Employees increasingly conduct work outside of traditional work hours via information communication technologies (ICTs). There is a need to understand how after‐hours ICT use relates to well‐being, given that such connectivity has become unavoidable. We implement an episodic, event‐contingent design to evaluate the association between different ICT media (i.e., e‐mail, phone call, chat app, short message service) and the within‐person outcomes of psychological detachment as partially mediated by task productivity. A daily diary survey was collected over three consecutive workdays to capture after‐hours ICT use. Daily surveys were completed by 498 individuals, with a total of 1494 episodes being captured of after‐hours work ICT engagement. Our results indicate that while engagement with any form of ICT after hours reduces psychological detachment, email and chat apps are associated with the lowest levels of psychological detachment. Moreover, whereas the use of asynchronous ICT has positive main effects on episode‐related task productivity, the use of synchronous ICT (e.g., phone) only enhances episode‐related task productivity when there are high organizational expectations for employees' responsiveness after hours.

Drawing on self‐determination theory, this study advances our understanding of employees' experiences working from home (WFH). Specifically, we examine the effects of two social‐contextual characteristics of WFH arrangements: whether employees voluntarily initiate their arrangement ( WFH initiation) and the proportion of WFH employees in a unit ( WFH density ). We conducted multilevel analyses on a multisource dataset drawn from organizational HR records and two surveys of 2115 WFH employees in a Fortune 500 organization. Employees who voluntarily initiated WFH, rather than at their employer's direction, experienced higher job autonomy and lower isolation. WFH employees in units with a lower proportion of other WFH employees experienced higher job autonomy. WFH initiation and WFH density also had effects on several distal employee outcomes, including job satisfaction, organizational knowledge, and turnover intentions, through their effects on job autonomy and isolation. Our findings provide valuable insight into the experiences of WFH employees and call attention to two important, yet understudied, factors that shape these experiences.

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.

Using an institutional lens, we investigate the isomorphic effects of both external and internal contexts on human resource management (HRM) systems. Our analysis uses data from 4768 organizations across 34 countries to focus on the similarities in HRM systems. By employing distance matrices, a commonly adopted method in geographic science, we find that both external and internal contexts affect (dis)similarities in HRM systems. Organizations in similar environments exhibit more similar HRM systems. Furthermore, we find that the devolvement of HRM activities from HRM to line management reduces the similarity of HRM systems across organizations. By contrast, a strong strategic position of HRM does not yield a comparable effect. Our study's main contributions include elucidating the multifaceted relationship between context and HRM, highlighting the HRM department's role in this relationship, clarifying the context–HRM connection via the concept of isomorphic pressures, and illustrating the use of distance matrices as tool with great explanatory power for the analysis of similarities among HRM phenomena.

When employees begin a new job in a competitive sales environment, they have a lot to learn in a short period of time. Most organizations incorporate an employee orientation and formal training, but newcomers also learn informally while on the job. We examine the impact of informal field‐based learning (IFBL) on individual outcomes of 242 newcomer sales employees. We investigate how supervisor empowerment interacts with employees' goal orientation to impact IFBL, which serves as a conduit to further influence training transfer and employee outcomes (i.e., supervisor‐rated performance, promotion, and turnover). Results demonstrate that IFBL promotes formal training transfer, which influences newcomers subsequent job performance, promotion, and turnover. We also found that supervisor empowerment has an indirect effect on employee promotion and turnover sequentially through IFBL, training transfer, and performance, and this indirect effect is moderated by employee goal orientation. Practical implications for leveraging supervisor empowerment and tailoring support based on employee goal orientation are discussed.

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.