As the international journal of human resource development (HRD), HRDI believes the importance of context in HRD research and practice. Context-specific considerations consist of both macro and micro perspectives. The macro perspective comprises of differences in geographical locations which reflects the societal, economic and national culture characteristics. The micro perspective includes factors that influence the behaviours of employees, managers, and the operational principles of corporations. The articles in this issue demonstrated the authors’ understanding of contextual influence in HRD research and practices. There are four peer-reviewed articles and one perspective article. The first referred article studied the relationship between perceived employability (PE) and employee performance. The second article examined home boundary permeability due to technology-related pressures. The third article investigated the organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) for a collectivist culture. The fourth article took a look at the relationships among manager–boss gender, self-awareness and managerial derailment. The perspective article discussed the unique developmental strategies towards HRD in a company called Saudi Aramco. Following is an overview of these articles.
The first article examined PE and its impact on employee performance. Hahn and Kim tested the relationships between PE and three dimensions of employee performance: the in-role, the adaptive and the extra-role performance. They also investigated the moderating effects of the perceived quality of employment to these relationships. Their study was based on a survey conducted at a South Korea company. While not many details were shared with the surveyed company, the authors noted that the unique Korean business practices and the influence of Confucianism should be considered while interpreting the findings of the study. The findings revealed significant positive relationships between PE and the three dimensions of employee performance, and the interaction effect of the perceived quality of the employment relationship was not found to be significant. Employees with high PE might exhibit high in-role performance to maintain self-concept of high employability regardless of their perceptions of the quality of their relationship with the organization. This finding suggested that PE as a self-concept consisted of education, skills, experience and attributes, which are relatively stable. Similarly, employees of high PE would likely exhibit high adaptive performance, adjust and cope with changes, regardless of the perceived quality of the employment relationship with the organization. However, the perceived quality of the employment relationship with the organization showed a significant impact on extra-role performance, which was measured as OCB. As a result, they argued that supporting employee training and development and investing in employees’ employability was a legitimate corporate strategy and could be expected with a positive outcome. While I was left wondering how PE relates to turnover intentions, this is an interesting research article with even more interesting findings.
The article by Kim and Hollensbe examined the impact of technology-related pressure on the permeability of home boundary. There is little doubt that the advancement of information technology has contributed to the pervasive challenge of work–life balance by blurring the boundary between work and home sphere through ubiquitous connectivity. This timely study aimed to provide a better understanding of this issue. Building on a survey of an information technology company in the Midwestern United States, this study found that technology-related pressure was a good predictor of home boundary permeability, three times more than segmentation preference and a well-established home boundary permeability indicator. To expend the understanding of home boundary permeability, they also examined the potential positive spillover of bring work home and found both negative and positive effects existed simultaneously. The study also found that home support might be able to mitigate the deleterious effect of home boundary permeability but not help with the beneficial effects. This study edges on the holistic approach to study technology-related work spillover. I would encourage future studies to examine this issue by looking at factors at both the work and home front, factors related to individual employees, family members, teams and the organization. The influence of technology, occupation, social norm/culture, family economic status should be considered as well.
The third article by Rurkkhum and Bartlett was to develop an OCB instrument for a collectivist culture. It was an effort to answer the challenge that OCB as a construct is heavily influenced by culture. First, they conducted a review of literature and interviews for item generation. Then an eight-step process was followed to reduce redundancy, improve wording and conduct item analysis. An instrument of 43 items was developed. To further validate the instrument, another study of 451 employees was conducted and the OCB measurement was finalized with 35 items. There are six dimensions, namely helping others, self-development, organizational loyalty, developing others, civic virtue and obedience. This instrument was different from the mainstream OCB instrument of the West. Even though I think the article may benefit from a comparative table that captures the similarity and differences of the newly developed instrument and the mainstream Western instrument, I think this study contributed to the indigenous instrument development. The entire study was conducted in Thailand, hence might limit its applicability to other Asian countries.
The last referred article by Song and Quast was to explore the impact of gender combination in self-other rating agreement, self-awareness and managerial derailment. The authors investigated the predictive values of gender combinations and self-awareness to managerial derailment potential. Using the archived database of a survey collected from a series of leadership and management development programs by a consulting firm from 2003–2015, they analyzed the data of three subsamples (US, UK and China). The findings suggested that male managers were more likely to overestimate themselves than female managers in all three countries. While their findings showed that gender might impact the self-other rating agreement in different ways, both male and female bosses inclined to rate the focal female managers in negative ways and the focal male managers in positive ways in all three countries. This confirmed the existence of gender bias in organizations. In the UK and US samples, female bosses tended to believe male managers were less likely to derail, while in the US and China sample male bosses tended to believe female managers were more likely to derail than male managers.
The last article is a perspective piece by Alexander who provided a detailed account of how Saudi Aramco has invested in human resource since the inception. This is a good reference for other organizations when planning and strategizing HRD activities. Again, the articles in this issue of HRDI demonstrated the importance of context in HRD research and practices. The differences in HRD strategies and practices and the influence of culture might go beyond geographical locations. It is important for HRD scholars to consider both macro and micro factors in conducting HRD research, especially in international settings.
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