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Career Guidance and Employment Issues for Neurodivergent Individuals: A Scoping Review and Stakeholder Consultation

Human Resource Management 2025 64(1), 201-227 open access
Growing recognition of neurodivergence amongst individuals poses challenges for career counselors and human resource practitioners when advising, guiding, and supporting the careers of this diverse group. Despite the potential for neurodivergent individuals to contribute to organizations, career guidance for these individuals is a relatively new area. We conducted a multidisciplinary project comprising a scoping review and stakeholder consultation to generate evidence‐based recommendations for identifying and supporting career paths that lead to positive employment outcomes for neurodivergent individuals. The scoping review included 78 articles on career guidance and associated employment issues (e.g., facilitators and barriers to employment) for neurodivergent individuals, while stakeholders, including neurodivergent individuals, counselors, and others, provided insights into their employment experiences. Our scoping review yielded nine themes: career guidance practice, predictors of employment, employment interventions, different forms of employment, work barriers and facilitators, strengths and challenges, person‐job fit, occupation and industry fit, and employment outcomes. The stakeholder consultations complemented the scholarly themes. Results were interpreted using the Stone and Colella theoretical model of factors influencing the treatment of people with disabilities. The model was extended across educational and work contexts, and to include the nature of occupations and industries. Building on this project and our overarching theoretical model, we map a future research agenda for the study of careers amongst neurodivergent individuals. Specifically, we highlight persistent methodological limitations of the literature before turning to theoretical implications across career stages. We conclude with practical implications for career counselors and human resource practitioners. Ultimately, our review calls for researchers and practitioners to help promote sustainable, high‐quality, and fulfilling careers for neurodivergent individuals.

“You Pretend to Pay Me; I Pretend to Work”: A Multi‐Level Exploration of Quiet Quitting in the Greek Context

Human Resource Management 2025 64(4), 923-941 open access
This study explores quiet quitting—a distinct form of workplace withdrawal—in the Greek context, adopting a multilevel approach to understand how cultural, institutional and individual factors shape this emerging phenomenon. Drawing upon relevant literature, we investigate the macro, meso‐organizational, and micro‐individual level factors that shape the emergence and persistence of quiet quitting. Through a qualitative, interview‐based methodology, we engage with a diverse sample of Greek Human Resource (HR) managers to capture their perceptions and lived experiences of the factors that contribute to quiet quitting. Our findings highlight the complex interplay between societal shifts, cultural norms, organizational practices, and individual coping mechanisms that give rise to and sustain quiet quitting behaviors. We propose a conceptual framework that situates quiet quitting within the unique socio‐cultural, economic, and institutional realities of the Greek context. This framework reveals how quiet quitting manifests as a dynamic process, initiated by psychological contract breaches and perpetuated through cycles of emotional exhaustion and identity rationalization. By providing a holistic understanding of the quiet quitting phenomenon, this study contributes to the advancement of contextualized Human Resource Management (HRM) research and offers valuable insights for practitioners navigating the challenges of the modern workplace.

Commitment and Quiet Quitting: A Qualitative Longitudinal Study

Human Resource Management 2025 64(2), 565-582 open access
Recently scholars across a range of fields have noted the importance of the issue of quiet quitting in term of both pervasiveness and profundity of impact. Our study views quiet quitting as employees intentionally opting actively to manage their work/working lives to adhere to contracted duties/hours while avoiding voluntarily taking on additional responsibilities, tasks, or roles. To date, almost universally, existing studies assume that quiet quitting is a single, monolithic, homogenous phenomenon which relentlessly generates ‘bad’ outcomes for firms and ‘good’ outcomes for perpetrators. This current study addresses these important assumptions with a key aim of our research is to supply grounded evidence of the nature of quiet quitting and to examine the outcomes of such actions for perpetrators' longitudinally. To facilitate this, we adopt the concept of commitment as our conceptual lens for explicating how employees' quiet quitting is manifested and utilize a longitudinal, qualitative research design to gauge outcomes. After outlining existing research in the area, we detail our research design and methodology, before presenting the insights gained during data collection and analysis. Our paper concludes with a discussion of a series of contributions to both theory and practice.

Keep Up the Good Work… or Else! Exploring Supervisor Responses to Quiet Quitting

Human Resource Management 2025 64(6), 1507-1523 open access
A Google search of “quiet quitting” yields over 350 million results, which is remarkable given that the term is only a few years old. Although quiet quitting is a relatively new trend, the concept it describes—an employee's conscious decision to do the bare minimum in their job rather than going above and beyond—is familiar to researchers who have investigated organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). However, for those interested in the effective management of human resources, what is important—yet unknown—is how managers respond to employees who engage in quiet quitting. Therefore, in this conceptual paper, we use attribution theory to explore supervisor responses to employees who engage in quiet quitting and subsequently withhold OCB. We propose that supervisors will generally have negative reactions to employees' withholding OCB, but we further explain how evaluations of locus, controllability, and stability and principles of discounting and augmenting influence supervisor attributions. Finally, implications for human resource theory, research, and practice are discussed.

Exploring the Duality of Perceptions: Insights into Uncertainties, Aversion and Appreciation Towards Algorithmic HRM

Human Resource Management 2025 64(2), 583-616 open access
The human resource management (HRM) function has witnessed the rapid integration of algorithms into incumbent processes; however, significant employee resistance and aversion to algorithmic decision‐making have also been reported. Research on algorithmic HRM practices indicates an underlying duality of perceptual responses by HRM professionals towards this technology. We seek to understand how HRM professionals experience algorithmic HRM use and determine if there are bright sides to its organizational integration. We undertake a qualitative, open‐ended study based on written responses to open‐ended questions from 58 respondents in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The data were thematically analyzed using grounded theory, which revealed four themes representing HRM professionals' overarching perspectives on why algorithmic HRM precipitates aversion or appreciation. The first two themes highlight HRM professionals' perceived subjective uncertainty regarding algorithmic HRM and its perceived negative effects on the organization. The third theme acknowledges the positive effect of algorithmic HRM, and the final theme discusses three critical coping strategies (embrace, avoid, and collaborate) that HRM professionals adopt to counteract their experienced fears. Our findings suggest that HRM professionals adopt a cautiously fearful rather than a wholly adverse outlook towards algorithmic HRM, wherein aversion and appreciation appear to emerge simultaneously. We contend this existence of a duality of perceptual responses to algorithmic HRM may be a precursor to setting a harmonious collaboration between humans and algorithms in the HRM domain, contingent on appropriate levels of oversight and governance. Implications for theory and managerial practice are also discussed.

From Strategic HRM to Sustainable HRM ? Exploring a Common Good Approach Through a Critical Reflection on Existing Literature

Human Resource Management 2025 64(5), 1381-1399 open access
The emergence of sustainability discourse has provided new avenues and momentum for human resource management (HRM) scholars to extend existing lines of enquiry and to generate new ones. This has led to a surge of research interest in sustainability in the last decade, not least as a response to the growing environmental concerns and, more recently, to the Sustainable Development Goals launched by the United Nations in 2015. The rapidly emerging body of research is accompanied by confusion and critiques regarding what sustainable HRM entails, how it can be measured, and who may benefit. This perspective paper discusses these issues by focusing on common good HRM as the latest variant of sustainable HRM and identifies challenges as well as opportunities for research. It draws on stakeholder theory, legitimacy theory, cultural perspective, and HR ecosystem theory to illustrate how future studies can advance our knowledge of common good HRM by building on the existing strong body of HRM scholarship and embracing a broader range of stakeholders, epistemological perspectives, and methodological approaches.

I'm Not Feeling It: The Role of Affective Diversity in Risk Management and Team Performance

Human Resource Management 2024 open access
Team performance is contingent on nuanced approaches to risk management—demanding both risky and cautious strategic orientations. However, research surrounding how teams navigate this balance is limited. We argue that both positive and negative affective diversity can aid team performance, through affective diversity's impact on the team's risky and cautious behaviors. Furthermore, we argue that team trait regulatory focus strengthens these relationships. Using a controlled laboratory setting with 58 teams in a complex, uncertain team task that requires both risky and cautious strategies for successful performance, results indicate that positive affective diversity relates to team performance through promoting risky behavior, while negative affective diversity relates to team performance through promoting cautious behavior. Teams high in trait prevention‐focus are more attuned to the information signals in teams with negative affective diversity, but we did not find that promotion focus impacted outcomes of positive affective diversity.

Mistreated but Still Resilient! Unraveling the Role of Servant Leadership in Mitigating the Adverse Consequences of Care Recipients' Incivility

Human Resource Management 2024 open access
In many countries, social care workers suffer from mistreatment from social care recipients. Such mistreatment poses a significant challenge from the human resource management (HRM) perspective as finding and retaining competent social care workers is a global challenge. However, only a few studies focus on the relationship between such mistreatment and social care workers' job and psychological resources. Drawing on the conservation of resources (COR) theory, our study sheds light on the relationship between social care recipients' incivility and the resilience of social care workers. Specifically, our study examines the mediating role of work meaningfulness on the care recipient incivility–care worker resilience link, and the moderating role of servant leadership on this mediated relationship. To test the proposed moderated mediation model, two studies were conducted in social care organizations in England ( n = 248) and Romania ( n = 296). Our results revealed that perceived care recipient incivility is indirectly and negatively related to care workers' resilience by undermining their perceptions of work meaningfulness. Moreover, when social care workers work under a servant leader, this indirect relationship becomes weaker. The discussion elaborates on the findings of our model as well as the theoretical and practical implications for the management of human resources in social care organizations.

Human resource executives' relative pay and firm performance

Human Resource Management 2024 open access
To operationalize the extent to which firms place a strategic emphasis on human capital and human resource management (HRM), we draw on the strategy field's dominant logic theory and on the emerging literature on executive compensation for the heads of major firm functions, such as HRM. Specifically, we investigate whether the pay of human resource executives (HREs) relative to other members of top management teams (TMTs) is related to firm performance. After controlling for the endogeneity of HRE status as one of the highest paid executives on the TMT, we find in a comprehensive sample of the largest US firms that HRE relative pay is positively related to firm financial performance, specifically Tobin's Q. We also find that the relationship of HRE relative pay with Tobin's Q is stronger in relatively smaller and younger firms in our sample. The findings suggest that a strategic emphasis on human capital and HRM leads to higher firm value.

Gender Differences in Job Requirements: Change Within Careers and Across Cohorts

Human Resource Management 2024 open access
We examine differences in jobs held by men and women based on a measure not used before, the standard human resources measures of “knowledge, skills, and abilities” generated by job analyses. While there is an abundance of evidence on gender disparities in pay, we know much less in detail about differences in the work men and women perform and especially how these differences have changed over time. We use nationally representative data for two cohorts of college graduates, one entering the post‐college workforce in 1994 and another in 2009, and we follow them for the first 10 years of their careers. We find that women generally held jobs with lower requirements relative to men. The gender gap in job requirements grew over the course of individuals' careers for the first cohort (1994–2003) but declined sharply for the second (2009–2018). We also find that among the second cohort, women received a wage premium for social skills that was greater than what men received.