The influence of HR practices upon knowledge brokering in professional organizations for service improvement: Addressing professional legitimacy and identity in health care

Drawing upon sociology of professions, our study extends insight into the specific HR practices that shape the microdynamics of knowledge-sharing behaviors among professionals. Empirically, we examine the influence of Human Resource (HR) practices on enactment of a knowledge-brokering role by doctors to drive service improvement in health care. Our study shows, first, HR practices influence professional identity, which is predicated on jurisdictional autonomy and client interest. Second, HR practices influence the legitimacy of any role and associated activities, with professionals valuing collegial leadership and evidence-based practice. Our study highlights it is employee perceptions of the effect of HR practices upon their legitimacy and identity that shape their attitudes and behavior toward knowledge sharing. Thus, different HR practices have different effects on knowledge sharing. Further, the same HR practice may be perceived differently even within the same cadre of professionals, depending upon their relative status and career interests.     

Human resource differentiation: A theoretical paper integrating co‐workers' perspective and context

This paper conceptualises “human resource (HR) differentiation” as a set of deliberate and differentiating HR practices across individuals within the organisation to address employees' unique work needs and preferences as well as reward them for their input. Despite the importance of HR differentiation, research has mainly focused on the recipients of such practices, overlooking the consequences of HR differentiation from co‐workers' perspective. This is a significant omission because a growing concern suggests that HR differentiation might be a double‐edged sword, as the presumed positive effects might only be confined to employees benefiting from it. Taking a first step, this paper offers a conceptual model that explains how co‐workers of a focal employee, who is entitled to an advantageous outcome through HR differentiation, are likely to react, either positively by showing contentment or negatively by showing anger, with behavioural consequences towards the focal employee and organisation. In so doing, we rely on deontic justice theory and explore contextual conditions at the individual and team level under which co‐workers react. As a result, our model can inspire future research by adopting a broader and more inclusive approach to HR differentiation, underlining the need for caution when implementing HR differentiation in a team setting.     

The last taboo?: surfacing and supporting Emotional Labour in HR work

The emotional challenges Human Resource Professionals (HRPs) face, and the work they do in managing emotion in day to day HR practice, have largely gone unacknowledged and unsupported and yet is arguably HR’s most value-added activity. Through in-depth interviews and diary study, we uncover the emotion handling aspect of HR work. Specifically we explore Emotional Labour (EL) which, despite its centrality to HR work, remains under-researched in the HR context. By asking our participants to recount and reflect on emotive interactions, we examine HRPs’ use of EL in their relational work; how they come to learn the emotion display rules of their role; the strategies they use to cope with such emotional demands and the factors that help/hinder this process. Our contribution is to ‘surface’ emotion in HR work and identify how organisations can prepare HRPs for, and support them in, their emotion handling efforts.     

Discretionary and transactional human resource practices and employee outcomes: The role of perceived organizational support

Utilizing perceived organizational support (POS) as the mechanism linking HR practices to employee behaviors in the workplace, we examine a broad set of HR practices in order to understand the relative importance of each HR practice (i.e., those that explain incremental variance over other practices) in influencing employee behaviors. We differentiate between discretionary and transactional HR practices to test the discretionary investment requisite of POS theory. The results show that of the eight discretionary practices, only participation and decision making directly influenced the extra‐role behaviors that employees exhibit, and only training and development directly impacted the customer‐oriented behaviors. Furthermore, one of the transactional HR practices was found to have a direct effect on organizational citizenship behavior. Our findings indicate that the performance management process, promotional opportunities, participation, and involvement in decision making affect how employees behave toward the customer and the extra‐role behaviors they exhibit. Furthermore, this occurs through the view employees develop of the organization as a place to work. That is, these four HR practices demonstrate to employees that they are valued, and, in turn, this feeling of being appreciated impacts their commitment to delivering high‐quality service to the customer and going beyond their job responsibilities. Implications for research and practice are discussed. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Technology transfer executives' backwards integration: An examination of interactions between university technology transfer executives and principal investigators

This paper examines interactions between technology transfer office (TTO) executives and publicly funded principal investigators (PIs) within the university. Although both actors make important contributions to value creation at the base of the triple helix, their identities remain under development and their interactions have been the subject of little if any empirical inquiry. Drawing on identity transitions and role boundaries, we suggest that PIs’ forward integration in the innovation process and the persistence of strong role boundaries with TTO executives hinders the value-creating potential of their interactions. To examine this issue we study how TTO executives surmount role boundaries to secure effective engagement with PIs. Based on 42 interviews with (15) TTO executives and (27) PIs in New Zealand our results make a number of contributions. For literature we find that TTO executives are leveraging shared ties with funding agencies to offer assistance in the preparation of PIs’ grant applications. Specifically, our findings indicate that TTO executives are probing deeper within the university and becoming more valued at the input side of the value chain as a key intermediary between university and funding bodies than between university and industry. Notably, we find this backward integration by TTOs is timely given PIs’ perceptions that TTO executives have difficulties mastering capabilities related to their more recognized expertise in market validation, business development and industry connectivity. We discuss the implications of these findings for practice, none more so than the challenges they present for the identity work of TTO executives at the micro-foundations of the triple helix.     

Whose Right to Jerusalem?

Jerusalem is a city mired in spatial conflict. Its contested spaces represent deep conflicts among groups that vary by national identity, religion, religiosity and gender. The omnipresent nature of these conflicts provides an opportunity to look at Henri Lefebvre's concept of the right to the city (RTC). The RTC has been adopted and celebrated as a political tool for positive change, enabling communities to take control of space. Based on extensive fieldwork and in‐depth interviews, this article explores the complexity of the RTC principles and examines three urban battlefields in Jerusalem — Bar‐Ilan Street, the Kotel and the Orient House. The RTC is a powerful idea, providing the opportunity to examine people's everyday activities within the context of how space can be used to support their lives. Yet Jerusalem's myriad divisions produce claims by different groups to different parts of the city. In Jerusalem, the RTC is not a clear vision but a kaleidoscope of rights that produces a fragmented landscape within a religious and ethno‐national context governed by the nation state — Israel. The growth of cultural and ethnic diversity in urban areas may limit the possibility for a unified RTC to emerge in an urban sea of demands framed by difference. Space‐based cultural conflict exemplifies urban divisions and exacerbates claims to ‘my Jerusalem’, not ‘our Jerusalem’. Identity‐based claims to the RTC appear to work against, not for, a universalistic RTC.     

Work transformation and the HR ecosystem dynamics: A longitudinal case study of HRM disruption in the era of the 4th industrial revolution

Disruption in human resource management (HRM) practices necessitates processes of mutual adjustment within the organization that seeks to address these changes properly, overcome tensions, and fit strategic needs. In our single longitudinal case study of a new HRM practice development concerning blue-collar worker talent management, we examine how HR professionals and managers interact and develop new HRM practices as a response to disruptive work transformation. Considering these interactions from the perspective of HR ecosystem alignment dynamics, we find that both managers and HR professionals engaged in fruitful collaboration processes along three differentiated steps to provide value for the whole organization. We propose a grounded theorizing of HR ecosystem alignment that is based on the progression of successive convergent and divergent phases and introducing collaborative spaces of work.     

Strategic HRM as process: how HR system and organizational climate strength influence Chinese employee attitudes

In contrast to the high-performance work systems literature that focuses on HR practices, we follow Bowen and Ostroff in examining human resource management (HRM) processes, specifically the strength of an HR system (its distinctiveness, consistency, and consensus) and its contribution to the organizational climate (employees' shared perceptions of the HR system). Based on 810 employees within 64 units in three Chinese hotels, we examine how employee perceptions of HRM system strength and organizational climate are associated with employees' work satisfaction, vigor, and intention to quit. The distinctiveness of an HRM system was found to be related to the three employee work attitudes, and high climate strength increases both the positive relationship between consensus and work satisfaction, and the negative relationship between consensus and intention to quit. We draw on aspects of Chinese society to interpret these findings. Several important research and HR practice implications are highlighted and discussed.     

Paying the piper: choice and constraint in changing HR functional roles

HR directors are often exhorted to play a more ‘strategic’ role in their organisations. However, it is not necessarily clear what is meant by this, or whether it is possible for departments to change their role at a whim. In this article we examine the changing role of the HR function within two contrasting organisations – an NHS trust and a bank – over a period of seven years. Drawing on role‐set theory and concepts of negotiated order, we illustrate how HR functional roles are located within a complex and dynamic social setting, and present a model that seeks to map these interrelationships.     

Preparing for organizational death: Proactive HR engagement in an organizational transition

This article describes an HR team's call to action in managing an organization's transition from healthy, vibrant, and financially successful workplace to its death after being acquired. The HR team countered conventional practice in two key ways. First, despite being from the seller's side, it acted unusually early in the company's acquisition and operated proactively throughout the integration process. This constructive approach stemmed from the self‐confidence developed in the HR function over years of process improvement and culture change. Second, the HR professionals were motivated (rather than threatened) by the high stakes involved in this organizational transition. Their company—with its industry‐leading business results and a loyal, long‐tenured workforce—was slated to be closed, dismantled, and auctioned off in pieces to other firms. The HR team's mission was to help people deal with the death of their current employer and prepare for life afterward while maintaining a focus on business results. This article shows how HR helped senior leadership handle the challenge of retaining the talent needed to meet customer commitments and keep the business running while also readying people for an uncertain future with many eventual layoffs. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Performance implications for the relationships among top management leadership,organizational culture,and appraisal practice: testing two theory-based models of organizational learning theory in Japan

The purpose of this study was to examine the interrelationships among top management leadership, organizational culture and human resource (HR) practices, and their associative effects on organizational performance. Based on the theory of organizational learning, we developed and tested two different causal models: (1) a feed-forward learning flow model in which supportive leadership by top management would create a community culture and HR practices within organizations; and (2) a feedback learning flow model in which a community culture would support the practice of supportive leadership by top management and HR practices within a firm. Our structural equation modelling (SEM) results for a sample of 225 Japanese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Japan supported the second model, in which the dominance of a community culture within the firm is an antecedent of top management's supportive leadership, which in turn necessitates a performance-based appraisal practice and eventually leads to better organizational performance in terms of objective indicators of turnover and absenteeism rates and workforce productivity. The findings are used to discuss the role of top management leadership in a particular organizational culture from the organizational learning perspective. Limitations and directions for future research are also discussed.     

Sink or Swim: Empowering Leadership and Overload in Teams' Ability to Deal with the Unexpected

The notion of improvisation has recently emerged in managerial studies as a viable solution to flexibly dealing with unexpected occurrences in work environments. However, past research on team improvisation has overlooked the contingencies that allow teams to effectively improvise. Drawing upon demand‐control theory, we investigate how empowering leadership and overload affect the improvisation‐performance relationship in the context of 48 work teams. Our results suggest that empowering leadership positively moderates the relationship between improvisation and performance, while overload attenuates the same relationship. Moreover, we found a joint effect of overload and empowering leadership influencing the improvisation‐performance link, such that improvisation is most positively related to performance when empowering leadership is high and overload is low. Conversely, we found that empowering leadership is particularly detrimental to the improvisation‐performance relationship when team members perceive high degrees of overload. Our findings make important contributions to the extant team literature as well as to the emerging literature on team improvisation. We outline several significant insights for HR managers and team leaders who are responsible for supporting teams that face unexpected events in the work environment. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

High reliability Human Resource Management (HRM): A system for high risk workplaces

High Performance Work Systems (HPWS) research is based on the search for the most suitable bundle of complementary practices appropriate for the organisation and its operating environment. We examine the contents of a HPWS in organisations seeking impeccable safety and reliability as their foremost ‘performance’ outcome. We propose a ‘High Reliability HRM’ framework, and examine the degree of implementation in a three case study of Australian state emergency services organisations. The findings highlight HRM practices inconsistent with the framework, and illustrated by rich interview accounts, we detail associated negative implications for employee behaviour and attitudes. We contribute to HPWS research by empirically examining how reliability-seeking organisations conceptualise and implement HRM systems. This study emphasises how inconsistency in HRM practice bundles can pose a threat to reliable service provision, a critical finding for emergency services and reliability-seeking organisations more broadly.     

Fluidity,Identity, and Organizationality: The Communicative Constitution of Anonymous

This paper examines how fluid social collectives, where membership is latent, contested, or unclear, achieve ‘organizationality’, that is, how they achieve organizational identity and actorhood. Drawing on the “communicative constitution of organizations” perspective, we argue that the organizationality of a social collective is accomplished through ‘identity claims’ – i.e., speech acts that concern what the social collective is or does – and negotiations on whether or not these claims have been made on the collective's behalf. We empirically examine the case of the hacker collective Anonymous and analyse relevant identity claims to investigate two critical episodes in which the organizationality of Anonymous was contested. Our study contributes to organization studies by showing that fluid social collectives are able to temporarily reinstate organizational actorhood through the performance of carefully prepared and staged identity claims.     

Structure of teams—A cooperative game theory approach

One key task for HR departments and managers is to design the structure of teams in the firm. Two main dimensions when carrying out this decision are the size of the teams and the combination of specialized expertise within the team. In this article, we apply cooperative game theory to model this decision. First, we introduce production games. These games are an enhancement of team games and allow the modeling of teams. Together with the coalition structure approach of cooperative game theory, we analyze two standard situations of team theory.     

How Offshore Professionals' Job Dissatisfaction Can Promote Further Offshoring: Organizational Outcomes of Job Crafting

This paper investigates the process that leads from job dissatisfaction to new business opportunities in organizations that offshore R&D activities to emerging countries. Specifically, we investigate a major source of job dissatisfaction for offshore professionals: the misalignment between the work that they perform and their professional identity. Our findings indicate that offshore professionals react against the perception of a threat to work‐identity integrity through individual and collective job crafting. A significant outcome of job crafting is the introduction of new markets, industries, and services, which in turn may change a professional's job design. The perceptions of the compatibility of organizational identity with professional identity and with new idea recognition on the one hand, and of distant and local social support on the other, act as intervening conditions in the process. We discuss theoretical contributions to the evolution of offshoring, job crafting, and the interplay between organizational and professional identity, together with managerial implications.     

Human resource practices and migrant workers' turnover intentions: The roles of post‐migration place identity and justice perceptions

This study adopts an identity perspective to explore the relationship between human resource (HR) practices and turnover intentions among migrant workers. Informed by HR attribution theory, we propose that the effects of HR practices will be more effective in reducing turnover among migrant workers when these workers have stronger post‐migration place identities and when they experience a sense of justice regarding their work and nonwork environments. Using a three‐way interaction model, we tested these ideas on a sample composed of 1,985 migrant workers in 141 firms in China. The results support the theoretical model.     

The Configuration of Organizational Images Among Firms in the Canadian Beer Brewing Industry*

abstract We integrate the literature on organizational image management and neo‐institutional theory to arrive at a better understanding of how organizations routinely represent themselves positively in their external environment. Drawing on a cross‐sectional exploratory study of the website communications of 36 firms in the Canadian brewing industry, we investigate how these organizations construct essential and distinctive organizational images in reference to a map of identity attributes and image categories at the organizational field level. We conclude that organizational self‐categorizations explain the field‐level configuration of images we discovered by establishing legitimacy claims targeted at relevant stakeholders.     

The changing face of HRM: in search of balance

Current models of HRM suggest that expectations about HR roles are changing as organisations are striving to make the HR function leaner and more ‘strategic’. In our article we explore the changing roles of HRM as they are perceived by different stakeholder groups within the HR profession through the medium of a study examining the diffusion of the concept of ‘the thinking performer’ launched by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development in 2002. We explain how the concept of business partnering dominates respondents' talk about HR policy and practice and raise questions about the impact of this in terms of HRM's relationship with employees, employee well‐being and the career paths of HR professionals. We argue that the profession needs to reflect seriously on the consequences of a dominant business/strategic partner framing of HR work, which fails to address the duality that has historically always been inherent in HR practice. We conclude that there is a need for a more balanced HR agenda addressing human and economic concerns in current and future models of HRM.