value generation. Increasing strain and depleting interpersonal exchanges, red tape distances public servants from their work and drains commitment. Drawing on secondary data from a large sample (n = 117,139) of Australian Public Service employees, this study found that red tape has direct and indirect adverse effects on public servants’ commitment. Specifically, it heightens work-related stress, with negative consequences on team climate that reverberate on commitment. Where red tape cannot be promptly addressed, action should be taken to mitigate its repercussions on commitment through increased stress and deteriorated team climate.
Acquisition integration remains one of the most complex and failure-prone phases of the acquisition process. Thus, understanding how organizations develop effective acquisition capabilities is vital. The simple rule perspective identifies heuristics as microfoundational building blocks of acquisition capabilities. This study contributes to this literature by shifting the focus from heuristic development to the problem of effective enactment across multiple actors. Drawing on a case study of a serial acquirer in the European food industry, we demonstrate how the composition of acquisition-integration heuristic portfolios affects their enactability. Heuristic portfolio congruence (alignment around a shared acquisition-integration rationale) and consistency (a stable pattern of acquisition-integration actions across actors and stages) are key for enactment by establishing complementarity among different types of heuristics. In addition, our findings show that the enactability of heuristic portfolios is shaped by experiential, vicarious, and inferential learning. Heuristics derived from experiential learning become cognitively legitimate and routinized, whereas those developed through vicarious and inferential learning may remain fragile because articulation and codification are more prone to causal and contextual knowledge decay in such contexts. Organizational legacy acts as an enactment filter, marginalizing new heuristics under conditions of integration pressure. These findings reframe organizational learning as a process of selective enactment, whereby organizational success can inadvertently produce rigidity in the enactment of new heuristics.
Open strategy expands participation in strategy-making through workshops, digital platforms, and cross-boundary forums. Yet organizations adopting similar participatory practices often experience markedly different levels of sustained strategic impact. Why does openness institutionalize in some settings but remain episodic in others? This paper develops a configurational governance perspective on open strategy. Rather than treating openness as a measure of participation intensity, we conceptualize it as an architectural system embedded within organizational decision infrastructure. Governance architecture comprises three interdependent design dimensions: entry design, which regulates the flow of information; evaluation design, which allocates attention and links participation to decision authority; and closure design, which stabilizes participation across recurring cycles. Drawing on configurational theory, we argue that strategic durability emerges not from any single design element but from the coherent alignment of these dimensions. Misalignment generates distinct participation trajectories, including symbolic consultation, bounded openness, and unstable recurrence. Institutionalized open strategy is most likely to arise under configurational coherence. By focusing on systemic alignment, the paper reframes open strategy as a governance capability and advances architectural explanations of strategic participation.
The rapid organizational deployment of generative AI (GAI) contrasts sharply with sluggish employee adoption rates, creating a critical disconnect between technological availability and workforce utilization. Drawing on Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) and Social Comparison Theory, this research contributes to addressing this gap by investigating how observing colleagues’ GAI adoption functions as a dual social cue, shaping individual adoption by activating two parallel cognitive pathways: the formation of positive outcome expectancy and negative outcome expectancy. We further examine how this process is moderated by the intra-team competitive climate. Through a mixed-method design involving a cross-sectional survey (N = 299), a controlled online experiments (N = 150), and a longitudinal field study (74 teams, 241 employees), we demonstrate three core insights. First, observing peer adoption triggers the simultaneous formation of both positive and negative outcome expectancies, even without direct performance feedback. Second, these two cognitive pathways exhibit temporal asymmetry: positive outcome expectancy sustains long-term, actual GAI adoption, while the influence of negative outcome expectancy is transient. Third, intra-team competitive climate acts as a pivotal boundary condition, amplifying the formation of both types of expectancy in high-stakes environments. The results challenge traditional unidimensional views of social influence in technology adoption. We reveal that peer GAI adoption functions as a double-edged social signal and contribute to SCT by elucidating the evaluative nature of vicarious learning in competitive contexts. Practical implications for managing AI-driven workplace dynamics are discussed.
The present study identifies leaders' attitudes toward an intended organizational change (ATC) and their dispositional resistance to change (DRTC) as key interrelated contingencies that shape the effects of transformational leadership on employees' ATC. To develop our theoretical reasoning, we integrate transformational leadership theory and insights into the role and relevance of other leader attributes in times of change. We test our multilevel theory with an expanded cross-sectional research design using multiple data sources, i.e., data from 316 employees working in 51 teams and their team leaders. In line with our predictions, we find that the relationship between transformational leadership and employees' ATC is contingent upon leaders' ATC. We also observe an indirect moderation effect of leaders' DRTC on the relationship between transformational leadership and employees' ATC, which is transmitted via leaders’ ATC. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and practice.
Job autonomy has been recognized as an important job characteristic associated with a range of benefits for the employer. However, it remains unclear whether autonomous employees are more helpful than other workers, despite the critical importance of employee helping behavior in the workplace. In this study, we examine how employees’ job autonomy is related to their propensity to engage in workplace helping. Using two samples of service workers and their immediate supervisors in China, we find that organization-based self-esteem mediates a positive relationship between job autonomy and employee helping behavior. We also find that the personality trait of neuroticism negatively moderates this association, such that this positive relationship is weakened among those with a higher level of neuroticism. Our research contributes to the literature by elucidating how job autonomy is associated with helping behavior among frontline employees, while identifying both the underlying mechanism and the conditional effect under which this relationship holds.
Companies face increasing pressure to enhance the environmental impact of their value proposition, value creation, delivery, and value capture mechanisms. Sustainable business model innovation remains challenging due to conflicting economic and environmental objectives and uncertainties linked to novel offerings. While organizational frames can guide actions, their role in decision-making for sustainable business model innovation remains underexplored. This study examines how companies across various industries employ organizational frames for sustainable business model innovation. Using an inductive approach, we analyzed 99 semi-structured interviews with business leaders through a two-step data collection process. Our empirical model reveals two organizational frames in sustainable business model innovation, shaping decisions toward architectural transformation or modular adaptation. The findings enhance the business model innovation and frame literature by uncovering the role of organizational frames in navigating the complexities of sustainable innovation. This research offers practical insights for managers seeking sustainable growth through sustainable business model innovation.
The public service ethos underpinning public employment encourages public servants to broaden their contribution to public value creation by proactively embracing workplace challenges. This study examines how organizational culture and public leadership foster such proactive behavior in the public sector.Drawing on survey data collected from 2262 municipal public servants, the study employs an ordinary least squares regression model to investigate the direct and indirect effects of organizational culture on the individual propensity to undertake challenging job demands. The findings indicate that an organizational culture characterized by participation and transparency energizes public servants to challenge their jobs. Furthermore, it strengthens public leadership, which, in turn, enhances employees’ readiness to undertake challenging job demands. These results suggest that public sector organizations should cultivate workplace environments that engage public servants and reinforce their motivation to contribute to public value generation.
A key question in the strategic management literature concerns how and through which mechanisms CEO hubris shapes firm's outcomes. Positioned within this debate, we argue that the implications of hubris appear to depend on how it is expressed in corporate disclosure. We distinguish between two forms of hubristic disclosure: rhetorical hubristic disclosure, which emphasizes the firm's resources, capabilities, and prospects and may reinforce stakeholders' confidence, and egocentric hubristic disclosure, which elevates the CEO's personal agency and may undermine firm legitimacy. We test our arguments through a longitudinal analysis of S&P 500 firms' annual reports over the 2014–2024 period, including the COVID-19 crisis. Our findings show that rhetorical hubristic disclosure is positively associated with firm resilience, suggesting that firm-oriented, confident communication may help sustain perceptions of organizational strength during external shocks. In contrast, egocentric hubristic disclosure is negatively associated with firm resilience, suggesting that CEO-centered communication may hinder adaptation to external shocks. These results contribute to the literature by showing that CEO hubris is not uniformly detrimental; rather, its implications for resilience depend on whether hubristic disclosure is directed toward the organization's collective capabilities or toward the CEO's individual agency.
Managers play a key role in shaping whether older workers remain in employment or move toward retirement. Yet we know relatively little about how managers interpret aging employees in organizational contexts. This study examines how managers make sense of employees in relation to age and how these interpretations shape their assessments. We use the GATE framework (generation, age, tenure, and experience) to structure the analysis. Based on qualitative interviews with 20 managers in Norway, we show how managers draw on multiple considerations related to age when assessing employees’ capabilities and their potential for continued contribution. We demonstrate how these interpretations shape whether employees are supported, sidelined, or encouraged to remain in employment, with consequences for managerial responses in practice and the conditions for extended working lives.
Despite strengthened international norms and heightened awareness, measures to promote the employment rights of people with disabilities by multinational enterprises (MNEs) continue to be undermined by symbolic gestures and resistance in practice. We argue that a multi-stakeholder approach can enable the effective embedding of disability inclusion in MNEs, generating sustained business and societal value. Drawing on interviews with senior leaders, human resources professionals, and employees with disabilities, complemented by internal and public documents, this study examines disability inclusion initiatives at three MNEs. We analyze how such initiatives are framed, and how leadership commitment, stakeholder collaboration, and employee support are mobilized to achieve a sustained transformation.
The supply of electronic workplace surveillance (EWS) technologies has increased sharply since the COVID-19 pandemic and the normalization of remote work. Marketing promises make it very tempting for managers and organizations to implement more surveillance in a comprehensive and invasive way. Whether or not to do so and what to disclose to employees constitute management dilemmas with important ethical stakes, as these technologies reduce employees' autonomy and privacy, and decisions based on surveillance data may be unfair. This study examines the extent to which the transparency of EWS helps to maintain psychological contracts for employees and prevent turnover intention. Drawing on signaling theory, we argue that the signal sent by transparency will be interpreted differently by employees depending on the perceived scope of surveillance and on their digital literacy. In a time-lagged study of 157 unionized workers designed with Quebec's main union confederations, we found that (a) surveillance transparency prevents psychological contract breach and turnover for employees exposed to low or moderate surveillance, (b) transparency is inefficient for those who observe a wide scope of surveillance in their workplace, and (c) digital literacy had no effect on these relationships. Our findings extend the EWS literature by outlining both the value and limitations of transparency. They have implications for responsible management: specifically, no amount of transparency can make up for the extensive use of EWS.
