Employment discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender ( LGBT ) individuals remains a persistent problem not addressed by federal and most state equal employment opportunity laws in the United States. Despite this lack of regulation, a growing number of organizations are voluntarily adding sexual orientation and gender identity to their nondiscrimination statements, providing domestic partner benefits, sponsoring affinity groups, and establishing other “ LGBT ‐friendly” policies. This article incorporates institutional theory and organizational demography to explore the antecedents to these policies to understand why some organizations seek to be at the forefront of this trend while others do only the minimum to embrace this element of diversity. The analysis of a sample of Fortune 1000 firms reveals that state law dealing with gay rights in non‐employment‐related areas for the state where each company is headquartered, the number of women serving on each firm's board of directors, and whether other companies in the same industry have adopted progressive policies are all related to company policy toward its LGBT employees. Sexual orientation of employees by industry does not seem to influence company policy.

Research findings from industrial and organizational psychology and other disciplines cast doubt on the simple assertion that a diverse workforce inevitably improves business performance. Instead, research and theory suggest several conditions necessary to manage diversity initiatives successfully and reap organizational benefits. This article reviews empirical research and theory on the relationship between workforce diversity and organizational performance and outlines practical steps HR practitioners can take to manage diversity initiatives successfully and enhance the positive outcomes.

While it has long been recognized that the human resource function must take a more customer-oriented perspective on the design and delivery of HR programs, this view has focused primarily on internal customers. However, external customers can provide important input into HR activities (e.g., job analysis information), they can participate in HR activities (e.g., selection decisions), and they can use HR activities (e.g., receive training). By expanding customer orientation in the HR function to focus explicitly on external customers, a more direct relationship between human resource management and competitive organizational performance can be established.

By examining the case of American and European firms operating in Japan, this article contributes to the central debate of how and when multinational corporations (MNCs) learn from their foreign subsidiaries. Through structural equation modeling, we assess how specific human resource management (HRM) practices (critical thinking encouragement, supervisory encouragement, learning incentives, deployment of internal mechanisms and processes, expatriation, and corporate training) enhance (1) knowledge transfer outflows from the subsidiary to other parts of the MNC and (2) the subsidiary's performance in its local market. We find learning orientation to be a key antecedent of all HRM practices we investigated. From a practical point of view, a noticeable finding relates to the lack of effects of critical thinking encouragement on market knowledge acquisition and dissemination when (1) there is a significant presence of expatriates in the subsidiary and (2) when local managers have access to training programs at headquarters (HQ) and other affiliates.

Teams are pervasive in today's world, and rightfully so as we need them. Drawing upon the existing extensive body of research surrounding the topic of teamwork, we delineate nine “critical considerations” that serve as a practical heuristic by which HR leaders can determine what is needed when they face situations involving teamwork. Our heuristic is not intended to be the definitive set of all considerations for teamwork, but instead consolidates key findings from a vast literature to provide an integrated understanding of the underpinnings of teamwork—specifically, what should be considered when selecting, developing, and maintaining teams. This heuristic is designed to help those in practice diagnose team‐based problems by providing a clear focus on relevant aspects of teamwork. To this end, we first define teamwork and its related elements. Second, we offer a high‐level conceptualization of and justification for the nine selected considerations underlying the heuristic, which is followed by a more in‐depth synthesis of related literature as well as empirically‐driven practical guidance. Third, we conclude with a discussion regarding how this heuristic may best be used from a practical standpoint, as well as offer areas for future research regarding both teamwork and its critical considerations.

This paper reports the results of two studies undertaken in the same Fortune 500 company as it adopted an Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) program. Study 1 assessed employees' perceptions of fairness, trust, and turnover intentions regarding ADR options. Compared with other options for ADR, a program consisting of mandatory mediation followed by mandatory and binding arbitration (MMBA) resulted in significantly lower levels of procedural fairness perception, organizational trust, and intentions to stay with the firm. Contrary to previous research, no significant effects were found related to respondents' demographic characteristics and their reactions to ADR program characteristics. In Study 2, job‐applicant flow data were evaluated and compared by corporate region to determine the effects of an MMBA program installed in one region. Results revealed no significant effects related to the MMBA program on the organization's ability to recruit and ultimately fill key positions. As in Study 1, no significant effects were found in Study 2 for the demographic characteristics of applicant race/ethnicity, gender, or age on applicant recruitment decisions. Although Study 2 results indicated job candidates are unaffected by the existence of an MMBA program, given Study 1's results, practitioners should be cautious about implementing such a program for current employees.

Moneyball (Lewis, 2003), a New York Times bestseller, is a book about baseball. When read through a broader lens, however, Moneyball is also a book about innovation, resistance to change, competitive advantage, achieving excellence, and, of most relevance here, human resource management. While many would agree that the radical innovation described in Moneyball represents a “new vision of management” in baseball, this article describes how Moneyball lessons might contribute to a “new vision of HRM” in various types of organizations. The focus of the article is on what HR executives and scholars can learn from the Moneyball phenomenon. More specifically, the authors address a number questions related to the Moneyball story that have relevance to successfully implementing HRM innovations; these questions have to do with overcoming resistance to the implementation of radical innovation and how HRM innovation can contribute to sustainable competitive advantage.

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In this research, we aim to further our understanding of supervisors' enactment of psychosocial risk management and their own psychological responses to supporting employees through stressful work situations. Informed by event system theorizing and the special case of affective events, we examined 342 employee critical events of a stressful nature through the eyes of the supervisor. Thematic analysis revealed 16 supervisor actions that were aggregated into nine supervisor action themes that supervisors evaluated for stressfulness and effectiveness. Clustering stressfulness and effectiveness scores revealed the emergence of three supervisor groups: favorable, unfavorable, and challenge. Multinomial logistic regressions demonstrated that both organizational and supervisor psychosocial risk management capabilities reduced the odds of supervisors developing unfavorable psychological responses in relation to their supervisor action, whereas supervisors with time pressure and psychological distress had increased odds. In addition, supervisors experiencing psychological distress had a twofold likelihood of experiencing their chosen action as both stressful and effective, calling into question the potential for future benefits to arise from what might be otherwise considered a challenge experience. Overall, our findings demonstrate that pre‐existing features of the supervisor's own psychosocial work environment shape their psychological responses to having enacted psychosocial risk management, irrespective of the type of supervisor action.

The integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) into knowledge work is fundamentally reshaping employee performance and value creation in ways that challenge conventional wisdom. Rather than performance disparities being reduced through AI adoption, we argue that they may increase as star employees leverage superior domain expertise and strategic AI deployment to widen performance gaps—a phenomenon we term the “AI‐specific Matthew Effect.” These performance transformations coincide with dramatic shifts in value appropriation dynamics: Personal AI tools will enhance employee bargaining power by enabling portable, high‐value outputs independent of organizational resources, whereas enterprise AI systems serve as novel isolating mechanisms that strengthen firm value capture. These developments necessitate a theoretical reconceptualization of strategic human capital frameworks. Accordingly, we introduce the AI‐specific Matthew Effect to explain how AI may intensify performance stratification, modeling how AI reconfigures value creation and capture between employees and firms, and extending foundational human capital theories to account for human–AI complementarity. Our integrative theoretical framework offers critical guidance for navigating this transformation, helping organizations balance productivity gains with workforce equity in an uncertain era of interdependent human and artificial intelligence.