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Organizational researchers studying well-being – as well as organizations themselves – often place much of the burden on employees to manage and preserve their own well-being. Missing from this discussion is how – from a human resources management (HRM) perspective – organizations and managers can directly and positively shape the well-being of their employees. The authors use this review to paint a picture of what organizations could be like if they valued people holistically and embraced the full experience of employees’ lives to promote well-being at work. In so doing, the authors tackle five challenges that managers may have to help their employees navigate, but to date have received more limited empirical and theoretical attention from an HRM perspective: (1) recovery at work; (2) women’s health; (3) concealable stigmas; (4) caregiving; and (5) coping with socio-environmental jolts. In each section, the authors highlight how past research has treated managerial or organizational support on these topics, and pave the way for where research needs to advance from an HRM perspective. The authors conclude with ideas for tackling these issues methodologically and analytically, highlighting ways to recruit and support more vulnerable samples that are encapsulated within these topics, as well as analytic approaches to study employee experiences more holistically. In sum, this review represents a call for organizations to now – more than ever – build thriving organizations.

Community colleges are an under-recognized but vital component of higher education. Public two-year colleges provide a foundation for baccalaureate degree attainment, educate a skilled math and science workforce, and support local economic development. Our research, which examines women STEM faculty at community colleges, highlights the role of gender in reproducing advantages and disadvantages within the academy.

Data were collected by face-to-face interviews with 27 women faculty at nine community colleges in Ohio. We utilized semi-structured interviewing techniques to examine key dimensions such as decision-making leading to employment in two-year institutions, perceived advantages and disadvantages of such work, job satisfaction, and challenges to balancing career and family.

Results indicate considerable satisfaction among women faculty members, but contradict a popular stereotype that work at community colleges is easier for women with families. Despite relative parity in terms of occupational composition, pay, and tenure, community colleges are gendered in that they lack formal programs, institutionalized support, and leadership opportunities to support women.

Adjunct faculty play an important role in higher education but are underrepresented in our sample. Future research is needed to examine the unique situation of part-time faculty.

Community colleges are uniquely poised to contribute to improving gender equality for women in STEM. Understanding community colleges and the academic careers of women in STEM employed by these institutions is a vital step in our nation’s efforts to develop systemic approaches to increase representation and advancement of women in STEM careers.

High-involvement work processes (HIWPs) are associated with high levels of employee influence over the work process, such as high levels of control over how to handle individual job tasks or a high level of involvement at team or workplace level in designing work procedures. When implementations of HIWPs are accompanied by companion investments in human capital – for example, in better information and training, higher pay and stronger employee voice – it is appropriate to talk not only of HIWPs but of “high-involvement work systems” (HIWSs). This chapter reviews the theory and practice of HIWPs and HIWSs. Across a range of academic perspectives and societies, it has regularly been argued that steps to enhance employee involvement in decision-making create better opportunities to perform, better utilization of skill and human potential, and better employee motivation, leading, in turn, to various improvements in organizational and employee outcomes.

However, there are also costs to increased employee involvement and the authors review the important economic and sociopolitical contingencies that help to explain the incidence or distribution of HIWPs and HIWSs. The authors also review the research on the outcomes of higher employee involvement for firms and workers, discuss the quality of the research methods used, and consider the tensions with which the model is associated. This chapter concludes with an outline of the research agenda, envisaging an ongoing role for both quantitative and qualitative studies. Without ignoring the difficulties involved, the authors argue, from the societal perspective, that the high-involvement pathway should be considered one of the most important vectors available to improve the quality of work and employee well-being.

The future of unions hangs in the balance. Labor unions face enormous challenges to overcome decades of decline and diminishing power. The authors examine the current status of unions with an eye toward identifying pathways to rejuvenation. Our analysis focuses on what the authors know about the decline of unions, how its compares historically, and what avenues are available to unions to change. Pathways to growth with undoubtedly require breaking old molds, which have proven ineffective. Unions need to explore new models of representation to take advantage of a changing workforce with new employment relationships typified by the “gig economy.” The authors present an agenda for fruitful research and discuss the implications of a weakened labor movement on the well-being of society.

Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) possess an advantage in preparing students of color for the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce (Gasman & Nguyen, 2014; Upton & Tannenbaum, 2014). It has been suggested that implementing additional strategies to increase the availability, dissemination, and quality of information related to successful HBCU outcomes will allow HBCUs to sustain themselves into the future (Gasman & Nguyen, 2016). We discuss the use and benefits of a novel framework THRIVE Index tool (Byrd & Mason, 2020). THRIVE uses seven dimensions (e.g., Type, History, Research, Inclusion, Identity, Voice, and Expectation) to illustrate best practices of academic pipeline programs and increase the availability of HBCU success outcomes in a comparable format. Academic pipeline programs come in several varieties, but their goal is to propel individuals from one level of the academy to another and into the workforce. Using a common framework like THRIVE also allows for the creation of a clearinghouse of what successfully works for us at HBCUs from the perspective of HBCU pipeline program directors. We describe strategies for how this option for knowledge transfer to stakeholders (e.g. parents, corporations, educational institutions, etc.) can aid in long-term sustainability efforts like recruitment strategies and partnership efforts.

The research aimed at explaining women microcredit repayment delay when loans are not granted on any joint liability group nor any other scheme based on social capital or financial collateral.

Previous research showed that greater female autonomy is associated with bearing fewer children and the former could be correlated to a higher loan repayment rate because of social and financial benefits for the household. Female autonomy proxied through the number of children and its square is regressed on the number of weeks of repayment delay in an OLS model as well as in a multilogit model that identifies borrowers according to their credit status (regular, delayed, and delinquent).

We found that more autonomous women, those bearing less than four children, repay credit more promptly and are less likely to switch into the delinquent credit status.

Economic variables need to be complemented with some specific characteristics of the borrower, as they have a role in explaining women’s repayment delay.

The research provides an alternate explanation about why women repay loans when a microcredit institution does not rely on a lending methodology based on joint liability groups.