Knowledge that Transforms

Employee perceptions of human resource (HR) practices have become a central focus in strategic human resource management (HRM) research due to their impact on individual and organizational outcomes. Recent studies highlight the importance of understanding how these perceptions are formed, what they encompass, and why they vary across employees. This special issue of Human Resource Management aims to advance this evolving area of research by focusing on variability in employee perceptions of HR practices. We review the current literature on employee perceptions of HR practices, including (1) theoretical and conceptual clarity of the employee perceptions of HR practices construct, (2) antecedents of these perceptions across multiple levels (i.e., individual, HR department, (line) management, and organizational levels), (3) stakeholder alignment, and (4) the dynamic nature of perceptions of HR practices. We then consolidate existing research by offering an integrated overview based on extant studies, incorporating the four themes featured in this special issue. To guide future research, we present a comprehensive agenda aimed at fostering a more nuanced understanding of employee perceptions of HR practices, thereby enhancing both theoretical insights and practical impact in strategic HRM.

Sexual harassment has persisted for decades as an open secret within organizations, creating an ongoing challenge for Human Resource practitioners. Many employees experience or witness harassment yet say nothing. When they contemplate complaining, they are discouraged from doing so. Some still muster the courage to speak out about these abuses, but find their complaints ignored, downplayed, or dismissed by those in charge. Building on prior research, we propose that these practices add up to signals of silence, which we conceptualize and empirically operationalize. Drawing on social information processing theory, we explicate how these signals help sustain and perpetuate sexual harassment. We further argue that supervisors can counteract these harmful signals of silence by modeling ethical leadership. We investigated these ideas with two sets of studies comprising seven independent samples. In Study 1 ( N total = 2649 participants), Phases 1 through 5, we developed and validated a higher‐order aggregate measure of harassment signals of silence (Harassment SOS scale) comprising three interrelated elements: being silent, silencing others, and not listening. In Study 2 ( N total = 1111 participants), we used field samples collected from two North American police departments to test the relationship between signals of silence and experiences of harassment, along with the role of ethical supervision in mitigating the harmful effects of silence. We discuss the implications of these findings for research and practice, including the implementation of relevant HR policies and practices.

This study examines how the COVID‐19 pandemic, as a disruptive external shock, has reshaped organizational practices, with particular emphasis on changes in work design and compensation strategies. Drawing on a unique dataset of over 1.8 million online job postings from Chinese publicly listed firms, we employed a large language model to systematically quantify work design characteristics. Using a difference‐in‐differences approach, we found that the pandemic significantly enhanced skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, feedback, and work‐from‐home feasibility. Notably, these effects varied by occupational nonroutineness: occupations with high nonroutineness exhibited larger increases in task significance but smaller increases in other work design characteristics. Moreover, work design characteristics mediated the relationship between the pandemic and salaries, though these indirect effects were attenuated for nonroutine occupations. Additionally, we observed post‐pandemic adjustments in firms' compensation, including notable declines in performance‐related pay and insurance benefits, accompanied by increases in subsidies. These findings provide new insights into how organizations redesign work and adjust compensation strategies in response to large‐scale external shocks.

Despite the increasing application of digital technology in management practices, its implications for employee involvement and high involvement work systems (HIWSs) remain largely unexplored. Based on an in‐depth qualitative case study of Tencent—one of China's largest information technology companies—this article explores whether and in what ways employee experience (EX)‐oriented digital HRM contributes to the development of HIWSs. Drawing on socio‐technical systems theory, we examine the goals, tasks, structures, actors, and technical elements of the digital HRM system in the case company, as well as the interactions among these elements. Our findings suggest that the EX‐oriented digital HRM system enhances two key dimensions of HIWSs: technological empowerment and organizational involvement. First, EX‐oriented digital HRM provides employees with digital tools that enable them to exercise some autonomy in various facets of their work life. This includes self‐management, team collaboration, and personalized learning and development opportunities. Second, EX‐oriented digital HRM arguably promotes employee involvement in both product development and some aspects of organizational management by leveraging user experience design. This study contributes to the theory of socio‐technical systems and the literature on HIWSs in the digital era.

New ventures are expected to continuously add new jobs and managerial positions to meet the expanding demands of scaling. However, the rapid pace and inherent uncertainty of scaling often lead founders of new ventures to rely on heuristics when making these critical hiring and managerial appointment decisions. By integrating research on scaling, cognition in decision‐making, and gender stereotypes with literature on HR practices, we argue that such heuristics can exacerbate reliance on gender stereotypes rather than the actual competencies of potential candidates. Using matched employer‐employee census data covering all new ventures established and led by solo male founders in Sweden between 2004 and 2018, we find that scaling decreases the likelihood of hiring females for job positions and appointing females to managerial positions. However, the founder's HR education mitigates these negative effects on both female hiring and managerial appointments, while the founder's HR experience only mitigates the negative effects on female hiring decisions. We also tease out the invoked mechanisms, conduct post hoc tests, and run an extensive number of robustness tests.

Performance appraisal (PA) is commonly used by organizations to manage their employees. However, the role of PAs in employee creativity remains ambiguous, with positive, negative, or even nonsignificant relationships reported in the literature. The aim of the present research is to address this ambiguity. Drawing on multidimensional conceptualizations of PA and creativity, and integrating self‐determination theory and expectancy theory with selection, optimization, and compensation theory, we develop a multilevel conceptual framework incorporating diverse linkages between PAs and creativity. Time‐lagged survey data were collected from 582 research and development employees working in 49 companies. The results indicate that developmental PA is positively related to radical creativity via intrinsic motivation, with age augmenting this indirect linkage. In contrast, administrative PA is positively related to incremental creativity through extrinsic motivation, with age attenuating this indirect relationship. These findings extend the theoretical understanding of the PA–creativity relationship and offer important practical insights into the utility of PAs in managing employee creativity.

Human resource management (HRM) is inherently complex. It involves systems of principles, practices, and activities operating at individual, group, organizational, and macro levels, which are interlinked through complex processes. Yet, empirical research has not kept pace with this conceptual richness. We hope to inspire HRM scholars to address complexity. We draw on theoretical frameworks that explicitly conceptualize systems as systems , processes as processes and systems as processes complemented by empirical examples (mainly from adjacent fields) to illustrate how these modes of thinking have helped solve complex problems and how this could be applied to HRM. Embracing complexity in HRM is not about making research harder for its own sake but about seeing the field as it truly is dynamic, interconnected, and evolving. We need to shift our attention from isolated variables toward patterns, processes, and interdependencies across time. This requires richer data, deeper collaboration, and methodological boldness, and opens new possibilities for understanding the patterns and dynamics that shape people and organizations. Complexity in HRM invites us to see connections rather than fragments, to uncover the dynamics beneath the surface, and to design insights that matter. Perhaps the future of HRM research lies not in simplifying complexity, but in embracing it.

Employees' bridging social capital (EBSC), conceptualized as the collective bridging social capital that employees bring into the organization, has been recognized as a potential resource for fostering organizational resilience (i.e., the ability to survive and thrive when confronted with unexpected disruptions and challenges), especially for small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in a turbulent business environment. However, the questions of how and when EBSC relates to organizational resilience remain underexplored. Drawing on dynamic capabilities theory, we propose that knowledge sharing—a dynamic and emergent process where knowledge is introduced, exchanged, combined, and integrated within organizations—represents a key process through which EBSC may be associated with organizational resilience. We further propose that this mechanism is stronger in organizations that extensively implement high‐involvement work practices (HIWPs). Using data from 1131 participants (including top management team members, middle‐level managers, and entry‐level employees) across 175 SMEs in Nigeria, we find that the relationship between EBSC and knowledge sharing, as well as the indirect association between EBSC and organizational resilience via knowledge sharing, is stronger when HIWPs are high rather than low. These findings highlight the importance of HIWPs in leveraging EBSC to enhance organizational resilience, providing practical insights for SMEs seeking to harness EBSC for organizational advantages.

Employee retention, motivation, performance, and well‐being remain enduring priorities in human resource management, yet existing constructs such as engagement, commitment, and satisfaction do not fully capture the depth of emotional attachment that some employees feel towards their jobs. We introduce Love of the Job (LOJ) as a higher‐order form of affective attachment to one's job that integrates passion for one's work, non‐romantic intimacy with coworkers, and commitment to organizational membership, grounded in Sternberg's triangular theory of love. Across a four‐stage, eight‐sample program of research (total N = 1,801), we develop and validate a concise and reliable LOJ scale using diverse working‐adult samples and longitudinal designs. The measure demonstrates strong psychometric properties and discriminant validity from related constructs, establishing LOJ as a distinct form of work attachment, and shows incremental predictive validity for key outcomes, including discretionary performance, innovation, and job crafting, as well as retention and well‐being indicators such as turnover intentions, partial absenteeism, and work neglect. Together, these findings position LOJ as a novel, theoretically grounded construct with strategic relevance for HRM and provide scholars and practitioners with a robust tool to assess and better understand employees' deep emotional attachment to their work.

The increasing use of information communication technology (ICT) has made telepressure, the urge to reply quickly to work‐related messages, a common experience among today's employees. By integrating theoretical underpinnings of conservation of resources with rumination literature, we posit that after‐hours telepressure leads to a resource‐loss process via evening affective rumination, as this type of rumination increases next‐morning emotional exhaustion. In the meantime, after‐hours telepressure enables a resource‐gain process via evening problem‐solving pondering, as this type of rumination promotes next‐morning cognitive flexibility. Moreover, we argue that leader path‐goal facilitation, leader behaviors that facilitate employees' goal achievement by providing guidance and removing obstacles, alleviates the impact of after‐hours telepressure on employees' next‐morning emotional exhaustion by reducing their evening affective rumination and strengthens the positive effect of after‐hours telepressure on employees' next‐morning cognitive flexibility by increasing their evening problem‐solving pondering. Through a 10‐day experience sampling investigation of 81 employees working in various industries in China (i.e., Study 1) and a 5‐day experience sampling investigation of 95 employees in an e‐commerce company in Singapore (i.e., Study 2), we find support for most of our hypotheses. As a whole, by providing a more balanced account of the consequences of after‐hours telepressure from the COR perspective, our work advances extant management literature and offers novel practical insights in terms that companies can help employees suffer less and even benefit from telepressure by enhancing leaders' levels of path‐goal facilitation.