The increasingly frequent involvement of companies’ line managers in human resource (HR) activities leads us to investigate the strategic value that these managers grant HR. This research focusses on the line managers’ perception of the strategic importance of HR, versus the perception of HR managers themselves, as a relevant factor in line managers’ own involvement within the execution of HR-related tasks. If line managers do not perceive the relevance and strategic importance of HR and its key role in the company’s strategy and performance, it is difficult to guarantee the managers’ commitment and effectiveness in HR management implementation. Based on interviews with HR development and line managers in 100 Spanish firms, we verified discrepancies in HR versus line managers’ perceptions, confirming that the assessment given by the line managers is slightly lower and, in turn, providing us with references to draw useful conclusions for a successful implementation of HR practices.

This study explores the relationship between high-performance human resource practices and organizational outcomes, using organizational learning capability as a mediating variable. By analyzing a sample of 85 Spanish companies in the chemical industry, the results suggest that the application of high-performance human resource practices is positively related to the development of organizational learning capability. This, in turn, is positively related to the financial and non-financial firm’s performance. The mediating role of learning capability is useful and should be considered in studies that analyze the link between human resource practices and performance, a central topic in the literature on strategic human resource management. Additionally, this study provides indications which can help companies design suitable conditions for promoting organizational learning capability, which is directly related to the development of human resource systems.

This study deals with the issue whether collectivism-oriented human resource management (HRM) system influences individual creative contribution to research teams in particular in an Asia-Pacific context. It is argued that, given certain environmental factors, such as high person-organization value congruence among team members and task interdependence, the collectivism-oriented HRM system should have a positive effect on individual creative contribution to the research teams. A multi-level theoretical model is proposed accordingly, which is then tested with data from 40 research teams and 168 individuals in Chinese universities. The results demonstrated that collectivism-oriented HRM helps to enhance individual creative contribution through the path of value congruence. Moreover, the relationship between value congruence and individual creative contribution was moderated by task interdependence. These findings offer novel insight into how an organization can develop its HRM system and improve individual creative contribution in research teams.

This study contributes to our understanding of the mediating and moderating processes through which satisfaction with developmental human resources practices are linked with organizational citizenship behaviour. Our model posits that the effect of satisfaction with developmental human resources practices on organizational citizenship behaviour is mediated by perceived organizational support and is moderated by job breadth. The methodology consisted of collecting data from 331 nurses who were surveyed about their satisfaction with developmental human resources practices, perceived organizational support, organizational citizenship behaviours and job breadth. Results support this model.

Research on innovation management has pointed out that the capitalization of collaborative innovation practices is influenced by firms’ internal context. This paper aims to answer the following question: which organizational factors help to overcome the challenges that firms face in the different phases of the collaborative innovation process? For this purpose, previous literature is revised and three case studies are analyzed by means of applying a framework that structures the collaborative innovation process in three areas of relevance (i.e., development, integration and commercialization of the innovation). The results of the analysis inform the proposal of a theoretical framework that identifies the organizational context factors that determine the success or failure of collaborative innovation practices in each of the stages of the process.

In today’s global business environment teams are fast becoming the norm. Collaboration is an essential factor in leveraging team effectiveness, and organizations are looking for strategies to increase collaboration among their teams. In this study, we administered an eSurvey to 308 professionals working in face-to-face and virtual teams to investigate emotional intelligence and strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results as strategies to support the collaborative process. Results found the regression of collaboration on emotional intelligence (controlling for age, ethnicity, and education) was significant (p<.01). Results also found a significant indirect effect between emotional intelligence and collaboration as mediated by strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results (β=0.110, Z=2.444). We focus on understanding the effect of emotional intelligence on team collaboration as mediated by strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results. Recommendations are provided for increasing emotional intelligence and strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results among team members. Our research has important implications for teams and their pervasive use in business.

The objective of this paper is to understand the influence of emotional intelligence on creativity, considering the mediating roles of job resourcefulness, self-motivation and organizational commitment moderated by individual success. The investigation is based on data from 519 questionnaires collected from a sample of Portuguese workers. Structural equation modeling was used with multigroup analysis.The results show a positive influence of emotional intelligence on creativity and other behavioral variables, and individual success appeared to moderate most of the presented relationships. The sample used in this study is not probabilistic, thus the results are difficult to generalize. This investigation identifies several work-related outcomes of emotional intelligence and highlights its importance and raises new ideas for training programs, namely in the field of soft skills. This investigation is innovative in that we analyze the mediating effects of different variables, like job resourcefulness, on emotional intelligence’s relationship with creativity, moderated by individual success.

This paper adopts an integrative and complementary approach to the universalistic and contingency frameworks for analyzing the effectiveness of high-involvement work practices (HIWPs) in Spanish manufacturers. It focuses on some practices that firms adopt at operational level (decentralization, teamwork, job enlargement, information and knowledge sharing and performance-based compensation) to enhance operational performance (cost, quality, flexibility and delivery) and financial performance (return on asset), dealing with the possible moderating effect of three contextual variables: firm age, firm size and trade union power. Using moderated hierarchical regressions and data from 265 Spanish manufacturers, our results show that three of the five HIWPs considered in our study have direct effects on business performance. We also find that three contextual variables have moderating effects on the relation between HIWPs and business performance. Our paper contributes to the debate over the respective merits of the universalistic and contingency frameworks; it offers a broader view about the type of contemporary human resources practices that are successful in the Spanish industrial sector, and in a European manufacturing context, and may guide managers when assigning their firms’ limited resources to the most relevant human resources practices in each particular setting, considering internal characteristics, such as firm age, firm size and trade union power.

This paper examines office design as a spatial context of organizations. Organizations increasingly invest in designing workspaces to support employee creativity, foster company innovation and communicate a positive company image. This paper takes a critical view of this ‘hype’ by describing and analysing images of the headquarters of allegedly ‘creative workspaces’ published on the internet across a broad range of industries and corporations. Our analysis shows how their design follows standardized or stereotypical approaches to nurturing creativity: playfully or artistically designed open spaces, environments reminiscent of home, sports and play, nature, past/future technologies, or culturally aligned symbols. We discern underlying connections between office spaces and creativity, suggesting that creativity flourishes in happy, relaxed and playful communities within close-knit teams. We then identify three contradictions in relation to the existing literature on creativity and workspaces: individually versus collectively produced creativity; professionally designed workspaces versus workspaces created through participation; and planned versus emerging creativity.