AbstractWe want to create a new narrative about the human resource (HR) profession. HR professionals have often been plagued with self‐doubts, repeatedly re‐exploring HR's role, value, and competencies. If HR is to fully (and finally) become a profession, these self‐doubts need to be replaced with informed insights. These informed insights should be based more on global data than personal perceptions so that the emerging narrative for the HR profession has both substance and meaning.

Abstract We analyze the consequences of consumer education on prices and welfare in retail financial markets when some consumers are naive about shrouded add-on prices and banks try to exploit this. Allowing for different information and pricing strategies we show that education is unlikely to push banks to full price disclosure, which would be efficient, but instead to a new equilibrium in which banks discriminate between consumer types. Welfare analysis reveals that education, while positive for consumers who learn to make better financial decisions, imposes a negative externality on other consumers when banks respond by setting higher prices. Overall, the welfare effects of consumer education can be negative. Our results identify important pitfalls policy makers should take into account when considering the seemingly harmless intervention of consumer education.

Recent years have shown an increased focus on workforce analytics and the importance of workforce analytics in helping HR professionals to be more useful business partners. This suggests that HR professionals may need to become more and more data savvy and develop better analytical abilities if they hope to perform well and contribute meaningfully in the future. Despite this emphasis, there has been no research explicitly connecting the individual level analytical abilities of HR professionals to their job performance. Using a proprietary sample of 360 feedback surveys from 1,117 HR professionals in 449 unique organizations we test this general relationship. We also test whether the relationship varies by industry‐, company‐, and job‐level factors. We find support for our main hypotheses that HR professionals with higher analytical abilities will also have higher perceived job performance. We also find that the strength of this relationship varies by some job roles. We explore and discuss these empirical results.

Despite substantive organizational ramifications, surprisingly little theory explains executive succession planning processes. A firm’s board of directors has the fiduciary responsibility to select CEOs, but, historically, boards have failed to exercise this authority. Increasing focus on corporate governance has prompted directors to become more engaged in organizational management, but boards face significant barriers to gathering and processing information. However, there is a dearth of research examining how boards overcome informational barriers to enhance decision-making effectiveness. Accordingly, the current study integrates procedural rationality in decision-making with research on boards as information-processing groups to explore how and why boards conduct succession planning processes. Procedural rationality results in formalized processes designed to collect essential information about CEO succession candidates; these processes, in turn, lead to a greater quantity and quality of CEO succession candidates. We also illustrate how CEOs can influence the effectiveness of board information gathering and processing. The tests of the theoretically generated hypotheses rely on in-depth qualitative interviews, coupled with unique survey and archival data from 355 firm-year observations of 218 large organizations, collected over three years.