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Research on the relationship between high-performance workplace practices (HPWPs) and organizational performance has largely focussed on western settings, limiting the knowledge of how these systems influence performance in other countries, including Pakistan. Universalistic assumptions underpin the HPWP paradigm; to examine the validity of these assumptions, the purpose of this paper is to study the links between HPWP and performance in Pakistan, a country with different cultural norms and institutional settings to those in which most research has been conducted.

The authors draw on a unique survey of 392 establishment managers in the banking, pharmaceutical and information technology sectors. The authors include managers of foreign-owned multinational subsidiaries and domestic firms to ensure the sample represents firms in Pakistan.

The authors find that some individual HPWPs (recruitment and training) are associated in a statistically significant way with lower labour turnover, higher productivity and higher financial performance. Employee involvement is associated with lower labour turnover and higher labour productivity. Compensation is associated with higher financial performance. None is linked to higher labour turnover, lower productivity or lower financial performance in a statistically significant way. Performance appraisal was not statistically significantly associated with any of the three outcome variables.

The results provide some relatively strong support for universalistic assumptions, but also highlight the need for future research to examine the variable links of some HPWPs and the lack of any association for the performance appraisal measure.

Drawing on data from a unique, large-scale survey, the purpose of this paper is to examine the links between e-HRM and perceived labour productivity both directly and through the mediating role of HR service quality amongst commercial-bank workplaces in Pakistan, many of which have introduced e-HRM.

The authors use partial least squares structural equation modelling to examine the direct links between e-HRM and productivity as well as the mediated links between e-HRM, perceived HR service quality and productivity.

The authors show that e-HRM practices have a statistically significant, positive effect on managers’ perceptions of labour productivity. The authors also reveal that e-HRM practices influence the quality of HR service, and that the quality of HR services fully mediates the relationship between e-HRM practices and managers’ perceptions of labour productivity.

The results highlight the importance of designing and implementing e-HRM systems so that they support organisation workflow and enable workers to carry out a range of HR and non-HR activities more efficiently. In particular, this study suggests that managers should focus on how e-HRM impacts on HR service quality in a holistic way, as this is the “route” via which e-HRM can improve labour productivity.

Existing research has demonstrated a link between e-HRM and the quality of HR services; however, these studies downplay the potential impact of e-HRM on labour productivity, a key organisational outcome and one that e-HRM aims to improve. This study contributes to the HRM literature by identifying how e-HRM can improve labour productivity by enhancing the perceived HR service quality. This study, therefore, provides the basis for future theory developments in this area.

Existing work on convergence/divergence among HRM practices in MNCs and local firms mainly focuses on Europe and the USA. Limited research examines these organizations in Pakistan, hindering our understanding of what policies MNCs are likely to adopt there as well as the extent of any differences between HRM in MNC subsidiaries and local firms. The purpose of this paper is to examine the similarities and differences between the HRM practices of MNC subsidiaries and domestic firms to assess if there is evidence for convergence or divergence.

The authors targeted MNC subsidiaries and domestically owned firms working in the banking, information technology and pharmaceutical sectors in Pakistan. These sectors have enjoyed a steady inflow of foreign direct investment and have a sizeable number of MNC subsidiaries. Out of 1,081 companies, some 392 participated in a face-to-face survey (response rate of 36.4 percent). The authors ran a series of binary logistic regression models to test the hypothesized relationships between HR practices and nationality of ownership.

The authors reveal that a small minority of both types of firm use some practices, such as high compensation contingent on performance and performance review, appraisal and career development. However, domestic firms use some practices, such as extensive training, performance appraisals and performance-related pay significantly less than their multinational counterparts. The authors argue that these differences reflect institutional influences in Pakistan as well as a potential opportunity for local firms to change their HRM practices. In other areas, such as recruitment and employee involvement, there are no differences between the two groups.

The authors deepen our understanding of the types of HR practices that local companies in an emerging economy are likely to adopt as well as those that they are unlikely to adopt. Existing research has tended to downplay HRM in Pakistan and the different use of individual HRM practices among MNC subsidiaries and local firms. This research reveals that some companies in Pakistan have sophisticated HRM practices in place in some areas; however, MNC subsidiaries make greater use of some HR practices, reflecting different cultural norms between the two groups.

This paper aims to revise an earlier version of a measure used to assess parent–child consumer-based communication to better capture how parents talk with their children about consumer matters.

Three separate studies were used to revise the measure. The first tested the original measure with parents and children in a supermarket to determine its predictive validity. The second utilized focus groups with parents to refine the measure. The final study sampled 503 parents via MTurk to test the performance of the revised measure regarding reliability and validity.

The first study found that the original scale did not perform well as it relates to predicting child consumer behavior. The second study used parents to describe in their own words how they talk to their own children about consumer issues. Using these insights, the final study used the redesigned scale and identified four dimensions to the consumer-related family communication patterns instrument: collaborative communication, control communication, product value and commercial truth. These four dimensions had good reliability, convergent validity and predictive validity.

With an updated measure of parent–child consumer-based communication that more closely matches how parents talk to their children about consumer issues, this measure can help researchers understand how children are socialized as consumers.

This study offers researchers a reliable and valid measure of parent–child consumer-based communication that can help inform future studies on this important topic.

This paper aims to explore how children’s developing ability to effectively regulate their emotions influences their consumer behavior .

Working with 80 children and one of their parents, this study used direct observations of child behavior in a task where they needed to regulate their emotions and a survey of parents about their child’s emotional development and consumer behavior. The research used quantitative methods to test whether children’s emotion regulation predicted parent reported consumer behavior (e.g. purchase requests, parent–child purchase related conflict) via multiple regression analyses.

After controlling for children’s age and linguistic competence, the study found that children’s ability to control positively valenced emotions predicted consumer behavior. Specifically, children who had more difficulty suppressing joy/happiness were more likely to ask their parents for consumer goods and were more likely to argue with parents about these purchases.

Content analyses of commercials targeting children have shown that many of the persuasive appeals used by advertisers are emotionally charged and often feature marketing characters that children find affectively pleasing. These findings suggest that these types of marketing appeals may overwhelm younger children which can lead to conflict with parents. Consequently, marketers and policy makers may want to re-examine the use of such tactics with younger consumers.

While the potential link between children’s emotional development and consumer behavior has been suggested in theoretical work, this is the first known study to empirically test this theorized relationship.

This study draws upon social exchange theory to explore the role of impersonal trust as an intermediate value-creating factor between electronic human resource management (e-HRM) and productivity. The purpose of this paper is to seek the antecedents and consequences of impersonal trust within organisations to provide a holistic view of e-HRM and employee productivity. This is the first study to examine how impersonal trust mediates the relationship between e-HRM and employee productivity.

The data were collected through a large-scale survey of 700 line managers in Pakistani banks. The data were analysed using structure equation modelling.

The empirical results validate all of the study’s hypotheses, including the role of impersonal trust, which partially mediates the relationship between e-HRM and employee productivity. The results provide empirical evidence that technology-enabled HRM supports organisations by enhancing organisational trust and productivity outcomes.

Such findings contribute to the HRM literature: e-HRM and organisational trust are key predictors for improving employee productivity. The existing literature suggests that e-HRM has a positive impact on employees’ trust in the HRM department. The results provide valuable insights for HR practitioners allowing them to enhance employee productivity by using e-HRM to improve employees’ trust in the organisation.

This paper aims to examine the implications for the Irish housing market of the economic slowdown due to the Covid-19 virus.

In this paper, an inverted demand function for housing is augmented to include a residential market activity variable and estimate the impact on house prices of the decline in economic activity due to the virus-related measures. The likely future path of house prices based on two different recovery scenarios is also examined. Under both scenarios house prices are forecast to decline in the near term.

The scenario analysis presented here indicates that Irish house prices are set to fall over the next 18 months as a result of the Covid-19 downturn. This contraction in prices is due to the decline in household disposable income and the sharp fall-off in mortgage market activity, which will inevitably result from the administrative closedown implemented by the Irish authorities.

As such the approach builds on several studies which have examined both house price movements in general and the relationship between house prices and mortgage credit availability. The paper also draws on the latest analysis of the implications for the Irish economy of Covid-19 and the related administrative closure methods introduced by the public authorities.

This paper investigates whether changes in autonomy and embeddedness in host locations by foreign owned subsidiaries are associated with improvements in performance by subsidiaries. The results provide evidence that increasing operational decision‐making autonomy is associated with enhanced performance as measured by both subjective and more objective measures of performance. The results on the importance of increasing strategic decision‐making autonomy and embeddedness are less clear, with improved performance being detected in some cases, but only for the subjective measure of performance.

A core concept of work–home interface research is boundary permeability – the frequency with which elements from one domain cross, or permeate, the boundary of another domain. Yet, there remains ambiguity as to what these elements are and how these permeations impact important outcomes such as role satisfaction and role performance. The authors introduce a multidimensional perspective of work–home boundary permeability, identifying five forms of boundary permeation: task, psychological, role referencing, object, and people. Furthermore, based on the notion that employee control over boundary permeability behavior is the key to achieving role satisfaction and role performance, the authors examine how organizations’ HR practices, leadership, and norms impact employee control over boundary permeability in the work and home domains. The authors conclude with an agenda for future research.

The changing roles of the United Nations (UN) and national institutions have made addressing climate change a critical concern for many multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) survival and growth. This chapter discusses how such institutions, which vary in their nature and characteristics, shape firm strategies for climate change adaptation. Exploring different versions of institutional theory, the chapter demonstrates how and why institutional characteristics affect typical patterns of firm ownership, governance, and capabilities. These, in turn, influence companies’ internationalisation and climate-change strategies. Climate change poses challenges to how we understand firms’ strategic decisions from both an international business (IB) (HQ–subsidiary relations) and global value chains (GVC) (buyer–supplier relations) perspective. However, climate change also provides opportunities for companies to gain competitive advantages – if firms can reconfigure and adapt faster than their competitors. Existing IB and GVC research tends to downplay the importance of climate change strategies and the ways in which coherent or dysfunctional institutions affect firms’ reconfiguration and adaptation strategies in a globally dispersed network of value creation. This chapter presents a perspective on the institutional conditions that affect firms’ climate change strategies regarding ownership, location, and internalisation (OLI), and GVCs, with ‘investment’ and ‘emerging standards’ playing a significant role. The authors illustrate the discussion using several examples from the Global South (i.e. Bangladesh) and the Global North (i.e. Denmark, Sweden, and Germany) with a special emphasis on the garment industry. The aim is to encourage future research to examine how a ‘business systems’, or varieties of capitalism, institutional perspective can complement the analysis of sustainability and climate change strategies in IB and GVC studies.