Knowledge that Transforms

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.

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.

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.

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.

It has been claimed that the HR “profession” suffers from a chronic shortage of social legitimacy. In this article, we advance the idea that HR is also to some extent subject to public stigmatization for being immoral. In other words, we maintain that certain aspects of contemporary HR work can be conceptualized as morally dirty work. We provide empirical support for this contention by analyzing a set of 28 films portraying HR practitioners at work. The research results comprise both task‐related and method‐related filmic representations of HR work as immoral, thus furnishing a comprehensive and nuanced picture of the moral issues that can affect the HR profession. Furthermore, the results show that some of the HR characters analyzed—typically those who hold a role as (co‐)protagonists in the story—realize the immorality affecting their work and decide to distance themselves from it by either exiting the role, trying to reform it, or openly raising resistance against their employer. These research results suggest the need to integrate dirty work scholarship into study of the HR profession, while they provide important indications in terms of future HR research, practice and education.

Thriving is believed to occur when employees feel a sense of progress and momentum in the organization. This conceptual basis for thriving is inherently temporal—implying an underlying individual change process—which sets thriving apart from other well‐being criteria in the Human Resource Management literature. However, surprisingly little research has demonstrated and unpacked the change and development processes that lead to thriving. In this article, we develop and test a theoretical model of the dynamic origins of thriving in a socially important context: the aging workforce. Specifically, we propose that older workers thrive when they experience relational spirals: a deepening of the employee‐organization relationship as psychological contracts and role expansion drive each other in a mutually reinforcing spiral. Results from a large‐scale nationally representative longitudinal study of 3370 Australian older workers—spanning 1.5 years and three time points—support the proposed model. Older workers' relational psychological contracts and role expansion formed a mutually reinforcing spiral process over time which ultimately led to higher levels of thriving. These results held even after imposing autoregressive control of lagged variables at earlier time points, and after accounting for the contributions of transactional psychological contracts to the spiral process. Our theorizing and empirical approach brings dynamic processes to the forefront of HR research on thriving, and points to implications for the role of HR in successful aging.

Although Assessment Center (AC) role‐play assessments have received ample attention in past research, their reliance on actual behavioral information is still unclear. Uncovering the behavioral basis of AC role‐play assessments is, however, a prerequisite for the optimization of existing and the development of novel automated AC procedures. This work provides a first data‐driven benchmark for the behavioral prediction and explanation of AC performance judgments. We used machine learning models trained on behavioral cues ( C = 36) to predict performance judgments in three interpersonal AC exercises from a real‐life high‐stakes AC (selection of medical students, N = 199). Three main findings emerged: First, behavioral prediction models showed substantial predictive performance and outperformed prediction models representing potential judgment biases. Comparisons with in‐sample results revealed overfitting of traditional approaches, highlighting the importance of out‐of‐sample evaluations. Second, we demonstrate that linear combinations of behavioral cues can be strong predictors of assessors' judgments. Third, we identified consistent exercise‐specific patterns of individual cues and cross‐exercise consistent behavioral patterns of behavioral dimensions and interpersonal strategies that were especially predictive of the assessors' judgments. We discuss implications for future research and practice.

While the compressed workweek (CWW) has gained traction in recent years, its impact on firms' financial performance is not well understood. This study addresses this gap in the literature by examining the effect of the CWW on shareholder value. Drawing on social exchange theory and its norm of reciprocity, we introduce a conceptual model on the main effect of the CWW on shareholder value, and the moderating roles of the anticipated type and degree of employee reciprocation. To test the model's predictions, we exploit the announcement of Belgium's mandatory adoption of a CWW in February 2022 as the setting for a policy event study analysis. We find positive average stock price reactions of Belgian listed firms to the CWW's announcement, consistent with investors expecting the CWW to result in favorable employee reciprocation. Stock price reactions are more positive for firms with a lower ex ante employee productivity, suggesting employees are predicted to reciprocate with higher efforts. Stock price reactions are also more positive for firms with a higher reliance on knowledge workers, consistent with these employees deriving a greater utility from flexible working arrangements. Robustness tests, including a placebo analysis and an event study of international firms with Belgian subsidiaries, corroborate our results. Our study offers several theoretical contributions and has practical implications for HR managers and policymakers.

In our study, we examine implementation of strength‐based practice (SBP) that invokes a new way of working for social workers in England. We note two antecedent conditions to support new ways of working. First, hybrid managers, who combine professional and organizational perspectives, act as a conduit for implementation of new ways of working through supporting implementation of high performance work practices (HPWPs). Second, the financial context faced by social care providers influences whether new ways of working, and HPWPs associated with this, aim to improve productivity, or enhance capability and commitment of social workers. We identify three HPWPs that support the new way of working because they align with professional identity of social workers. First, hybrid manager jobs were designed to afford opportunity for recruitment of appropriately able social workers to enact strategic influence over SBP implementation. Second, intervention to support peer‐to‐peer learning enhanced the ability of social workers to deliver SBP, and also motivated social workers toward SBP implementation because they retained professional autonomy in developing their practice. Third, performance management intervention was developmental rather than judgmental, designed to enhance ability of social workers to deliver SBP. Similar to the peer learning intervention, it remained within control of social workers, hence motivated them to engage with SBP.

Understanding how employees respond to HR systems is a critical question in the strategic HR literature and the need for more nuanced theoretical frameworks explaining who responds differentially to HR systems persists. Drawing on a contingency perspective and the theory of purposeful work behavior, we present a theoretical framework that suggests that employee motivational goal strivings interact with commensurate HR bundles (communion‐enhancing HR bundles, status‐enhancing HR bundles, and achievement‐enhancing HR bundles) to predict employee job performance. Based on survey data collected from 362 employees in 84 service units, our findings reveal that the effects of communion and status strivings on job performance are more positive and stronger for employees in units with higher levels of communion‐enhancing HR bundles and status‐enhancing HR bundles, respectively. In contrast, the effect of achievement goal strivings on job performance is weaker in units with higher levels of achievement‐enhancing HR bundles. These findings have significant implications for both theoretical and practical perspectives, shedding light on the role of employee motivations in shaping the effectiveness of HR bundles on employee performance.