Knowledge that Transforms

ABSTRACT 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.

ABSTRACT 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.

ABSTRACT 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.

ABSTRACT 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.

ABSTRACT As hybrid working blurs boundaries between work and nonwork, it is critical we understand how these boundaries are negotiated by employees. Existing literature establishes that work‐life flexibility policies and relational others shape their boundary management, yet the mechanisms through which they do so remain underspecified. Drawing on border theory, we examine how these policies and relational others within and outside work influence the construction of employees' work–nonwork boundaries. Qualitative data were collected from hybrid working academics with varied relational circumstances through interviews aided by photo‐elicitation, revealing the complexity of their boundary management. Our findings make three contributions to border theory and HRM scholarship and practice. First, we extend border theory by theorizing the critical mechanisms through which relational others and work‐life flexibility policies shape employees' boundary management by prompting, facilitating , and legitimizing boundaries. Second, we reveal the complexity that arises when multiple boundary‐keepers act simultaneously, at times reinforcing and at others undermining one another. Third, we offer a more differentiated understanding of how flexible working policies inform employee boundaries in practice, demonstrating that they can also prompt, facilitate, and legitimize these boundaries, or fail to do so. These findings generate important implications for how work‐life flexibility policies are designed, implemented, and evaluated.

ABSTRACT The present study examined factors predicting employee participation in employee stock purchase plans (ESPPs). Despite the plausible benefits of ESPPs for participating employees, many employees do not participate in ESPPs even when they are eligible. To shed light on this puzzle, we investigated key variables related to the plan (i.e., discount rates), the firm (i.e., stock price movements), and an external event (i.e., COVID‐19 pandemic) in relation to employees' participation in ESPPs. Using a unique proprietary dataset on employee stock purchases from 40 publicly traded companies with a total of 1,005,300 employees, we found that discount rates and past stock price increases, on their own, were not associated with higher participation. However, these relationships became significantly positive when past stock prices displayed stability rather than volatility during certain pre‐participation periods. In addition, we observed that the firms in our dataset had significantly higher ESPP participation rates during (vs. before) the pandemic. These findings offer various research and practical implications, extending the compensation and employee ownership literature that has paid little attention to the predictors of employees' ESPP participation.

ABSTRACT This study unravels how the effects of work‐life policies (WLPs) on individual employees' perceived control over their work schedule have cumulative effects across employees, ultimately crossing levels to enhance organizational outcomes like sales. We tested a multilevel mediating model comprising two cross‐level mechanisms: a top‐down link between the organization's availability of WLPs and individual‐level variables like control over work schedule and job satisfaction, and a bottom‐up link between job satisfaction (aggregated within the organization) and sales growth. Analyses of multilevel, multisource data from 3262 employees in 70 organizations supported the top–down hypotheses predicting that gains in employee control over their work schedule mediate the positive relationship between WLPs availability and job satisfaction. Furthermore, analyses of sales growth data using a matched subsample of 39 organizations and 1872 employees supported the bottom–up hypothesis that organization‐level job satisfaction is positively associated with sales growth over a three‐year span. Our results begin to shed light on the micro‐foundations of doing well (i.e., increasing sales) by doing good (i.e., increasing employees' control over their work schedules through WLP).

ABSTRACT Research on how to leverage high‐performance work systems (HPWS) and other strategic human resource management (HRM) systems to improve performance outcomes has long been a cornerstone of the HRM discipline. This study offers a comprehensive mapping of the field through bibliometric analysis and a thematic synthesis of 3503 peer‐reviewed articles published across 156 leading journals from 1995 to 2025. By revisiting the HRM‐performance relationship and tracing the evolving trajectories of scholarly inquiry, the review identifies four major thematic domains: (1) configurational HRM architectures, (2) multilevel HRM‐performance impacts, (3) “black box” mechanisms that mediate and moderate the HRM‐performance link, and (4) emerging topics in HRM systems in responding to crises and socio‐technological changes. The review finds evidence for complex transmitting patterns through which HRM systems improve performance, characterized by a horizontally interwoven and vertically multi‐level nature. The study addresses longstanding conceptual fragmentation by clarifying the structure and theorization of HRM systems and contributes a synthesized framework to guide future research. It also highlights promising but underexplored avenues, such as the role of algorithmic HRM, methodological pluralism, and configurational logics, in advancing the understanding of HRM‐performance dynamics. Practical implications are elaborated, translating theoretical findings into actionable guidance for practitioners.

ABSTRACT In today's polarized sociopolitical climate, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts increasingly face backlash, with equity in particular becoming marginalized in both scholarly and practitioner discourse despite its central importance for ensuring fair allocation of opportunities and resources across the employee lifecycle. These concerns are magnified as human resource (HR) decisions become increasingly mediated by artificial intelligence (AI), which shifts the locus of equity from individual judgment to systems design. In this paper, we introduce the concept of HR‐AI systems design, defined as the intentional planning and configuration of AI tools that support core HR functions in ways that reflect and embed focal organizational values. More specifically, we focus on equitable HR‐AI systems design, which concerns the design of AI‐mediated HR systems in which equity considerations are embedded in their underlying logics, evaluative criteria, and decision processes. Drawing on positive organizational scholarship (POS), we develop a values‐based framework for equitable HR‐AI systems design grounded in three core elements: a strengths‐based orientation, justice as a virtuous value, and high‐quality connections as a relational principle. These POS‐informed design elements can redirect dominant merit‐based, optimization‐based, and homophily‐based biasing logics embedded in existing HR‐AI systems toward more equitable outcomes. This paper contributes to DEI scholarship by theorizing equity as a designable systems feature, advances research on AI in HR by identifying equity‐oriented design logics, and extends POS scholarship to digitally mediated organizational contexts.

ABSTRACT Women's quotas are widely used to promote gender equality in organizations, yet little is known about how the general workforce perceives and reacts to them. Drawing on signaling theory, we examine employees' awareness of women's quotas and how it influences their reactions. Using data from the Linked Personnel Panel, a representative German dataset linking employer and employee reports ( N = 2270), we distinguish between signal awareness and signal interpretation to assess their distinct roles. Awareness differs systematically between women and men, with women more likely to correctly recognize whether a quota exists. At the same time, we observe substantial misalignment between formal policy and employee perception: 42.6% of employees fail to recognize an existing quota, and 30.0% believe a quota exists where it does not. Perceiving a quota is associated with higher work engagement among both women and men; however, this relationship is significantly weaker when quotas are legally obligated, indicating that external obligation reduces their signaling value. Theoretically, our study advances signaling research in HRM and diversity by showing that awareness is a critical precondition and that employees respond to quotas based on their signaling value. Practically, our findings suggest that organizations should actively ensure quotas are noticed and interpreted as commitments to gender equality, as complying with legal obligations alone is insufficient.