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The purpose of this paper is to explore varieties of capitalism (VoC) as a moderator of the effect of: the strategic HR function role; and the level of union presence on the adoption of different human resource management (HRM) practices categorized as either person-centered or performance-centered.

The authors use data on both multinationals and locally owned firms from 14 OECD countries, collected through the Cranet 2009 survey. The hypotheses of the proposed model were tested using hierarchical multiple regression analysis.

Evidence shows that the strategic HR function is positively related to the adoption of both types of HRM practices, whereas higher levels of union presence inhibit the adoption of performance-centered practices and promote the adoption of person-centered practices. In addition, although VoC does not show any significant direct effects on HR practices, there is a moderating effect of VoC on the HR function role – HRM practices and union presence – HRM practices relationships.

The use of survey data with single respondents might produce reliability problems. Additionally, the data used are cross-sectional, which means that causality cannot be determined.

Managers in multinationals corporations and local firms must be aware of the distinct effects of the strategic HR function and trade union presence in different market economies. In particular, special attention must be paid when a firm expands globally, “outside the reach” of the national market economy or type of capitalism, and operates in different VoC.

The present paper contributes to better understanding the influence of VoC, not only on HRM practices, as in previous research, but also on the relationships between the HR function role and the level of union presence and the types of practices promoted.

This study aims to take a step toward integrating research regarding the image, role and identity of management accountants by understanding how employers’ perceptions of the ideal management accountant image differ from operational managers’ perceived role expectations, how management accountants perceive their identity and how those factors shape management accountants’ understanding of who they are and want to be.

A qualitative design draws upon the case company’s 100 job advertisements and 31 semi-structured interviews with management accountants and operational managers. Those data are entwined with role theory and its core concepts of expectations and identities and also early recruitment-related theoretical aspects such as image and employer branding.

The findings reveal how employers’ perceptions of the ideal image and operational managers’ role expectations shape and influence the identity of management accountants. However, management accountants distance themselves from a brand image and role expectations. They experience identity conflict between their current and desired identity, the perception of not being able to perform the currently desired role. Although this study presents some possible reasons and explanations, such as employer branding for the misalignment and discrepancy between perceptions of employer (image), expectations of operational managers (role) and management accountants’ self-conception of the role (identity), this study argues that the identity of a management accountant results from organizational aspects of image and role and individual aspects of identity.

Image and external role expectations can challenge identity construction and also serve as a source of conflict and frustration; thus, a more comprehensive approach to studying the identity of management accountants is necessary to understand what contributes to the fragility of their identity.

The results provide an understanding of the dynamics of the image, role and identity to support management accountants and employers and to further address the suggested dissonance and ambiguities.

This study contributes by showing how the dynamics and connections between the image, role and identity influence the identity construction of management accountants. Moreover, this study shows how overpromising as a part of employer branding might not reflect the reality experienced by management accountants but may cause frustration and threaten the management accountants’ identity.

Service research has previously documented service providers’ role in addressing the barriers of technology mediation, mostly at the service delivery level. The purpose of this study is to enhance our understanding about the role of service providers who hold strategic and operational roles, as well as investigate the impact of coordinated, organization-wide initiatives in dealing with the demands and associated emotional ambivalence of technology-mediated services.

This qualitative study draws from a series of in-depth interviews with health-care service providers who hold strategic and operational roles in health-care organizations along with participant observation to develop an understanding of the broader organizational context of telehealth services.

This paper outlines the strategic sense-giving process and highlights how health-care service providers who hold strategic and operational roles enact the sense-giver role. This study illustrates that strategic sense-giving involves the recognition of sense-making gaps; identification of sense-giving opportunities; and provision of templates of action.

This study illustrates that sense-giving can be performed by a number of organizational members in a more formalized way which extends informal sense-giving efforts at the peer-to-peer level. The importance of strategic sense-giving in providing templates of action for service providers and consumers is highlighted. This study also shows how strategic sense-giving safeguards against confusion and errors by communicating appropriate ways of using technology. Finally, the role of strategic sense-giving in helping service providers and consumers cope with the emotional ambivalence of technology-mediated service interactions are demonstarted.

The article has two major purposes. The first purpose is to examine the roles and practices of communication professionals in relation to internal aspects of crisis communication. The second is to suggest new roles and practices for communication professionals that will enable a strategic approach to internal crisis communication. This article is based on empirical material from a larger three-year research project that focuses on internal crisis communication at a university hospital (UH) in Sweden.

This article is based on empirical material from a larger, three-year research project that focuses on internal crisis communication at a university hospital (UH). For the purpose of this article the authors have mainly analysed transcripts of 24 semi-structured interviews that lasted 1-1.5 hours each. The authors chose to interview both communication professionals and other key persons/crisis managers in order to have the role and practices of communication professionals elucidated not only from the perspective of communication professionals themselves.

A conclusion from the case study is that communication professionals have a rather limited role in internal crisis communication. Their role is primarily focused on information distribution through the intranet, even though they are also involved in strategic managerial work during the acute stage of the crisis. The communication professionals are first and foremost called for once the crisis has already occurred, which can be seen as a “communication on demand” approach, which limits a strategic orientation. In this paper some new roles and practices for communication professionals are suggested, which involve a strategic approach and cover all the stages of crisis.

Future research needs to go deeper into the practices and processes of these roles.

Important prerequisites for fulfilling a strategic role as a communication professional are membership of the board, diversified communication roles, a developed managerial role, being closer to core operations, and legitimacy.

The absence of a strategic crisis management thinking and discourse in organisations delimits communication professionals to a technical role rather than a managerial and strategic role. Taking internal crisis communication seriously and adopting a broader view of crises will raise new demands on communication professionals, which go beyond the operational and tactical roles in the acute phase of a crisis.

This paper argues, based on academic research as well as personal experience, that management development (MD) functions are not always utilising their resources, either in terms of people or time, effectively. They are perceived to spend large amounts of their time on “administrative” or “welfare” aspects of the role whilst neglecting some of the more strategic issues or roles. Using a model of HR roles, we explore the potential roles for the MD function, analysing exactly what each role would imply for MD activities. We conclude by suggesting that MD is in many cases in danger of becoming left behind as the rest of the HR function moves onto more strategic concerns. Thus the challenge is to forge a more strategic role, either as a strategic business partner or as a change agent.

Replicating Ulrich's model, this study aims to investigate empirically the HR role performance of a case organisation. Despite the popularity of the model, both theoretical discussions and empirical research that build on the model are scarce.

The present study investigates HR professionals' and line managers' perceptions of HR roles in a regional full‐service bank based on a combination of interviews and a questionnaire survey distributed to the HR executive and line managers.

The case study evidence reported suggests that not only are all four roles strongly represented, they are also equally shared between the HR executive and line managers.

This study is limited by the usual problem of a wider application of findings provided by a small‐scale single‐case study. The generalisability of the findings would be improved by conducting more comparable cases within the field.

HR professionals are struggling to make top executives and colleagues recognise the value of their operations and initiatives. It is therefore increasingly important to demonstrate the value of the HR function, and a first step towards demonstrating its value is to define and clarify the roles and role expectations of the HR function in the organisation. This study demonstrates how an organisation can get a clear picture of the roles that are performed or perceived as performed by the HR function by using Ulrich's relatively simple model, and thereby create a good basis for further discussion and clarification.

The purpose of this study is to understand the relationship between the role of internal consultant and role of the HR practitioners in the manufacturing companies of Malaysia.

Three main elements in the competency of internal consultation are measured. They are: knowledge in the area of project management; internal coaching ability; and the ability to be a solution provider.

The HR practitioner needs to overcome many barriers to reach the ultimate goal of becoming a strategic partner in his or her organisation. The findings suggest that the HR executive that understands business strategy is more likely to develop HR processes and procedures that support the implementation of a business strategy and are therefore, better able to involve themselves in organisational development activities on a deeper level.

This study by its very nature is limited by virtue of its having been carried out only on manufacturing companies in Johor, the Southern‐most state of Malaysia. Thus, its findings cannot be generalised. The number of respondents in this study was relatively small (89) and does not fully represent the thousands of HR managers employed by manufacturers in Malaysia.

Even though the findings cannot be used to reflect the overall HR competency of internal consultation in Malaysia, it does serve as an exploratory study that can be expanded more broadly in the future.

The paper can help HR professionals to look more perceptively into the expectations of their CEOs concerning their role as HR practitioners and will be of interest to those working in that area.

This paper aims to focus on changes in the way in which business‐to‐business companies are responding to customer and market pressures for higher service and relational investments, and the need for new capabilities in managing the business risk in the company's customer portfolio. The paper seeks to propose a model of the strategic sales organization as a basis for management review of how to realign sales, account management, and marketing processes around customers to achieve and sustain superior customer value.

The study traces the emergence of new pressures and mandates which are changing management thinking about the “front‐end” of organizations and edging companies towards a revolution in the role of sales, account management and marketing comparable to earlier reinventions in operations and supply chain strategy.

The outcome of the review is a model of the imperatives for the strategic sales organization.

The model produced in the review provides a tool or framework for executive consideration of the strategic sales issue, both in evaluating the strategic role and performance of the existing sales and account management structures and in designing new roles for delivering competitive strength in the future.

While the strategic role of the sales organization has been discussed in the literature, this paper provides a practical framework for executives to use in addressing the potential role of the strategic sales organization. The framework also highlights promising research directions for marketing and sales scholars.

Seeks to contribute to the empirical database on the progression of thinking with regards to the strategic role of manufacturing by reporting some results of a study on the manufacturing‐strategy thinking and practices amongst practising managers of operations based in a newly industrialized economy (NIE). In particular, highlights the finding that while almost all operations managers in the sample perceive that manufacturing can and should contribute to overall corporate strategy, their view of the role of manufacturing is that it should primarily be reactive vis‐à‐vis other functional areas; such a view is far from strategic. Operations managers in the survey agree that there are many ways to compete besides cost, but their main criterion for evaluating the manufacturing function is still cost and productivity. They seem to fail to recognize the existence of tradeoffs in the production system. They acknowledge the necessity to handle strategic issues, but still perceive infrastructural decisions as mere operational decisions. While the role of managers in NIEs is likely to be more cost focused rather than strategic in orientation, they need to be better and further exposed to the current concepts of manufacturing strategy thinking and development. In particular, a more proactive form of the strategic role of manufacturing could be pursued.

This study aims to identify and analyze the different roles corporate social responsibility (CSR) can play in corporate strategy. By acknowledging that one of the biggest challenges for companies in committing to sustainability is the strategy work, the authors outline specific strategic initiatives to achieve these roles and the strategic outcomes that will follow such initiatives.

Four illustrative case examples show how companies are recasting the role of CSR. The new CSR roles are characterized through two strategic dimensions: an inside-out (firm-oriented) vs outside-in (market-oriented) orientation and an emphasis on leveraging vs an emphasis on prospecting activities.

The findings show that to realize the opportunities of CSR for business, the environment and society at large, the role of CSR in the boardroom must be reconfigured. By recasting its role, CSR can become a driver for the strategy process and a transformative force generating strategic changes.

This paper aims to encourage top executives to take a proactive stance toward responsibility, recognize the new roles and potential impact that CSR can have in corporate strategy and assist strategic decision-making regarding CSR.

The paper aims to move beyond integrating sustainability into existing strategies and business models by demonstrating how sustainability can also inspire strategic changes a priori when the role of CSR is recast in companies. By viewing CSR as a driver of corporate strategy and strategic initiatives, the authors suggest that besides helping the environment, the community and society, CSR can take care of corporate strategy.