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The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the work of the Dutch government's “Taskforce Part‐time Plus” set up to stimulate longer working hours for particularly Dutch women holding part‐time jobs of less than 24 h per week, to help counteract a predicted structural shortage of manpower.

In 2009, the Taskforce commissioned two studies. The first study comprised three surveys, respectively, among: women holding smaller part‐time jobs; full‐time working men; and employers. The second study focused on the relationship between ambition, working hours and gender. A survey of 7,000 male and female labour‐market participants was combined with qualitative data collection, encompassing focus group interviews with 35 male and female part‐time workers and their managers, and three group model building sessions.

The first study showed that only a small amount of Dutch part‐time working women is willing to work longer hours in the short term. In the second study, the hypothesis that women's lower working hours could be explained by a lack of career ambition was rejected. However, the results showed that women did neither feel challenged, nor supported by their working and household conditions to extend their working hours to realize their ambitions (in the short run).

The paper illustrates that, in the Dutch case and in some contexts, greater equality, diversity and inclusion not only demands support for reduced work‐loads, but rather calls for a new culture in which women's marginal labour‐market participation does not remain unquestioned.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to two related contemporary debates on the changing views of the employment relation and on the adoption of telework as a new work practice by analyzing line managers' general telework‐attitude formation processes, and possible outcomes in concrete request situations, mirroring managers' views of the employment relationship.

This multi‐method study among 65 managers in six financial‐sector organizations comprises two parts. The interview part focuses on managers' arguments for or against telework in their departments, and how these are weighed in the telework‐attitude formation process. In the vignette study, managers assess their attitudes towards specific, hypothetical, but realistic telework requests of fictive employees in their departments.

Combining the results of both studies, it is shown that the governance view dominates. Some managers, however, consider telework an “idiosyncratic deal.” Particularly in telework‐request situations, also the exchange view enters into the managers' perceptual frames. In order to decrease managers' ambivalence towards telework, the human resource management (HRM)‐system needs to be internally consistent and based on a view of the employment relationship which stresses commitment and trust as guiding principles, rather than control and coordination.

Employing a “configurational approach to strategic HRM,” this paper focuses on the importance of the “embeddedness” of telework practices in larger HRM‐systems in general, and the role of cultural obstacles in particular. Telework arguments are considered the HR principles guiding the telework‐attitude formation process, and mirroring managers' views of the employment relationship as part of their workforce philosophies.

As Ovid said, “There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent.” It is this very premise that frames the discoveries in this chapter and the compelling paradox it has raised. What began as a question of how performance is sustained, unveiled a collection of core organizational paradoxes. The findings ultimately suggest that sustained high performance is not a permanent state an organization achieves, but rather it is through perpetual movement and dynamic balance that sustainability occurs.

The idea of sustainability as movement is predicated on the ability of organizational members to move beyond the experience of paradox as an impediment to progress. Through holding three critical “movements” – agile/consistency, collective/individualism, and informative/inquiry – not as paradoxical, but as active polarities, the organizations in the study were able to transcend paradox, and take active steps to continuous achievement in outperforming their peers. The study, focused on a collection of hospitals across the Unites States, reveals powerful stories of care and service, of the profound grace of human capacity, and of clear actions taken to create significant results. All of this was achieved in an environment of great volatility, in essence an unbalanced system. It was the discovery of movement and ultimately of dynamic balancing that allowed the organizations to in this study to move beyond stasis to the continuous “state” of sustaining high performance.

All things change, nothing is extinguished…. There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent. Everything flows onward; all things are brought into being with a changing nature; the ages themselves glide by in constant movement. (Ovid)

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into diversity management practices in the Baltic states and present experience of HRM practitioners' in initiating the integration of people with disability into the workforce at a multi national retail chain.

An interview with HR managers of a retail chain on issues related to the integration of people with disability into the workforce, providing background for the relevance, motives, implementation difficulties and organisational benefits of such practices from a business perspective.

Main challenges related with integration of people with disability into the workforce are as follows: attraction of people with disability, work adjustment to meet the abilities of employees with disability, and preparation of managers and co‐workers to work along with these people. Attraction of people with disability works best on the basis of references from their peers. These people make highly loyal employees. Besides they contribute to the development of a more positive climate in the organisation.

This paper presents a good practice case on the integration of people with disability, one of the most discriminated groups of employees, which is still a rare business practice in the Baltic countries. It also provides recommendations on integration issues for other practitioners.

The purpose of this study is to examine what kinds of Dutch organisations offer their employees a choice in the composition of their benefits with the aid of a theoretical model that incorporates insights from rational choice theory, the theory of institutional pressures and the bundles of human resource management (HRM) theory.

To test the theoretical model data were collected from nearly 600 Dutch organisations in the market sector. Multivariate binary logistic regression analyses were used to analyse these data.

The research showed that flexible benefit plans (FBPs) are widespread and show a considerable degree of consistency in the options they offer. FBPs are most likely to be offered by organisations that have freedom to manoeuvre in their benefits, that witness other organisations around them offering such arrangements, and that offer HRM policies and practices that are strongly focussed on the combination of work and family, and on flexibility in working arrangements.

Attention to HRM policies in addition to a combination of rational choice and institutional theory proved valuable in explaining the uptake of a new arrangement, and this merits further exploration.

FPBs offer Dutch organisations the opportunity to give their employees more choice in the way they are paid, and to adjust this pay to their personal situation. Offering this choice fits in with a family‐friendly HRM structure and increases flexibility for both parties.

The paper provides useful information on FBPs.

The organizational literature accepts that when an organization generates commitment among employees through cultural mechanisms, it will be more efficient since the individuals will be involved in the attainment of the organizing objectives and will be motivated to pursue them. It is not clear, however, how organizations can generate this commitment, what constitutes its key characteristics, or what impact its use has on organizational performance. This paper therefore aims to identify the cultural practices that allow organizations to generate commitment, to analyze its impact on organizational performance, and to analyze the degree to which these practices should be used to obtain commitment. The model presented is tested in Spanish hotels, which offer a clear example of the relevance that these sorts of tools can have in the achievement of organizational objectives.

Originating from the USA in the early 1990s, diversity management has been “imported” to Europe to become a fashionable practice in many business organizations. The aim of this paper is to provide further insight into whether and how the diversity management discourse challenges and replaces existing local discourses on equality and diversity, and how diversity management is given content and meaning in a specific local context.

Statements on diversity, diversity management and equality on both the Dutch and the international websites of ten leading companies in the Netherlands are analyzed.

The analysis shows that translations of diversity management may in fact not actually replace existing local discourses, but rather leave the existing local discourse more or less intact and alter the original diversity management discourse to fit into this local discourse.

This paper offers some important lessons for management practice.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an “extended conceptualization of the business case” including both organizational characteristics and institutional conditions to analyse employer involvement in extra statutory childcare and leave arrangements. Special attention is given to Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries.

The (multi‐level) multinomial regression analyses included company‐level data on human‐resource practices of 2,865 firms nested in 19 countries, representing all European welfare state regimes.

The extended business case appeared fruitful in order to explain variations in employer involvement. Particularly, state support was found to be negatively related to employer involvement. In the liberal regime, employer involvement was high, but variations across organizations were significant. In CEE‐countries, employer involvement was lowest, and did not vary by organizational business‐case factors.

The paper used data from a cross‐sectional survey. To capture the long‐term trends, dynamics and nuances in employer involvement within and across various institutional contexts, a longitudinal in depth study is needed.

While state support in many CEE countries is declining, the analyses showed that employers will not automatically step in by providing additional work‐family arrangements. Social partners could use institutional pressure to stimulate a balance between state support and employer involvement.

The extended business‐case perspective contributes to the theory on the institutional embeddedness of decision making of employers. Moreover, it adds to the knowledge on employer involvement in institutional contexts which have hardly been studied before.

The purpose of this paper is to link previous research on diversity, social capital and strategic human resource management (SHRM), and propose a model to explain how an SHRM system can moderate the effects of diversity on cognitive and relational dimensions of social capital.

Quantitative methodologies were used to address the study's research questions and hypotheses drawing on aggregated data obtained from 53 groups (228 individuals).

The empirical evidence analyzed rejected a deterministic view of the consequences of diversity, assuming that the extent to which they benefit group social interaction depends on certain conditions that can be managed by SHRM. Adopting a configurational point of view, it is concluded that different SHRM configurations can be used, depending on the effects of diversity that the organization wishes to moderate.

Future research should consider the particularities of the sample.

To define diversity‐oriented SHRM strategies, firms must start with a systematic analysis of their diversity profiles, studying the concrete relational and cognitive dynamics that heterogeneity causes.

This model considers the SHRM system as a construct that determines social interaction between employees and therefore moderates the effects of demographic and human capital diversity on group performance.