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The purpose of the cross-cultural study is three-fold – (1) to examine the effect of agile strategic human resource management (ASHRM) practices for each stage of the employee life-cycle on employee outcomes, (2) to investigate employee outcomes – organisational outcome linkage and (3) to explore the link between organisational outcomes and shared values to society.

The research used random sampling to select 674 managers (358 from India and 316 from Thailand) who work in food processing firms. A structured questionnaire was administered to the respondents separately for collecting data. The authors used PLS-SEM to verify the study hypotheses and related research models.

The multi-group analysis (MGA) results indicated a significant difference in agile SHRM practices, employee outcomes, organisational outcomes and shared values in the Indian and Thai samples. However, the difference in the impact of the organisational outcome on shared values to society was found to be insignificant, suggesting that organisational outcome had a similar impact on shared values in both countries.

The agile strategic HR practices, especially talent acquisition, learning and development, reward and recognition, must be aligned to suit country-specific culture for improving job satisfaction, employee engagement and employee productivity, which would result in improved organisational outcomes such as profitability and customer satisfaction, ultimately enhancing shared values to society. This comparative analysis would also help the Indian and Thai food sectors develop new strategies or alter existing ones in light of the ASHRM model.

The study provides an innovative ASHRM framework from a cross-cultural perspective, which may help organisations to adopt agile talent acquisition, career development and separation strategies to thrive in the turbulent international business environment.

This paper aims to explore the strategic and evolving role of human resource management (HRM) directors within the context of underdeveloped institutional arrangements. The study focuses on India and conducts a comparative analysis of the roles of HRM directors in both multinational enterprises (MNEs) and domestic firms.

Survey-based data from the HRM directors of 252 enterprises were gathered for the comparative analysis, including both multinational and domestic enterprises.

HRM directors in MNEs lack the proficiency required to effectively fulfil their strategic role. In addition, there has been a notable shift in the responsibilities of HRM directors in MNEs, with increased emphasis on labour movements and trade union negotiations, as opposed to traditional human resource (HR) activities. This shift suggests that the role of HRM in MNEs operating in India has been influenced by local isomorphic forces, rather than following a “pendulum swing” between home and host country institutional pressures. The prevalence of informality in the Indian institutional arrangements may act as a strong counterforce to integrating the strategic agency of MNEs' home country HRM directors into the organizational structure. Despite facing resistance from the local institutional context, HRM directors in MNEs are responding with a pushback, prioritizing labour movements and trade union negotiations over core HRM activities.

The study highlights the broader implications for theory and practice, shedding light on the challenges faced by HRM directors in navigating incoherent institutional arrangements. It emphasizes the need for a deeper understanding of local forces in shaping HRM practices within multinational settings.

We contribute to the comparative HRM literature by elaborating on power struggles that HRM directors face amid the dichotomies of formal power and authority that are encoded in the organizational structure versus culturally contingent power that can be accrued from engaging in informality. We also highlight their engagement in prolonged institutional mediation and change, which serves as a compensatory mechanism for the institutional shortfalls they encounter within the context of emerging markets.

The primary purpose of this contextual study was three-fold: (1) to study the effect of HR practices on employee lifecycle (ELC) on organisational outcomes; (2) to investigate the mediating role of employee outcomes in the relationship between HR practices and organisational outcomes; (3) to assess the differences in HR practices of the Indian and Thai food processing industries.

The study used random sampling to select 574 (278 Indian and 296 Thai) HR managers in food processing industries. A structured questionnaire was administered. The PLS-SEM was used to validate the relationships, while multiple group analysis (MGA) was employed to compare the HR practices.

The results revealed a significant influence of HR practices on organisational outcomes. Employee outcomes also mediate this influence. MGA results showed no significant variation in the effect of HR practices on organisational outcomes between India and Thailand.

HR practices must be aligned to suit country-specific business contexts to achieve organisational outcomes by improving employee outcomes. The findings would guide managers of the Indian and Thai food industries to develop tailor-made HR strategies.

This study contributes to comparative HRM in the Asian context by offering an empirically tested framework. Additionally, this comparative research offers insightful information on convergent best practices among Asian nations.

This research aims to explore whether or how organizations adopt people analytics (PA), its value and potential socio-technical factors that can enable or hinder PA projects by disrupting and reshaping human resource management. We do this by focusing on the Italian context.

We conduct a scoping review of data collected between 2018 and 2022 via Google Alerts (GA), a content change detection and notification service that is gaining popularity in scholarly research.

Our findings suggest that the diffusion of PA applications in Italy, especially those of a descriptive nature, is growing. Most of the existing PA applications are positioned in a positive technocratic light, envisioning the value of PA for both employees and organizations. The value for the latter appears to be direct, while the value for employees is realized through organizational initiatives. The findings also suggest that while enablers can vary between PA application types, the barriers, especially technological and environmental, are generic for both descriptive and predictive/prescriptive PA applications.

Theoretically, we propose a framework for analyzing PA applications, their values, enablers and barriers. Methodologically, we present and describe in detail a novel approach, drawing on GA that can be used to study PA in specific contexts. Practically, our study serves as a helpful point of reference for managers planning or implementing PA in Italy, for benchmarking PA in Italy over time and for comparative international studies.

Considering the significant increase in researchers’ interest in human resource management (HRM) in the public sector domain, this study aims to focus on producing a scale of HRM practices customized for the context of public organizations.

Experts and semantic analysis were performed for the scale development (qualitative stage), and exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis through structural equation modeling was conducted for the scale validation (quantitative stage).

The public HRM practices scale (public HRMPS) is composed of 19 items, distributed along four factors/dimensions, named training, development and education; relationship; work conditions; and competency and performance appraisal. The scale showed evidence of internal and construct validity (convergent, divergent, criterion-related and discriminant), as well as reliability and content validity.

The public HRMPS can be applied in relational studies to test structural models of prediction, mediation and moderation to evaluate relationships with organizational behavior variables, such as leader-members exchange, engagement at work, life quality at work and well-being at work, among others.

The public HRMPS may also serve as a useful diagnostic tool for the decision-making process made by public managers so they can promote a strategic, evidence-based HRM. Furthermore, the transforming role of strategic HRM can be operationalized by adopting practices gathered in the public HRMPS, advancing toward new HRM strategies to promote healthier and more productive work environments.

Healthier and more productive environments translate into real impacts for society, the first beneficiary of public services with more quality, efficiency and accountability.

The public HRMPS is the first attempt to produce an operationally valid and reliable measure to evaluate strategic HRM practices, responding to calls in the literature concerning the need for an integrated, comprehensive and customized HRM practices scale for the public service context.

This study extends the understanding of the context of IHRM headquarters as one of the top management groups (TMGs) through the application of both upper echelons theory and contextual theory.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with senior Israeli HR managers from international advanced-technology companies.

This study expands on theory by explaining how contexts act as constraints or opportunities for IHRM headquarter professionals as TMGs. The organizational context in which the IHRM headquarters take part is based on two themes: organizational structure and shared values. This is followed by the context of IHRM headquarters that includes two foundations for integration: strategic IHRM and trust. Finally, integration is derived from two themes: collaborative behaviors and electronic HRM.

This research has yielded a theoretical framework, which makes progress toward developing an integrative paradigm between IHRM headquarters' behavioral integration and organizational features. The paper presents a valuable “toolkit” for facilitating internal integration in IHRM headquarters.

Positive psychology helps us understand the knowledge required to contribute to adolescents' societal development and adjustability. Adolescence is the crucial stage to work on for a balanced personality. The present study concerned adolescents' self-strength, happiness, and help-seeking behaviour. The authors aimed to explore the relationship between adolescents' self-strength and happiness and investigate the mediational effect of adolescents' help-seeking behaviour on their self-strength and happiness.

The research design of the current quantitative study was correlational, and 809 adolescents from China and Pakistan participated in the present study. Data were personally collected from participants through self-developed scales.

We deployed Pearson correlation and simple mediation using SPSS software and found a linear, positive, strong (r = 0.654, n = 809, p = 0.000 < 0.01) and statistically significant correlation between adolescents' self-strength and happiness. The authors also found a significant indirect effect of help-seeking on adolescents' self-strength and happiness at (β = 0.373, t(907) = 7.01).

Using self-reported scales to gather information was one of the study's limitations. Adolescents may have misunderstood the notion or construct narrated in words or responded biasedly despite the bilingual scales.

This study offers social and practical implications for educators, parents, and school administrators to address the development of adolescents' personalities using a positive psychology lens.

The findings are of significant importance for teachers working in the elementary schools. They may work on adolescents' self-strength, happiness, and help-seeking to develop balanced personalities.

This study focuses on owner-managers’ paternalism and its effects on human resource management (HRM) in micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) during COVID-19 pandemic. It aims to describe and discuss how owner-managers paternalism enhanced the sustainability of exemplary MSMEs.

A qualitative approach employing Heideggerian interpretive phenomenological methodology was used. Data were collected from 30 exemplary MSME restaurants using non-participant observation, document analysis and in-depth interviews with a purposive sample of 75 key informants: 30 owner-managers and 45 of their employees in 10 Thai tourist provinces over three time periods. Verbatim transcripts were coded using template analysis to generate distilled data summaries.

Four HRM themes were identified: (1) staffing, (2) development, (3) performance management and (4) compensation. A proposed model was suggested to understand how owner-managers’ paternalism affects four HRM practices. Owner-managers use their authority, combined with high levels of benevolence and morality, through supportiveness and kindness for employees to meet both their work and personal needs. Specifically, their employees repay them through performance and loyalty. This reciprocal relationship positively impacts employers, employees and MSMEs.

The generalization of the study's outcomes is limited by the sample size and study methodology. The findings propose alternative HRM practices for Thai restaurants, therefore, generalization to all types of MSMEs and all areas of the world is not possible. In future research, it would be useful to consider a mixed-methods approach using large samples of MSMEs across the country or in other countries. Some small HR issues that were noted in this study, such as using the horoscope, astrology and zodiac as hiring tools, could be studied further. Future studies should explore the main thrust and relationship established between owner-managers and employees to drive MSMEs' performance.

The findings may be used as guidelines for creating a deep bond between employers and employees to strengthen MSMEs and foster sustainability.

Important for instilling HRM practices in MSMEs. This paper provides policy implications for governments, relevant public agencies and other developing countries. They need to put forward for consideration of new strategies for migrant policy, in order to solve the shortage of labor in MSMEs. A well-considered policy could increase employee well-being during crises by bringing supportive strategies together.

This study expands knowledge of the effects of paternalism on HRM practices in shaping employer and employee relationships through social exchange theory (SET).

We studied the relationship between job engagement and systematic problem solving (SPS) among shop-floor employees and how lean production (LP) and Internet of Things (IoT) systems moderate this relationship.

We collected data from a sample of 440 shop floor workers in 101 manufacturing work units across 33 plants. Because our data is nested, we employed a series of multilevel regression models to test the hypotheses. The application of IoT systems within work units was evaluated by our research team through direct observations from on-site visits.

Our findings indicate a positive association between job engagement and SPS. Additionally, we found that the adoption of lean bundles positively moderates this relationship, while, surprisingly, the adoption of IoT systems negatively moderates this relationship. Interestingly, we found that, when the adoption of IoT systems is complemented by a lean management system, workers tend to experience a higher effect on the SPS of their engagement.

One limitation of this research is the reliance on the self-reported data collected from both workers (job engagement, SPS and control variables) and supervisors (lean bundles). Furthermore, our study was conducted in a specific country, Italy, which might have limitations on the generalizability of the results since cross-cultural differences in job engagement and SPS have been documented.

Our findings highlight that employees’ strong engagement in SPS behaviors is shaped by the managerial and technological systems implemented on the shop floor. Specifically, we point out that implementing IoT systems without the appropriate managerial practices can pose challenges to fostering employee engagement and SPS.

This paper provides new insights on how lean and new technologies contribute to the development of learning-to-learn capabilities at the individual level by empirically analyzing the moderating effects of IoT systems and LP on the relationship between job engagement and SPS.