Studying mutuality and perversity in the impacts of human resource management on societal well‐being: Advancing a pluralist agenda

Abstract

Situated within a societal perspective on human resource management (HRM), this paper asks how HRM academics can make a better contribution to understanding the impacts of HRM on societal well-being. It argues that we should target the 'so what?' questions that matter to society, including important issues of employer-employee misalignment and of perverse alignment ('perverseperformance work systems'). It calls for an approach to societal issues in HRM that is problem-focused and theoryinformed. While recognising some validity to the criticisms of academic HRM raised in the 'psychologisation' debate, the article argues that the critique is over-generalised and contests the idea that the concern of HRM academics with enhancing workplace mutuality is an expression of a unitarist ideology. Mutuality and unitarism should not be conflated. In advancing a pluralist agenda, it argues that we must become better at theoretical integration, at synergising our research methods and at engaging constructively with practitioners and policy makers.

Fostering the high‐involvement model of human resource management: what have we learnt and what challenges do we face?

“…As Eurofound's (2020, 4) research suggests, workers and societies have much to gain from exploring the opportunities for greater involvement among those in lessskilled occupations, such as 'service and sales workers, machine operators and workers in elementary occupations'. The challenge is to do so in ways that employees and firms find mutually advantageous or that are 'Pareto optimal': benefiting one party without harming the other, and thus, bringing gains to society (Boxall 2021;Freeman and Kleiner 2006).…”

“…The theory, then, leads to a final point: there is generally a win-win argument in HIWS models (e.g. Boxall 2021;Wood and Ogbonnaya 2018). HIWSs are seen to have the potential to enhance organisational performance through stronger forms of human and social capital and to bring about closer alignment with employee interests.…”

“…Using British data, they find that greater organisational involvement has a negative effect on organisational performance, via lower job satisfaction, which actually undermines its positive, direct effects. This study is also an example of the growing number that are testing the links from HRM to both employee well-being and individual or organisational performance (the HRM-WB-IOP nexus), an essential development if we are to understand how to enhance mutuality in the workplace (Boxall 2021; Peccei and van de Voorde 2019).…”

Exploring the Nature and Antecedents of Employee Energetic Well-Being at Work and Job Performance Profiles

“…To assess which antecedents are predictive of the resulting profiles, we conducted a multinomial regression analysis using the package Nnet (v.7. [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. This analysis compared the likelihood of an employee being a member of a certain profile with a referent group based on a specific antecedent.…”

“…In this context, management and employees are two important internal organizational stakeholders. While the managerial perspective remains dominant in the field of strategic human resource management (SHRM), there have been recent calls to more closely consider the concerns of multiple stakeholders [2] (p. 31) by exploring how win-win situations that directly both benefit employees and management can be achieved [3][4][5]. Empirical studies have demonstrated that high happiness well-being (e.g., employees' satisfaction with their work) and performance can go handin-hand [6,7].…”