Celebrating and advancing the scholarship of David P. Lepak (1971–2017): special issue introduction

Abstract

This special issue is devoted to Professor David P. Lepak, who passed away on December 7, 2017. The special issue is meant to honor Professor Lepak’s (or affectionately called Dave among his close friends and peers) intellectual contribution to the field of human resource management (HRM) and his academic influence on many of us who study HRM-related topics. We first introduce the special issue by highlighting three research topics that were central to Dave’s work: (1) strategic management of human capital resources; (2) strategic HRM; and (3) multilevel HRM. We then introduce nine articles in the special issue and discuss how each of them contributes to one or more of the three topics of Dave’s interest. We also provide a general discussion of all the articles and offer directions for future research.

Keywords:

• David P. Lepak
• strategic human resource management
• strategic human capital

We introduce this special issue of the International Journal of Human Resource Management in honor of Professor David P. Lepak (or affectionately called Dave among his friends and peers) with a combination of heavy hearts and great pride. Dave unexpectedly passed away on December 7, 2017. At the time of his untimely death, Dave was the Douglas and Diana Berthiaume Endowed Chair of Business Leadership in the Department of Management in the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He had also held academic appointments at Rutgers University, University of Bath, and University of Maryland. Among many honors he had received, Dave was the Editor-in-Chief of this journal from 2013 to 2017. Therefore, we organize this special issue to recognize Dave’s contribution to this journal and reflect his academic contribution to human resource management (HRM) research.

In this introduction article of the special issue, we first review Dave’s primary contribution to the field of HRM. We focus on the journal articles and book chapters he had written, even though he had also influenced this field in many other ways such as writing textbooks, editing peer-reviewed journals, teaching and mentoring students, and taking leadership roles in academic associations (e.g. Academy of Management and Strategic Management Society). The articles in this special issue are in line with and build on Dave’s contributions. We introduce the nine articles included in this special issue and discuss how those studies extend Dave’s work on different research areas. Finally, we summarize the contributions in this special issue and discuss a number of future directions.

Overview of Dave’s academic contribution

Dave started his academic career by pursuing his PhD in Business Administration from the Smeal College of Business at Pennsylvania State University and received his PhD degree in 1998. Throughout his 20-plus-year academic career, he had published about 20 book chapters and 50 academic articles in top-tier, peer-reviewed journals. His work had been cited nearly 26,000 times in total in Google Scholar and over 5,000 times in Web of Science by February 2021. We conducted a bibliometric analysis on articles citing Dave’s work and found that his work has influenced scholars from more than 370 institutions in over 90 countries (Figure 1). He had also coauthored with more than 80 scholars and many of them continue to contribute to the field of HRM. By taking a careful review of each of his publications, we summarize his primary contributions to three themes.

Figure 1. Institutions of scholars citing Dave’s academic work.

Theme 1: strategic management of human capital resources

Dave was first known to the academic world for his work on the human resource (HR) architecture (Lepak & Snell, 1999) coauthored with his advisor Professor Scott A. Snell. They developed a theoretical framework for firms to use multiple configurations of human capital and employment options to improve strategic capability and firm performance. More specifically, they argued that not all employees possess knowledge and skills that are of equal strategic importance and labor market uniqueness and proposed four employment modes to manage four types of human capital. Two following studies (Lepak et al., 2003; Lepak & Snell, 2002) provided empirical support for the HR architecture model. Together, these studies have set the foundation for HR architecture research and influenced several related research areas such as internal and external labor markets, employment flexibility, and strategic human capital resources.

Throughout his career, Dave continued to extend his strategic human capital resources research to diverse research areas, such as star employees (Kehoe et al., 2018), cluster hiring (Eckardt et al., 2018), strategic HRM (Boon et al., 2018), human capital resources theory (Nyberg et al., 2014), and sleep-related work characteristics (Barnes et al., 2016). According to a recent handbook on strategic human capital resources (Nyberg & Moliterno, 2019), Dave was also considered an early contributor to human capital resources theory and a co-founder of the Strategic Human Capital Interest Group at the Strategic Management Society.

Theme 2: strategic hrm

Dave was one of the major contributors to strategic HRM research. He started to work on this topic when he was still a doctoral student (Youndt et al., 1996) and quickly became a world-wide leading scholar on this topic. One of his major contributions to the strategic HRM literature is to explore the mediating mechanisms and boundary conditions of the relationship between HRM systems and organizational performance. For example, he was among the first to empirically examine how employee skills, motivation, and behavior mediate the relationship between HRM systems and performance outcomes (e.g. Jiang et al., 2012; Messersmith et al., 2011; Takeuchi et al., 2007) and had paid attention to the mediating role of organizational capabilities (e.g. Patel et al., 2013). Moreover, he had taken a contingency perspective to examine the conditions under which HRM systems are more or less likely to influence performance outcomes (e.g. Han et al., 2019).

Another contribution he made to strategic HRM research is to clarify the components of HRM systems. Traditionally, HRM systems have been defined in a variety of ways. He was one of the first to adopt the ability-motivation-opportunity framework to categorize HRM practices into three HR policy domains (e.g. Jiang et al., 2012, 2013; Lepak et al., 2006), which has become one of the most widely used frameworks to study HRM systems in the past decade. He and his coauthors also challenged traditional strategic HRM research by showing that different components of HRM systems have differential effects on employee outcomes (e.g. human capital and employee motivation) (e.g. Jiang et al., 2012). His recent review on HRM systems also provided actionable suggestions on how to advance HRM systems research towards conceptual clarity and construct refinement (Boon et al., 2019).

Theme 3: multilevel HRM

Although Dave had solid training in organization theory and strategic management which traditionally focus on firm-level relationships, he actively advocated the use of multilevel theories and methods in HRM research. For example, while serving as an Associate Editor of Academy of Management Review, he proposed a theoretical model of value creation and value capture with his coauthors (Lepak et al., 2007), which was the first article using a multilevel perspective to study the topic of value creation. Three of his publications have also set the examples for empirical studies on multilevel strategic HRM research (e.g. Jiang et al., 2013; Liao et al., 2009; Takeuchi et al., 2009). He also initiated the special issue on multilevel approaches to human resource management research (Shen et al., 2018) when he was the Editor-in-Chief of this journal.

Dave also promoted the employee perspective in the research of strategic HRM. Traditionally, strategic HRM scholars measure HRM systems by surveying managers. His research challenged this approach by arguing that employees may have different perceptions and interpretations of HRM systems even when they are exposed to the same practices. For example, he and his coauthors proposed the concept of HR attributions and found that employees may make different attributions about the reasons why management adopts HRM practices, and that these HR attributions are related to their attitudes and behaviors (Nishii et al., 2008). He also proposed the concept of HR salience to reflect individual preference and tastes for HRM practices (Lepak & Boswell, 2012) and worked with his students to develop a measure of HR salience (Garg et al., 2021). The emphasis on the employee perspective complements the macro-level strategic HRM research to provide a more complete understanding of how HRM systems and practices influence employee outcomes which may in turn affect organizational outcomes.

Although we focus on Dave’s work on these three themes, his work has touched many areas of HRM research such as virtual HRM, e-HRM, international HRM, knowledge creation, innovation, social network, and time issues in HRM. We know that he would have continued to make important contributions to the field of HRM and lead the field to novel directions. It is our privilege to serve as guest editors for this special issue in honor of Dave who was the mentor and friend of many people like us. We also thank all contributors who submitted their papers to this special issue and all reviewers who helped us manage the editorial process, resulting in acceptance of the following nine papers. Each of them reflects Dave’s research interests mentioned above and extends his work to advance the literature of HRM. Dave’s main research areas can also be seen from the cluster analysis performed on keywords used in Dave’s publications¹ (Figure 2) with a strategic HRM cluster (#0) in the center with value creation (#4) and innovation (#3), and ambidexterity (#8) in the nearby areas, representing theme 2 (Strategic HRM); firm performance (#1) and intellectual capital (#7) clusters represent theme 1 (Strategic Management of Human Capital Resources); and employee attitudes (#2), employee performance (#5), psychological contract (#6) and fit (#9) represent theme 3 (Multilevel HRM), broadly speaking.

Figure 2. Cluster analysis of keywords used in Dave’s publications.

Overview of special issue articles

In this special issue we are presenting nine pieces of research that are highly related to Dave’s research interests and academic contributions. The first two studies contribute to our understanding of strategic management of human capital resources. Luo et al. (2021) provided a comprehensive review of the extant studies that have cited the classic HR architecture articles by Dave (Lepak et al., 2003; Lepak & Snell, 1999, 2002). They identified 205 studies that utilized the HR architecture perspective in a substantive manner and further categorized them into three (theoretical application, empirical validation, and extension and critiques). Based on their review of these categories, the authors offer several future research directions for the HR architecture perspective.

One important research question in the strategic human capital literature is about human capital resources emergence. Eckardt et al. (2021) conducted a study to address this topic. Drawing upon prior work (e.g. Eckardt & Jiang, 2019; Moliterno & Nyberg, 2019; Ployhart & Moliterno, 2011), they argue that individual knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) (i.e. individual human capital) form unit level human capital resources (i.e. the stock of human capital with productive capacity) through the transformation (i.e. modifications to KSAs of unit members) and amplification (i.e. synergy that makes the whole greater than the sum of individual human capital) process. They posit that an emergence effect is present when the human capital-performance relationship is accentuated at the unit level of analysis. They found support for the emergence effect using data on major league baseball pitchers.

The next articles move the focus away from strategic human capital research to strategic HRM. Subramony et al. (2021) conducted a study about human resource function investments and labor productivity. The authors argued that organizational investments of financial resources into their HR functions will influence labor productivity and that the availability of professional HR staff and implementation of high-performance work systems can moderate this relationship. They used a sample of 475 US organizations to examine their hypotheses and found that investing financial resources into HR functions is more positively related to labor productivity when there is a larger proportion of HR staff occupying professional/technical roles and when there are low levels of high-performance work systems (HPWS).

In a conceptual article, Collins (2021) builds on previous research that applied the resource based view in strategic HRM to propose that a high commitment HR strategy leads to firm competitive advantage by creating greater firm-level employee-based resources. Drawing on the dynamic managerial capabilities literature, Collins proposes a model in which CEO dynamic managerial capabilities (CEO managerial cognition, social capital, and human capital) plays a moderating role in two ways: first, in creating a context that facilitates more consistent implementation of a firm’s high commitment HR strategy across managers (i.e. as a moderator of the relationship between firm-level high commitment HR strategy and implementation of high commitment HR by leaders), and second, to help to more effectively manage employee-based resources and strengthen the relationship between employee-based resources and competitive advantage.

The next set of articles are related to multilevel HRM and HRM issues from the employee perspective. Van Beurden et al. (2021) provided a qualitative review of the employee perspective on HR practices. The authors reviewed how employee perceptions of HR practices are examined in the literature of HRM as well as the theoretical perspectives and conceptualizations used to study employee perceptions of HRM. They also discussed future avenues for gaining a more comprehensive understanding of employee perceptions of HRM.

Meijerink et al. (2021) worked on the same topic by conducting a meta-analysis of mediating mechanisms between employee reports of human resource management and employee performance. The authors distinguished between descriptive and evaluative reports of HRM practices. By using a meta-analytical approach, they found that descriptive reports of HRM practices are more positively related to personal and job resources while evaluative reports of HRM practices are more positively related to job attitudes. The two categories of mediators can further mediate the positive relationship between employee-reported HRM practices and employee performance.

Building on prior research on cross-level effect of HPWS and employee outcomes, Miao et al. (2021) further investigate how and when HPWS may influence individual employee job satisfaction and affective commitment. Complementing prior research based on social exchange logic (i.e. employees reciprocate the benefits to them), they argue that HPWS can cause actual change in employee psychological capacities, which in turn drive employee job satisfaction and affective commitment. They further posit that interactive justice climate plays an important moderating role because managers/supervisors interact frequently with employees and implement intended HPWS. Using multi-source data from 569 employees in 44 Chinese firms, they found that organizational HPWS has an indirect relationship with job satisfaction and affective commitment via psychological capacities, and that interactional justice climate strengthened this indirect relationship.

Related, Ma et al. (2021) examine team-level HPWS and its relationship with individual-level creativity. They further focus on identifying individual level boundary conditions of the HPWS - creativity relationship. Drawing from social cognitive theory and the interactionist model of creativity, they propose a model in which individual-level job characteristics (employee’s person–job fit and goal difficulty) moderate the relationship between team HPWS and individual creativity via individual self-efficacy. Using multi-source and multi-level data from 321 supervisor–subordinate dyads from 75 teams in China, they found that person–job fit and goal difficulty moderate the indirect relationship of team HPWS with creativity through employee self-efficacy, such that the indirect relationship is stronger when person-job fit is high or when goal difficulty is low.

Last but not least, Garg et al. (2021) conducted two studies about HR practice salience. The authors focus on the concept of HR practice salience from the employee’s perspective and develop a new scale of HR practice salience, capturing salience of work flexibility, extensive training, and performance-based pay practices. The results from both studies (policy capturing method with two-wave time lagged data obtained from 118 graduate students in Study 1 and two-wave time lagged field data obtained from 451 full-time employees registered through Qualtrics in Study 2) generally support the moderating role of HR practice salience in the relationship between HR practices and job pursuit intentions (Study 1) and employee attitudes (job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intentions: Study 2).

Conclusion and future directions

The nine papers included in this special issue cover the three research themes to which Dave was so dedicated. For the theme of strategic management of human capital, we have one paper about Dave’s original work on HR architecture (Luo et al., 2021) and one paper about human capital resources emergence (Eckardt et al., 2021). For the theme of strategic HRM, we include one paper about the relationship between HR function investment and labor productivity (Subramony et al., 2021) and one paper about the role of CEO dynamic managerial capabilities in the relationship between commitment HR strategy and firm competitive advantage (Collins, 2021). For the theme of multilevel HRM, we have two review articles about employee perceptions of HRM systems (Meijerink et al., 2021; Van Beurden et al., 2021), two empirical studies of the cross-level effects of HPWS on individual outcomes (Ma et al., 2021; Miao et al., 2021), and one study proposing a new construct of HR practice salience (Garg et al., 2021). We hope that Dave would have found it exciting to see many scholars share the same research interests. We believe that he would have continued to lead the research on these themes.

As we had the privilege of learning from and collaborating with Dave, we keep wondering what he would have expected us to study in the future research of HRM. Therefore, in the final section of this editorial, based on our interactions with Dave, we discuss several research directions which he might have wanted us to explore in the future. We do not attempt to provide a comprehensive review of strategic human capital literature or strategic HRM literature as several recent reviews on these topics already exist (e.g. Jackson et al., 2014; Jiang & Messersmith, 2018; Kaufman, 2020; Nyberg & Wright, 2015; Wright et al., 2018; Wright & Ulrich, 2017). Instead, we focus closely on the three research themes related to Dave’s research.

Future direction 1: strategic human capital

In the past ten years, strategic human capital has become a new research area that integrates economics, strategy, HRM, and psychology perspectives in studying human capital. Dave considered this “a natural extension of the architectural perspective in that it focuses on the relative contributions different employees (human capital) make towards organizational competitiveness” (Lepak et al., 2017, p. 32), which brings together several scholars with different backgrounds and perspectives on human capital to generate new and more comprehensive insights into the strategic management of human capital. One future research direction involves employee mobility. Research on turnover, stars (e.g. Kehoe et al., 2018), and cluster hiring (e.g. Eckardt et al., 2018) has shown that employee mobility has potential benefits but also challenges, depending on the type of human capital that is involved as well as contextual factors. Future research could further examine the conditions under which mobility may be positive or negative, for example by further exploring how social capital, the fit between an employee’s human capital and the firm’s other resources (e.g. Raffiee & Byun, 2020), or social networks (Soltis et al., 2018) influence the effects of employee mobility.

Second, so far, studies on human capital resource emergence have focused most on the human capital itself (in terms of individuals’ knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics), and how this relates to firm level outcomes (Eckardt & Jiang, 2019). Research suggests that context plays an important role in human capital emergence and more research is needed on the factors involved in the human capital resource emergence process (e.g. Nyberg et al., 2014). Dave and his coauthors suggested that one important factor from the organizational context that plays a role may be the HR system (Boon et al., 2018). Future studies could integrate insights from strategic HRM with human capital resource emergence and examine how HRM systems influence human capital emergence, for example by examining whether some types of HRM systems facilitate human capital resource emergence better than others. Also, research may focus on how HR practices or systems help to create complementarities in human capital, and whether this varies between teams or units depending on how the human capital is distributed among the team members (Boon et al., 2018).

Future direction 2: strategic HRM

Dave and his coauthors have suggested several ways to advance the literature of strategic HRM. First, strategic HRM research has made great progress in understanding whether HRM systems are related to organizational outcomes and how employee-related outcomes (e.g. human capital and work attitudes and behaviors) mediate this relationship. Prior studies have heavily relied on the resource-based view of firm, human capital theory, and social exchange theory to explain the HRM-performance relationship (Jiang & Messersmith, 2018; Takeuchi et al., 2007; Wright & Ulrich, 2017). To have a more nuanced understanding of the HRM-performance relationship, future research can adopt a social network perspective to explore how the behavioral interactions among employees may impact the emergence of human capital resources, affective relations, and information flow in organizations (Soltis et al., 2018). This may shift researchers’ attention from examining overall human capital or employee attitudes and behaviors to studying social resources in the workplace as a new mechanism of the relationship between HRM systems and organizational performance.

Second, strategic HRM can benefit from more examinations of the boundary conditions of the relationship between HRM systems and organizational performance (e.g. Rabl et al., 2014). Several recent reviews have recognized that strategic HRM scholars have paid relatively less attention to the moderators of the HRM-performance relationship than to the mediating mechanisms (Jackson et al., 2014; Jiang & Messersmith, 2018). Among studies examining the moderators of the HRM-performance relationship, most of them focus on the role of business strategies and industrial characteristics and draw upon the resource-based view of the firm (e.g. Chadwick et al., 2013; Datta et al., 2005). Scholars can extend this stream of research by focusing on other moderators such as market entry timing mode (Han et al., 2019), firm ownership (Liu et al., 2017), leadership (Jiang et al., 2015), peer companies (Jiang, Takeuchi, & Jia, in press), and national culture (Jiang et al., 2015; Lepak et al., 2018). Researchers can also examine how HRM systems’ performance effects may be moderated by new technology and work transformation (e.g. HRM digitalization and artificial intelligence) and environmental disruptions (e.g. economic recession and COVID-19 pandemic). Further, research may consider adopting other theoretical perspectives to explain the antecedents and outcomes of HRM systems, such as institutional theory (Boon et al., 2009), social network theory (Soltis et al., 2018), and socio-technical systems theory (Trist & Bamforth, 1951).

Third, the field of strategic HRM has also witnessed an emerging trend of incorporating time into theoretical development and empirical examination of the effects of HRM systems (e.g. Birdi et al., 2008; Kim & Ployhart, 2014; Piening et al., 2013; Schmidt & Pohler, 2018). Strategic HRM scholars have been aware of the lack of longitudinal research for a long time (e.g. Guest et al., 2003; Wright et al., 2005). The initial concern is that it is difficult to draw causal conclusions about the HRM-performance relationship without a longitudinal design. But recent studies have started to integrate time into theoretical development of HRM research (Bliese et al., 2020; Lepak et al., 2018; Ployhart & Hale, 2014). More specifically, Lepak et al. (2018, p. 264) suggested that “looking to future studies, research needs to embrace the reality that employees work for employers over a period of time. Yet, the influence of any particular HR practice on that employee may be bounded in certain periods of time”. In another review chapter, Lepak et al. (2017) also encouraged more studies to examine how the changes in HRM systems lead to changes in performance outcomes over time, how the effects of HRM systems may change over time, and whether patterns of change in HRM systems and their performance effects can be identified. We expect more strategic HRM research integrating time into theoretical development and utilizing longitudinal data (e.g. archival data and field experiment) to explore the temporal issues in strategic HRM.

Future direction 3: multilevel HRM

Undoubtedly, multilevel theories and methods provide valuable opportunities to examine how HRM practices or systems implemented at the unit level may influence individual attitudes, behaviors, and well-being. As researchers pay increasing attention to employee well-being (e.g. Guest, 2017; Van De Voorde et al., 2012), we may expect scholars to continue to apply the multilevel approach to examine different psychological mechanisms and boundary conditions for the relationships between higher-level HRM variables and individual-level employee variables. Because employees can be the informants of both HRM practices and their own attitudes and behaviors (Meijerink et al., 2021; Van Beurden et al., 2021), which may lead to the common method bias issue, we recommend scholars to pay special attention to research designs by avoiding common source, cross-sectional data collection when pursuing this research stream.

A more challenging task for multilevel HRM research pertains to the bottom-up emergence process through which individual-level human capital (e.g. knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics), perceptions and interpretations, and attitudes and behaviors can be aggregated to the unit level to influence unit-level outcomes. For example, Nishii et al. (2008) studied individual attributions for HRM practices and their effects on individual outcomes. They also tested the relationship between aggregated employee attitudes and behaviors and customer satisfaction at the unit level to show that it is meaningful to study HRM attributions. This bottom-up emergence process can help align multilevel HRM research with the traditional strategic HRM’s focus on the relationships between HRM systems and performance outcomes at the organizational level of analysis (Delery & Roumpi, 2017). Examining the emergence process can also contribute to strategic human capital research which argues that unit-level human capital resources emerge from individual knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (Eckardt & Jiang, 2019; Nyberg et al., 2014; Ployhart & Moliterno, 2011). For example, Eckardt et al. (2021) in this issue has set an example to examine this emergence process. We encourage more research to explore this emergence process with novel datasets.

In addition, multilevel HRM research has not paid much attention to the relationships at the group level or team level of analyses (Chang et al., 2014). In several reviews by Dave and his coauthors (e.g. Jiang et al., 2013; Lepak et al., 2017, 2018), they all suggested that the group-level analysis may play an important role to understand how HRM systems are implemented by managers and interpreted by employees and how the group-level may transfer the effects of organizational-level HRM systems on employee outcomes and then link employee outcomes back to organizational-level performance. In this special issue, Ma et al. (2021) examine individual level consequences and boundary conditions of team-level HPWS, and future research may extend this line of research by also including the organizational level of analysis. Examining HRM systems at the group level can also speak to the issue of intended versus implemented HRM systems (Nishii & Wright, 2008) and the role of line managers in the implementation of HRM systems (Kehoe & Han, 2020). While we recognize the difficulties of collecting data at the firm-, team-, and individual-levels, HRM scholars may integrate work groups and teams research to HRM to enrich future research in both research areas.

In the end, it is our great pleasure and honor to be the guest editors of this special issue in honor of Dave, who was our mentor, colleague, collaborator, and friend. We dedicate this special issue to him and his family (his wife, Ellen, and their four children) and thank all who have helped make this special issue possible. We will all miss him so greatly.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We thank Xin Wen, a doctoral student from the Management and Human Resources PhD program at The Ohio State University, for helping us to conduct the bibliometric and cluster analyses.