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The current research investigates the gender difference in the attitudes of current employees and job seekers (or “future” employees) to payroll cost reduction methods (downsizing vs cutting pay).

Two studies were conducted. In Study 1, we analyzed a secondary dataset (survey data) of 2,139 employees in Ireland. In Study 2, we conducted an online experiment on 384 people in the US.

Study 1 reveals that, for males, downsizing survivors' commitment and job satisfaction levels are higher than those of employees whose pay is cut. In contrast, there were no differences in the commitment and job satisfaction levels between survivors of downsizing and pay-reduced employees for females. The analysis in Study 2 indicates that females are more attracted to organizations that utilize pay cuts over downsizing to overcome financial difficulties. In contrast, males demonstrated no differences in job-seeker attraction outcomes to organizations that chose either of these two payroll cost reduction methods. Thus, the results of the two studies indicate that females, compared to males, form less negative (or more favorable) attitudes toward pay cuts over downsizing.

The findings urge organizations to consider gender differences and develop relevant mitigation plans when one method must be chosen to reduce payroll costs.

The outcomes of this research indicate that the selection of a payroll cost reduction method may lead to a disparate impact on gender composition in an organization.

This study investigates the relationship between media and social media sentiment and the likelihood of CEO pay cuts. The purpose is to examine whether and how these pay cuts influence market reactions. The study aims to provide insights into how external sentiment affects corporate decision-making and market perceptions, particularly in the context of CEO compensation.

Using a sample of 6,331 firm-year observations from 2015 to 2021, this paper employs quantitative analysis to assess the association between media and social media sentiment and CEO pay cuts. We utilise company DEF14A SEC filings to identify CEO pay cut dates and capture traditional media and Twitter sentiment 30-days prior to these filing dates.

We find a negative association between media and social media sentiment and CEO pay cuts, indicating that firms facing more negative sentiment are more likely to engage in pay cuts. We find evidence that CEO pay cuts are negatively correlated with market reactions, suggesting markets generally do not seem to favour decisions to cut CEO pay. This relationship, however, is complex and influenced by multiple factors, including the nature of sentiment and the specific components of CEO compensation.

The study faces limitations in identifying the varying degrees of pay cuts and their motivations. Additionally, the content of news articles and Twitter posts used to measure sentiment was not specifically identified, which may affect the accuracy of sentiment measurement.

This research offers valuable insights for managers and corporate decision-makers, highlighting the potential impact of public sentiment on critical executive compensation decisions.

The study underscores the influence of media and social media in shaping public opinion and driving corporate actions, highlighting the growing intersection between social perceptions and corporate governance. This has broader implications for how firms engage with media platforms and manage their public image, particularly in the realm of executive compensation.

We are the first to study the impact of media and social media sentiment on CEO compensation decisions and market reactions. By employing DEF14A filings as event dates for market reaction studies, we offer a novel approach to analysing the impact of executive compensation changes on market behaviour.

Management discretion in the decision to reduce payroll costs is an important but under-researched issue in management accounting. The authors leverage the experimental environment to test the role of organizational culture (close vs. distant) and managerial communion (concern for others) along with their interaction with sales decline persistence (one vs. two periods) on planned layoff decisions. The authors find that communal managers are hesitant to downsize employees and that a close organizational culture interacts with one period sales declines to reduce layoffs although the influence of culture is reduced with persistent sales declines. The authors also examine the influence of culture and communion on managers’ preference for pay cuts as an alternative to layoffs. The authors find that a close culture and higher communion are associated with decisions to choose pay cuts over layoffs; however, these costs interact such that managers low in communion in a distant culture express a higher preference for layoffs. These findings illustrate the combined influence of economic, organizational, and dispositional factors on manager decisions about the extent and form of labor cost reductions due to sales declines.

This study investigates the mediating role of wage and workforce adjustments, along with the moderating influence of collective bargaining system and employees’ localization, in elucidating the relationship between the COVID-19 shock and workplace employee relations (ER) tension.

Survey data from 1,483 enterprises across 21 prefectural cities in China’s Guangdong Province are collected. The hypotheses are tested by logistic regression.

The study reveals a positive correlation between the COVID-19 shock and workplace ER tension across crisis-hit enterprises, irrespective of their size or industrial sector. Wage reduction and mass layoffs emerge as significant mediators, while the collective bargaining system (CBS) and employees’ localization act as moderators.

The measurement of ER is limited in a single-item scale. Representation of China is also limited since the study exclusively focuses on Guangdong province. The study offers some contributions that firm-level data reveal the pathway through which COVID-19 creates ER tension.

On the one hand, the authors recommend the establishment of an effective communication system between employers and employees. On the other hand, managers should consider the role of informal institutions. Furthermore, the authors suggest implementing tailored strategies at the enterprise level.

Intense external shocks result in widespread layoffs and increased wage reductions within workplaces, and under such circumstances, formal or informal institutions may be insufficient to alleviate ER tension. In this case, the state authorities – including governments and other public agencies or bodies – are necessary to intervene in to organize tripartite dialogue.

While numerous emerging studies on COVID-19 explore how different countries manage industrial relations tension at the national level, few focus on ER at workplace level, particularly in developing countries. Understanding how workplace ER evolve during external shocks and identifying institutional measures to mitigate their negative impact is crucial for future crisis management.

The paper redefines workplace spirituality (WS/WPS) by transcending the existential vacuum (in psychiatric terms a sense of lack of meaning of human existence and thus of work), leading to the development of workplace creativity, productivity and satisfaction, targeting operational profitability and organizational optimization.

Spirituality is analyzed philosophically, following the Nietzschean definition in response to Schopenhauer’s primordial suffering. Philosophical syncretism yields a viable organizational culture change model of spiritualizing the workplace. For this purpose, specific techniques are proposed which are combined with those already applied to various large companies and organizations.

Spirituality in the workplace acts as a catalyst for developing beneficial qualities by increasing employee job satisfaction, organizational efficiency and business profitability, when equally responding to stakeholders’ needs.

The suggested change model holistically fosters organizational, operational, individual and collective effectiveness through work place spirituality redefined.

For the first time spirituality in the workplace is discussed under a brand new perspective, resulting in an interdisciplinary emerging model, contributing to the field by providing guidance to academics and practitioners to its auspicious implementation through organizational culture change.

The authors study and compare the effects of three CEO compensation restricting policies issued by the Chinese government in 2009, 2012 and 2015. This paper aims to shed light on the conditions under which CEO compenstation can be effectively regulated without negatively affecting firm performance.

These policies targeted state-owned enterprises (SOEs), especially central state-owned enterprises (CSOEs). Using these policies as natural experiments, the authors investigate how their effects differ on CEO compensation, firm performance and two known performance-decreasing mechanisms: perk consumption and tunneling activities.

The authors show that restricting CEO pay does not necessarily backfire in terms of deteriorating firm performance. This non-decreasing firm performance can be achieved by restricting perk consumption and tunneling activities while introducing CEO pay regulations.

The authors exploit a powerful experimental setting in the context of China. The evidence contributes to the literature on CEO pay regulations and is relevant to the managerial decisions of policy makers and boards of directors.

Performance management system (PMS) is a crucial element of strategic human resource practices in any organization. This research aims to provide a concise overview of how bibliometric analysis is employed to assess the influence and significance of cutting-edge technologies in shaping of PMS. This study seeks to identify key trends, emerging technologies and their impact on the evolution of performance management practices, contributing valuable insights for researchers, practitioners and policymakers in this field.

This investigation is carried out utilizing total of eight research questions, which are examined through VOS Viewer and Biblioshiny software. The research offers visual diagrams and tables depicting the data extracted from the Scopus Database.

The study’s results underscore a noticeable increase in research literature pertaining to PMS, indicating a shift from conventional methods to a strategic, technology-driven approach. These findings cover the way for further investigation across various disciplines, offering opportunities to enhance the efficacy and productivity of PMS.

The implementation of new technologies such as Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and robotics etc. in PMS have also been analysed to give a sneak peak of the bigger future picture of AI and strategic human resource integration.

To the best of the authors' understanding, this analysis represents the inaugural application of bibliometric techniques to evaluate the advancement of research on Performance Management System (PMS) dating back to 1978, utilizing academic literature sourced from the Scopus database.

Over the years, the impact of the business cycle on firm strategy has been neglected in the area of strategic management and remains one of the most important but least developed research streams in management scholarship. Studies in this area are scattered across time and domains, therefore, there is a need to consolidate this fragmented literature to provide a comprehensive review and thus avenues for further research. This study aims to address this gap.

In this study, the systematic literature review (SLR) method is used to select and examine research articles in the area of firm responses and decisions during recession. This SLR examines 127 studies and carries out a thematic synthesis of the literature.

Based on the SLR and thematic synthesis of the literature, the themes identified in this study include – severity of recession impact (Theme 1); firm specific characteristics (Theme 2); resource adjustment activities (Theme 3); and firm performance (Theme 4), based on these themes and analysis this paper maps and proposes various relationships and linkages in this research domain that can be explored further for the development of scholarship in this field of study.

This paper fulfills the need for a systematic review of the extant literature on firms’ responses during recession. The study synthesizes literature and carries out a thematic analysis from 1980 till the period February 2024 to provide directions to advance this domain of literature.

This paper aims to examine the consistency between firms’ stakeholder-friendly responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and their environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings. Consistent firms are those with high prior ESG ratings that actively support stakeholders during the COVID-19 crisis.

The authors use data from JUST Capital, which tracks Russell 1000 firms’ actions in response to the pandemic, to examine the relationship between pre-pandemic ESG ratings and their COVID responses towards employees, customers and communities. The authors also analyse the impact of firms’ consistency between pre-pandemic ESG ratings and stakeholder-friendly COVID responses on ESG ratings and stock returns.

This study finds that firms with higher pre-pandemic ESG ratings are more likely to support their stakeholders during the pandemic. The authors also find that firms with high ESG ratings before the pandemic experience a decline in their ESG ratings if they do not actively support their communities during the COVID-19 crisis, although insufficient employee/customer support does not impact their ESG ratings. Finally, the authors find that firms with higher pre-pandemic ESG ratings that continue to uphold their ESG commitments through community assistance during the pandemic achieve higher stock returns compared to inconsistent firms.

The results reveal gaps in how comprehensively ESG agencies assess firms’ crisis responses, highlighting areas for rating improvements. The findings contribute to sustainable development by revealing the importance of firms upholding their ESG commitments during crises to maintain stakeholder trust and drive long-term value creation.

The findings underscore the need for responsive, transparent ESG rating processes to support the integration of sustainability considerations into corporate practices and investment decisions, particularly during evolving societal expectations during crises.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate how pre-pandemic ESG ratings explain firms’ stakeholder-friendly responses during the COVID-19 pandemic and analyse the integration of these responses and pandemic risks into ESG ratings during the crisis.