Abstract This chapter bridges the gap between two fields: strategic human resource management, which focuses on predicting unit/firm performance, and staffing and selection literature, which focuses on predicting individual/team performance. The chapter is organized around Wright and Snell’s (1998) fit and flexibility framework to address the dual concerns of fitting staffing and selection with strategic goals while simultaneously enabling flexibility to respond to changing environmental conditions. The chapter concludes by exploring the implications for research and practice, explaining how this integrated approach informs key aspects of staffing system design and implementation, such as the choice of selection methods and the prioritization of certain knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Recent workforce disruptions including work relocation, machine learning, and widespread layoffs, have increased the challenges that business leaders face. These disruptions to the workforce have highlighted the importance and challenges of leadership. To understand how the dramatic workforce changes are affecting the roles and requirements of business leaders, we collected data from senior business leaders about how they navigated and, in many cases, transformed their organizations through crisis. We also interviewed senior business leaders about what is needed to guide the modern organization. Based on these learnings, we formulated explanations for how senior business leaders can be successful, particularly during times of upheaval. The combination of learnings allows us to consider how senior business leaders can learn from crises to positively affect organizational performance for the long-term and what organizations can learn about senior business leaders during challenging times.

This paper investigates the impact of intellectual capital on employee flexibility in SMEs, specifically focusing on how human, relational and structural components of intellectual capital contribute to skill and behavioural flexibility. The research addresses the gap in understanding how intellectual capital influences employee adaptability, essential for achieving strategic goals, especially in SMEs with limited resources. We have tried to address these research questions: Does intellectual capital improve skill and behavioural flexibility?; and how does employee flexibility impact the achievement of strategic goals? We have employed an empirical, quantitative research approach. Data has been collected through a structured survey from a sample of 233 Italian SMEs, and the relationships between variables has analysed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM). Our findings reveal that human capital significantly enhances both skill and behavioural flexibility, while relational capital positively influences these aspects to a lesser extent. Interestingly, structural capital shows no significant direct impact on skill and behavioural flexibility. Both skill and behavioural flexibility demonstrate a significant positive impact on planning effectiveness. Contrary to previous studies, our results indicate that in SMEs, a high level of formalisation favours the achievement of strategic goals without hindering employee flexibility. This research advances the understanding of intellectual capital's role in SMEs by empirically demonstrating its impact on employee flexibility and subsequent performance. For scholars, this study extends the theoretical framework linking intellectual capital, employee flexibility and a firm’s ability to reach strategic goals in SME contexts. It challenges existing assumptions about the relationship between formalisation and flexibility in smaller organisations, opening new avenues for future research. Furthermore, our findings contribute to the ongoing discussion about the unique characteristics of SMEs and how they can effectively manage their resources to remain competitive. For practitioners, particularly SME managers, the study emphasises the critical importance of fostering human and relational capital to achieve greater employee flexibility. By doing so, SMEs can enhance their ability to reach strategic goals.

In this study, we extend the scope of recruitment research to encompass the organizational perspective. We investigate how recruitment expenditures, the reputation of the organization, and the reputation of its managers contribute to a firm's capacity to acquire top-tier human capital, which in turn drives superior organizational performance. Relying on signaling theory and the resource-based view, we suggest the quality of human capital acquired will mediate the relationships between recruitment expenses, organizational reputation, managerial reputation, and organizational performance. Additionally, we expect recruitment expenses to be a stronger predictor of human capital quality than organizational or managerial reputation. With a sample of NCAA football teams over five years, we find the quality of human capital acquired at least partially mediates both the relationships between recruitment expenses and organizational performance and between organizational reputation and organizational performance.

This paper reviews the transformative role of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in Human Resource (HR) management, from a practice perspective, highlighting both opportunities and challenges and laying out a use-inspired future research agenda. This scoping review is grounded in insights from a unique Summit held in Spring 2024, which brought together HR academic scholars with dozens of Fortune 500 Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) and their top technical leaders to discuss the workforce implications of GenAI. The paper identifies six key themes from the Summit practitioners: GenAI as disruptive and transformative, data as competitive advantage, adoption challenges, potential ethical abuses, the experimentation imperative, and the critical role of CHROs. These six themes provide a foundation for future research directions, which are discussed regarding six functional HR areas: recruitment and selection, training and development, performance management, job and work design, talent management, and compensation and benefits. The research agenda in each area emphasizes the need for academic researchers to understand and address the practical challenges posed by GenAI. Overcoming these substantive challenges will demand meaningful effort and a keen willingness to learn, on the part of both HR leaders and scholars. The paper concludes with a call to action for management scholars to engage in use-inspired research that bridges the gap between academic knowledge and practical HR challenges.

In the current study, we contend that one way in which the management of people and work impacts organization performance is through building capabilities. More specifically, expanding beyond the traditional HR systems-organization performance research literature, we examine how HR flexibility, technical HRM, strategically-oriented HRM, and workforce strategic importance build a specific type of capabilities, namely organization strategic human capabilities, which in turn drives organization performance. Within a global, cross-industry sample composed of 9,923 individuals from 505 for-profit organizations, HR flexibility, strategically-oriented HRM, and workforce strategic importance were found to have positive effects on organization strategic human capabilities. Our findings also indicate that both technical and strategically-oriented HRM affect organization strategic human capabilities indirectly through HR flexibility. Furthermore, in addition to its positive effect on organization strategic human capabilities, workforce strategic importance was found to moderate HR flexibility's positive effect on organization strategic human capabilities. Finally, within a subsample composed of 8,060 individuals from 284 for-profit organizations, organization strategic human capabilities were found to be a key proximal precursor of organization performance.

The current study contributes to the ongoing discourse in the extant literature concerning the performance effects of the commitment-inducement and the compliance-enforcement approaches to the management of people and work. We expand on two research studies conducted in China to assess if the finding that commitment-inducement and compliance-enforcement result in higher organization financial and operational performance generalizes to corporate social responsibility performance and to countries and cultures across the globe. Using the current study’s large global multi-source sample, our findings illuminate that compliance-enforcement explained significant incremental variance in both organization financial and operational performance and organization corporate social responsibility performance beyond that of the commitment-inducement approach alone. Moreover, the highest levels of both performance outcomes were obtained by organizations that simultaneously used both commitment-inducement and compliance-enforcement; that is, hybrid governance. Compliance-enforcement was also found to have a more substantive relative effect on organization financial and operational performance while commitment-inducement was found to have a more substantive relative effect on organization corporate social responsibility performance. Furthermore, as hypothesized, at the between country-level, the relationship between the commitment-inducement approach of managing people and work and corporate social responsibility performance was found to be more negative both for a high individualism than a low individualism culture and for a high uncertainty avoidance than a low uncertainty avoidance culture, respectively. Whereas, the relationship between the compliance-enforcement approach and corporate social responsibility performance was found to be more positive for a high uncertainty avoidance than a low uncertainty avoidance culture. Finally, as hypothesized, at the between country-level, commitment-inducement and compliance-enforcement were found to be substitutes and have a negative synergistic effect on corporate social responsibility performance. Implications, limitations, and avenues for future research are discussed.

CEOs are increasingly called upon to take public stands on political issues, a phenome-non dubbed "political activism." These stands tend to have either moral foundations or moral implications, yet it is unclear whether stakeholders truly want CEOs to make stands, and, if so, how philosophically grounded they are in their stated positions. This paper explores the philosophical worldview questions relevant to current issues facing organizations, particularly those that have been characterized as "wokeism." It then examines how these worldview positions translate or apply to these issues in ways that seemingly contradict CEOs' stands. Finally, it explores how the concept of the social imaginary, CEOs' political beliefs, mass media's reciprocal effects, and CEO narcissism may influence CEOs to take "woke" political activist positions.

For over two decades, there has been increasing theory and research on HR flexibility, however, there is still much to be understood regarding its relationship with other constructs and the potential boundary conditions to its effectiveness. This study replicates and extends this work using a global multi-source, multi-respondent sample composed of 8,139 respondents from 306 organizations. The results provide additional evidence for the mediating role of HR flexibility in the high-performance work system—organization performance relationship. Additionally, they illuminate the mediating role of HR flexibility in the organization high technology focus—performance relationship and the mediating effects of organization size on this relationship as well as on the relationship between HR flexibility and organization performance. In sum, the findings underscore the advantage of being large and contributes to our understanding of HR flexibility’s impact on organization performance and further illustrates that HR flexibility can be an organization-level asset in certain circumstances (for very large organizations) and a liability in others (for smaller organizations)