Faculty Publications - Human Resource Studies

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https://hdl.handle.net/1813/72705

The Human Resource Studies Department consists of world-class faculty members engaged in research, teaching and practice. These faculty members play integral roles in the administration of the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies (CAHRS), an ILR-based research center funded by over 50 corporations, and the ILR Executive Education Program that offers advanced training to HR practitioners. Their goal in teaching is to balance a rigorous academic research approach with a real-world practice orientation. In this way they provide their students with state-of-the-art knowledge relevant to managing human resources in organizations.

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Task Interdependence and Shared Leadership: A Structural Perspective on the Distribution of Leadership in Teams
Nguyen, Thao P. H.; Bell, Bradford S. (SAGE, 2024)
Shared leadership has consistently been shown to predict team effectiveness. However, research also indicates that different teams may require different configurations of shared leadership, and achieving maximum sharedness in leadership does not always guarantee superior team outcomes. This reality underscores the need for a normative theory of shared leadership that can extend our understanding of the construct and facilitate its adoption in organizations. Despite the significance of such a theory, little attention has been given to its development and our understanding of how shared leadership should be distributed across different teams remains quite limited. In this article, we adopt a structural perspective to propose that the task interdependence network can serve as a robust foundation for devising effective shared leadership strategies. Our conceptual framework outlines the nuanced implications of the task interdependence network—from determining the optimal level of shared leadership necessary for performance to identifying potential members for shared leadership responsibilities. In doing so, we emphasize that the specific implications of the task interdependence network may vary, rather than remain uniform, across different dimensions of shared leadership.
Team Membership Change and Team Effectiveness: The Role of Informational Attributes
Kim, Eunhee; Bell, Bradford S. (SAGE, 2024)
This study examined the impact of informational attributes of team membership change on affective emergent states and team effectiveness, and how members’ emotional intelligence (EI) shapes this impact. Results from two laboratory studies showed that change predictability and rationality affected team potency and identification. These emergent states had unique effects on team effectiveness over and above the effects of team process. Results also showed that members’ EI moderated the effects of change predictability and rationality. These findings emphasize the importance of membership change attributes, affective emergent states, and team composition in determining team effectiveness after a membership change.
Multiple Status Signals in Multinational Teams: Implications of Lingua Franca Proficiency and Task Expertise for Informal Leadership
Nguyen, Thao P. H.; Bell, Bradford, S.; Yuan, Y. Connie (SAGE, 2024)
Lingua franca proficiency and task expertise coexist in multinational teams as prominent status signals that are often relied upon to infer a member’s competence. These personal attributes, however, do not always suggest consistent information since those with lower lingua franca proficiency might be more expert at the task and vice versa. In examining their joint implications, we draw on status characteristics and expectation states theories to identify the signaling nature of each attribute. Unlike the categorically specific quality of task expertise, lingua franca proficiency possesses characteristics commensurate with both specific and diffuse signals: it represents a social group and, at the same time, carries valid information about performance for certain tasks. Using archival (Study 1) and experimental (Study 2) data, we explore how the hybrid nature of lingua franca proficiency shapes its interaction with task expertise and implications for subsequent leadership outcomes. We provide further evidence for the generalizability of our findings through a supplemental study that includes 18 interviews with current members of multinational teams across various organizations.
It Matters How You Got There and Who Else Is Doing It: Examining the Effects of Two Social-Contextual Characteristics of Working From Home
McAlpine, Kristie L.; Bell, Bradford S.; Léon, Emmanuelle (Wiley, 2024)
Drawing on self-determination theory, this study advances our understanding of employees' experiences working from home (WFH). Specifically, we examine the effects of two social-contextual characteristics of WFH arrangements: whether employees voluntarily initiate their arrangement (WFH initiation) and the proportion of WFH employees in a unit (WFH density). We conducted multilevel analyses on a multisource dataset drawn from organizational HR records and two surveys of 2115 WFH employees in a Fortune 500 organization. Employees who voluntarily initiated WFH, rather than at their employer's direction, experienced higher job autonomy and lower isolation. WFH employees in units with a lower proportion of other WFH employees experienced higher job autonomy. WFH initiation and WFH density also had effects on several distal employee outcomes, including job satisfaction, organizational knowledge, and turnover intentions, through their effects on job autonomy and isolation. Our findings provide valuable insight into the experiences of WFH employees and call attention to two important, yet understudied, factors that shape these experiences.
The Goldilocks Effect of Strategic Human Resource Management? Optimizing the Benefits of a High-Performance Work System through the Dual Alignment of Vertical and Horizontal Fit
Han, Joo Hun; Kang, Saehee; Oh, In-Sue; Kehoe, Rebecca; Lepak, David P. (Academy of Managment, 2019)
Although vertical and horizontal fit in strategic human resource management are foundational to the links between a high-performance work system (HPWS) and organizational performance, little is known about how these two fits interact to affect organizational performance. We address this shortcoming while also advancing knowledge on each type of fit. We offer a more nuanced examination of vertical fit (which has typically been assessed with respect to organizations’ broad strategic types) by focusing on the alignment of an HPWS with an organization’s market entry timing mode—a key element of strategy. We propose that among organizations pursuing new product development, the effect of an HPWS on organizational performance is most positive under a fast-follower entry timing, followed by a first-mover and finally a fence-sitter entry timing. We then hypothesize that the benefit of vertical fit is magnified when the complementary human resources practices comprising an HPWS are implemented with greater internal consistency (or with similar intensities) across the ability, motivation, and opportunity domains—reflecting a positive interaction between vertical and horizontal fit in predicting the effectiveness of an HPWS. Analyses of four-wave nationally representative panel data yield strong support for our dual-alignment model of SHRM.
An Expanded Conceptualization of Line Managers’ Involvement in Human Resource Management
Kehoe, Rebecca; Han, Joo Hun (American Psychological Association, 2019)
Recent research provides evidence that, contrary to implicit assumptions in much of the strategic human resource management (SHRM) literature, human resource (HR) systems and practices are in fact enacted with substantial variation across units even within organizations, with such variation largely a function of the line managers involved in implementing HR practices in the units under their supervision. While instrumental in demonstrating the critical role that line managers play in facilitating the causal chain linking organizations’ HR practices with intended employee and organizational outcomes, we contend that the focus of this research on HR practice implementation as a singular and unidimensional characterization of line managers’ involvement in human resource management (HRM) represents an oversimplification on several counts. Broadly, we propose that this focus fails to account for the varied nature of line managers’ downward influences in the context of HRM. Thus, we integrate insights from research on HR practice implementation, workforce differentiation, and autonomous strategic behavior to develop a more complete understanding of line managers’ downward involvement in HRM. Based on our synthesis of relevant insights from these literatures, we propose a research agenda focusing on questions spanning four broad areas with the aim of fostering and guiding future SHRM scholarship to further our understanding of the antecedents, processes, and consequences associated with line managers’ influences on HR system content and process in organizations.
Give Them Some Slack - They're Trying to Change! The Benefits of Excess Cash, Excess Employees, and Increased Human Capital in the Strategic Change Context
Bentley, F. Scott; Kehoe, Rebecca (Academy of Management, 2020)
We address calls for contextualization in the study of slack resources by examining the pursuit of strategic change as a contingency that shapes the effects of human resource (HR) slack and financial slack on firm performance. Using data on U.S. commercial banks from 2002 to 2014, we demonstrate that HR slack is more positively related to firm performance in firms pursuing strategic change, and that this relationship is stronger in the presence of greater financial slack. Moreover, we find that the moderating effect of financial slack on HR slack in the strategic change context operates through changes in organizations’ human capital investment, offering a unique examination of a key mechanism through which slack resources create value and through which complementarities between different types of slack come to fruition. Our paper advances the contingency perspective within the slack literature and brings important insights from the resource management perspective to the conversation on slack and performance.
Revisiting the Concepts of Vertical and Horizontal Fit in HRM: What we Know, What we Don't Know, and Where it Might Go
Kehoe, Rebecca (Academy of Management, 2021)
The theoretical soundness and practical relevance of strategic human resource management (SHRM) scholarship has recently come under scrutiny. The goal of this symposium is to offer a starting point for SHRM scholars to rethink our approach to understanding the achievement of competitive advantage through HR, guided by a reconsideration of what it means to achieve horizontal fit and vertical fit in HRM. Collectively, the three papers in this symposium contribute to this effort through a reconsideration of the content of the HR systems we study, an expansion of the strategic bases against which we consider the vertical fit of HR systems, and a more explicit incorporation of complexity and change into our understanding of both the horizontal and vertical fit of the HR “ecosystems” in organizations. In this paper, I introduce the key issues and questions with which the papers in the symposium interface and highlight potential avenues that future SHRM scholarship could pursue to address them.
Shadows and Shields: Stars Limit their Collaborators' Exposure to Attributions of Both Credit and Blame
Kehoe, Rebecca; Bentley, F. Scott (Wiley, 2021)
Building on the notion of cumulative advantage, we undertake a nuanced examination of how collaborating with a star affects attributions of credit and blame to nonstars in collaborative endeavors. Situating our inquiry in the US hedge fund industry, we hypothesize two-way interactions predicting that collaboration with a star comanager will weaken both the positive effect of comanaged fund success and the negative effect of comanaged fund failure on nonstar managers’ professional status attainment (i.e., the status of a manager’s subsequent employing firm). Specifically, we argue that the involvement of a star comanager will weaken prospective employers’ attributions for positive or negative performance to a focal nonstar manager, due to presumptions of the star’s disproportionate influence in collaborative decisions. We then theorize a series of three-way interactions specifying the roles of other signals of a nonstar manager’s competence in this process. More precisely, we argue that a nonstar’s performance outside the collaborative context and the status of the nonstar’s current employer will weaken the dampening effect of comanaging with a star in the context of success and strengthen the favorable, blame-reducing effect of comanaging with a star in the context of failure. Therefore, we suggest that nonstars who can signal their competence with these independent status signals will achieve greater professional status attainment than will those lacking such signals following both collaborative success and collaborative failure with a star. Our primary analyses support our hypotheses, while our supplementary analyses offer corroborative support for theorized mechanisms and evidence to address alternative explanations.
In with the Old? Examining when Boomerang Employees Outperform New Hires
Keller, JR; Kehoe, Rebecca; Bidwell, Matthew; Collings, David; Myer, Adam (Academy of Management, 2021)
As most careers now span across organizations, former employees represent a growing source of potential hires for many organizations. Yet, we know little about whether and when firms benefit by rehiring former employees. To answer these questions, we adopt a knowledge-based view of hiring to develop new theory about how returning former employees’ (“boomerangs”) post-hire performance might differ from that of external hires who have no previous experience with the firm(“new hires”). We theorize that, relative to new hires, boomerangs’ familiarity with the organization’s social system will allow them to more effectively engage in coordination and overcome internal resistance from organizational incumbents. As a consequence, boomerangs should have a particular advantage in roles that require a higher degree of coordination and in units that are likely to be more resistant to outsiders. Comparing the post-hire performance of 2,053 boomerangs and 10,858 new hires over an eight-year period in a large health care organization, we find that, upon being (re)hired into the organization, boomerangs outperform new hires in their initial job spell and that this performance advantage is larger in jobs requiring greater internal coordination and in contexts characterized by greater internal resistance to external hires.

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