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In this paper, we argue that work should be recognized as “commons.” We call for a new approach to how managers define their role and responsibility regarding the problem of work flexibility and of its societal implications. We argue that, in the global and digitized economy, it is in the best interest of all the company’s stakeholders that managers choose combinations of work arrangements and human resource policies considering the externalities of these decisions. Managers’ responsibility spans to the costs and risks that the broader social system of organizational stakeholders will bear because of their decisions. When labor market institutions are “thin,” it is management’s responsibility to contribute structuring and shaping them, so that the interests of workers, independent of the work arrangements, are considered.

This chapter will address the graying of the workplace which is forcing a paradigm shift in workplace hiring policies. The “baby boomers” generation with their large number in population and years of work experience play a large role in shaping the American workplace. As this large group of workers is aging, managers are faced with the need for greater understanding of not only how to accept but also how to reskill and integrate emerging workplace technologies into this older and experienced workforce. Additionally, HR researchers have suggested that organizations undergo a cultural shift in order to develop ways to compete globally using technology. There have been several articles regarding creating people advantage since 2011. Understanding the benefits of creating people advantage within organizations will be described in this chapter.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the roles of perceived organizational support (POS) and work status (regular worker/contract worker) in moderating the relationship between participation in decision making (PDM) and perceived insider status (PIS).

Data were collected with survey questionnaires that were administered to a sample of 369 employees from a case company in Taiwan, for which both regular and contract workers constitute the main workforce. After confirming the reliability and validity of the measurements, the authors conducted hierarchical regression analysis to examine the hypothesized relationships.

The mean PIS for regular workers is smaller than that for contract workers in the case company. For the group of contract workers, the positive influence of PDM on PIS is greater for those with lower POS than for those with higher POS. However, the negative moderating effect of POS does not exist for the group of regular workers.

This study adds to the existing literature by showing that contract workers, classified as external workers, can experience PIS, and that POS negatively moderates the positive relationship between PDM and PIS for contract workers. The managerial implications are discussed.

Very little is known about how contingent workers' identification with an organization evolves over time. This study seeks to contribute to the literature by investigating how the emergence and strength of organizational identification is affected by four variables: duration of primacy; duration of recency; frequency of interaction with other members of the organization; and frequency of information received about the organization.

Using a cognitive model of organizational identification grounded in memory, agent‐based modeling and NetLogo language were employed to form a model in which two groups of 567 contingent workers joined 1,134 different organizations and worked for 365 days. Correlation and multiple linear regression were used to analyze the data.

Evolution of organizational identification for a contingent worker depends on how much the individual interacts with other members of the organization and how much information about the organization that particular individual receives over time.

The generalizability of the simulation study's findings may be expanded if similar studies are carried out incorporating factors that mark differences in individuals, groups, organizations, sectors, industries, cultures, and geographies.

The existing literature on how contingent employees identify with an organization does not adequately provide a process‐based view of the phenomenon. This study extends and complements literature on contingent workers by emphasizing the social construction of time in and from memory throughout the process of organizational identification.

Despite the trend, managing and maximizing the effectiveness of blended workforce is not well-understood. The purpose of this paper is to institutionalize a blended workforce model in the post-COVID era, that is, a movement from homogenous workforce to heterogenous workforce of full-time employees working in tandem with gig talents connected via digital platforms.

The evolution of gig economy is presented for contextualizing the development of prospective business models in the post-COVID era to establish clarity on the relationship between the employers and the blended workforce. To achieve this conceptual switch, a framework is proposed to support this type of workforce for creating a fair balance.

By drawing on the concepts of various talent management functions, propositions were made predicting that the alignment of the multilateral activities of the gig workers with permanent workforce will be leveraged in the future to address the needs of short-term specialized skill-sets and scalable operations while creating a fair balance through a flexible and agile workforce.

First, the paper explores how bridging the gap between the traditional and gig workforce can impact the key antecedents of a blended workforce ensuring a fair trial. Second, on an economical level, the COOKIE framework proposed in the paper is expected to play a crucial role in creating new job opportunities, boosting employee morale while minimizing costs and increasing productivity of the organizations.

The purpose of this research is to examine the causes and consequences of permanent employees' perceptions that temporary employees are a threat to their job security.

The underlying theme of the current research is that an important reason why temporary employees can disrupt the work environment is that permanent workers can perceive them as threatening. A survey of permanent (n=99) and temporary employees (n=62) was used to test hypotheses. Multiple sources were used to assess permanent employees' treatment of their temporary co‐workers.

Permanent employees felt more threatened when they perceived the layoff policy and motives for using temporary workers as inappropriate, and when the position of temporary employees was equal to or above their own rank. The relationship between these feelings of threat and their behavior toward the temporary employees was moderated by temporary employee type. Specifically, permanent employees who did not feel threatened treated involuntary temporary employees better, but permanent employees who felt threatened treated voluntary temporary employees better.

The sampling procedure limits the generalizability of the findings.

This paper helps illuminate the dynamics between temporary and permanent workers to enable organizations to decide when temporary employees will be helpful and when they will be harmful. The results provide specific recommendations for when different types of temporary employees should be used.

This paper applies psychological and organizational theories to the workplace to uncover when blended workforces are likely to be problematic.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the key determinants of organisational silence from the perspective of non-standard workers (NSWs). The study focuses on three research themes: first, analysing the experiences motivating NSWs to remain silent; second, analysing the role of the NSW life cycle in the motivation to remain silent, the final theme is evaluation of the impact on organisational voice of an organisation employing a workforce in which NSWs and standard workers (SWs) are blended.

The study utilises a phenomenological approach, as defined by Van Manen (2007), to collect and analyse the phenomenon of organisational silence from the perspective of NSWs. The NSWs are defined as individuals operating via Limited Liability UK registered companies created for the purpose of delivering services to organisations via a contract of services. This study employed a combination of phenomenology and hermeneutics to collect and analyse the data collected from the NSWs using semi-structured interviews (Lindseth and Norberg, 2004).

The study concludes with three core findings. NSWs experience similar motivational factors to silence as experienced by standard workers (SWs). The key differential between a SW and a NSW is the role of defensive silence as a dominant motivator for a start-up NSW. The study identified that the reasons for this is that new NSWs are defensive to protect their reputation for any future contract opportunities. In addition, organisations are utilising the low confidence of new start up NSWs to suppress the ability of NSWs to voice. The research indicates how experienced NSWs use the marketing stage of their life cycle to establish voice mechanisms. The study identified that NSWs, fulfiling management and supervisory roles for organisations, are supporting/creating climates of silence through their transfer of experiences as SWs prior to becoming NSWs.

This study is a pilot study, and the findings from this study will be carried forward into a larger scale study through engagement with further participants across a diverse range of sectors. This study has identified that there is a need for further studies on organisational silence and NSWs to analyse more fully the impact of silence on the individuals and the organisation itself. A qualitative phenomenological hermeneutical study is not intended to be extrapolated to provide broad trends. The focus of the phenomenological hermeneutic research methodology is on describing and analysing the richness and depth of the NSW’s experiences of silence in organisational settings.

This paper draws together the studies of worker classification, motivators for organisational silence, and the impact of blending SWs and NSWs in an organisational setting. The study demonstrates that academic research to date has focused predominantly on SWs to the exclusion of the 1.5 million, and growing, NSWs in the UK. This study examines these under-represented workers to analyse the participants’ experiences of organisational silence, and its consequences in organisational settings, demonstrating a need for further studies.

Many workers today are employed under a variety of nonstandard work arrangements, such as contract work and agency temporary work. While prior research has shown that the use of nonstandard workers can be detrimental to standard workers’ attitudes and behaviors, producing conflict between nonstandard and standard employees, that research has not shown how or why. We propose a model in which threat to status of, and accommodation by, standard workers cause negative reactions to nonstandard workers, contingent upon the competence of nonstandard workers. The model helps explain how subtle differences among seemingly similar nonstandard work arrangements can produce dramatically different challenges to work group effectiveness. Implications for the effective blending of work groups are discussed.

Kenyan Small and Medium-sized Tourism Enterprises (SMTEs) have been highly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, the tourism workforce had to face lockdowns and travel restrictions. In order to maintain business and operational continuity, the tourism workforce had to leverage on internet technologies and digitalisation as a means of enabling business continuity and providing value addition in their supply chains. This study sought to investigate on the extent to which digital skills aid in the tourism recovery process as well as improve the employees' well-being amid the COVID-19 pandemic among SMTEs in Nairobi City County.

The study took a qualitative approach based on constructivist grounded methodological approaches that emphasised specifically on the discovery of emerging trends and patterns in behaviour as well as development of new theory. The aim was to understand the tourism workforce recovery process using digital skills. The process involved data gathering from interview participants, qualitative emic and etic coding, analytical memo writing, theoretical sampling and reconstructing theory.

The findings of the study showed that due to losses attributed to the lockdowns and travel restrictions, prospective digital business models have been formulated for tourism stakeholders during the lockdown period. The changing technological landscape globally showed that digital skills will continue to be in great demand to meet the needs of the marketplace. Further, the use of social digital tools to build a mental health response to COVID-19 was instrumental to the recovery process. Technological resilience is a key factor that will play a role in reviving the sector.

A structured vision, roadmap and tourism strategy for mainstreaming digital skills and developing technological resilience within the tourism and hospitality sector is important towards coping and adaptive strategies for the SMTEs in the Kenyan context.

This study examines how digital skills are vital for tourism recovery especially for the SMTEs within the developing countries context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine “black box” links between HRM innovations and organizational performance by investigating the perspective of a workforce often excluded from the HR realm. Professional Independent Contractors (IPros) play a vital role in achieving workforce flexibility and innovation. While the use of such arrangements has been examined often using a compliance-oriented lens, the authors explore the value of adding a commitment aspect.

In total, 375 IPros working in Australian organizations completed an online questionnaire distributed by a national business support services provider.

Results show organizational support significantly predicted work engagement and affective commitment. Self-efficacy, age and gender were also significant predictors.

The cross-sectional nature of this study and reliance on self-reported data limit the reliability of the findings. In addition, the findings may be specific to the Australian labor market.

The study present the views of a difficult to reach population and the findings suggest by adopting an innovative hybrid commitment-compliance HR configuration, practitioners may positively increase desirable contractor outcomes.

Concerns that organizational imperatives for efficiency, quality and high performance will be compromised by considering the human side of non-employee work arrangements are not supported. Indeed, as previously outlined, much of the concern with the employee/non-employee dichotomy is legally based and an artefact of a system of labor law that in many settings has failed to move with the times.

Few investigations of the impact of high commitment HRM practices have incorporated the perspective of professional, non-employees. While IPros are recipients of compliance focused contractor management practices, carefully integrated commitment-based HRM aspects have the potential to deliver positive outcomes for both individuals and organizations.