ABSTRACT Workforces are becoming increasingly multilingual, yet relatively little is known about how language‐based exclusion shapes employee behavior. Drawing on social exchange theory, we examine how linguistic ostracism, a subtle form of workplace exclusion, undermines employees' organization‐based psychological ownership and subsequently increases destructive voice behavior. We argue that linguistic ostracism weakens employees' felt sense of possession, connection, and responsibility toward the organization, thereby increasing the likelihood of organization‐directed retaliatory voice. Furthermore, we propose that perceived high‐involvement work practices (HIWPs) buffer these adverse effects by reinforcing employees' sense of value, inclusion, and influence within the organization. Across two studies, we find consistent support for our theorizing. Study 1, a vignette experiment involving 301 employees, demonstrates that linguistic ostracism increases destructive voice behavior. Study 2, a three‐wave multisource field study of 241 employee–supervisor dyads, shows that organization‐based psychological ownership mediates the relationship between linguistic ostracism and destructive voice behavior. In addition, perceived HIWPs weaken the negative relationship between linguistic ostracism and psychological ownership, thereby reducing the indirect effect of linguistic ostracism on destructive voice behavior. By integrating workplace ostracism, psychological ownership, and perceived HIWPs research, this study advances understanding of how language‐based exclusion shapes employee behavior and highlights the important role of involvement‐oriented work practices in multilingual workplaces.
ABSTRACT Economic crises may alter not only employees' commitment levels but also the mechanisms through which commitment develops. This study examines whether the determinants of organizational commitment changed following economic crisis in Japanese subsidiaries operating in China and whether such changes differed by employee position. Using repeated employee survey data collected between 2007 and 2011, Study 1 compared temporal changes across four subsidiaries. Results showed that increasing reliance on reward fairness was concentrated within one manufacturing subsidiary rather than occurring uniformly across firms. Study 2 focused on production workers within this subsidiary and tested whether the association between reward fairness and commitment strengthened after crisis. Regression analyses indicated that reward fairness became significantly more important for organizational commitment following the crisis ( β = 0.184, p < 0.001). The increase was significantly weaker among supervisors than among employees ( β = −0.153, p = 0.050). Additional models simultaneously controlling for alternative commitment determinants showed that only reward fairness increased in predictive importance after the crisis, whereas other determinants remained stable or weakened. These findings suggest that economic disruption may reshape commitment formation processes and that employee position conditions responses to reward fairness under uncertainty. The study contributes to HRM research by demonstrating that commitment determinants are dynamic, context dependent, and heterogeneous across organizational settings.
ABSTRACT Given the covert, prevalent, and costly nature of employee expediency, identifying effective human resource management (HRM) practices to curb such behavior is important. Drawing on the theories of moral emotions, we propose that perceived socially responsible HRM (SRHRM) elicits organization‐directed, other‐praising moral emotions, which in turn inhibit employee expediency. Moreover, we theorize moral ownership as a boundary condition that amplifies this indirect effect. Through a two‐wave field study in China and a pre‐registered experiment in the US and the UK, our hypotheses were empirically supported.
ABSTRACT Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) has become a widely adopted HR process that aims to forecast workforce and skills changes in alignment with organizational strategy. Both academic and professional literature often assumes that SWP mechanically enhances HR efficiency and legitimacy, leading to increased organizational performance. However, this view overlooks the practical challenges that organizations face when implementing SWP. On these grounds, this paper investigates the mechanisms that constrain the implementation of SWP in organizations. Drawing on critical realism, we develop a stratified explanatory model that emphasizes SWP's structural contingency, procedural fragility, and political nature. We identified six interconnected mechanisms that explain why SWP projects fail to be realized in practice, providing a critical and pragmatic perspective on how SWP unfolds within organizations.
This paper develops a three-layer conceptual framework, comprising surveillance architecture, HRM design choices, and employee responses, to explain how digital surveillance reshapes workplace relationships. Anchored in organizational paradox theory, the framework treats workplace visibility as a persistent, two-sided tension rather than a uniformly negative force, and positions HR as the architect whose design choices determine which pole prevails; Foucauldian surveillance theory, conservation of resources theory, and organizational power perspectives serve as mid-range accounts of the mechanisms through which this paradox operates. On this basis, the paper proposes four interrelated mechanisms through which digital monitoring produces relational consequences. First, the same visibility architecture generates professional isolation when monitoring is opaque and disciplinary, but can foster recognition and inclusion when design is transparent and participatory. Second, employees internalize digital performance metrics and reshape their professional networks around quantifiable outputs, marginalizing tacit knowledge and mentoring, though participatory metric design can partially counteract this displacement. Third, employees segment their relationships across monitored and unmonitored interaction spaces, developing shadow networks alongside official platforms, while also engaging in counter-surveillance and sousveillance practices that redistribute visibility on their own terms. Fourth, continuous presence demands deplete the emotional and cognitive resources employees need for authentic professional connection, though platform design and workload autonomy moderate this effect. A temporal lifecycle spans all four mechanisms, tracing how surveillance effects evolve from early adoption through normalization, strain, and relational reconfiguration.
New hire ghosting, in which applicants accept an offer and then quit before their first day without notice, is an emerging and consequential staffing phenomenon. Drawing on job embeddedness theory, we conceptualize new hire ghosting as a form of pre-entry withdrawal influenced by dispositional risk and the fragile fit, links, and sacrifice factors characteristic of the post-offer, pre-entry phase. Across two complementary studies, we examine ghosting's prevalence, drivers, and implications. In Study 1, using a multi-year archival dataset (N = 157,154), we found that 4.1% of accepted offers at a large telecommunications company ghosted, resulting in staffing disruptions costing over $6.9 million each year. Hires with longer offer-to-start delays and customer-facing roles experienced greater ghosting risk. Building on these findings, Study 2 surveyed a broad sample of adults in the US to compare recent ghosters to employed non-ghosters (N = 434). Fit (lower perceived organizational attractiveness), links (non-referral hires, weaker pre-entry communication), and sacrifice (greater financial insecurity, the presence of external offers) were all associated with ghosting outcomes, with impulsivity further attenuating the protective benefits of embeddedness effects. Collectively, these findings extend embeddedness theory into the post-offer, pre-entry period and help identify targeted staffing practices that can mitigate ghosting.
Problematic substance use (PSU) is a significant, inadequately managed people management challenge. Drawing on the conflicting outcomes and mutual losses perspectives on HRM and employee wellbeing, and using Job Demands-Resources theory to explain underlying strain-driven loss cycles, we examine factors shaping PSU and help-seeking among 575 midwives during the COVID-19 pandemic. We make three contributions to HRM theory and practice that collectively extend beyond HR practices to develop a broader, multi-level framing of HRM in wellbeing research, attentive to peers, managers and stakeholders beyond the organisation. First, empirically, we find that, for committed professionals, PSU emerges as a coping response and individual regulatory strategy to maintain functioning given excessive job demands (work stress, traumatic incidents, insufficient recovery) and inadequate job resources; HR systems should treat PSU as a health and wellbeing issue, addressing root causes rather than defaulting to sanction. Second, conceptually, ostensibly supportive resources (e.g., supervisor support, co-worker relationships, organisational policy) can operate as illusory resources, reach tipping points and lose protective value, or constrain help-seeking; HR wellbeing interventions must evaluate whether resources function as intended and how to enable uptake. Third, theoretically, our focus on PSU as a health-related form of wellbeing advances the under-developed mutual losses perspective, showing how conflicting outcomes may transition to mutual losses. We evidence how punitive HR enactment together with managerial, co-worker and supra-organisational dynamics (public expectations, regulatory reporting) converge to suppress help-seeking and shape loss spirals; HR should act and advocate to dismantle punitive norms and build psychosocial environments that enable help-seeking.
Research investigating the outcomes of idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) often overlooks the perspective of employee career advancement, while research examining the antecedents of i-deals largely neglects supervisors' personal characteristics. Additionally, few studies in workaholism adopt an inter-personal lens to examine how one individual's workaholism influences others at workplace. Drawing on the Role Identity Theory, we address these gaps by examining the relationships between supervisor workaholism, three types of i-deals (task, schedule flexibility, and location flexibility), and employee promotability. Utilizing data collected from 414 employees and 54 supervisors in China, we find a negative relationship between supervisor workaholism and both schedule flexibility i-deals and location flexibility i-deals, as well as a positive link between task i-deals and employee promotability. Additionally, our results demonstrate that supervisor workaholism moderates the effects of both task i-deals and location flexibility ideals on promotability. Further supplementary analyses reveal that supervisors' assessments of employees' intrinsic motivation mediate the effect of task i-deals on promotability, and that supervisor workaholism moderates both the effect of schedule i-deals on intrinsic motivation and the indirect effect of schedule i-deals on promotability through intrinsic motivation. Theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.
Employee voice (EV) has attracted sustained scholarly attention across human resource management (HRM), industrial and employment relations (I/ER), and organizational behavior (OB). However, research remains fragmented across disciplines, providing limited understanding of how organizations systematically create, sustain, and adapt voice arrangements over time. This paper advances a capability-based perspective on EV by introducing the organizational Capability for Managing Voice (CMV), defined as an organization's capacity to elicit, collect, process, respond to, and evaluate voice processes and outcomes. Drawing on the literature on organizational routines and capabilities, we develop an integrative process model that theorizes how organizations create, sustain, and reconfigure the CMV through feedback, learning, and dynamic capabilities. The model conceptualizes managing voice as a multi-level organizational process that links micro-level voice behaviors to meso-level organizational arrangements and systems, and to macro-level contextual influences, thereby integrating insights from HRM, I/ER, and OB research. By advancing understanding of EV as an organizational process, the model provides a foundation for future research on voice as a dynamic, systemic, and embedded organizational phenomenon. It also offers guidance for practitioners seeking to design, monitor, and adapt voice systems in contextually aligned, responsive, and sustainable ways.
Against the dominant view in HRM concerning the value‐creating use of large language models (LLMs) in relation to Human Capital, our provocation asks whether LLMs will enhance or compromise Human Capital at work in the long‐run. We feel compelled to ask this question because Human Capital represents employees' accumulated learning experiences, which provide the knowledge and skills needed to perform effectively at work. However, knowledge is a multifaceted rather than monolithic phenomenon, requiring a more differentiated treatment when considering the use of LLMs at work, its effects on different types of knowledge and, eventually, the formation of Human Capital. We mobilise digitally mediated learning—where synthetic inputs replace first‐hand experience—to theorise mechanisms for explaining how LLMs (as one Gen‐AI application producing synthetic content) shape different types of knowledge, and the formation of Human Capital. We identify two mechanisms, namely, (i) multiple degrees of abstraction from the concrete real‐world to the digital world and (ii) the conflation of ‘word form’ and ‘meaning’ in outputs of LLMs. We consider the theoretical and practical ramifications of our provocation for the development of Human Capital in the age of LLMs.
While digital transformation has advanced rapidly within firms, there is limited understanding of the role played by the labor force along the progress. Using the Chinese private enterprises survey dataset, this study investigates the impact of employee representation on firm digital transformation. The study reveals that firms with established labor union or worker representative congress exhibit higher levels of digital transformation. The study further explores two competing mechanisms, internal protection and labor force technology complementarity, to explain why labor embraces digital transformation. The results identify the labor force technology complementarity as the underlying channel, highlighting the significant empowering effect of employee representation on labor. The study thus provides evidence to understand the importance of labor engagement in shaping the future labor landscape.
This paper advances Human Resource Management (HRM) scholarship by introducing an accessible method to analyse of both visual and textual social media content in combination. Although HRM studies increasingly mobilise social media data, most approaches remain text-centric, overlooking the HR-relevant cues, embedded in images, that can inform micro, meso and macro level interpretations. We propose a method that classifies latent features from images and texts by leveraging the potential of a Large Language Model, namely GPT-4o-mini. We illustrate the method with an example that reports a promising performance of the GPT-4o-mini model. We highlight the conceptual potential of our method for theory development through multimodal data, enabling multi-level analysis of HRM phenomena, and we discuss practical applications for HR practitioners in recruitment and selection, gauging employee engagement, and assessing organisational image, alongside limitations and considerations for responsible use.
Guided by the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) perspective, this study explores user experiences with the perceived agency of algorithmic technology in the context of talent management (TM) decisions. Through a qualitative analysis of 11 client companies utilizing algorithmic TM decision-making technology provided by an HR tech service firm, we identified divergent perceptions of algorithmic technology's agency. While some participants viewed the technology as enhancing decision quality and explainability by promoting objectivity and standardization, others perceived it as constraining managerial judgment and overlooking context-specific, non-quantifiable factors. These contrasting perceptions gave rise to three distinct behavioral responses-endorsing, conforming to, or undermining the technology's agency. In some cases, employees strategically adjusted their behaviors to align with algorithmic outputs, thereby reshaping the actor-network and influencing TM decision-making dynamics. This study contributes to the ANT perspective by showing how perceptions of agency and behavioral responses reconfigure human-technology networks, offering a relational understanding of algorithmic agency in organizational settings. It also contributes to the HRM and technology literature by examining how algorithmic technologies, as relational actors, influence managerial and employee responses, particularly in the management of high-potential employees. Finally, it advances TM research by demonstrating how different organizational actors interpret and respond to algorithmic TM decisions, revealing how employees may strategically leverage such systems.
Recent research has underlined the growing importance of sustainability in HRM policy and practice, taking into account long-term multi-stakeholder goals. However, few studies have specified the drivers and outcomes of sustainable HRM practices, nor the contradictions that arise when managers attempt to satisfy the demands of both internal and external stakeholders. Drawing on in-depth case studies of the UK public sector, we distinguish between the institutional sustainability logics of (i) viability (concerned with necessary resources and capacities to deliver) and (ii) legitimacy (concerned with satisfying social and moral demands for fair and consistent HR practices) and explore how these two logics interact through positive and negative feedback loops. Our findings show that across an increasingly complex HRM eco-system, the tensions between viability and legitimacy are increasingly addressed through a focus on building individual human capital and personal wellbeing rather than protecting job security and the collective 'common good'.
International human resource management (IHRM) and its larger sibling of international business (IB) have cross-fertilized each other for many years. In this paper, we suggest that IHRM research's nuanced appreciation for new patterns of work, such as the increase in internationally integrated work processes and the emergence of global virtual teams, can make a valuable contribution to IB research, specifically to the core idea that countries exhibit institutional distance, with important implications for a range of outcomes for multinational companies (MNCs). We contend that IHRM research has much to offer to provide a fuller account of distance and how it is viewed differently by individuals in MNCs, thereby contributing to the growing microfoundations lens in IB and beyond. In this paper, we give structure to the new patterns of work by positing that individuals differ in how they experience institutions: direct or mediated, holistic or partial, and enduring or transitory. We illustrate the relevance of these dimensions of positionality by building on prior work in IB, which has conceived of distance as a matter of similarity versus dissimilarity, equivalence versus non-equivalence, as well as a question of how encompassing and how malleable institutions in the host country are. Combined, we seek to start a fresh conversation on how changes in work realities of the 21(st) century make us see classic theoretical concepts in new ways, and how the core idea we develop in this paper - that the positionality of individuals shapes their perceptions of distance - raises a set of important questions for future research.
Employee voice has long attracted interest from academics, policymakers, and practitioners in light of its myriad benefits. To date, employee voice researchers have identified a wide array of voice practices that are organized and understood through a core set of dimensions. However, there are growing calls for more interdisciplinary research to ensure the field's repertoire of practices is effective in terms of addressing employees' and firms' needs while also being attuned to the contemporary nature of work, which includes increasing concerns about inclusion and employee polarization. In this conceptual paper, we seek to expand the field's understanding of existing and potential voice practices by considering whether and how core dimensions and families of practices from democratic innovations scholarship have been applied in employee voice research. We identify four understudied dimensions and three understudied families of practices, illustrate how they could be applied in the context of employee voice, and articulate contributions to research and practice.
Technological advancements and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic have accelerated the transition toward hybrid workplaces. Even though the design of appropriate HRM practices is recognized as an important factor in ensuring an effective transition toward hybrid work environments, existing research has offered limited insights into how companies might strategically integrate hybrid work in a coherent HRM system of HRM to attain a competitive advantage. Indeed, extant empirical studies mainly focus on the individual level of analysis, while the discussion on hybrid work practices at the organizational level remains conceptual. This paper aims to advance this debate by relying on the theoretical perspective of strategic human resource management (SHRM). Most extant models in the field of SHRM either focus on the vertical linkages of HRM practices with corporate strategy or on the horizontal alignment of the HRM system, missing the opportunity to adopt a comprehensive approach to SHRM to explain the current transition to hybrid workplaces. In addressing these gaps, the study uses a longitudinal case study of an Italian company over 4 years of implementation of a hybrid work environment and explores HR's interventions through the lenses of the Harvard model and the ability-motivation-opportunity (AMO) framework. Specifically, the study examines how vertical and horizontal alignment of strategic hybrid work HR practices are achieved and influence employee, organizational, and societal outcomes, providing valuable insights for companies approaching this new way of working and for HR managers and professionals.
This research investigates how inclusion-focused generative AI (GAI), designed with diversity, fairness, and inclusion principles, mitigates disability bias in hiring-particularly under complex, cognitively demanding conditions. Drawing on Construal Level Theory, two experiments with HR professionals (N = 117; 238) compared standard, inclusion-focused, and control conditions. Inclusion-focused GAI significantly reduced bias by emphasizing job-relevant competencies and lowering psychological distance. The study introduces a fairness-oriented AI design that advances accountability and inclusion in HR systems, offering implications for equitable hiring, bias auditing, and the strategic use of ethical AI in talent acquisition.
For many organizations, developing workforce capabilities is central as it involves refining critical human resource processes such as upskilling or the acquisition of new profiles. These processes are becoming increasingly complex to manage as organizations collaborate within larger work ecosystems. Surprisingly, little research has addressed how multiple organizations collaborate to support the development of workforce capabilities, potentially leading to ecosystem-level learning of HR patterns. Using a multi-respondent qualitative research design, we examine how various stakeholders in a workforce ecosystem-including freelance workers, organizations, and public entities-elaborate HR patterns for cross-boundary workers. HR pattern development by multiple actors is achieved through coordination among them, supported by top- and middle-level managers from within organizations. HR ecosystem learning is energized by centrifugal and centripetal forces depending on pivotal actors, either distancing themselves from or keeping close to usual organizational patterns, which requires an intricate balance. We highlight the specific theoretical and practical implications for HR ecosystem learning.
Although collective turnover has garnered growing scholarly attention within strategic human resource management (SHRM), prior research has predominantly focused on its organizational consequences while overlooking its compositional nuances (i.e., the distinction between voluntary and involuntary turnover) and dynamic interdependencies, an oversight with far-reaching implications for workforce strategy. Drawing on a decade of monthly employee turnover data from a large distribution center in Hong Kong, we find a positive relationship in voluntary turnover rates across consecutive months, providing novel empirical evidence for turnover contagion in labor-intensive logistics settings. Additionally, high involuntary turnover exerts a lagged negative effect on subsequent voluntary turnover, while elevated voluntary turnover predicts higher involuntary turnover in later months, uncovering bidirectional dynamics previously underexplored in SHRM literature. Building on these findings, we develop a stylized SHRM-focused behavioral model that illustrates how turnover dynamics shape contextually tailored optimal dismissal policies and firm profitability, offering actionable theoretical contributions and managerial implications for workforce stability.
