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The purpose of this paper is to explore managers’ learning-oriented leadership, and what conditions managers face when working with the promotion of employees’ learning.

Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with managers in three manufacturing firms. Verbatim expressions of the interview participants were analysed using stepwise analytical procedures.

The managers used many kinds of activities to promote learning. Most common were activities related to learning opportunities that arose during daily work. The identified activities ranged from being planned to occurring more spontaneously. Depending on the situation or the learning activity, the managers used different behaviours to promote learning. They supported, educated and confronted employees, and they acted as role models. Factors constraining the implementation of learning-oriented leadership included limited resources, and a lack of commitment from top management, employees or the managers themselves.

Future research should study learning-oriented leadership from the employees’ perspective.

Managers’ notions about learning and development constitute an important condition for learning-oriented leadership. Therefore, managers need to be trained in how to promote their employees’ learning at work.

This study adds to the limited knowledge of how managers carry out a learning-oriented leadership in their daily work. The findings contribute knowledge regarding managerial practices of promoting employees’ workplace learning by identifying different activities and behaviours that managers could incorporate into their leadership.

This paper aims to further our understanding of policy–practice gaps in organizations from an organizational learning perspective. The authors conceptualize and analyze policy–practice gaps in terms of what they label the dual challenge of organizational learning, i.e. the organizational tasks of both adapting ongoing practices to prescribed policy demands and adapting the policy itself to the needs of practice. Specifically, the authors address how this dual challenge can be understood in terms of organizational learning and how an organization can be managed to successfully resolve the dual learning challenge and, thereby, bridge policy–practice gaps in organizations.

This paper draws on existing literature to explore the gap between policy and practice. Through a synthesis of theories and an illustrative practical example, this paper highlights key conceptual underpinnings.

In the analysis of the dual challenge of organizational learning, this study provides a conceptual framework that emphasizes the important role of tensions and contradictions between policy and practice and their role as drivers of organizational learning. To bridge policy–practice gaps in organizations, this paper proposes five key principles that aim to resolve the dual challenge and accommodate both deployment and discovery in organizations.

Because this is a conceptual study, empirical research is called for to explore further and test the findings and conclusions of the study. Several avenues of possible future research are proposed.

This paper primarily contributes by introducing and elaborating on a conceptual framework that offers novel perspectives on the dual challenges of facilitating both discovery and deployment processes within organizations.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are increasingly outsourcing human resource (HR) activities to outside labour market intermediaries. In this paper, the focus is on a specific type of labour market intermediary, the HR intermediary (HRI). The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss SME outsourcing of HR services to membership-based HRIs, and potential problems and benefits that may arise in this process.

The empirical foundation comprises case studies of three Swedish HRIs and 12 of their SME clients. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews and a document study.

The findings show that social aspects such as trust, shared values, communication and commitment are crucial characteristics of the cooperation between HRIs and SMEs. These social aspects are a result of the owner/membership structure, and a distinguishing feature of the studied HRIs in comparison to other types of labour market intermediaries.

The results of the study underline the need for increased research related to the intermediary concept and its meanings in different contexts. There is also a need for more empirical research on HRIs, e.g. comparisons between different types of HRIs, and studies of the emergence of virtual intermediaries. Future studies should focus on the role of LMIs and HRIs in regional development processes.

Companies that interact with HRIs should reflect on the different pros and cons that this cooperation may result in, both in the short term and in the longer term.

The study provides an enhanced understanding regarding the relations between SMEs and HRIs, based on the two broad types of SMEs (with low/high internal HR skills) and two types of HRIs (with short/long-term orientation).

The purpose of this paper is to assess previous research on conditions for managers’ learning and development in daily work practices and how such conditions may influence their sustainability and also to propose a concept and a heuristic model that reconceptualizes and expands on the theoretical foundations generated in previous studies of managers’ learning and development at work.

This paper is based on an integrative literature review. The literature search identified 1,403 unique studies. Nine qualitative and seven quantitative studies met the relevance and quality criteria and were included in the review.

The results of the review found associations between managers’ learning conditions, career opportunities, individual engagement and sustainability. However, the small amount of empirical data used in the reviewed studies and the cross-sectional design of the studies make it difficult to establish the nature of the relationship between different variables.

The results of this paper show that managers need to care for and take advantage of opportunities for their own development and not only function as creators of their employees’ development. Employers should keep in mind that the development environment includes managers and employees.

This paper contributes with an original concept of managers’ development environments and a conceptual model that integrates theory with results from the included studies. Based on the model, propositions that may serve as an agenda for future research are formulated.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the competence in use when working with interactive research, which is a continuation and elaboration of action research.

A qualitative research approach was adopted for the study. The main body of empirical material in this paper is based on two sources of data – a survey comprising open-ended questions, followed by a series of focus group interviews. The respondents were researchers with varying degrees of experience in using interactive research.

The findings provide illustrations of what characterises interactive research as work and identify an additional set of activities that go beyond traditional research activities. Some activities are relatively easy to describe, while others exist in the gaps between other activities – e.g. boundary spanning – and are harder to explicitly define in terms of implications for the involved researchers’ competence. The work activities reaching beyond the traditional research boundaries are implicit and are not a common shared practice. From a competence point of view, this implies that the competence in use for these implicit tasks of interactive research becomes individually carried. Based on these findings, a number of individual aspects of what constitutes competence in use are suggested.

In future studies, it would be valuable to use a mixed-method approach that also includes longitudinal observations of the actual work of conducting interactive research.

The findings and suggestions for how to understand the competence of interactive researchers can be used as guidance for training in research education.

This study contributes to previous research by describing important requirements and critical elements of competence in use when conducting interactive research.

This study aims to contribute knowledge about different professional identities represented among HR practitioners from Weber's “ideal types” framework.

The paper is based on semi-structured interviews with 34 Swedish HR practitioners working in large public and private organisations.

The findings reveal that HR practitioners' identity is perceived as indistinct, unclear and shattered, which leaves lots of room for interpreting HR identity. Based on a thematic content analysis, three different ideal-type identities are presented, each representing the characteristic traits of an HR identity type. These are the Defender who always supports the managers, the Disturber who questions the managers in favour of the employees and the Driver who focuses on the economic expansion of the organisation.

One of the potential constraints of this study is the authors’ reliance on interview data. This finding implies that future research can employ mixed methods or observational techniques to bridge the gap between narrated responsibilities and real-time actions. The data source, predominantly from larger organisations, presents another limitation. This raises a significant research implication: there is a need to study identity formation among HR practitioners in smaller organisations. The theoretical framework this study contributes can aid in comprehending HR practitioners' identities and their corresponding actions. Continued research might explore the significance of these ideal-type identities.

The model presented provides a new way of understanding HR practitioners' complex and shattered professional identity and the various stakeholders that direct different expectations towards them. This knowledge can be used both in HR education and in HR work as a basis for discussing the social work environment of HR practitioners and negotiating their work and identity.

The study contributes knowledge of the professional identities of HR managers, an under-researched area, especially when it comes to empirical research about the HR practitioners' own experiences of their everyday work and view of the HR profession.

This paper introduces interactive research as an emerging approach within a broad family of collaborative research approaches in management and organization research. Interactive research is a way to contribute to the dual tasks of long-term theory development and innovation and change processes in organizations. One of the distinguishing features of interactive research is a focus on continuous joint learning processes between the researchers and the involved practitioners.

The basic concepts, contributions and challenges of the interactive research approach are presented and illustrated in the present paper through a practical case, the HELIX Centre.

Interactive research is a way to advance scientific knowledge about the development of new types of work organizations and the development of sustainable operations. The multi-disciplinary and interactive research approach at HELIX has made it possible to reach a high degree of both rigour and relevance in research questions and projects. The authors identified five principles from the HELIX case that were instrumental in accomplishing the dual tasks of interactive research.

The interactive research approach is a powerful method of collaboration between different stakeholders throughout the research process. This type of research makes it possible to interact at various levels of research, from the programme level, to research and development projects, to the individual level. The results from interactive research should not only be considered traditionally valid but also valid in relation to organizational and societal needs.

Conducting research that is both practice- and theory-relevant is important for the service research community. Action research can be a fruitful approach for service researchers studying the transformative role of service research and wanting to make contributions to both the research community and to practical development. By exploring the current use of action research in service research, this study aims to make suggestions for enhancing the contribution to theory and practice development and to propose criteria for research quality for action research in service research.

This study builds on a systematic literature review of the use of action research approaches in service research.

The study makes three main contributions. First, it posits that any action research project needs to consider the four elements of problem identification, theorization, creating guiding concepts and intervention. Second, based on these elements mirrored in service action research, it outlines and analyzes three approaches to action research (i.e. theory-enhancing, concept developing and practice-enhancing). Third, it suggests a move from instrumental to a more conceptual relevance of the research and elaborates on the criteria for research quality.

This study contributes to the understanding of how action research may be applied for conducting high-quality collaborative research in services and proposes measures to enhance research quality in action research projects focusing services.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the role of learning in performance measurement.

The authors develop a theoretical framework combining workplace learning theory with purposes of performance measurement. The authors elaborate this framework empirically by identifying critical incidents from a case set within a context containing a broad range of different performance measurement activities. Finally, the authors discuss the results and the possible implications for using the theoretical framework in order to better understand facets of learning regarding the design of performance measurement.

Workplace learning theory provides a deeper understanding of how the mechanisms of performance measurements support control or improvement purposes. The authors propose a tentative framework for learning as a driver for performance measurement and four facets of learning are identified: reproductive, rule-oriented, goal-oriented and creative learning.

The empirical material is limited to the healthcare context and further studies are needed in order to validate the findings in other settings.

The authors argue that all managers must consider what kind of learning environment and what kind of learning outcomes best serve the interests of their organisation. Purposeful and carefully designed organisational arrangements and learning environments are more likely to induce intended learning outcomes.

Previous connections between the fields of “performance measurement” and “workplace learning” often lack any deeper conceptualisations or problematisations of the concept of learning. In this paper, the authors provide a more nuanced discussion about the process of learning in performance measurement, which may provide a basis for further research and scholarly attention.

This study aims to explore how human resource (HR) practitioners conceive of their practice, reveal challenges they grapple with in daily work and generate a conceptual framework of HR praxis.

The paper is based on interviews with HR practitioners in Sweden and a review of articles that examine aspects of HR practitioners' work.

The HR practitioners' work is fragmented and reactive, filled with meetings and affords few opportunities to work undisturbed. Operational tasks are prioritised over strategic work, and their work sometimes involves tasks that are not HR's responsibility. The nature of HR practitioners' daily work mimics the work of their main “customer”, i.e. managers within the organisations.

The HR practitioners were working mainly in the service of managers, which suggests that they have an internal focus. Consistent with current, prescriptive HR discourse, HR practitioners should adopt a multi-stakeholder perspective of human resource management (HRM) and a more external focus that is necessary to contribute to wider, organisational effectiveness. The findings could enrich what is taught in higher education by providing students with an account of the reality of HR practitioners' daily work.

The study provides a situated account of the daily work of HR practitioners, which is largely absent from the literature.