Knowledge that Transforms

The core principle in strategic human resource management (SHRM) holds that organizations gain competitive advantage from HR systems with practices that work well together (horizontal alignment) and that support overall strategy (vertical alignment). This paper develops a theory explaining how artificial intelligence integration, a tool intended to improve alignment, can unintentionally cause alignment breakdown. Drawing on SHRM theory and the process‐based model of HRM system strength, we build four propositions. We argue that AI's operational requirements weaken horizontal alignment by creating logic conflicts within HR systems, cause employee skill development to drift from strategic needs, cause employees to default to metric‐aligned behaviors, and diminish workforce value as a competitive resource. We synthesize these dynamics in a framework of four organizational states, Strategic Synergy, Contested Alignment, Strategic Fragmentation, and Algorithmic Capture that characterize firms at different stages of AI‐driven misalignment. This paper contributes a process‐based theory explaining organizational risks of AI adoption in management systems.

Underneath headlines that decree organizations are increasingly abandoning or rolling back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in response to anti‐DEI pressures, we argue that how organizations are doing this warrants further focus. While the strategy literature speaks to tactics for addressing institutional pressures, missing in the study of how organizations address anti‐DEI pressures is consideration of how HRM systems impact and are impacted by such action. Incorporating a strategic human resource management (SHRM) view, we offer three approaches—all of which are substantiated with evidence from contemporary organizations—that range in the extent to which organizations resist or embrace anti‐DEI pressures. The common thread linking these approaches is that each one moves beyond an oversimplified emphasis on “alignment.” We do not advocate misalignment per se but underscore how the nuances embedded in each approach reflect the intentionality of organizations and how they consider contingencies (i.e., external alignment) and configurations (i.e., internal alignment) in proactively adapting HRM systems in response to anti‐DEI pressures. In advancing these views, we develop an agenda to drive future empirical research addressing the intersection of DEI backlash and HRM.

Although feedback is intended to facilitate employee effectiveness, negative feedback sometimes impedes, rather than improves, employee outcomes. We draw from Event Systems Theory to develop a conceptual model that identifies how event‐based characteristics of negative feedback (i.e., novelty, disruption, and criticality) relate to employee effectiveness (i.e., work goal progress, work withdrawal, and interpersonal helping) via two mechanisms—felt competence and cognitive depletion. Results from a 10‐week event sampling study were generally supportive of our theory, indicating that felt competence and cognitive depletion play key roles in mediating the effects of event‐based negative feedback characteristics on employee outcomes. These findings indicate that specific, event‐based characteristics of negative feedback play an important role in explaining employee reactions to such feedback, determining whether it facilitates (vs. hinders) employee effectiveness.

Despite firms' increasing experimentation with nontraditional human capital sourcing and selection approaches, our understanding of how and why these are adopted and diffuse among competitors is limited. Drawing on neo‐institutional theory, we examine how mimetic, coercive, and normative pressures influence firms' adoption of nontraditional labor market approaches. We conceptualize labor markets as “traditional” and “nontraditional” based on firms' observable human capital selection activities and investigate how competitors' prior use of nontraditional sourcing approaches (mimetic pressures), coercive pressures stemming from customer‐based demand conditions, and top manager institutional agency (the capacity of top managers to interpret and act against prevailing normative pressures) influence adoption. We further examine how field‐level performance feedback from nontraditional‐sourced human capital influences the impact of these institutional pressures and aspects of adopting these alternative sourcing approaches. Using a longitudinal dataset of Major League Baseball franchises from 1977 to 2002 and event‐history models of first adoption of non–South/Central American international player sourcing, we assess how organizational and contextual conditions affect the timing of adoption. Results indicate mimetic and coercive institutional pressures, top manager institutional agency, and field‐level performance feedback systematically influence adoption decisions. The findings contribute to our understanding of institutional drivers in firms' human capital sourcing and selection behavior and offer insights into the broader dynamics that drive the adoption of nontraditional labor market approaches across firms.

With expanded access to remote work, employees are spending a greater share of their time working from home. As a result, work and family demands increasingly intersect during the workday, creating more opportunities for interruptions from family members. Drawing on boundary theory, we argue that family‐to‐work interruptions differ from interruptions that originate within the work domain because they require employees to navigate a cross‐domain role transition involving distinct expectations, relationships, and role demands. To advance our understanding of the affective consequences of family‐to‐work interruptions, we leverage affective events theory to examine the effect of daily family‐to‐work interruptions on negative affect at the end of the workday and, in turn, emotional exhaustion in the evening. Importantly, we assess the role of individuals' general perceptions of family‐to‐work conflict and schedule autonomy as cross‐level moderators. We find that the positive effect of daily family‐to‐work interruptions on end‐of‐workday negative affect is stronger for individuals with higher overall perceptions of family‐to‐work conflict and with lower schedule autonomy. Finally, post hoc analyses suggest that gender further shapes these relationships, with the moderating effect of family‐to‐work conflict emerging only among women and the moderating effect of schedule autonomy being substantially stronger for women than for men.

Digital visibility has become a central organizing condition in digitally mediated work, reshaping how employees are recognized, evaluated, and connected. In this conceptual paper, we theorize digital visibility as a sociomaterial HRM condition that simultaneously enables recognition and generates performative pressures. Anchored in relational cohesion theory, we develop the Digital Visibility–Belonging Paradox concept to explain why the same visibility infrastructures that make employees more observable may also weaken the relational foundations of belonging. We distinguish between authentic belonging and simulated belonging to show how digital visibility can simultaneously support felt recognition and relational connection while encouraging employees to display connection, availability, and engagement through digitally visible cues. We further identify cognitive, emotional, and structural mechanisms through which visibility shapes these divergent trajectories, as well as organizational and system‐level boundary conditions that influence whether visibility supports relational connection or intensifies performative availability. The paper contributes to HRM scholarship by repositioning visibility governance as a relational and humanistic responsibility in digitally mediated work.

Organizational scholars have begun to recognize the importance of social cohesion, but we know little about how it can lead to broader social impact, and even less about the role of human resource management (HRM) in these processes. To investigate this link, we examined corporate community co‐development as a particularly impactful HRM initiative. The program involved a Silicon Valley technology company partnering with five nonprofit organizations. Our study comprised a comprehensive mixed‐method longitudinal design involving 62 interviews and 382 h of field observations combined with a large‐scale quantitative survey ( n = 1101). The findings reveal that HR managers not only facilitated the logistics of the program but also helped to create three generative tensions: the balancing of belonging and uniqueness, of the familiar and the unfamiliar, and of within‐sector and across‐sector connections. HRM helped participants navigate these tensions through specific processes that combined human and social capital to develop social cohesion. We also empirically demonstrate that social cohesion was positively associated with social impact in both the company and the nonprofits.

Virtual work has become a defining feature of contemporary organizations, yet Human Resource Management (HRM) scholarship lacks an integrated understanding of how it should be managed. We address this disconnect by shifting the focus from individual and team experiences to the organizational management of virtual work through HRM. We conceptualize virtual work and organize prior research along four dimensions: spatial, temporal, technological, and employment relationship. Building on this, we develop an integrative framework based on two axes, the degree of virtuality and the nature of the employment relationship, from which four forms of virtual work emerge and between which organizations may transition: co‐located, hybrid, fully virtual, and virtual gig work. We delineate four corresponding HRM roles and their implications for managing and transitioning between these arrangements: traditional, integrative, enabling and empowering, and algorithmic HRM. We conclude by outlining future research directions to advance HRM in virtual work, with a focus on emerging technologies, global contexts, and rethinking theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches.

Human resource management (HRM) theory has long recognized that context shapes employee behavior and performance. Less developed is the employee competency through which individuals determine what a given context requires and adjust their behavior accordingly. This article develops contextual agility as a competency needed when expectations, norms, cues, or relationships are unfamiliar, unstable, conflicting, or under‐specified. Under these conditions, routine responses are often insufficient; employees must adapt, recombine, or construct responses that fit the context. I argue that contextual agility operates through three interrelated processes: attentional openness, regulatory flexibility, and response enactment. At the individual level, these processes are supported by six durable skills: curiosity, humility, resilience, tolerance of ambiguity, perspective‐taking, and relationship‐building. The article contributes to HRM theory by specifying contextual agility as a competency that links contextual demands to appropriate behavioral responses, and by explaining how HR systems can select, develop, reinforce, and scale this competency to build a contextually agile workforce.

HR faces a conundrum over how to organize hybrid working patterns given the pros and cons associated with conducting work across multiple domains. Many organizations are currently seeking to clarify and often increase the requirements for employee presence at employer premises, meaning studies are needed to better understand how HR should look to influence decision‐making regarding office attendance practices. We draw on theories of boundary control to examine the relationship between return‐to‐office (RTO) policy enforcement, office time, and eudaimonic worker wellbeing; specifically work‐related vitality and work meaningfulness. We propose that enforced RTO policies serve to lower eudaimonic wellbeing via reducing both the psychological experiences of volition (working from one's preferred location) and control (being able to choose where one works). Across two time‐lagged survey studies, including a field study in an organization implementing a new RTO policy (Study 1), we find broad support for our propositions. We further find higher office time does not automatically follow RTO policy implementation and that office time is unrelated to eudaimonic worker wellbeing. In our third study, interview data collected over 2 years from key stakeholders of the RTO implementation allows us to explore unresolved and new questions prompted by the two survey studies. We discuss these findings in relation to building theory‐informed insights into office attendance policies and the importance of worker volition and control over hybrid working patterns.