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Organizational scholars studying compensation often place an emphasis on certain employee groups (e.g., executives). Missing from this discussion is research on the compensation systems for low-wage jobs. In this review, the authors argue that workers in low-wage jobs represent a unique employment group in their understanding of rent allocation in organizations. The authors address the design of compensation strategies in organizations that lead to different outcomes for workers in low-wage jobs versus other workers. Drawing on and integrating human resource management (HRM), inequality, and worker literatures with compensation literature, the authors describe and explain compensation systems for low-wage work. The authors start by examining workers in low-wage work to identify aspects of these workers’ jobs and lives that can influence their health, performance, and other organizationally relevant outcomes. Next, the authors explore the compensation systems common for this type of work, building on the compensation literature, by identifying the low-wage work compensation designs, proposing the likely explanations for why organizations craft these designs, and describing the worker and organizational outcomes of these designs. The authors conclude with suggestions for future research in this growing field and explore how organizations may benefit by rethinking their approach to compensation for low-wage work. In sum, the authors hope that this review will be a foundational work for those interested in investigating organizational compensation issues at the intersection of inequality and worker and organizational outcomes.

Every organization must deal with new challenges such as automation, digitization, or structural transformation, which requires a highly resilient and engaged workforce to stay competitive. Strong leadership in a firm and specific abilities of the leader are necessary to manage uncertainties and to be able to react to certain changes. Various studies regarding organizations and resilience focus on large enterprises, while studies on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are lacking. SMEs account for 99.6% of all companies in Austria and are largely run by entrepreneurial owners and their families. Based on transformational theory, the theory of resilience as well as positive psychology, we investigate five SME owners and their personal resilience in an exploratory study. The owners were selected by purposive sampling with the aim to develop a framework with recommended actions for the personal resilience of SME leaders.

This chapter discusses how the real options theory can be useful for understanding the adoption of human resources management (HRM) practices. The authors review how the real options theory has provided insights into the processes through which firms manage uncertainties involved in the adoption of HRM practices. The authors offer propositions for future HRM research from the real options perspective. The authors contend that analyzing HRM practice adoptions through the lens of real options theory can enhance our understanding of the mechanisms through which firms choose which HRM practices to adopt and how they adjust the timing, scale, and methods of investment in these practices. Specifically, the authors suggest that differences in information relevant to valuation of HRM options are the source of distinct choices of HRM options across firms. Finally, the authors propose advancing knowledge on HRM practice adoptions by using a portfolio of options approach, as well as considering factors like competitors, path dependence, and switching options.

This comparative book review is concerned with two recent studies of essential workers in Germany: Jana Costas’ Dramas of Dignity and Peter Birke’s Grenzen aus Glas [literally ‘borders made from glass’]. While Costas is interested in studying how individual cleaners preserve their sense of dignity despite their widely believed stigmatizing work roles, Birke is interested in the power resources migrant workers can potentially mobilize for improving their working conditions despite the multi-dimensional (inter-sectional) precarity they confront in their life situation. In the context of German industrial and organizational sociology, both studies represent comparatively rare exemplars of detailed qualitative and ethnographic work that illuminate the labour process from taking a workers’ perspective. Using different approaches to fieldwork, both studies reveal the precarious nature of being an essential worker in areas such as meat packing, warehouse work, and cleaning. This general observation gives rise to some concluding speculations about the emancipatory potential of ethnographic research, in labour studies and beyond.

In this chapter, we introduce the topic of essentiality of work, exploring its implications for workers, labour markets, and public policy. The essentiality of work often corresponds in a dialectical way with the precarity of work, raising pressing questions about how societies value and, more pertinently, devalue various types of labour, thereby influencing life chances and societal integration. What we see in the contributions to this volume and the wider evidence is that essential work is typically performed by workers who are treated as expendable, or inessential. We proceed to outline the various contributions from the studies compiled in this volume. These present diverse perspectives on ‘essentiality’ and the experiences of essential workers. Offering a range of new empirical insights, the volume underlines the vitality and lasting relevance of essentiality – both as a concept and in the experience of workers – beyond the pandemic.

Talent management is conducted to maximize an organization's overall performance and efficiency which helps to serve as a competitive advantage. Human resource management is a concept which includes human-related activities, but talent management is a strategy which helps to get new talent, develop their skill sets and provide better employee engagement and experience to retain the top potential employees in an organization. Improvement in recruiting and retention of a workforce results from a well-executed talent acquisition approach. In the 21st century, employee retention has become a primary concern for the organizations specially with work from home and hybrid models.

The workforce for tomorrow is going to be very different from what it has been. Technology is transforming the way people work within organizations. The workplace is rapidly evolving in terms of people and processes and is going through a lot of technological changes. The terminologies such as automation, artificial intelligence, augmented reality and block chain technologies are slowly becoming part of the workplace and everyday activities of the organization.

The challenges are many and especially post-pandemic organizations are going through some major changes such as a mindset shift of employees to take up more remote working opportunities, building virtual teams, increase in the gig economy workers (contractual workers) and a diverse workforce which makes it even more challenging for the organization to manage and retain talent.

There has been considerable discussion about the poor outcomes of irresponsible management, which are often discussed as being the result of “shortcomings” of contemporary capitalism: runaway self-interest, quarterly focus, elite orientation, volume orientation, and one-pattern capitalism (Kim, 2022). In order to address such shortcomings in business education, particularly with strategy-related modules that were taught with a focus on creating “shareholder value,” the Sustainable Decisions and Organisations (SDO) module was designed by academics as the capstone module for the master of business administration (MBA) program and delivered with the aim of developing capabilities of students to be leaders and future generators of sustainable value for business and society at large. The students participating in the module are shown how a “stakeholder” approach to developing business strategy can lead to more sustainability-oriented value creation. The module addresses how companies can contribute to “sustainability” by aligning their economic/financial, societal, and ecological impacts with limited resources through strategy. This contribution discusses the implementation of this module and demonstrates how students are provided learning opportunities around how sustainability-related issues can be embedded into a business organization's strategy to enhance the organization's performance while addressing risks by working with stakeholders to create value and thus be able to contribute to relevant UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

This study examines the construction of essential labour during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Research questions include: (1) How have government policies shaped designations of essential versus non-essential labour? (2) What are the consequences of these designations for essential workers? To address these questions, the author employs a case study of custodial services employees at Prairie University, a large public university in a major Texas city (Prairietown). The author begins with an examination of federal, state, and municipal guidelines about COVID-19 safety and critical infrastructure in order to understand the policy landscape within which custodial employees at Prairie University were formally deemed essential. Drawing on theories of non-nurturant care work, the author shows how government guidelines for essential work released during the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic discursively invisibilized cleaning labourers. The author then demonstrates how this invisibilization contributed to Prairie University custodial services staff members’ exposure to COVID-19. The author concludes by considering the implications of the findings for future research on care work and the construction of essential labour.

Organizations remain a vital sociological topic, but organizational sociology, as a subfield, has evolved significantly since its inception. In this paper, I argue that organization sociology is becoming increasingly disconnected from organizational theory, as currently conceived. The focus of sociological research on organizations has become more empirically grounded in the study of social problems and how organizations contribute to them. Sociologists continue to see organizations as important actors in society that play a role in shaping social order and as contexts in which social processes play out. I propose two main sociological approaches for organizational research, which I describe as “organizations within society” and “society within organizations.” The first approach examines the role of organizations as building blocks of social structure and as social actors in their own right. The second approach treats organizations as platforms and locations of social interactions and the building of community. These approaches are somewhat disconnected from the sort of grand theorizing that characterizes much of organizational theory. I argue that the problem-oriented sociology of these two approaches offers a vital way for organizational scholars to expand and theoretically revitalize the field.

The personalities of leaders have been shown to impact the culture of their organizations and are also expected to have a more distal impact on the firm’s financial performance. However, the authors also expect that leader gender is an important intervening variable such that exhibiting various personality dimensions may result in unique cultural and performance-based outcomes for women and men leaders. Thus, the authors seek to examine first the impact of leader personality on organizational performance, as driven through organizational culture as a mediating mechanism. In doing so, the authors propose the expected impact of specific personality dimensions on certain types of organizational cultures, and those cultures’ subsequent impact on the organization’s performance. The authors then extend to consider the moderating effects of leader gender on the relationship between leader personality and organization. To support their propositions, the authors draw from upper echelons and implicit leadership theories. The authors encourage researchers to consider the proposition within a sample of the largest publicly traded US companies (i.e., Fortune 500) at an important era in history such that for the first time, 10% of these companies are led by women. In doing so, the authors hope to understand the leadership dynamics at the highest echelons of corporate governance and provide actionable insights for companies aiming to optimize their leadership composition and drive sustainable performance.