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This paper aims to explore the relationship between owner-manager or leader’s ambidextrous leadership style and its effect on human resource management (HRM) practices, contextual ambidexterity and knowledge-intensive small- and medium-enterprises (SMEs) strategic agility.

This study presents an in-depth qualitative case study analysis of two knowledge-intensive SMEs from India’s information technology and health-care products industry serving a range of global clients. Using the theoretical lenses of empowerment-focused HRM practices, ambidextrous leaders, contextual ambidexterity and strategic agility, semi-structured interview data of leaders, managers and employees of the case organizations were analysed. Through a two-staged analytical process, we abductively developed a novel conceptual framework at the intersection of the above theoretical lenses.

The findings suggest that the knowledge-intensive SME’s strategic agility, ambidexterity and empowerment-focussed HRM approach was influenced by the owner-manager or leader’s ambidextrous leadership style and their philosophy towards managing people and had a positive impact in creating a culture of trust, participation, risk-taking and openness, and led to delivering innovative products and services as well as several positive employee-level outcomes.

Recent literature reviews on HRM In SMEs highlight several gaps, including the impact of owner-manager or leader’s philosophy of managing people in shaping HRM practices and employee outcomes. This paper thus adds to the existing literature on HRM and knowledge-intensive SMEs.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on how adopting technologies impacts employees’ job performance and well-being. One such new job demand is the use of technology-based knowledge sharing (TBKS), which has the potential to influence employees’ job performance and well-being. Therefore, human resource managers must provide resources that facilitate the adoption of TBKS to improve job performance while minimising mental health effects.

Guided by social capital theory, social exchange theory and the job demands-resources model, the authors analyse survey data from 281 Vietnamese employees.

The results of this paper show that TBKS influences employee mental health and directly and indirectly affects job performance. The authors examine the moderating effects of training, transformational leadership and organisational resources on the relationship between the new job demands of TBKS on job performance and mental health outcomes.

TBKS platform developers should offer user-friendly interface functions and extend critical features. HRM should communicate more with employees, care about their well-being and consider their goals and values. HRM needs to provide training to help employees adapt to organisational changes. Leadership also needs to make employees perceive that organisational success is closely related to the success of TBKS.

This paper draws upon the three fundamental tenets of three theories as a triangular base to examine the relationship between TBKS and its outcomes. This paper contributes to the knowledge management literature by delivering a comprehensive understanding and demonstrating how the inclusion of technology in knowledge sharing and human resource practices can impact employee performance and well-being.

Building on the arguments of expectancy theory and social exchange theory, the present study provides insights into the process by which pay-for-performance (PFP) impacts employee job performance.

Based on a sample size of 226 employees working in a technology company in India, the study examines the relationships between PFP, procedural justice, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and employee job performance. Data on perceptions of PFP and procedural justice were collected from the employees, data on OCB were collected from the supervisors and the data on employee job performance were collected from organizational appraisal records.

The study found support for the positive relationship between PFP and job performance and for the sequential mediation of the relationship between PFP and job performance via procedural justice and OCB. Further, procedural justice was found to mediate the relationship between PFP and OCB.

The study was cross-sectional, so inferences about causality are limited.

The study tests the relationship between PFP and employee job performance in the Indian work context. The study shows that the existence of PFP is positively related to procedural justice which, in turn, is positively related to OCB. The study found support for the sequential mediation of PFP-job performance relationship via procedural justice and OCB.

The study provides an insight into the underlying process through which PFP is related to employee job performance. To the best of our knowledge, such a study is the first of its kind undertaken in an organizational context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role played by host country nationals’ (HCNs) collectivism and the interpersonal affect they develop toward expatriate colleagues, in determining the degree to which Chinese HCNs would be willing to offer role information and social support to expatriates from India and the USA.

The authors conducted a between-subjects simulation (n=402) with front-line, junior-level professionals in four global organizations operating in China, measuring their interpersonal affect toward a hypothetical expatriate colleague, and their willingness to offer role information and social support to the expatriate.

Results indicated the interpersonal affect felt by Chinese HCNs mediates the relationship between the collectivism levels of Chinese HCNs, and their willingness to offer role information and social support to expatriates.

It should be acknowledged that the authors used hypothetical “paper-people” to test the hypotheses. Future studies should investigate the impact of collectivism and interpersonal affect on HCN willingness to offer role information and social support by examining HCNs’ attitudes toward real-life expatriate colleagues.

While empirical studies examining HCN willingness to offer role information and social support have begun to emerge in the expatriate literature, only a couple of studies have included interpersonal affect as a key determinant. Given that interpersonal affect is a key determinant of individuals’ reactions to others, but also a complex construct, the findings confirm the need for organizations to examine how this impacts performance and co-worker interactions in the workplace.

The diversity literature has yet to investigate relationships between diversity and leader–member exchanges (LMX) at multiple levels of analysis. The purpose of this paper is to test a multilevel model of nationality diversity and LMX. In doing so, the authors investigate the role of surface- and deep-level diversity as related to leader–member exchange differentiation (LMXD) and relative LMX (RLMX), and hence to subordinate job performance.

The authors test a multilevel model of diversity and LMX using multisource survey data from subordinates nesting within supervisors. The authors do so in a context where diversity in nationality is pervasive and plays a key role in LMXs, i.e., a multinational organization in Dubai. The authors tested the cross-level moderated model using MPlus.

The results suggest surface-level similarity is more important to RLMX than deep-level similarity. The relationship between surface-level similarity and RLMX is moderated by workgroup nationality diversity. When workgroups are more diverse, there is a positive relationship between dyadic nationality similarity and RLMX; when workgroups are less diverse, similarity in nationality matters less. Moreover, LMXD at the workgroup level moderates the relationship between RLMX and performance at the individual level.

This study is one of very few to examine both diversity and LMX at multiple levels of analysis. This is the first study to test the workgroup diversity as a cross-level moderator of the relationship between deep-level similarity and LMX. The results challenge the prevailing notion that that deep-level similarity is more strongly related to LMX than surface-level diversity.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of high-performance work systems (HPWS) on the performance of Vietnamese firms. It teases out the antecedents and effects of managers’ beliefs about why HPWS exist and are adopted within their firms, and also what effects HPWS practices have on their firm’s performance.

The authors adopt a longitudinal design to provide insights into why and how HPWS are shaped and diffused, and also how they convert the inputs into outputs such as HR outcomes, firm innovation and performance, based on a sample of 17 in-depth interviewees who were CEOs, HR managers, general managers in 17 Vietnamese service firms.

Results demonstrate that HPWS can impact both employee outcomes (e.g. employee attitudes, behaviours and productivity), and firm performance (e.g. firm innovation, firm growth and profit growth).

The study underscores the importance of HPWS as a response to organizational change that can help deal with external pressures and provides evidence about how the HPWS-innovation relationship is established in the research context.

This is among the first study to extend some aspects of institutional theory to understand the context of how and why HPWS are shaped and executed to respond to environmental pressures. It underscores the importance of HPWS as a response to organizational change that can help deal with external pressures, thereby serving as a leading step to yield meaningful outcomes with respect to the advancement of this research stream.

While a range of studies have been undertaken on role efficacy (RE) and managerial effectiveness (ME), understanding of the link between RE and ME in the extant literature remains underdeveloped and, in particular, there is a need to develop appreciation of the phenomenon in varying (national and cultural) contexts. The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of ME by considering the relationship between RE and ME in the Indian context. In tandem with this focus, the study considers the parallel underlying dynamic and influence of social cognitive frameworks and adaptive self-regulation mechanisms.

The study employs a quantitative methodology and follows a correlational design. A survey questionnaire was employed sequentially (the independent variable was measured at time 1 and the dependent variable was measure at time 2) in order to collect data from 294 Indian managers. Structural equation modeling was used to ascertain the validity of measures and multiple hierarchical regression analysis was conducted to test the study hypotheses.

The results of the study identify that RE dimensions, i.e. role making, role centering and role linkage were significantly and positively related to ME and these findings are particularly important in relation to the transforming cultures of Indian work and organizational environments. These findings advance the understanding of social cognitive theory and adaptive self-regulation processes in relation to RE and ME.

The empirical results of this study suggest that RE-related components may be used as means to boost employee effectiveness.

The study identifies a significant role for RE in relation to beneficial outcomes for ME. These findings contribute to the field of social cognitive mechanisms by establishing positive relationships in domain link efficacy, i.e. RE and ME.

This paper examines the relationship between timing of negotiations and idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) through the moderating effects of core self-evaluations (CSE), and between i-deals and employee reactions through the moderating effects of transformational leadership behaviour (TLB) in the Indian hospitality industry.

A total of 275 employees working in 39 companies responded to a self-administered questionnaire. To test the research hypotheses, the methodology of structural equation models was used.

The results show that the relationship between before hiring negotiations and i-deals is stronger for those individuals who had low self-worth, due to countervailing forces created by their belief that they may not be eligible for i-deals. In contrast, the relationship between after hiring negotiations and i-deals is stronger for those who had high self-worth, due to their belief that they were entitled to i-deals. Additionally, the research highlights that the relationship between i-deals and employee reactions is stronger for those organisations, which are high on TLB.

The data does not allow for investigating dynamic causal inferences, because they were collected using a questionnaire at a single point in time, and they were reported in retrospect, raising measurement concerns about recall bias.

From a managerial point of view, the findings of this study inform that in negotiating both employment conditions and work arrangements, organisations should try to achieve i-deals that are primarily flexibility focused, and that in increasing efficiency organisations should make the employees feel well supported in order to develop more confidence in deploying skills and abilities to address a more open view of their i-deals.

The study contributes to our understanding about the Indian hospitality industry by utilising the self-enhancement theory in examining whether individual differences moderate the relationship between the timing of negotiations and i-deals, and also by utilizing the social exchange theory to examine whether TLB moderates the relationship between i-deals and employee reactions.

High-performance work practices (HPWPs) have been well documented within private organisations in developed country economies. Such practices, however, remain under-investigated in the public sector and in emerging economies. The purpose of this paper is to work towards filling this void, by empirically evaluating HPWP within an Indian public sector undertaking (PSU), also the world’s largest commercial public sector employer: the Indian Railways (IR).

The authors investigate whether the practices implemented in this organisation are consistent with the idea of HPWPs, and analyse how they are influenced by different stakeholders and ultimately associated with different indicators of organisational performance. The authors focused on six railway zones and interviewed a total of 62 HR practitioners.

The results show that most practices implemented are aligned with the idea of HPWPs, despite the existence of context-specific unique practices. Furthermore, the authors identify the influence of multiple stakeholders in decision making concerning different practices. The authors additionally found that the measurement of performance goes beyond financial indicators and several context-specific non-financial indicators are identified and their social importance is reiterated.

Theoretically, this paper utilises and contributes to the resource-based view of firms by identifying a distinctive bundle of competencies in human resources through HPWS in the IR.