This paper reports an international survey of how Industry 4.0 (I4.0) technologies are affecting job quality and employee well-being in manufacturing. Consistent with the theory that greater capital intensity and technological/operational uncertainty predict greater worker participation in management, the results more strongly support the optimistic rather than the pessimistic view of how I4.0 technologies will affect job quality. Greater use of the most prevalent I4.0 technologies is associated with greater involvement in decision-making, which leads to higher job satisfaction and better psychological health. Greater use of I4.0 technologies is not associated with work intensification. This suggests that I4.0 technologies can help humanize work, although our data suggest that the transformation to a smart factory may imply that employee involvement is associated with more highly qualified workers. The study does not rule out the emergence of digital Taylorism through increased managerial control and work intensification as I4.0 technologies are progressively debugged.

Work intensification and job insecurity undermine the quality of working life. To what extent can different types of employee involvement in decision-making ameliorate their impacts on employee well-being? Deploying job demands-resources theory and interrogating the European Working Conditions Survey 2021, this study shows that work intensification and job insecurity reduce well-being via lower work engagement and higher exhaustion. While each enhances job quality, individual organizational influence has a greater effect than task discretion in suppressing the negative effects of work intensification. The largest gains for employee and societal well-being will come through greater worker involvement at this level of participation.

Purpose This study examines how the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the HR function in large organisations. Addressing the predominance of normative accounts and limited empirical evidence in the AI–HRM literature, it explores how AI influences HR roles, the strategic positioning of the HR function, employee well-being and the professional future of HR specialists. Design/methodology/approach The authors used a multi-case qualitative research design to examine AI adoption and impacts in the HR function, studying five large financial services organisations in France and Canada with similar AI–HRM maturity. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with HR analytics leaders overseeing AI–HR applications, HR professionals and line managers. Findings The study highlights certain trends and identifies two trajectories underpinning the AI–HR interaction: an “AIHR” model, prioritising automation and cost-minimisation through AI, and potentially compromising employee well-being and deprofessionalising the HR function; and an “HAIR” model, placing greater emphasis on maintaining a human-centric, well-being-oriented approach, one in which “shepherding” of AI applications by HR specialists helps to entrench HR professionalism and to minimise perversities. Practical implications The choice between an AIHR or HAIR model requires periodic assessment of HR sub-functions and evolving HR roles. Under an HAIR model, closer collaboration between AI developers and HR professionals is essential to reduce opacity and mistrust, requiring the development of HR “fusion skills” and the implementation of a formal AI–HRM strategy encompassing governance, data, training, communication and stakeholder engagement. Originality/value The fast-paced rise of AI in HRM is reshaping the activities and roles of the HR function, with significant implications for organisational performance, employee well-being and the future of the HR profession. Despite growing interest and limited empirical research on the AI–HR interaction, this study explores how AI is being implemented in the HR function and its impacts on HR roles and the tensions they entail.

This paper provides a comprehensive review of continuity and change in the roles associated with the HR function and the tensions they entail, systematically covering over 50 years of research. It reveals that the normative models of HR roles, including the influential work of Ulrich (e.g., 1997), have stimulated greater interest in studying HR roles than the sociological studies conducted by the field’s pioneers. In terms of change, many HR specialists have sought to make a transition, through various means, towards a greater strategic role in organisations. The extent to which they have navigated this transition successfully has been influenced by complex, multi-level contingencies and by the varying interpretations and responses of the stakeholders involved in HRM. The literature analysis shows that the historical tensions associated with the HR function remain a defining continuity. As the paradox perspective suggests, they are lived with or adjusted to, with varying degrees of success. In contrast to the dichotomous view of HR roles that assumes a trade-off between strategic and operational roles, the review provides evidence of synergy or complementarity between them. This more integrative view of HR roles is clearly important for the pursuit of greater mutuality in the employment relationship, something that is often strongly valued by HR specialists. The paper includes recommendations for future research to develop the theories and the research process on HR roles and practical implications.

Purpose The authors examine the interactive effects of work engagement and work autonomy in enhancing job crafting behaviour and performance. Design/methodology/approach Dyadic data from a sample of 320 white-collar employees in an Indian manufacturer are analysed through structural equation modelling. Findings The level of job crafting is highest when both work engagement and work autonomy are high. Job crafting fully mediates the interactive effect of work engagement and autonomy on task performance and partially on contextual performance. Practical implications There is value in reviewing organisational constraints on employee autonomy to foster the ways in which highly motivated workers can craft their jobs and, thus, maximise their performance. Originality/value This study demonstrates the interactive effects of work engagement and autonomy in enhancing job crafting and, through this mechanism, employee performance.

Stated preference methods remain the only means capable of estimating non-use values yet can suffer from many types of well-known biases. We construct an approach to identify the role of social desirability bias, relative to other potential survey biases, using a stated preference survey for improving the status of species at risk. The survey respondents were asked how they would vote, how they think their fellow survey participants would vote, as well as how they think people in their region would vote in an actual referendum. We find that willingness-to-pay estimates for public good (passive use) values differ across these vote question types. Our results demonstrate how stated preference practitioners can use multiple referent groups to help disentangle social desirability bias from other survey biases.

PurposeThis paper aims to respond to questions being raised about the challenges, risks and impacts of Human Resource Analytics (HRA). Based on a study of 40 companies, it discusses the implications of HRA for practitioners, praxis and practices in HRM and adds to this a concern with whether HRA is enhancing mutuality in employment relationships.Design/methodology/approachUsing an abductive approach, the authors analyzed data from semistructured interviews with an HRA leader or specialist in 40 large organizations.FindingsWhile wrestling with the challenge of data quality and integration, the practice of descriptive analytics is widely adopted in these companies and the majority can demonstrate improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of HR activities through predictive analytics. The analytical competence of HR specialists is an ongoing issue. While much more research is needed, the companies in the authors’ sample demonstrated some valuable examples of mutual gains from HRA.Practical implicationsEducation in HRA must not only help to raise quantitative competencies among HR specialists but should also help them to ask critical questions about the theoretical propositions and subjective data points being built into HRA. Boundary spanning is important to enable effective HRA and processes for employee voice to be improved. Arguably, the time has come for a more formalized data analytics' strategy in large organizations.Originality/valueThis paper provides evidence on how HRA is being implemented in large companies, including how HRA leaders are managing its challenges and risks and the impacts it is having on business and employee outcomes.

Abstract The field of HRM, historically more focused on the managerial rather than the employee side of the employment relationship, has been changing over the last 30 years as researchers have investigated the opaque and troublesome links inside the ‘black box’ of the firm. A strong interest in employee motivation as a mediating variable between HRM and performance has provided the entrée for a range of theories that are relevant to an understanding of job quality. Researchers in HRM are increasingly assessing the impacts of HRM on employee well-being. Important lines of enquiry include research that targets the equity or fairness of employment relationships and assesses the balances between job demands and resources, between efforts and rewards, and between work and the rest of life. Studies of the interactions among these variables are critical to an assessment of job quality. When we look at the range of employer behaviour in reality, it is apparent that many types of jobs and organizations offer unattractive conditions. However, even in challenging circumstances, such as those that characterize low-paid work in the retail sector, studies suggest that it should be possible to find ways of enhancing the quality of working life.

This study interrogates the Work Orientation module of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) across three waves (1997, 2005 and 2015) to understand the job values of New Zealanders. It finds that men and women are more similar than different in their job values, that full-timers are more concerned with income and career prospects than part-timers, and that higher education tends to raise expectations of having an interesting job and a high level of pay. New Zealanders have become somewhat more altruistic at work, confirming the image of the 'helpful Kiwi', but their job values have not shifted much across these surveys and are similar to those of employees in other developed countries. The broad pattern is that a vital extrinsic factor, job security, and the intrinsic quality of work out-rank the value of the extrinsic factors of high income and career prospects for New Zealanders.

Purpose This study aims to explore the implementation of data analytics in the Big-Four accounting firms, including the extent to which a digital transformation is changing the work of financial auditors, why it is doing so and how these firms are managing the transformation process. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted 23 interviews with 20 participants across four hierarchical levels from three of the Big-Four accounting firms in New Zealand. Findings The firms have entered the era of "smart audit systems", in which auditors provide deep business insights that are communicated more effectively through data visualisation. The full potential, however, of data analytics depends not only on the transformation process within accounting firms but also on improvement in the quality of IT systems in client companies. The appointment of transformation managers, the recruitment of technology-savvy graduates and the provision of extensive training are helping to embed data analytics in the Big-Four firms. Accounting graduates in financial audit now need to show that they have the aptitude to become "citizen data scientists". Practical implications The findings explain how data analytics is being embraced in the Big-Four auditing firms and underline the implications for those who work in them. Originality/value The findings challenge the "technological reluctance" thesis. In contrast, the authors observe a climate of positive attitudes towards new technology and accompanying actions in the Big-Four firms. The authors show how branches of the Big-Four firms operating distantly from their global headquarters, and with smaller economies of scale, are implementing the new technologies that characterise their global firms.

The high-involvement model of human resource management (HRM) is seen as offering major benefits to organisations, employees and societies through enhancing employee motivation, enabling people to reach more of their potential, and producing better quality and innovation. However, it would be a mistake to imagine that we can stimulate more of it by simply 'turning up the volume' on its virtues. In this article, we highlight what we have learnt about the model, including the contextual factors that enable and constrain its uptake. We also discuss the tensions that affect the quality and sustainability of particular implementations. These include the need to retain employee commitment when it is threatened by all-too-common periods of restructuring, the need to manage the relationship between greater involvement and work intensification, and the need to ensure a good match between the kinds of autonomy that employees value and the working arrangements that organisations need in complex, interdependent teamwork.

Using a two-wave survey of 315 workers in a lean manufacturing plant, this study examines how work intensification affects employee wellbeing and how its effects may be ameliorated. It demonstrates that work intensification is transmitted into poorer wellbeing through greater emotional exhaustion. It shows that this mediation process is moderated by line-manager support, which buffers the relationship between emotional exhaustion and wellbeing. The study suggests that the health-impairing risks of high work intensity in lean settings can be reduced through better supervisory support. Ensuring that line managers have the opportunity, skills and motivation to offer good support to workers is a vital aspect of the interventions needed to counteract the health risks posed by lean production.

Based on an analysis of the New Zealand data in the Work Orientation module of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) across three rounds (1997, 2005 and 2015), this paper examines how workers in New Zealand perceive their job quality. These surveys imply that New Zealanders have relatively good jobs, as shown in healthy levels of job quality and job satisfaction. They rate highly the quality of their collegial relationships at work and typically perceive the intrinsic quality of their job as better than the extrinsic quality. A key issue in relation to the latter is that they generally do not rate their advancement opportunities as high. While men, full-timers and graduates have some advantages over women, part-timers and non-graduates in extrinsic job quality, the intrinsic quality of work is more evenly experienced. In terms of intrinsic issues, the rising level of stress from 2005 to 2015 poses a concern and there is no evidence that graduates enjoy any kind of premium in the intrinsic quality of work apart from a lower level of hard physical effort.

Situated within a societal perspective on human resource management (HRM), this paper asks how HRM academics can make a better contribution to understanding the impacts of HRM on societal well-being. It argues that we should target the 'so what?' questions that matter to society, including important issues of employer-employee misalignment and of perverse alignment ('perverse-performance work systems'). It calls for an approach to societal issues in HRM that is problem-focused and theory-informed. While recognising some validity to the criticisms of academic HRM raised in the 'psychologisation' debate, the article argues that the critique is over-generalised and contests the idea that the concern of HRM academics with enhancing workplace mutuality is an expression of a unitarist ideology. Mutuality and unitarism should not be conflated. In advancing a pluralist agenda, it argues that we must become better at theoretical integration, at synergising our research methods and at engaging constructively with practitioners and policy makers.

In this chapter, we examine the job-crafting behaviours of New Zealand employees during the Covid-19 pandemic. Using a sample of 15 full-time employees across various industries and occupations, we find that the job-crafting behaviours of employees were influenced by their personal characteristics and situation and the nature of their jobs. The degree of autonomy enjoyed by employees was critical in the type of changes they could make. The work attitudes of employees were affected by the degree of organizational support they experienced in these challenging times, and this had an effect on their job-crafting behaviours. In terms of types of job crafting, employees often engaged in relational crafting through adjusting their interactions with internal and external stakeholders and some found new meaning in their work through cognitive crafting. There was, however, little evidence of task crafting. © The Editors and Contributing Authors Severally 2021.

Many authors have advocated a human–centric view of Industrie 4.0 automation, in which the human operator works with augmented powers and capabilities such as super-strength, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, although their roles are still in the manufacture of the product. A human-automation symbiosis in the production process, with robotic and IOT tools helping to extend and meld the capabilities of the Operator to accomplish the tasks of production is a proposed goal. The approach taken in the present work does not, however, envisage a super-human outcome. Rather, the goal is the unleashing of human creative potential, as a complement to the robotic and virtual world of the automated production system. Agile manufacturers typically run small scale operations (20 people or less), make short runs of many products and are continuously involved in their design – both at detailed and conceptual levels. This can be a strength in terms of international competitiveness where knowledge of the production process, the product end user needs, and the machinery and tooling itself combine to produce innovation. SME manufacturers are actually designers. Their employees think about design as they manufacture. We foresee that the Operator may transition to a Maker – a person who works alongside the automated production system but with a different role - one which is essentially creative, rather than assisting or monitoring non-discretionary work flow steps or processes.

Drawing on the job demands-resources and effort-reward imbalance models, this study investigates the mediating roles of intrinsic motivation and distributive justice in the relationships between line-manager support and employee wellbeing (job satisfaction, work engagement and physical health). Responses to a survey of 357 front-line workers in a Chinese manufacturer were analysed through structural equation modelling. We find, in this context, that line managers are a strong determinant of employee wellbeing when they foster the intrinsic motivation of employees and their perceptions of organisational justice. Such findings are helpful for our understanding of attitudes in the Chinese workforce and underline the value of analysing multiple mediating mechanisms and multiple wellbeing outcomes in human resource management-wellbeing research.