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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic organisations are adapting to a new environment of global talent shortages, economic uncertainty and geo-political turmoil. As an outcome, the organisational strategies of digital transformation and remote working have been accelerated in the race to boost innovation, competitivity and attract staff. This has led to the rise of two new organisational dynamics: the increase of virtual teams (VTs) and focus on widespread work automation. However, despite the rise of these two related phenomena, literature does not connect them as one research area, and there is a gap in the understanding of the new employee wellbeing needs they form and how to respond to them. This paper aims to bridge this gap through a systematic literature across these areas.

This paper conducts a systematic literature review across the areas of leadership, VTs and automation over the past three years.

In this review, a number of newly arising employee wellbeing needs are identified such as fear of job displacement, a lack of self-efficacy and social cohesion, poor relationships with leaders and more. In addition, this paper recommends three fundamental research gaps to be addressed by future studies: 1. How to build and cultivate the new leadership skills needed to support VTs and workplace automation? 2. How to design work in a way that caters for employee wellbeing needs when operating in VTs or hybrid teams and working on or with workplace automation? 3. How to design work in a way that builds and emphasises the new employee skillsets to support augmentation and solves for the new employee wellbeing needs experienced by workplace automation?

This paper provides a novel contribution to literature by centralising current schools of thought across the cross-disciplinary themes and synthesising literature to recommend new wellbeing and leadership skills for organisations to focus on, alongside producing a new research agenda for scholars to focus.

The post-COVID environment presents significant challenges for organizations. Unfortunately, many leaders and organizations are living in “post-pandemic.” Leaders must reframe their approaches to employee relationships and the nature of the workplace. Employee experience, which combines, user experience, design thinking and organizational development, provides a methodology and perspective that is needed to address these significant changes. The purpose of this paper is to readdress employee experience and how its approach challenges conventional approaches to human resources (HR) and employee engagement and demonstrate how it can serve as an indispensable tool for transitioning to the new workplace.

Employee experience has become ubiquitous in organizations, but unfortunately the underlying sources and philosophies that distinguish this approach are often neglected. This paper demonstrates the new, irreversible organizational world created by COVID-19, reviews the origins of the concept, reviews the six principles previously introduced and then explicates three philosophical paradigmatic shifts that must be undertaken to take advantage of employee experience and address the new organizational challenges.

Employee experience can serve as a strategic tool for addressing post-COVID-19 organizational challenges. Past ideas about engagement will not work. Three shifts deriving from employee experience’s roots in user experiences, design thinking and emergent organization development must be adopted. Instead of thinking structurally in which things are primary, leaders need to take a relational perspective which insists on relational primacy. Because experience is holistic and embodied, a phenomenological perspective must take the place of the usual behavioral perspective. Finally, leaders and HR must see the task ahead as a collaborative codesign with employees, insisting on radical participation.

As with the medical challenges with the COVID-19 virus itself, the organizational challenges are new and have never been faced before. It is difficult to shift paradigms, challenge assumptions and redirect effort while maintaining operating organizations. Often, leaders and organizations are ill-equipped to address very novel situations from past experience and education. Much more research and practical implementations need to be conducted to continue to evolve the concept.

Organizations are facing many crises beyond the supply/demand economic issues caused by COVID-19. The social issues within the organizational world are often overlooked but having significant impact. Cultures have been attenuated and disrupted, employee expectations have changed and the remote job market has expanded opportunities for employment. As a result, retention, performance, loyalty and satisfaction have been negatively impacted. If organizations want to continue growth and productivity, they need to find new ways of working and operating.

The nature of work, organization and employee/organization relationship is in transition. Because much of people’s lives are spent in the workplace, this shift has significant implications for relationships within and beyond the workplace. COVID-19 has also had an impact on mental health, life satisfaction and other aspects of the human experience. Experience in the workplace and outside the workplace are converging and impacting each other. The new reality cannot be ignored or denied.

Many organizations, leaders and HR practitioners are approaching the new reality with outdated and ineffective tools from the pre-COVID-19 world, tools that were questionably effective then. Reclaiming the revolutionary underpinnings of employee experience is a necessary but often neglected action.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the challenges and employee development strategies for executives and managers when managing flexible work systems.

The paper takes an employee development perspective to discuss management strategies of flexible work systems. Research findings on the effects of work flexibility through flexible work systems, the challenges and the development strategies that executives and managers can use were reviewed from multi-level perspectives.

The flexible work system is the new normal in the workplace. Lack of social and face-to-face interactions reduces employees’ social learning, jeopardizing managerial justice and weakening the culture. To remain competitive and retain talented employees, executives should reexamine their current employee development strategies and implement new strategies that fit the characteristics of flexible work systems.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first comprehensive review of employee development strategies for flexible working arrangements. The paper provides practical guidelines and insights for executives and leaders managing employees under various flexible work systems.

Building on social exchange theory (SET), the main aim of this paper is to empirically study the impact of high-commitment work practices (HCWPs) systems on radical innovation. Additionally, the paper examines the mediating roles of employee innovative work behaviour (IWB) and knowledge sharing (KS) in the relationship between HCWPs and radical innovation.

Using a survey questionnaire, data were collected from employees working in pharmaceutical, manufacturing and technological industries in Jordan. A total of 408 employees participated in the study. Structural equation modelling (SEM) using AMOS v28 was employed to test the research hypotheses.

This research found that HCWPs in the form of a bundle of human resource management (HRM) practices are significant for employee IWB and KS. However, similar to previous studies, this paper failed to find a direct significant impact for HCWPs on radical innovation. Rather, the impact was mediated by employee IWB. Additionally, this paper found that HCWPs are significant for KS and that KS is significant for employee IWB.

Distinctively, this paper considered the mediating effect of employee IWB on radical innovation. Extant research treated IWB as a consequence of organisational arrangements such as HRM practices; this paper considered IWB as a foundation and source for other significant organisational outcomes, namely radical innovation. Additionally, the paper considered employees' perspectives in studying the relationship between HRM, KS, IWB and radical innovation.

This study aims to explore how not-for-profit organisations (NFPs) adopt service innovation and improve their employee resilience capabilities as a response to environmental changes arising from marketisation of public services.

Using a multiple case-study research design, this study involved 32 interviews with frontline employees working in a not-for-profit care-providing organisation.

This study finds that the development of absorptive capacity can facilitate service innovation adoption in NFPs and improve employee resilience in times of transition.

This study offers theoretical insights on service innovation, absorptive capacity and employee resilience in NFPs. It makes practical recommendations that will enable NFPs to help frontline employees better adopt service innovation practices in business models endorsed by the private sector.

The purpose of this article is to examine the impact of digital technology (specifically mobile applications) use on employees' perceptions of motivation at work (MW) and job performance (JP).

Survey data were collected from 4,089 employees working in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) registered to Small and Medium Enterprises Development Organization (SMEDO) in Turkey. The relationships were assessed through structural equation modeling with bootstrap estimation.

The results support the proposed framework illustrating the positive effect of perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU) of mobile applications on employees' perceived JP. Findings indicate that MW has exhibited a mediating effect between both PU and JP and PEOU and JP.

This article discusses the accelerating role of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on SMEs' technology acceptance and the acceptance's positive impact on employees' motivation and performance. This article adds to the literature on SMEs by enabling researchers and practitioners to understand the issues in digital technologies acceptance by SME employees and contributes towards enriching the knowledge on technology acceptance perceptions' role in SMEs coping strategies during the COVID-19.

This research explores the link between job redesign and skilling in three Lebanese service provider industries, aiming to understand how these factors affect organizational agility, a crucial factor for efficiency and effectiveness and promote long-term interventions through job redesign, upskilling and reskilling.

This study employed two surveys, one for personnel (employees) and one for human aid managers (HR managers). These surveys collected data from 384 employees and 67 HR managers. The study utilized a work design questionnaire (WDQ), skilling application evaluation and the change acceptance model and testing to evaluate job redesign, skilling application effectiveness, technology acceptance and change readiness.

It was revealed that there is a significant and positive relationship between job redesign and the application of skilling programs. This relationship was shown to enhance organizational agility, with a particular focus on employees' technology acceptance and readiness for change. The integrated framework that combines job redesign, upskilling and reskilling was empirically tested and found to enable organizations to build their agility. The study also identified challenges and offered solutions for implementation, emphasizing the importance of employee responsiveness.

This research emphasizes the need for organizations to adapt job designs and enhance employee skills to enhance organizational agility, recommending a structured approach that combines job redesign and skill development efforts.

This research integrates job redesign, upskilling and reskilling in Lebanese service provider industries, contributing to organizational change and workforce development. It emphasizes technology acceptance and readiness for change.

This paper aims to apply a mixed-methods approach to redefine essential work skill sets, propose components of these skill sets that are necessary for workers in the contexts of emerging market economies (EMEs), examine potential selection tools that should be applied across firms and explain implications for the labour process theory (LPT) of work.

During the first phase of this study, qualitative data was collected from methods, including semi-structured interviews with human resources (HR) experts from the Personnel Management Association of Thailand, top and HR executives and managers of firms across industries in Thailand. Non-participant observations were made during the pre-interview, interview and post-interview stages. Analysis of archival documents and Web-based resources was then conducted. The authors used the qualitative data obtained from the first phase to develop survey instruments for conducting quantitative research during the second phase of this study.

The empirical findings demonstrate that essential work skill sets are “soft skills” that help workers survive and thrive in the business arena in EMEs. These essential work skill sets have implications for the LPT of work in that they play an important role in transferring the power of negotiation from employers to workers in the labour market. Essential work skill sets here can be divided into eight skill domains: (1) ideation and system thinking, (2) information and digital literacy, (3) social skills with appreciation for diversity and inclusion, (4) communication and language, (5) creativity and innovation, (6) emotional quotient (EQ) for self-management and development, (7) growth/outward mindset and (8) cognitive skills for the job role. Within each essential work skill set, there are several skills that workers in the current world of work need to possess (42 skills in total). Additionally, potential selection tools include behavioural observation, behavioural-based interviews, STAR (Situation, Task, Action and Results) interviews, role plays, case studies and simulations, high-pressure interview questions, project assignments, assessment centres, in-depth interview questions and special methods, such as face reading and fingerprint reading. Top and HR managers across industries strongly agree that the eight essential work skill sets and 42 skills are necessary for workers to survive in the business arena in EMEs. They also strongly agree that talent selection tools, especially behavioural-based interviews, are used by their firms to select high-skilled job candidates in the labour market.

Because the eight essential skill sets proposed in this paper are based primarily on the qualitative data obtained from top/HR managers in firms across some industries, generalization to respondents across other industries or across other EMEs may be limited. It is possible that the context of other EMEs may be different from that of Thailand. In this regard, some of the essential work skill sets that are suitable in the case of Thailand may not be suitable in the case of other EMEs. Future studies should thus explore how institutional contexts of other countries/economies shape the definition of essential skill sets and their components, as well as potential selection tools that shall be applied to select high-skilled labour in those contexts.

This paper provides practical implications for top managers and/or HR managers of firms across various industries in EMEs. In particular, managers should internally train and develop their employees/workers to possess the eight essential skill sets: (1) ideation and system thinking, (2) information and digital literacy, (3) social skills with appreciation for diversity and inclusion, (4) communication and language, (5) creativity and innovation, (6) EQ for self-management and development, (7) growth/outward mindset and (8) cognitive skills for the specific job role so that their employees/workers can survive and thrive in the era of the brittleness, anxiety, non-linearity and incomprehensibility of the business world under pandemic conditions. Additionally, top managers and/or HR managers of these firms should apply the potential selection tools proposed in this paper to probe into job candidates’ past experience and behaviours to better predict such candidates’ success at work. In this regard, job candidates/workers should prepare themselves to possess these essential work skill sets so that they can be successful in the business arena and should understand potential selection tools that firms may apply to recruit and select them.

This paper provides social/policy implications for the government and/or relevant public agencies of Thailand and of other EMEs. These governments should encourage firms across industries to invest resources in training and developing their employees/workers to possess those essential work skill sets so that these employees/workers are industry-ready, leading to the alleviation of the problems of skill and mismatch in the labour market.

This paper contributes to the prior literature on human resource management (HRM), the comparative institutional perspective on employment systems based on the varieties of capitalism (VoC) framework and the LPT of work in the following ways: first, this paper fills in the research gap in the field of HRM that calls for studies that explore how the COVID-19 pandemic shapes essential skill sets and skills development among workers within firms (Cooke et al., 2021). Second, this paper provides implications for the LPT of work regarding how essential work skill sets are likely to return the power of negotiation from employers to workers in EMEs during the current situation. Third, the VoC framework tends to focus on only two types of economies, liberal market economies and coordinated market economies. However, this paper examines essential work skill sets and potential screening tools in the context of the underresearched country of Thailand, an EME. In fact, the Thai labour market is quite different from that of other EMEs labour markets, as it is impacted by an aging workforce. This paper contributes to the literature on comparative institutional perspectives on employment systems as it redefines essential work skill sets, proposes various components of these skill sets among workers and examines potential selection tools that are applied across firms located in EMEs.

This study investigates the psychological adoption of technology in relation to employees' mental beliefs about using technology in their workplace, because it is necessary to investigate the direct and indirect effects of information systems (IS) on employees' work-related results that underpin creativity and engagement.

Using a cross-sectional design, data were collected from 153 human resource (HR) employees who used human resource information systems (HRIS) in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Malaysia.

The results show that effective acceptance and adoption of an HRIS enables HR employees and management in SMEs to be creative, balanced and engaged. Facilitating conditions and task-technology fit positively affect the behavioral intention to accept and adopt an HRIS. Additionally, organizational citizenship behavior moderates the relationship between the behavioral intention to accept and adopt an HRIS and employee creativity.

This study significantly advances the fields of human resource management and IS by elucidating the factors influencing employees' adoption of technology. In an effort to address a research gap in existing research, it introduces a unified theory of acceptance and use of technology, which precedes the psychological adoption process by individuals. Furthermore, it offers both empirical and theoretical insights into the interplay between technology adoption factors and their subsequent impact on work-related outcomes.