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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the conceptual framework about human resources downsizing and restructuring and how organizations of the public sector can do that effectively and efficiently. These facts drive to the conclusion that the implementation of early retirement incentives requires the most elaborate planning and execution to be effective, predictable and safe in the long term.

This paper adopts an analytical, descriptive methodology approach to describe the basic features of the data by using the descriptive research design. Data have been collected through different sources, which include secondary data, to introduce the theoretical literature of the subject as books, journals, articles, published working papers and referred previous studies related to the same subject.

Downsizing process is a deliberate administrative process that includes, but is not limited to, workforce reduction and is primarily aimed at achieving efficiency in public organizations. The definition of workforce downsizing may be narrowed to reducing the number of workers, or more likely to refer to general efforts to restructuring human resources in public organizations, Early Retirement Incentive Programs (ERIP) represents a viable alternative for organizations seeking to reduce staff. For the ERIP to be successful, the program coordinator must understand the business objectives and goals that the organization is trying to obtain.

Human resources strategies concerning downsizing public administration workforce should be more appropriate to those who leave the organization and those who stay at work, reducing the negative psychological, administrative and economical effects. This could be achieved through a strategy called early retirement incentive programs.

This paper aims to study the type of short-time work (STW) schemes implemented in Spain to preserve jobs and workers’ incomes during the COVID-19 crisis and the corresponding labour market outcomes.

A dynamic macroeconomic model of job creation and destruction of the search and matching type in a dual labour market.

The model shows that the availability of STW schemes does not necessarily prevent a large increase in unemployment and job destruction. The quantitative effects depend on the degree of subsidization of payroll taxes and on the design of the policy. A scenario with a moderate degree of subsidization and where the subsidy is independent of the reduction in hours worked is the least harmful for both welfare and fiscal deficit. The cost of such a strategy is a higher unemployment rate. Concerning heterogeneous effects, the unemployed are the ones who experience the strongest distributional changes.

The effectiveness of STW schemes in dual labour markets using a search and matching model in the context of the COVID-19 crisis has not been analysed elsewhere. The literature has emphasized the importance of dynamics, labour market institutions and workers’ heterogeneity to understand workforce adjustment decisions in the face of temporary shocks to de- mand especially when firms’ human capital is relevant. These elements are present in the model. In addition, this paper computes welfare and distributional effects and the cost of these policies.

The recent global economic crisis affected workplaces in many countries, raising questions about the employees' situation. While most work-related studies in times of crises focus on job loss and unemployment, this study analyzes workplace violence in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis among municipal employees within care and education.

Mixed method approach was used for data collection; longitudinal online surveys and focus group interviews were used.

The prevalence of workplace violence increased between the three time points of the study, in particular in downsized workplaces. A higher proportion of employees working in care were exposed to threats and physical violence than employees in education as clients of employees in care services were more likely to lash out against employees due to cutbacks in services. Focus groups interviews indicated that the causes of increased workplace violence may be due to a spreading effect both from within and outside the workplace.

As workplace violence can have serious consequences for the health and well-being of employees, it is important for those who have responsibility for the work environment and occupational health in the workplace to design policies that take these findings into account.

Based on the mixed methods, longitudinal survey and focus group interviews, this study contributes to knowledge on workplace violence in times of economic crises. It shows that the prevalence of workplace violence increased not only directly after the economic collapse but also continued up to five years later.

This study focuses on HR practices that foster employee engagement during Covid-19. Companies in transition economies are particularly vulnerable to crisis and downsizing and other recessionary practices are frequently used.

Drawing on the model of caring human resource management, we utilise interviews with human resource representatives of 10 banks in the transition economy of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We analyse the banks at two different times to demonstrate how and why companies adapt their HR practices.

Our findings show a changing mindset in the deployment of highly context-specific HR practices. Strengthening company culture through a sense of community and communication ensure stability and continuity in work. Rather than layoffs, flexible work has become standard.

By highlighting the interplay between HR practices and employee engagement, we contribute to the discussion on engagement in exceptional circumstances and challenging settings and demonstrate how caring responsibilities “migrate” into HR practices in the professional context of a transition economy.

We propose a context-specific “protective caring approach” to foster employee engagement during crises.

Building on the institutional theory perspective on corporate governance change and based on interviews with investor relations (IR) managers in large Japanese companies, this study aims to examine Japanese IR managers’ perceptions of the influence of foreign shareholders on Japan’s corporate governance reform and stakeholder-based system. The paper examines tensions, conflicts and collaborations among different stakeholders involved in corporate governance changes in Japan, especially in the areas of firm ownership, employment relations and boards of directors. The paper explains why convergence does not happen in some large Japanese companies by investigating Japanese managers’ responses to and perceptions of foreign shareholders in multiple corporate contexts.

The author conducted in-depth interviews with ten IR managers at large, listed Japanese companies in Kyoto and Tokyo and two managers at foreign investment banks in Tokyo, between 2018 and 2021.

This paper explores five themes that emerged from my interviews: Chief executive officers’ (CEOs’) mixed perceptions of foreign investors, the effectiveness of CEO compensation and outside directors, managers’ reluctance to accept stock price-driven business strategies, foreign investors’ engagement vs investments in index funds and gender patterns, including the effectiveness of token female outside directors. The Japanese companies the author looked at incorporated foreign shareholders as consultants and adopted a few major shareholder-based customs, such as CEOs communicating with investors, having outside directors, increasing CEO compensation and slimming down unprofitable parts of the business via restructuring and downsizing. Simultaneously, they resisted a few major shareholder-based practices. Foreign shareholders’ pressure revealed tensions and contradictions between the Japanese stakeholder system and shareholder primacy-based customs.

This paper is one of the few qualitative studies that explores Japanese IR managers’ responses to and perceptions of foreign shareholders in corporate governance reform, with a particular focus on ownership, employment relations and board members. This paper provides examples of tension, conflict and cooperation between Japanese managers and foreign investors, as seen through the eyes of Japanese IR managers. Examining changes in Japan’s stakeholder-based system of corporate governance reform enables us to better understand the processes by which, with vigorous pressure from government and foreign shareholders, a non-western country like Japan may adopt shareholder-based customs and how such a change may also lead to institutional changes.

Despite immigrant-receiving countries' need for skilled professionals to meet labour demands, research suggests that many skilled migrants undergo deskilling, downward career mobility, underemployment, unemployment and talent waste, finding themselves in low-skilled occupations that are not commensurate to their education and experience. Skilled immigrant women face additional gendered disadvantages, including a disproportionate domestic burden, interrupted careers and gender segmentation in occupations and organizations. This study explores how the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic impacted skilled newcomer women's labour market outcomes and work experiences.

The authors draw on 50 in-depth questionnaires with skilled women to elaborate on their work experiences during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic pushed skilled immigrant women towards unemployment, lower-skilled or less stable employment. Most study participants had their career trajectory delayed, interrupted or reversed due to layoffs, decreased job opportunities and increased domestic burden. The pandemic's gendered nature and the reliance on work-from-home arrangements and online job search heightened immigrant women's challenges due to limited social support and increased family responsibilities.

This paper adds to the conversation of increased integration challenges under pandemic conditions by contextualizing the pre-pandemic literature on immigrant work integration to the pandemic environment. Also, this paper contributes a better understanding of the gender dynamics informing the COVID-19 socio-economic climate.

This focal chapter deals with the understanding of important ethical theories used in executive moral reasoning such as teleology, deontology, distributive justice and corrective justice, virtue ethics versus ethics of trust, from the perspectives of intrinsic versus instrumental good, moral worth versus moral obligation, and moral conscience versus moral justification. Ethical and moral reasoning will power executives to identify, explore, and resolve corporate moral dilemma, especially in the wake of emerging gray market areas where good and evil, right or wrong, just or unjust, and truth and falsehood cannot be easily distinguished. We focus on developing corporate skills of awareness of ethical values and moral imperatives in current otherwise highly commoditized and turbulent human, market, and corporate situations. The challenges of morality are multifaceted and diverse. Professionals usually have self-discipline and self-regulation abilities, ego strength, and social skills. Morality in the professions is not concerned with the issues of rudimentary socialization; rather, the issues involve deciding between conflicting values, where each value represents something good in itself. There are problems in both knowing what is right, good, true, and just on the one hand, and on the other hand, in doing what is right and avoiding wrong, doing good and avoiding evil, and being fair and just while avoiding being unfair and unjust. Several contemporary cases will illustrate the challenging dimensions of ethical and moral reasoning, moral judgment and moral justification embedded in executive decision processes, and corporate growth and profitability ventures.

Employment-related measures play a significant part in preventive and mitigative social policies. The importance of these actions is especially emphasised in times of crisis. This paper provides empirical insights into employment-related measures implemented in a sample of OECD countries as a response to the COVID-19 crisis in 2020. Furthermore, it addresses the continuity of the measures by July 2022.

The research applies and further develops a capability approach in the COVID-19 context to provide a theoretically informed empirical understanding of the implemented employment related measures.

The results indicate that countries expanded the coverage of previous preventive and mitigative employment measures horizontally and vertically while also introducing new schemes to protect workers. The main conclusions suggest that most employment-related measures (65.5%) were preventive aiming at saving jobs and broadening peoples capabilities with bridging measures during the crisis. The employment measures served first as an emergency aid. However, most measures were recalibrated and changed incrementally toward 2022.

The data consisted major employment-related measures and changes in social policies the studied countries. The authors focussed the examination on governmental-level measures. Thus, sub-national or sector-specific responses, for example tripartite agreements in certain employment sectors or social transfers in certain areas, were excluded.

The way in which welfare states reacted to employment problems during the COVID-19 pandemic may have an impact on how governments approach social policies in the future. The capability approach exhibits a pronounced strength by facilitating the establishment of sustainable trajectories for social policy and welfare services.

The capability approach embracing the preactive and proactive role of social policies lends a unique perspective on public policies.

While job insecurity generally impedes performance, there may be circumstances under which it can prompt performance. The purpose of this paper is to examine a specific situation (reorganization) in which job insecurity may prompt task and contextual performance. The authors propose that performance can represent a job preservation strategy, to which employees may only resort when supervisor-issued ratings of performance are instrumental toward securing one’s job. The authors hypothesize that because of this instrumentality, job insecurity will motivate employees’ performance only when they have low intrinsic motivation, and only when they perceive high distributive justice.

In a survey study among 103 permanent employees of a company in reorganization, the authors assessed perceived job insecurity, intrinsic motivation and perceived distributive justice. Supervisors rated employees’ overall performance (task performance and organizational citizenship behaviors).

Multilevel analyses showed that job insecurity was only positively related to supervisor-rated overall performance among employees with low intrinsic motivation and, unexpectedly, among employees who experienced low distributive justice. Results were cross-validated using employees’ self-rated performance, replicating the findings on distributive justice but not the findings on intrinsic motivation.

The results can inform future research on the specific situations in which job insecurity may prompt job preservation efforts, and call for research to uncover the mechanisms underlying employees’ negative and positive responses to job insecurity. The results and associated implications of this study are largely based on conceptual evidence. In addition, the cross-sectional design warrants precaution about drawing causal inferences from the data.

By combining insights from coping responses and threat foci, this study advances the understanding of when and why job insecurity may prompt performance.

This paper aims to review the experience so far of the Spanish labour market during the Covid-19 crisis in the light of the existing institutions, its performance during past recessions and the policy measures adopted during the pandemic. Emphasis is placed on the role of worldwide trends in labour markets because of automation and artificial intelligence, in shaping a potential recovery of this (hopefully) transitory shock through a big reallocation process of employment and economic activity. It also highlights some innovations to employment and social policies needed to smooth the reallocation process and lessen the rise in inequality associated to technological trends.

Theory and empirics.

The Spanish labour market will subject to a great reallocation shock as a result of Covid-19 and secular technological changes. Reforms need to be undertaken.

An overview and some new results.