ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to explore employee communication as a distinctive Human Resources (HR) practice and its relationship to employee silence. Building on signalling theory and drawing on a nationally representative sample of 1200 respondents from the UK workforce, our findings reveal that effective employee communication is negatively related to employee silence via the mediating role of managerial voice solicitation. Our study makes significant contributions to the theory of Human Resource Management. Specifically, we depart from studies exploring bundles of HR practices to focus on employee communication as a distinctively important HR practice. In addition, our findings shed light on the existence of a signalling chain, highlighting the important role managers can play in dampening employee silence and its negative workplace repercussions. Furthermore, in contrast to previous work focusing on structural factors promoting employee silence, our study turns the spotlight on ways to alleviate it. Given the harmful effects of employee silence on both employees and organisations, our study offers actionable insights into how such a behaviour can be diminished in the workplace.
ABSTRACT In this special issue introduction paper, we seek to advance HRM scholarship by examining how HRM can support the health and wellbeing of the healthcare workforce amid profound economic, socio‐cultural and technological change affecting healthcare systems globally. First, we analyse systemic challenges facing the global healthcare sector and their implications for healthcare workers' health and wellbeing. Second, in response, we synthesise insights from contemporary HRM literature on innovative organisational responses to sustain health and wellbeing of frontline healthcare workers. Third, we outline a future research agenda on workforce health and wellbeing in healthcare contexts. We argue for more inclusive, multi‐stakeholder approaches to wellbeing‐orientated HRM; greater attention to lived experience in the design and delivery of support practices; enhanced training and development for line managers; and the strategic use of AI and digital technologies to reduce workload pressures and strengthen support for frontline staff. When combined, these approaches offer a more sustainable pathway to improving healthcare workers' health and wellbeing.
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.
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 (beta = 0.184, p < 0.001). The increase was significantly weaker among supervisors than among employees (beta = -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.
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.
