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Organizations are reaching beyond typical firm boundaries to achieve competitive advantage. Human resource (HR) systems must simultaneously support alignment across the business ecosystem while acknowledging the benefits of disruption. The authors provide a fresh perspective on strategic HR management (SHRM), expanding the view beyond organizations to look at the ecosystem as a whole. The authors address the need for HR systems to balance the dualistic tensions of alignment and disruption. While examining the environmental logic of the ecosystem, the authors provide examples of disruption through competition and alignment through cooperation. The authors then examine potential research implications that could assist managers as they govern in a constantly changing and complex ecosystem. This chapter presents the HR ecosystem framework which provides a clear discussion of how different governance mechanisms might be utilized to help firms achieve a competitive advantage through the balance between alignment and disruption.

Creativity and innovation have been buzzwords of managerial discourse over the last few decades as they contribute to the long-term survival and competitiveness of firms. Given the non-linear, causally ambiguous, and intangible nature of all innovation-related phenomena, management scholars have been trying to uncover factors that contribute to creativity and innovation from multiple lenses ranging from organizational behavior at the micro-level to strategic management at the macro-level. Along with important and insightful developments in these research streams that evolved independently from one another, human resource management (HRM) research – especially from a strategic perspective – has only recently started to contribute to a better understanding of both creativity and innovation. The goal of this chapter is to review the contributions of strategic HRM research to an improved understanding of creativity at the individual-level and innovation at the firm-level. In organizing this review, the authors rely on the open innovation funnel as a metaphor to review research on both HRM practices and HRM systems that contribute to creativity and innovation. In the last section, the authors focus on more recent developments in HRM research that focus on ambidexterity – as a way for HRM to simultaneously facilitate exploration and exploitation. This chapter concludes with a discussion of future research directions.

Despite its stated intention to be independent, impartial and thorough, the 9-11 Commission was none of the three. The Commission was structurally compromised by bias-inducing connections to subjects of the investigation, and procedurally compromised, among other reasons, by (1) its failure to take up promising lines of inquiry and its failure to try to force the release of key documents that were closely guarded by the Bush administration, the FBI and various intelligence agencies; (2) its distortion of information about pre-9-11 military preparedness, foreknowledge of the attacks or attacks of like-kind; and (3) omissions of information related to the funding of the plot and the specific whereabouts of key officials on the morning of September 11, 2001.

These structural compromises and procedural failings converged to assure that the Commission would not challenge core elements of the “official story” of the 9-11 attacks. This failure was compounded by the Commission's desire to produce a final report that would read as a “historical narrative” rather than as an exhaustive set of findings on the critical unanswered questions that arose after the attacks. The Commission's unquestioning acceptance of the official narrative also meant that it missed a perhaps larger opportunity to challenge key myths associated with American exceptionalism. Thus, the 9-11 Commission ultimately functioned as an instrument of cultural hegemony, extending and deepening the official version of events under the guise of independence and impartiality.

This chapter addresses a lack of theory building in electronic-HRM (e-HRM) research and attempts to contribute with a (re-)conceptualisation of e-HRM as a nexus of practices and their material arrangements.

The work draws on theories from information systems research, science and technology studies, and sociology and organisation studies.

The (re-)conceptualisation indicates that future research should make further enquiries into the role of human agency and political processes in e-HRM.

As a methodological pathway a combination of ethnography and philosophical hermeneutics is proposed, enabling the achievement of a required pertinent sensibility in the study of social practices and human intentionality. Action research is also considered to be relevant for an engaged e-HRM scholarship.

The social implication of this research is the advancement of theories that emphasise the importance of human agency, morality and materiality in organisational processes.

The conceptualisation may thus facilitate research that reveal insights about involvement, reciprocity and power in e-HRM projects – knowledge that can direct the development of e-HRM project teams and thus facilitate strategic HRM.

Research in strategic human resource management (SHRM) has evolved over the past 30 years to become more theory based and to exhibit greater empirical rigor. However, much has changed in the external environment that makes the existing theories, approaches, and methodologies inappropriate for addressing the questions that organizations face in managing their human resources today. In this chapter we discuss a number of environmental changes impacting organizations and identify tensions that researchers have faced in exploring how firms seek to manage their people as a source of competitive advantage. We argue that past research has focused on only one side of the tension at a time, thus limiting the usefulness of the answers that research provides. We advocate for research that simultaneously addresses both sides of the tensions in a way that can revolutionize research in SHRM.

Decision-making in human resources management is done at both the micro and macro level of organizations. Unfortunately, the decisions at each level are often executed without consideration of the other, and current theory reflects this issue. In response to a call for integration of micro- and macro-level processes by Huselid and Becker (2011), we review the extant literature on strategic human resources and high-performance work systems to provide recommendations for both research and practice. We aimed to contribute to the literature by proposing the incorporation of the situation awareness literature into the high-performance work systems framework to encourage the alignment of human resources efforts. In addition, we provide practical recommendations for integrating situation awareness and strategic decision-making. We discuss a process for the employment of situation awareness in organizations that might not only streamline human resources management but also result in more effective decisions. Additional considerations include implications for teams, boundary conditions (e.g., individual differences), and measurement.

In recent years, practitioners have identified a number of problems with traditional performance management (PM) systems, arguing that PM is broken and needs to be fixed. In this chapter, we review criticisms of traditional PM practices that have been mentioned by journalists and practitioners and we consider the solutions that they have presented for addressing these concerns. We then consider these problems and solutions within the context of extant scholarly research and identify (a) what organizations should do going forward to improve PM practices (i.e., focus on feedback processes, ensure accountability throughout the PM system, and align the PM system with organizational strategy) and (b) what scholars should focus research attention on (i.e., technology, strategic alignment, and peer-to-peer accountability) in order to reduce the science-practice gap in this domain.

We develop a framework that explains the role of knowledge resources in the formation of international strategic alliances by multinational corporations. The focus is on the value and uniqueness of knowledge resources and two types of learning international strategic alliances, exploratory and exploitative. Also, we explain how the institutional environment – a host country's property and contractual rights, rule of law and the institutional distance between the countries of the partnering firms – affects the attractiveness of these two forms of alliances.