Publication trends in the Journal of International Financial Management and Accounting: A retrospective review

This study uses bibliometric analysis to assess Journal of International Financial Management & Accounting (JIFMA's) evolution between 1989 and 2021. In this retrospective review, we investigate the journal's performance, authorship trends, and intellectual structure. The journal's international focus is primarily on cross-country studies and the effects of country-level factors on various accounting and finance outcomes. The collaborative network of JIFMA's authors has also grown substantially consistent with rise in research collaboration in general across the world. We identify nine major themes making up JIFMA's knowledge structure: (1) value relevance of accounting information relating to the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards, (2) voluntary corporate disclosure, (3) corporate use of financial derivatives, (4) corporate governance, (5) equity valuation, (6) stock return seasonalities, foreign equity ownership, and cost of capital, (7) earnings announcements and pecking order behavior, (8) triple-bottom-line disclosures, and (9) managerial ownership and earnings management. Our findings will likely benefit JIFMA's editorial board and other journal stakeholders including future researchers.     

The intellectual structure of the journal Business Strategy and the Environment: A 25‐year author cocitation analysis

This article presents the intellectual structure and 25‐year author cocitation analysis of the journal Business Strategy and the Environment. The findings show that Business Strategy and the Environment is an emerging, well‐established journal in its field. The journal needs a core set of authors who are actively engaged in the production and certification of knowledge; further, it consists of a number of loosely linked research team contributors, each with its own areas of interest. The existence of these research teams is a sign of strength that characterizes the journal as it strives to foster a community of unified scholars whose published works advance our understanding of business strategic decisions and behavior with regard to the natural environment. This study is useful for contributors, readers, and editorial board members who form the journal's community of knowledge creation and certification.     

JMS at 50: Trends over Time

We present an analysis of the articles published in the Journal of Management Studies since its inception to assess to what extent JMS has: maintained its leading international ranking; maintained its founding mission as a broad based management journal; and remained a broad based management journal compared to other general management journals. In terms of its impact factor and citations despite reaching a low point in 2001, we find that JMS today ranks higher than it has ever done throughout its 50‐year history. From our content analysis covering the life‐cycle of JMS, we find four areas have been the most frequently represented, although their relative importance varies between decades: Organizational Management/Behaviour, Strategy, Human Resource Management, and General Management, accounting for 67 per cent of articles published over the period. JMS has strengthened its international author distribution through the increase in authors from the EU especially; the period 2000–04 which saw the predominance of UK authors was an anomaly. There are marked differences between type of article and author country of origin. Our comparative analysis of the word networks between the journals JMS, AMJ, ASQ, and HRM shows that over each decade the papers in the first three normally form a single cluster, indicating that the words used in the papers in the different journals are similar, while papers from HRM often form an outlining group. Notably, in the early 2000s papers in JMS form a distinct cluster, with papers from HRM paralleling the anomaly identified in the content analysis. Overall, JMS has regained its distinctiveness as a broad‐based international management journal, not favouring any particular theoretical or empirical approach.     

What Place For The Region? Reflections on the Regional Question and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

In our introduction to this Debates & Developments forum, ‘What place for the Region?’, we discuss why the founders of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) regarded the regional question as having the same importance as the urban question, and how the region has remained a significant focus during the journal's subsequent development. We then explore some of the conceptual challenges in defining and investigating regions before considering some of the key developments in contemporary regional theory. Our introduction proceeds by highlighting the key insights of the contributions to the forum––essays by Edward Soja, Mariona Tomàs, Joe Beall, Susan Parnell and Chris Albertyn, and Jean‐Paul Addie and Roger Keil––before concluding with a reaffirmation of the importance of the region in IJURR's mission as a journal of critical urban and regional studies.     

Is Strategic Human Resource Management Socially Responsible? The Case of Wegmans Food Markets, Inc.

In 2005, Wegmans Food Markets Inc., the family-owned supermarket chain, was awarded the number one spot on the Fortune “100 Best Companies To Work For.” Wegmans’ recognition illustrates an exemplary case of strategic human resource management embedded in an overall culture of social responsibility, amidst a highly competitive and low margin industry. We detail Wegmans’ human resource practices and its overall stakeholder orientation, arguing that the treatment of employees as strategic assets constitutes an effective approach to social responsibility. In other words, strategic human resource management can help organizations reconcile the often cited conflict between profits and principles. We therefore begin with an overview of the contemporary supermarket industry, provide a brief history of Wegmans, and showcase the supermarket chain’s human resource practices. In closing, we discuss Wegmans’ stakeholder orientation and comment on the divide between strategic human resource management and social responsibility research.     

The contextualization of human resource and quality management: a sensemaking perspective on everybody's involvement

The principal idea of this paper is that human resource management (HRM) and quality management (QM) ideas require contextualization when used to change organizations. Here, contextualization stands for the process that leads to a shared meaning, i.e. the majority of the co-workers in an organization understand and define a concept or change in terms that are shared and accepted. In the present paper, we study a strategic change project, based on HRM and QM ideas, conducted at the County Council of Värmland (CCV), the public healthcare authority in the County of Värmland in Sweden, where the focus was on everybody's involvement. Our interpretation of the project shows that a shared meaning of the concept of everybody's involvement was not reached in this particular case, i.e. contextualization did not occur. One important result of the study is that contextualization is a prerequisite for realizing HRM and QM thoughts. The paper also stresses how important it is that general and ‘non-contextualized’ HRM and QM ideas are adapted to local practices when used to direct organizational change.     

Study on human resource management in Korea's chaebol enterprise: a case study of Samsung Electronics

Korean chaebol firms have taken advantage of the owner–management system and to date are still enjoying its strength. I discuss the characteristics of human resources management (HRM) systems in the context of Samsung Electronics, Korea's largest chaebol following the Asian crisis of 1997, explaining why the SEC HRM system should be changed and what recent changes have been made, as perceived by both respondents and HR manager interviewees. The study of SEC HRM practices can provide real value to Western companies because it incorporates firm-specific advantages such as network strength, emperor-like power over group-wide management, and an agile decision-making process.     

The relationship between trust,HRM practices and firm performance

Numerous researchers have begun to examine organizational trust and its influence on the workforce. However, little empirical research has focused on the conditions that engender organizational trust – those that make managers more willing to accept the vulnerability inherent in certain managerial actions that are part of human resource management. This study evaluates the trust mechanism and the way HRM practices mediate its impact on improving organizational performance. One hundred and four HR managers from the leading companies in the Israeli industrial, service and trade sectors, based on sales and operating revenue, completed questionnaires. Overall, we found that HR managers are more likely to offer training and shape the internal promotion system when trust is high. In addition, we found that firms exhibited higher organizational performance when trust is high. The paper also presents some of the model's implications.     

Theoretical implications from the case of performance-based human resource management practices in Japan: management fashion,institutionalization and strategic human resource management perspectives

In Japan, a new type of human resource management (HRM) practices called ‘performance-based HRM practices’ (seika-shugi in Japanese) emerged in the 1990s, and has been adopted by many Japanese firms. In this paper, I illustrate how these type of practices emerged as a management fashion, diffused across a large number of Japanese firms, and became institutionalized in the Japanese business context; and discuss the relationship between performance-based HRM practices and firm performance. This illustration is used to develop a theoretical framework to better understand the relationship between HRM practices and firm performance by integrating theories of management fashions, institutionalization and strategic HRM. Suggestions for future research are also discussed.     

The Demography of Resources

A longitudinal event‐history analysis using complete data on the aircraft fleets of all British airlines over the period 1919 to 1975 was applied to elucidating how a firm's internal resource demography can explain its resource divestiture decisions. The likelihood of divestiture for any particular aircraft was found to depend strongly on its age and size, but also on the age and size heterogeneity of an airline's entire fleet. The results constitute a demonstration of the utility of taking a demographic approach to studying the management of resource portfolios. This approach may also prove fruitful in the study of other types of strategic resources and their management.     

Double-edged effect of talent management on organizational performance: the moderating role of HRM investments

Abstract

More than a decade after the publication of the book The War for Talent, there has been growing interest in the role of talent management in achieving organizational success. Although past studies have empirically investigated the role of talent management and its positive association with organizational performance, few studies have integrated the bright and dark sides of talent management. Using a sample of 444 firms in South Korea, this study finds that talent management has a double-edged effect on firm outcomes, including innovation and voluntary turnover rate. Moreover, it finds that the effect of talent management considerably varies across organizational contexts. Specifically, this study identifies the conditions under which the negative role of talent management changes across different levels of human resource management investments. Demonstrating the dual direct effect and contextual effect of talent management, this study provides reference for future studies on talent management, specifically those that aim to discover the mechanisms influencing the distinguished role of talent management in organizational outcomes. This study further discusses the theoretical and practical implications.     

Perspectives on line managers in human resource management: Hilton International's UK hotels

Although contextual factors act to encourage the devolvement of human resource management to line managers, recent research indicates that there is substantial potential for human resource specialists and line managers to share more effectively responsibility for their organization's human resource activities in business partnerships. The foundation for this is arguably commonality in opinions on the principles and practices of human resource activities. However, line managers and human resource specialists often have dissonant opinions on human resource management.

This paper explores line manager and human resource specialists' perspectives on line manager involvement in human resource management, theoretically and empirically. The primary work comprises a survey of the views of line managers and human resource specialists on devolving a range of human resource activities to line managers in a case organization, Hilton International's UK hotels. Differences between line managers' and human resource specialists' perspectives are found in five aspects: understanding and ownership of the company's service and HR strategy; line manager involvement in and rankings of HR activities; HR specialists' support of line managers; barriers to line managers' involvement in HR activities; and the competence of line managers in HR activities. Importantly, it is found that where there are divergent views across line managers and their HR specialist in their hotel there is poor hotel business performance and, conversely, convergent views are evident in the effectively performing hotels. These findings may have resonance for other organizations in devolving human resource management to the line and developing human resource business partnerships for business performance. It is proposed that three types of line manager buy-in are central to their active involvement in HR, namely: conceptual understanding of the rationale for their involvement; implementation effectiveness through HR role clarity and capability; and affective commitment in believing in the value of their involvement in HR.     

Human resource management control system and firm performance: a contingency model of corporate control

This study explores how corporate controls used by the parent company of a conglomerate affect subsidiaries' human resource management (HRM) control–performance relationship. Empirical results from 93 firms reveal that the appropriate use of HRM control systems was a contributing factor to firm performance. When a subsidiary's approach to HRM was based on behavior control, performance was lower when the parent company emphasized financial control. When a subsidiary's approach to HRM was based on output control, performance was higher when the parent company emphasized either strategic or financial control. When a subsidiary's approach to HRM was based on input control, performance was higher when the parent company emphasized strategic control.     

Cross-cultural perceptions of clan control in Korean multinational companies: a conceptual investigation of employees' fairness monitoring based on cultural values

While enjoying success in their home territory in terms of human resource management (HRM) and employee commitment, Korean multinational companies (MNCs) seem to struggle in their overseas subsidiaries to replicate this success in attracting/retaining talent. To explain the HRM challenges seen in many Korean MNCs, we adapt the notion of employees' fairness monitoring in developing a model which illustrates the relationships between clan control in Korean MNCs, employee's perceived fairness and the cultural values of individualism and collectivism. We offer our first set of propositions concerning associations between fairness monitoring and cultural values, before suggesting another set of propositions about relationships between employees' fairness judgement and clan control in Korean MNCs. Figures graphically illustrating of some of our propositions are also presented. Our model proposes that clan control in Korean MNCs may cause perceived low fairness judgement during employees' fairness monitoring in both individualistic and collectivistic cultures. We believe this paper should stimulate further enquiries in international HRM, cross-culture and fairness literatures.     

When knowledge management meets HR strategy: an exploration of personalization-retention and codification-recruitment configurations

The resource-based view and the knowledge-based view are important developments in strategic management theory, and ‘knowledge management’ has exploded in the popular management literature. There is, however, little empirical literature that explores the connections between firms' attempts at knowledge management and their HR strategies. In this paper, we focus particularly on links between knowledge management and staffing practices. High-technology manufacturing was selected as the site of our research, as high-technology firms rely on highly skilled employees to innovate and develop new products and are therefore an ideal environment for exploring the strategies employed for both managing knowledge, and recruiting and retaining employees. Drawing particularly on the work of Hansen et al. (1999 Hansen, M.T., Nohria, N. and Tierney, T. 1999. What's Your Strategy for Managing Knowledge?. Harvard Business Review, March–April:, : 106–16. [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), this paper identifies and explores two fits between knowledge management and HR strategy or what we call KM-HR configurations: ‘personalization-retention’ and ‘codification-recruitment’. We argue that there is no one way to manage knowledge and its links to HRM and build a simple framework of potential KM-HR configurations with propositions for future research.     

Context and Action in the Transformation of Strategy Scholarship

We revisit Andrew Pettigrew's seminal ‘Context and action in the transformation of the firm’, first published in this journal in November 1987. In doing so, we not only review Pettigrew's contributions, but contextualize these with respect to adjoining strategy scholarship. Our discussion concludes with some novel, and fairly speculative, ways forward, designed to advance strategy scholarship. Working with the ideas contained in Pettigrew's article and drawing on insights from institutional entrepreneurship, we make a case for the processualization of strategy content research. This allows us to add the issue of effectiveness of strategy practices to current strategy‐as‐practice research while arguing for a further humanization of strategic management.     

Research productivity patterns in the organizational behavior and human resource management literature

Closely following the analysis approach used for similar studies in the economics and finance literature, we present the first study to examine if there exists an empirical regularity in the bibliometric patterns of research productivity in the organizational behavior (OB) and human resource management (HRM) literature. Our results present strong evidence that there indeed exists a distinct empirical regularity. It is the so-called Generalized Lotka's Law of scientific productivity pattern: The number of authors publishing n papers is about 1/n^c of those publishing one paper. The observed pattern in the OB and HRM area is interestingly very consistent with those in much older, related business disciplines.     

Expanding the concept of fit in strategic human resource management: An examination of the relationship between human resource practices and charismatic leadership on organizational outcomes

We investigate the relationship between high‐commitment human resources (HCHR) practices and chief executive officer (CEO) charismatic leadership on voluntary employee turnover and relative performance to peers in a sample of 281 small firms. In this study, we expand upon prior conceptualizations of fit within the literature on strategic human resources (HR) to include the fit of HCHR with other aspects of the people management system. Specifically, we hypothesize a variety of relationships that may occur (e.g., positive synergistic, deadly combination, or substitution) and find that when a firm uses a system of HCHR practices and has a charismatic leader, performance is highest and turnover lowest. Conversely, when a firm does not invest in either, performance is lowest and turnover highest. We also found some support for a substitution effect as our data showed that when there is a mismatch between a firm's HR system and the leadership characteristics of the CEO, turnover is higher and performance lower than the high‐investment people management system (high HCHR and high‐charismatic leadership), but turnover is lower and performance higher than the low‐investment (low HCHR and low‐charismatic leadership) people management system.     

Examining transformational leadership,job satisfaction,organizational commitment and organizational trust in Turkish hospitals: public servants versus private sector employees

Leadership, job satisfaction, organizational commitment and trust have become important processes for healthcare management in recent years. One of the contemporary human resource management functions in the organizations involves engaging in leadership development, improving organizational trust and organizational commitment and increasing job satisfaction. Considering the rapidly changing healthcare technology and higher levels of occupational complexity, healthcare organizations are increasingly in need of engaging in leadership development in any given area of expertise to address ever-changing nature of the industry and the delivery of quality of care while remaining cost-effective and competitive. This paper investigates the perceptions of both public servants and private sector employees (outsourcing) on transformational leadership, organizational commitment, organizational trust and job satisfaction in Turkish healthcare industry. Additionally, the paper analyzes the predictability of organizational commitment based on employee – both public servants (physicians, nurses, administrative personnel and other healthcare professionals) and private sector employees (outsourcing) (auxiliary services such as administrative assistants, security personnel, kitchen, laundry and housekeeping employees) – perceptions of transformational leadership, job satisfaction and organizational trust. Using a survey instrument with items adopted from the transformational leadership inventory (TLI) [Podsakoff, P. M., MacKenzie, S. B., Moorman, R. H., & Fetter, R. (1990). Transformational leader behaviors and their effects on followers' trust in leader, satisfaction, and organizational citizenship behaviors. Leadership Quarterly, 1, 107–142], the organizational commitment questionnaire [Meyer, J. P., & Allen, N. J. (1997). Commitment in the workplace: Theory, research, and application. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage], the organizational trust inventory (OTI) [Cummings, L. L., & Bromiley, P. (1996). The occupational trust inventory (OTI): Development and validation. In R. Kramer & T. Tyler (Eds.), Trust in organizations: Frontiers of Theory and Research (pp. 302–330). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage] and job satisfaction survey (JSS) [Spector, P. E. (1985). Measurement of human service staff satisfaction: Development of the job satisfaction survey. American Journal of Community Psychology, 13, 693–731], this quantitative study was conducted among 2108 healthcare employees (public servants and private employees) in two large government hospitals in Turkey. The study findings indicate a significant difference between the public servants and private sector employees in terms of their perceptions on two dimensions of transformational leadership (being an appropriate model, providing individualized support), overall transformational leadership and one dimension of job satisfaction (communication). The two dimensions of job satisfaction – operating procedures and communication – as well as organizational trust were the significant predictors of organizational commitment of public servants, whereas the two dimensions of leadership – individualized support and fostering the acceptance – as well as the two dimensions of job satisfaction – promotion and contingent rewards – and organizational trust were the significant regressors of organizational commitment of private sector employees. In addition, there is a significant difference between the predictors of the dimensions of organizational commitment (transformational leadership, job satisfaction and organizational trust) in terms of public servants versus private sector employees. Finally, organizational trust has a significant effect on overall organizational commitment as well as its three dimensions for public servants and private employees.