The role of leadership in human resource management: perspectives and evidence from Asia Pacific

Abstract

The objective of this special issue is to advance our understanding of the role of leadership at all levels of organizational hierarchies in promoting effective human resource management (HRM) in the broadly defined Asia Pacific region. Leadership and HRM are two key factors affecting outcomes at organizational, team/unit, and individual levels either within the same country or in a cross-border context (Boada-Cuerva, Trullen, and Valverde 2019; Chang 2016; McClean and Collins 2019; Steffensen et al. 2019). However, the development of the two fields to date has largely occurred in parallel (Vermeeren, Kuipers, and Steijn 2014), thus not capturing the full range of potential benefits and insights to be gained from analyses drawing on both fields and creating an urgent need to integrate research on leadership and HRM in various contexts (Boada-Cuerva, Trullen, and Valverde 2019; McClean and Collins 2019; Steffensen et al. 2019). More particularly on the urgent need for integrating leadership and HRM research, we note first that focusing on either leadership or HRM alone fails to explain most of the variance in resultant outcomes in key studies in the extant literature (Jiang et al. 2012; Podsakoff, MacKenzie, & Bommer 1996; Tzabbar, Tzafrir, and Baruch 2017). For example, because leadership and HRM may be correlated with each other (Chang 2016; McClean and Collins 2019) and may both affect organizational, team and individual outcomes (Steffensen et al. 2019), it is important that they can be examined simultaneously to minimize omitted variable bias when estimating their impacts. Furthermore, leadership and HRM may interact with each other when shaping various outcomes, complementing or substituting each other's impact. Several recent studies have started to investigate such interactions (

The relationship between self-leadership, the future of human resource management, and work engagement

“…Previous studies found that HRM correlated with leadership (Gill et al, 2018;Lopez-Cabrales et al, 2017;Zhao et al, 2020), but studies on future HRM (analytical skills, employment relations and future workspace) and self-leadership could not be found. Suan and Nasurdin (2014), Aybas and Acar (2017), Alzyoud (2018), Guan and Frenkel (2018), Ahmed et al (2019) and Tensay and Singh (2020) found that HRM had a positive relationship with work engagement, but this study found that future HRM had a positive relationship with work engagement.…”

“…Human resource management practices (high performance, high commitment, high control, high involvement and international HRM) and leadership (authentic, ethical, transformative, paternalistic, authoritarian and global leadership, and leader-member exchange) have interactive effects on organisational, team/unit and individual outcomes (Zhao, Liu, Zhu, & Liu, 2020). Leadership has an indirect effect on outcomes through HRM practices, and HRM practices may have an indirect effect on outcomes through leadership.…”

Analysis of Factors for Korea’s Export Companies to Respond to Trade Remedies: Mediation Effect of Fairness Perception

“…Leadership is defined from a social and political perspective as the role of politicians and managers, with the competency to promote stability within an organization by adapting to the external environment [24]. Theories related to leadership assert that the organization members are more motivated when the leader accepts more challenging roles for its members and takes more enthusiastic action to strive toward achieving the given goals [25,26].…”

International and comparative human resource management: an Asia‐Pacific perspective

“…Markoulli et al 2017), reviews of I/CHRM research (e.g. Sanders and De Cieri 2021), and reviews of issues such as leadership in the Asia-Pacific (Zhao et al 2020), to date we lack a review of the international and comparative HRM research in the Asia-Pacific region. We argue that such a review is important to build understanding of the cross-national and comparative HRM issues that are specific to this region.…”

“…This scholarship has tended to overlook important contextual factors such as institutional factors and societal norms that require understanding of the local contexts in Asia-Pacific countries (Bhagat, McDevitt and McDevitt 2010). There is emerging evidence that, possibly as a consequence of incomplete information, management and HRM practices developed in Western contexts may not fulfil their intended purpose when transferred into Asia-Pacific contexts (Zhao et al 2020).…”