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Three decades of academic and professional discourse on HR technologies (HRTs) have produced continued disagreement over construct definitions and research streams that are highly fragmented. These realities suggest that greater consistency in meanings is sorely needed if we are to integrate and upgrade knowledge in this area. This chapter draws on the findings of a systematic research review to properly define the content domains of human resource information systems (HRIS), virtual human resources (virtual HR), electronic human resource management (e-HRM), and business-to-employee (B2E) systems. An integrative synthesis was performed on 242 system-level writings that appeared in the literature from 1983 to 2017. The weight of the evidence strongly supports treating HRIS, virtual HR, e-HRM, and B2E systems as independent, complimentary constructs. While the first three comprise a firm’s HRT system, the fourth construct is more appropriately positioned in the business-collaborative system. The sample was further evaluated with an analytic framework to detect patterns of practice in research designs. This revealed that much more attention has been focused on system actions and outcomes than on attitudes and system characteristics. Different units of analysis were well represented aside from trans-organizational studies. Finally, a case is made for better contextualizing HRT research by recognizing differences in assimilation stage, functional penetration, and collective proficiency. These factors are rarely mentioned, let alone studied, raising additional concerns about measurement error. Detailed suggestions are offered on ways to incorporate them. Together, these materials should promote more sophisticated and generalizable assessments of technology, improving our ability to understand its impacts.

A small-scale study was conducted to qualitatively explore the “lived experiences” of persons who remarried between the ages of 55 and 75. Improved life expectancy, high divorce rates, increased odds of being widowed over time, and the need for intimate relationships across the lifespan are some of the factors associated with a recent increase in remarriage rates of older adults. While demographic trends indicate that repartnering in the later years will likely become more common, little is known about remarriage in the “young-old” years.

The study included in-depth, semistructured interviews with 11 newlyweds (seven females, four males) who had remarried between the ages of 55 and 75. Word-for-word transcripts were qualitatively analyzed through a process of open coding and constant comparison to identify salient themes related to the original research question “What is the transition to remarriage experience like for adults aged 55–75?”

Five themes emerged from the analysis of participant interviews: positive orientation toward remarriage, practical/pragmatic view of the union, desire for companionship, recognition of others’ feelings, and willingness to adapt.

The findings were salient to a small group of “young-old,” white, middle-class males and females from the Midwest and are not meant to be generalizable. The results can serve as a basis for further research and understanding of romantic relationships and repartnering across the life course.

This study helps to fill the gap that exists in the current literature related to romantic relationships and remarriage in the “young-old” years of life.

Job design researchers advocate that jobs should be interesting, that is they should involve tasks that are meaningful and have significance. However, all jobs contain tasks that may be meaningful and significant and essential to organizations’ operation but not enjoyed by the employee. We refer to these tasks as non-preferred work tasks (NPWT). In this chapter, we draw on Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory to develop a conceptual model proposing that the intensity and frequency of non-preferred work tasks reduces employees’ propensity to engage in extra-role discretionary work behavior, and that job crafting and emotional state moderate this relationship.

We argue that self-stigma places patients on a path of marginalization throughout their life course leading to a negative cycle of opportunity and advancement. Mental health patients with higher levels of self-stigma tend to have much lower self-esteem, efficacy, and personal agency; therefore, they will be more inclined to adopt role-identities at the periphery of major social institutions, like those of work, family, and academia. Similarly, the emotions felt when enacting such roles may be similarly dampened.

Utilizing principles from affect control theory (ACT) and the affect control theory of selves (ACTS), we generate predictions related to self-stigmatized patients’ role-identity adoption and emotions. We use the Indianapolis Mental Health Study and Interact, a computerized version of ACT and ACTS, to generate empirically based simulation results for patients with an affective disorder (e.g., major depression and bipolar disorder) with comparably high or low levels of self-stigmatization.

Self-stigma among affective patients reduces the tendency to adopt major life course identities. Self-stigma also affects patients’ emotional expression by compelling patients to seek out interactions that make them feel anxious or affectively neutral.

This piece has implications for the self-stigma and stigma literatures. It is also one of the first pieces to utilize ACTS, thereby offering a new framework for understanding the self-stigma process. We offer new hypotheses for future research to test with non-simulation-based data and suggest some policy implications.

We examine whether self-stigmatization may affect the everyday social interactions of individuals with a diagnosed, affective mental health disorder. Past research demonstrates self-stigmatization lowers self-esteem, efficacy, and personal agency, leading to the likely adoption of role-identities that are at the periphery of major social institutions. We advance research on self-stigma by examining the likely interactional and emotional consequences of enacting either a highly stigmatized self-identity or a weakly stigmatized self-identity.

Using affect control theory (ACT), we form predictions related to the interactional and emotional consequences of self-stigmatization. We use the Indianapolis Mental Health Study and Interact, a computerized instantiation of ACT, to generate empirically based simulation results for patients with an affective disorder (e.g., major depression and bipolar disorder), comparing simulations where the focal actor is a person with a mental illness who exhibits either high or low levels of self-stigma.

Self-stigma is predicted to negatively influence patients’ behavioral expression, leading the highly self-stigmatized to enact behaviors that are lower in goodness, power, and liveliness than the weakly self-stigmatized. Their corresponding emotional expressions during these types of interactions are similarly negatively impacted. Even though these likely interactions are the most confirmatory for people with high levels of self-stigma, they lead to interactions that are behaviorally and emotionally more negative than those who have been better able to resist internalizing stigmatizing beliefs.

This piece has implications for the literature on the interactional and life course challenges faced by psychiatric patients and contributes to the self-stigma literature more broadly. This work will hopefully inform future research involving the collection of non-simulation-based data on the everyday interactional experiences of people with mental health problems.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.

Business ethics provide a potent source of competitive advantage, placing increasing pressure on organizations to create and maintain an ethical workforce. Nonetheless, ethical breaches continue to permeate corporate life, suggesting that there is something missing from how we conceptualize and institutionalize organizational ethics. The current effort seeks to fill this void in two ways. First, we introduce an extended ethical framework premised on sensemaking in organizations. Within this framework, we suggest that multiple individual, organizational, and societal factors may differentially influence the ethical sensemaking process. Second, we contend that human resource management plays a central role in sustaining workplace ethics and explore the strategies through which human resource personnel can work to foster an ethical culture and spearhead ethics initiatives. Future research directions applicable to scholars in both the ethics and human resources domains are provided.

Abusive supervision is associated with many detrimental consequences. In this theory-review chapter, we extend the abusive supervision literature in two ways. First, we argue that more attention needs to be given to the emotion contagion processes between the leader and followers. More specifically, leaders’ negative affect can lead to followers’ experiences of negative affect, thereby influencing followers’ perception of abusive supervision. Second, we explore how employees draw upon their cognitive prototypes of an ideal leader or Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs) to evaluate leader behaviors. In this regard, we argue that ILTs can influence the (negative) emotional contagion process between the leaders’ negative affect and followers’ perception of abusive supervision. In our proposed model, leaders’ expressions of negative affect, via emotional contagion, influence followers’ negative affect, perception of abusive supervision, and two behavioral responses: affect- and judgment-driven. The negative emotional contagion process between the leader and followers also differs depending on followers’ susceptibility to emotional contagion and their ILTs. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our model.