Leadership, knowledge and people in knowledge-intensive organisations: implications for HRM theory and practice

Introduction

In order to offer insights into the management of HR challenges in Knowledge Intensive Firms/Organisations (KIO’s), this Special Issue explores three strands of research: International HRM, leadership and the knowledge-intensive firm/organisation. In this introduction against the background of global developments affecting KIOs, we will first highlight the key leadership issues in global KIOs, including managing, creating and sharing knowledge, and motivating and developing those employed in KIOs. Then we introduce the papers in the special issue, including a Practitioner’s Vision of HRM in a global KIO, and seven research papers from authors from Australia, Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Pakistan, the Russian Federation, Switzerland, Thailand and the United Kingdom on leadership in KIOs that reflect the title of this article: leadership, leading knowledge and leading people in knowledge-intensive organisations. And finally, we sketch some future developments and recommendations for further research relevant to international HRM.

Background

Knowledge and people are the key strategic resources in KIOs but as Björkman & Welch (2015) have noted, issues at the organizational level in international human resource management increasingly require consideration of issues at multiple levels ranging from the macro to the micro. We, therefore, begin with a brief historical overview of two of the key drivers in the macro-business environment which have affected the value of knowledge and human capital – globalisation and technology. Globalisation is a strong driver in many knowledge-intensive industries where the need for high up-front investment in people and innovation, product, branding and promotion create global network effects, leading to a strong globalisation pull on the demand side while global sourcing and production provide a strong globalisation push on the supply side (Millar, Choi, & Chen, 2005). The development of information and communication technologies in the 1980s and 1990s also shifted the focus of business strategy from physical assets to data and intellectual assets. These developments in the macro-business environment have been reflected at a more micro-level in HRM research and practice within firms.

Globalisation effects

Much of the interest in international HRM followed the global political, social and economic turmoil that took place in the 1970’s as a result of global military conflict, social unrest and rising cost of fossil fuels which created a need for business strategies that could cope with disruptive changes in the business environment and a need for innovative responses. This was reflected in the growing interest in management research on innovation and knowledge-based competition where knowledge is the primary strategic resource for organizations (Grant, 1996; Spender & Grant, 1996). In order to create value for an organisation, knowledge embedded in the organisation must be shared and applied to practical business problems, leading to considerable research on the process of knowledge sharing (Argote & Ingram, 2000). This interest in knowledge-based competition flowed into strategic HRM research and by the late 1990s and early 2000s, the focus was on how organisations could develop, sustain and manage pools of scarce talent through a combination of both active external recruitment and internal talent development (Cascio & Boudreau, 2016).

Technological drivers

Concurrently, developments in ICT have had an impact has on work practices within organisations and hence HRM. Digitisation of work enabled individuals to connect to each other from one location to another and enabled the outsourcing of production formerly done in one location to a dispersed set of global locations. In HRM research and practice this has been accompanied by increasing attention to questions of how to compete globally while operating effectively within local cultures. Furthermore, the increasing availability of information networks has made possible largely virtual organisations (DeSanctis & Monge, 1999) where much of the communication is virtual, and where much of the work involves processing of information by knowledge professionals distributed worldwide, on behalf of clients who may themselves be globally distributed. This in turn has led to increased HRM demands within businesses to develop skills such as managing virtual teams (Hertel, Geister, & Konradt, 2005).

From knowledge scarcity to knowledge abundance

The combination of increases in supply of skilled workers in less-developed countries and advances in information and communication technology has led to an increase in use of offshoring by companies to scarce talent worldwide (Lewin, Massini, & Peeters, 2009). This shift towards external sources of knowledge has been further enabled by the development and widespread adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, which facilitate sharing of user-generated content. This allows users to interact and collaborate with each other using social media and other platforms as both creators and users of content in a virtual community, in contrast to Web 1.0 where people were limited to the passive viewing or clumsy asynchronous iterative revision of content. The increased access to knowledge worldwide has led to organisational innovations to access knowledge resources from a wider range of sources, including external sources, in contrast to the traditional vertical integration approach where internal R&D activities lead to internally developed products that are then distributed by the firm.

These changes in global supply and access to knowledge and information present a challenge to any business, but especially KIOs, organisations for whom the majority of the work is intellectual in nature, and where employees are typically well educated, well qualified and frequently professionals (Alvesson, 2000). For such organisations, their intellectual capital, people, is often their only or most precious and valuable asset – and one which presents some specific leadership challenges, especially in terms of motivating knowledge creation and knowledge exchange as well as in motivating knowledge professionals to stay within the firm.

Challenges for leadership in knowledge-intensive firms

Leading knowledge creation

One of the key characteristics of knowledge-intensive organisations is the dynamic, heterogeneous and temporal nature of their services (Pina & Tether, 2016). Succeeding as a knowledge-intensive organisation requires a capacity to constantly evolve, to adapt, to be creative, innovative and entrepreneurial. More so than most, knowledge-intensive organisations need to develop a culture that promotes organisational learning; that encourages innovation and the development of novel systems and processes, products and services. A key priority for leaders of KIOs, therefore, is maximising the creative value of their employees, stimulating innovative and creative behaviour and the creation of new knowledge.

Whilst the promotion of such behaviours lends itself to the traits characteristic of transformational leadership – inspirational motivation and intellectual stimulation (Bass & Avolio, 1995), the often uncertain competitive environment and easily changed internal dynamics of the knowledge intensive firm may require the certainty and consistency of a more transactional approach to leading – oft argued to be the worst type of leadership to stimulate cooperation and harness knowledge. What then is the most appropriate and effective approach to maximising the creative value of knowledge workers? What contextual factors should leaders account for, what contingencies may influence the impact of their leadership style when leading their teams in knowledge-intensive organisations?

Creating an environment that both stimulates and welcomes knowledge creation is also a vital component of the knowledge professional leader’s armoury, both in terms of encouraging experimentation and risk-taking behaviours, and the co-creation of knowledge in knowledge intensive team work. If individuals are to feel safe enough to speak up, to offer their thoughts and ideas, to challenge the status quo, to innovate and experiment, they need a team environment high in psychological safety (Edmondson, Kramer, & Cook, 2004). Such an environment is conducive to the creation of new knowledge and innovative behaviour because individuals will perceive that they have the freedom to offer new ideas and to experiment without the fear of judgement or ridicule (West, 1990). The resulting increased levels of participation and contribution will in turn lead to the cross-fertilisation of ideas and enhanced creativity and innovation.

How then can leaders of knowledge professionals create an environment which fosters psychological safety? What behaviours can they cultivate that will encourage their knowledge workers to contribute so that they might access the intellectual capital which resides within their heads, and encourage the creation of new and valuable knowledge? And as research also suggests that the personal agendas and self-interest of the individual may present a barrier to knowledge creation in teams and organisations, an additional leadership challenge emerges in terms of developing high-quality relationships built on a shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect if leaders are to encourage collaboration and the co-creation of knowledge as well as organisational commitment (Carmelli & Gitell, 2009).

Leading knowledge exchange

Such a climate is equally critical to the management of knowledge exchange, with a wealth of research demonstrating that trusting relationships result in greater knowledge sharing and more innovative behaviours (Abili, Thani, Mokhtarian, & Rashidi, 2011). In order to feel comfortable and confident in sharing knowledge, those working in KIOs need to both trust that others will use their knowledge appropriately and trust the value and integrity of the source of knowledge of which they are a recipient (Staples & Webster, 2008). They must also trust that they will be able to retain their value to the organisation – if your knowledge is your unique commodity, how can you ensure that sharing that knowledge will not diminish your value? A challenge, therefore, for leaders of knowledge workers is to develop a climate of psychological safety as well as interpersonal trust at an individual level between co-workers in knowledge-intensive teams.

At a more operational level, leaders of knowledge professionals need also to incorporate practices that will facilitate the exchange of knowledge both across departmental and organisational boundaries, and expose them to novel approaches to work, to multiple perspectives, to different solutions and to different mind sets, opening the doors to new and innovative ways of working, sowing the seeds for innovation and creativity, and stimulating the co-creation and exchange of knowledge (Garvin, Edmondson, & Gino, 2008). This needs to be balanced, however, with the cost of the time and resources through which new and innovative ideas can be actioned and implemented (De Jong & Den Hartog, 2007).

The interaction of leadership and knowledge management with technology

A more recent consideration for leaders of knowledge professionals is the introduction of technological methods for managing knowledge exchange. Such forms of technological knowledge management are designed to capture both explicit, or documented knowledge through the documentation of knowledge in an organisational repository (Watson & Hewett, 2006), and implicit, or undocumented knowledge, through the development of databases, or knowledge maps which are designed to replicate social networks (Criscuolo, Salter, & Sheehan, 2007). These systems are developed in order to facilitate the access to and exchange of knowledge across an organisation and are often seen by organisational leaders as facilitating knowledge sharing across the organisation, speeding up the process and improving quality. An example may be the problem solution templates that major consultancy firms – typical KIOs – deploy when a certain type of issue needs to be tackled in different firms, or industries. The approach is that a solution developed for firm A [the template] is applied and creatively adapted, with consultants using their knowledge and skills to identify needs and opportunities for adapting or going beyond the template to meet the circumstances of the particular client (e.g. firm B), or even enhancing the template for future use by other consultants.

The challenge for leaders arises, however, in the frequently encountered resistance by the knowledge professional to engaging with these systems, described by Von Nordenflycht (2010) as the challenge of ‘herding cats’. The assumption has been that this is the result of a reluctance on the part of the knowledge worker to share their knowledge (Camelo-Ordaz, Garcia-Cruz, Sousa-Ginel, & Valle-Cabrera, 2011). However, and as will be explored later in this Special Issue, perhaps this disengagement in knowledge management systems is the result of the knowledge workers’ differing perspectives regarding the value of such systems rather than a disinclination to share, and/or is knowledge hiding part of the way they work.

Whatever the antecedent, given this resistance, leaders are challenged to find ways of incentivising their knowledge professionals to engage both with each other and, in these technological processes, to commit their knowledge to electronic storage, and to maintain and update it to keep it relevant and fresh. It is a challenge for leaders to identify and demonstrate the value of these systems to those who have preference for the relational embeddedness of social networks for the exchange and creation of knowledge (Collins & Smith, 2006).

Motivating and developing knowledge professionals

In addition to the challenge of motivating the creation and exchange of knowledge in knowledge-intensive firms, organisational leaders are also challenged with ensuring that their intellectual capital, their knowledge talent, is retained – that that competitive edge is kept within their organisational boundaries. Research suggests that knowledge workers, particularly professionals have higher mobility by virtue of their professional qualifications and as such their retention presents a particular challenge for leaders of knowledge-intensive firms (Reed, 1996). For this group of individuals whose key intrinsic motivation is their ability to develop their professional skills and satisfy their professional expectations, competitive pay and rewards alone are unlikely to motivate them to engage in knowledge creation or exchange nor encourage organisational commitment (Ayree, Wyatt, & Min, 2009). Knowledge professionals whether in knowledge-intensive organisations or knowledge-intensive departments of more traditional firms, demand stimulating and challenging work (Swart & Kinnie, 2003), work which through its very nature will allow them to both develop and apply their skills, and work that is designed to allow them to develop themselves as professionals. For professional knowledge workers, leaders need to consider the individual values and intrinsic motivations of their staff. And rewards for performance, in the shape of promotions and further education opportunities, should be focused on enabling them to progress as professionals as well as within the organisation itself (Horwitz, Heng, & Quazi, 2003).

Intergenerational differences in knowledge professionals

Whilst not unique to leaders of knowledge intensive organisations, the challenge of the ageing population and the demographic shift to include much older managers is one which is particularly relevant. While Mahon and Millar (2014) emphasise the importance of intergenerational cooperation and openness to being managed by younger people, a vital element of organisational performance for knowledge-intensive organisations is the ability of their employees to learn – to develop their knowledge, skills and abilities (Hetzner, Gartmeier, Heid, & Gruber, 2009), and this is equally true of the older knowledge worker. However, a growing literature has found a negative effect of age on learning performance (Rossnagel, Schulz, Picard, & Voelpel, 2009) and it is suggested that this is likely associated with the perceived minimal pay back of the energy invested in learning for the older generation as they near the end of their careers (Lang & Carstensen, 2002). As such, the older knowledge worker may be less inclined to engage in effective learning strategies, deep learning that results in new and innovative ways of working, double-loop learning that is proactive rather than reactive, and involves the development of new ways of working rather than just fixing problems (Torbert, 1999). This issue is examined in the paper by Dominik Froelich later in this Special Issue.

This preponderance of more surface level learning is often reflected in the learning preferences of the younger generation – Gen Y – who have also been found to engage in more surface level learning and lack the critical thinking and analytic skills to succeed as knowledge workers (Schofield & Honoré, 2009). Thus, for leaders of both younger and older knowledge professionals, there is the challenge of finding the means to demonstrate the value of learning and incentivising their employees to engage in deeper level learning and continuing to develop their skills, knowledge and abilities.

Introduction to the collection of papers

The papers in this special issue deal with the challenges identified above, drawing from data in different knowledge-intensive industries and different countries, and using a variety of methodologies. We begin with a practitioner’s view, or rather, practitioner’s vision, by Laurent Choain, Chief People and Communication Officer at the Mazars Group in Paris, and a professor at Paris Assas. In ‘Research by Professionals: from a Knowledge-Intensive to a Research-Intensive led PSF’, he addresses the changing context of managing people in the global arena of the professional service firm and especially the challenge of continuous motivation and effectiveness of partners in an international law firm. He succinctly manages to combine tackling the complex reality of the young yet multigenerational PSF, the outmoded standard HR model, the reluctance of partners to fulfil executive roles, and focus on defining proprietary knowledge creation and thought leadership as the core PSF competitive advantages. Mazars achieve this through stimulating the smarter partners to do research and study for a PhD in a ‘mid partner career’ at the age of 40–45 years and become thought leaders. If you help them shine, you shine and this, ultimately, will elevate your brand recognition as well as your employer value proposition. In the current VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) world, KIOs can create their own second curve of career success: their transformation into a research intensive organisations is not a given but a very exciting prospect for a profession that may jeopardise its attractiveness and its future should it not be ready to take on a risk like this.

Interestingly, the admirable dynamics of the here and now practitioner’s vision highlight to a certain extent the time capsule of academic research – publication of which seems to lag behind the reality of today. Nevertheless, we believe that the soundness and interesting angles of the collection of the seven papers make their contribution well worth reading, and together with Laurent Choain’s paper, the eight papers form a solid, creative and innovative answer to how to better manage the HR challenges in KIOs, ideally in global KIOs – the question put in the call for papers. The other seven papers are clustered into the three groups, focusing on leadership, knowledge sharing and people leadership in KIOs, respectively.

Leadership in KIOs: the role of leaders

Leadership and strategy are also demonstrated through the action and behaviour of Boards as shown in the first paper in our collection which is by Jana Oehmichen, Mariano Heyden, Dimitrios Georgakakis and Henk Volberda. In ‘Boards of Directors and Organizational Ambidexterity (OA) in Knowledge Intensive Firms’, they examine an under-researched topic, that of the role of the board of directors in KIOs. KIOs need to balance both exploration and exploitation to renew their knowledge base and the paper examines the relation between boards of directors’ knowledge heterogeneity and organisational ambidexterity, i.e. the influencing of simultaneous exploration and exploitation strategies in KIOs. The findings suggest that the benefits of knowledge heterogeneity only outweigh the costs for boards that are highly heterogeneous. The discussion takes in possible benefits for organisational learning, strategic leadership and human resource management.

In the second paper in this cluster on leadership, Bilal Afsar, Yuosre Badir, Bilal Bin Saeed and Shakir Hafeez in ‘Transformational and transactional leadership and employee’s entrepreneurial behaviour in knowledge intensive industries’ examine the moderating role of psychological empowerment on the relationship among transformational leadership, transactional leadership and entrepreneurial behaviour in KIOs. Through an analysis of data from a cross-industry sample of 557 employees and 64 leaders from eight different knowledge-intensive organisations, the authors show that high levels of psychological empowerment are associated with a positive relationship between transformational leadership and entrepreneurial behaviour, whereas transactional leadership shows a negative relationship. Causality was not, however, established and further research is recommended to address the hypothesis that transformational leadership helps retain employees in KIOs provided that levels of psychological empowerment are high.

Leading knowledge in KIOs: knowledge sharing

In our second cluster of papers on leading, managing, creating and sharing knowledge in KIOs, Tatiana Khvatova and Madeleine Block research of how trust impacts upon knowledge-sharing performance within KIOs in ‘Exploring the Role of Task-Related Trust in Intra-Organisational Knowledge Sharing’. Building on structural contingency theory, which sees organisations as adapting to their changing environments, the paper highlights the key role of trust in knowledge sharing but also its limits, and challenges the often cited boundaryless positive correlation between trust and knowledge sharing. Furthermore, the paper differentiates trust into actual and desired task-related trust and shows that excessive trustful behaviour, as well as an excessive internal desire for trust, may actually inhibit knowledge sharing, since that appears dependent on task uncertainty.

The second paper on knowledge sharing, ‘Espoused versus realized knowledge management tool usage in knowledge intensive organizations’ by Taman Powell and Véronique Ambrosini, reports on an empirical study in five global management consultancies investigating how consultants choose between knowledge-sharing alternatives and the factors driving this choice. This multi-level study shows that the criteria used by the consultants and by the partners/the leadership to assess knowledge-sharing alternatives proved to be different. Using different criteria resulted in the leadership championing tools and policies that the consultants did not perceive as valuable. The paper also provides some guidelines for informed organisational responses to this lack of consensus and the herding cats challenge discussed earlier, together with a S/W evaluation of the knowledge-sharing approaches and possible interventions by the leadership targeted at improving the performance of each approach.

Leading people in KIOs: innovation, learning and retaining talent

Our final cluster of papers is on leading people, and motivating, retaining and managing talent, including innovation and learning. The first paper by Anna Bos-Nehles, Tanya Bondarouk and Koos Nijenhuijs examines the question of how to encourage innovation in a public sector organisation, often thought of being an oxymoron in ‘Innovative Work Behaviour in Knowledge-Intensive Public Sector Organizations: the Case of Supervisors in the Netherlands Fire Services’. In spite of the lack of competitive pressures, the limited identification of the costs and benefits of innovative ideas and the lack of opportunities to incentivise employees financially, knowledge-intensive public sector organisations too require innovation to ensure long-term survival. This paper focuses on the ways in which supervisors stimulate their subordinates to engage in innovative behaviours. Using document analysis and both unstructured and semi-structured interviews with firefighters and their direct supervisors, as well as with employees who have previously submitted and championed innovative initiatives, the authors demonstrate the ability of public-sector supervisors to engage employees in (mostly incremental) innovative behaviours through supportive and coaching leadership styles, high-quality leader–member exchange relationships and a team climate for innovation. They also highlight bureaucracy, budget restrictions and status quo habits as reasons for implementation failures.

In the second paper in this cluster, Dominik Froelich investigates the often neglected issue of how to facilitate training of older professionals and managers in KIOs in his ‘Older managers’ informal learning in knowledge-intensive organisations: Investigating the role of learning approaches among Austrian bank managers’. Based on a study of 139 Austrian bank managers, the paper examines how chronological age affects learning approaches and, in turn, learning outcomes. The paper shows that deep learning increases and surface-disorganised learning, mostly used by older managers, decreases learning outcomes, operationalised as performance in the last job appraisal, development of job-specific core skills, perceived career development and subjective job performance.

Last but by no means least is our final paper, ‘Multiple Foci of Commitment and Intention to Quit in Knowledge- Intensive Organizations (KIOs): What makes Professionals Leave?’ by Zeynep Yalabik, Juani Swart, Nick Kinnie and Yvonne van Rossenberg, who examine the different sources of commitment by professional workers – who have a strong sense of autonomy and do not like direction or formal organisational processes – and the factors that make professionals leave the organisation. Drawing upon the Theory of Attitudes and Field Theory and a study of a global KIO which provides outsourcing and consulting services on HRM and employment services, the paper shows that (i) organisational commitment and team commitment are negatively related, and profession commitment is positively related to the professionals’ intention to quit and that (ii) organisational–profession commitment interaction is negatively related, and team-profession commitment interaction is positively related to the intention to quit.

Conclusions

Future developments

We have seen how developments in information and knowledge management technologies that are a global phenomena provide both the context for, and are a major driver and facilitator of strategies through which KIOs compete and prosper. The HRM implications of this are similarly global and given that larger percentages of the workforce are now working in knowledge-intensive professions, organisations or departments, the paucity of research on HRM in KIOs urgently needs redressing – a task which we hope we have contributed to through this Special Issue.

The global expansion of knowledge sources is expected by most futurists to continue, with some speaking of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, characterised by ‘a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres’ (Schwab, 2016). Like the previous industrial revolutions, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is expected to bring about significant improvements in the quality of life for populations around the world. Transportation and communication costs are predicted to drop, making global logistics and supply chains more efficient, and reducing the cost of international trade. At the same time, the replacement of some workers by machines is expected to reduce the returns to less-skilled labour and require changes in working methods, employment structures and possibly social structures.

With over 50% of the workforce in the UK in 2020 expected to be members of Generation Y (Morgan, 2013; UK Commission for Employment and Skills, 2014), who have grown up ‘connected, collaborative and mobile’, organisations will also need to adapt their HR policies to attract and retain or be prepared to re-employ Gen Y workers. With an ageing population in both Western countries and e.g. China and Japan, many firms will also need to increasingly recruit workers from lesser developed countries, posing challenges not only of managing a younger workforce, but also of a more ethnically and culturally diverse workforce with multigenerational leadership.

The paper by Yalabik et al. in this Special Issue argues that KIOs should aim to strengthen the commitment of their professionals if they are to retain them in the organisation because their commitment to the organisation, team and profession impact their leaving intentions. In addition, the leaders of KIOs should pay attention, in particular to how commitments interact, and how these interactions impact professionals’ leaving or staying intentions. In the long-run, understanding these interactions and management of professionals’ retention may be a key to the competitive advantage of KIOs.

Implications for future of work and management

There is increasing recognition that the above developments in global business and technology are likely to have profound implications for the future of work (UK Commission for Employment and Skills, 2014) and for HRM (Scullion, Collings, & Gunnigle, 2007). Most commentators concur on the following. First, there will be a higher degree of interdependency at work and interaction with a broader and more diverse network. This in turn will increase the need for skills in managing projects to be present more widely within the organisation, the need for working with external collaborators and the need for continuous learning and skills training. Decision-making is expected to be more decentralised, occurring more broadly in companies and at various levels of responsibility. New work patterns will emerge with the continued desire for more flexible, ‘anytime, anywhere’ working arrangements, requiring effective policies to manage more mobile professionals on a variety of contracts.

There will be a continuous demand for motivated knowledge professionals which will demand a KIOs willingness to admit re-entrants and entrants at older age, as well as for innovation, which will need a KIO that provides a safe and supportive environment with leaders who understand the idiosyncracies of both Gen Y and Gen Z, and a more multicultural and intergenerational KIO professional workforce. All this will include new forms of leadership. Transformational leadership rather than transactional leadership is hypothesised as being more effective in KIOs in a number of papers, e.g. by Afsar et al. and by Bos-Nehles et al., in this special issue and more open and multilevel leadership styles are found by Powell & Ambrosini to be preferred by knowledge professionals and leaders alike.

Recommendations for further research

The demographic and technological changes in the international environment outlined above, the long-term global shift in work and employment patterns, managing global knowledge assets, the increased demands for highly skilled professionals in KIOs and the need for a different type of leader demand further research in the field of HR in KIOs. The richness of data and information in the various papers discussed above assists us in sketching out a number of avenues.

First, there is a case for much more research about the governance of KIOs including the strategic role of both supervisory and unitary boards and the impact of structure and specialisation especially in partner-led organisations. The composition of the board, background of the directors and cultural diversity may have significant implications for international management, and issues of transparency and objectivity in decisions on e.g. promotion and election to partner are of concern to HRM professionals not only on technical grounds, but also through their impact on satisfaction and retention.

Secondly, the interdependence between people, trust and knowledge sharing is worthy of further research in the organisational culture context, as a better understanding of the positive correlation between trust and knowledge sharing is needed.

The current demographic shift prompts the question how informal learning at work may be facilitated for increasingly older professionals and managers in KIOs as well as younger ones. KIO professionals have a strong sense of autonomy and do not like direction or formal organisational processes.

And further research is recommended to examine the effectiveness of forms of leadership that have emerged after transformational leadership, such as stewardship or more distributed leadership, in attracting, motivating and/or retaining employees in KIOs and coping with the fluidity of the structures and boundaries within which knowledge workers and professionals operate.

Our final recommendation for research lies in mapping out the increasingly difficult set of competencies required for the international HRM professional in KIOs. The issues discussed in this article which span areas from leadership, learning and team building, to global, cultural and multigenerational understanding, from motivating and developing knowledge professionals to create and share knowledge to the interaction of leadership, knowledge and technology all assist in this endeavour. Knowledge-intensive organisations, in particular. rely on their people as their most important asset, who in turn are deserving of a (I)HRM department that understands, appreciates and motivates them through the HRM function, perhaps one that currently is of often underappreciated importance.

A word of thanks

We are indebted to the large group of dedicated, alert and constructive reviewers who helped us make our decisions throughout the reviewing process: Adam Smale, Andrew Day, Anna Bos-Nehles, Anthony Mitchell, Belgin Okey-Somerville, Caroline Rowland, Chris Mabey, Hari Mann, Ian Hayward, Joanne Lawrence, Juani Swart, Kai Peters, Laurent Choain, Matt Copeland, Megan Reitz, Michel Ehrenhard, Mike Malmgrem, Nadine Page, Nidthida Lin, Patricia Hind, Rainer Harms, Riita Viitala, Roel Schouteten, Roger Delves, Sascha Hoogeveen, Stephen Chen, Svetlana Khapova, Tanya Bondarouk, Tatiana Khvatova, Trudi West, Vicki Culpin.

We would also like to express our thanks to IJHRM Administrator Penny Smith, IJHRM Editor Peter Dowling and IJHRM Associate Editor Tanya Bondarouk for their advice and assistance especially at the start of the process.

And last but not least, we would like to wish you enjoyable and happy reading of this challenging, inspiring and rich Special Issue of the International Journal of Human Resource Management.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.