Pathway to Promote Diversity within Public Transit Workforce

There are many aspects of the transportation industry that can be focused on, but the lack of resiliency is one of the most urgent. Enhancing resiliency and creative problem-solving is essential to the industry’s growth and survival. But it cannot happen without building a more diverse workforce. Women still make up a small fraction of transportation workers, and African American and Hispanic employees are even less represented. These disparities are increasingly pronounced in many senior positions, particularly in STEM fields. Meanwhile, the public transportation industry is experiencing a severe and worsening workforce shortage and many agencies have reported substantial difficulty recruiting, retaining, and developing skilled workers. Considering the transit industry’s existing diversity and inclusion toolkits and guidelines, this project emphasizes lessons from in-depth interviews with leaders from 18 transit agencies across the country. The interviews illuminate the existing challenges and creative solutions around transit workforce diversity and inclusion. From the interviews, we discovered: 1) the critical factors that impact the current level of diversity and career mobility within transit agencies; 2) how diversity efforts help explore resources and provide opportunities for effective and robust employee engagement; and 3) the significance of evaluation systems in creating a more transparent recruitment process that initiates structural shifts, resulting in better recruiting. Moving towards inclusive and equitable workforce environments is a healing process that starts with understanding these gaps. We call this effort Healing the Workforce through Diversification

Surfacing Automation Criteria: A Process Architecture Approach

This paper describes the outcomes of a case study aimed at surfacing and analyzing decision making criteria used to prioritize process automation initiatives with a view toward engendering a process-centric organization and eventually exposing these processes as services. The study used structured interviews, content analysis, and enterprise process architecture mapping techniques to explore the implicit and explicit logic underlying process automation decisions. The results point to a wide range of decision making criteria involving technology, business and industry characteristics. We discuss the implications of our analysis for future, larger-scale, research projects and describe the potential implications for organizations interested in moving toward a process-oriented enterprise

GitLab: work where you want, when you want

GitLab is a software company that works “all remote” at the scale of more than 1000 employees located in more than 60 countries. GitLab has no physical office and its employees can work from anywhere they choose. Any step of the organizational life of a GitLab employee (e.g., hiring, onboarding and firing) is performed remotely, except for a yearly companywide gathering. GitLab strongly relies on asynchronous coordination, allowing employees to work anytime they want. After highlighting some of the main practices implemented by GitLab to effectively work all remotely and asynchronously, I asked renowned organizational scientists their thoughts on this interesting case and to question the generalizability of the all remote asynchronous model. Understanding whether and under what conditions this model can succeed can be of guidance for organizational designers that are now considering different remote models in response of the COVID-19 shock and its aftermath

On theory, technique and text: guidelines and suggestions on publishing international human resource management research

Publishing international human resource management (IHRM) research continues to be a challenge for seasoned as much as junior faculty. Quantitative and qualitative studies exploring HRM-related topics involving multiple countries or complex contextual factors raise issues of developing an appropriate research question, presenting multilevel methodologies, and making a contribution in which context stands central. In this Editorial, we reflect on such issues as discussed at the 2nd Global Conference on International Human Resource Management held at the Pennsylvania State University (USA) in 2015. Journal editors, reviewers and authors contribute to provide practical suggestions on the craft of getting published, including design of a study, developing a writing style, and dealing with journal feedback. Finally, we explore some myths and misperceptions around publishing IHRM research in high-ranking journals

Mapping the field of virtual work: a co-citation analysis

Interest in the area of virtual work continues to increase with articles being written from different disciplinary perspectives - e.g. information systems (IS), management, psychology and transportation. In this paper, we map research on virtual work to (a) understand the intellectual base from which this field has emerged, (b) explore how this field has evolved over time, and (c) identify clusters of research themes that have emerged over time and the relationships between them. Specifically, we use co-citation analysis of research published in all social science disciplines to map the field at three points in time - 1995, 2000 and 2006. Our results show that the field has grown from nine research clusters in 1995 to sixteen in 2006. A comparison across these maps suggests that research in the cluster of "virtual teams" has gained significance even as research within some earlier clusters such as "urban planning and transportation" has lost ground. Our longitudinal analysis identifies relevant concepts, theories and methodologies that have emerged in the field of virtual work. This analysis can help interested researchers identify how they may want to contribute to the field of virtual work - by adding to popular clusters, enriching emerging smaller clusters or by acting as bridges across clusters. (author's abstract)Security: staffonl

Factors Contributing to Virtual Work Adjustment,”

Abstract We explore factors associated with employee adjustment to virtual work. In particular, we explore structural factors (i.e., work independence and evaluation criteria) and relational factors (i.e., trust and organizational connectedness) as predictors of adjustment to virtual work. Additionally, we explore age, virtual work experience and gender as moderators of the relationships. We find that structural and relational factors are important predictors of adjustment and that the strength of the relationship is contingent upon individual differences. We explore the implications of these findings for future research and for practice

A global perspective on diversity and inclusion in work organisations: Introduction

This Academy of Management, Human Resources Division, Ambassadors' Programme special issue presents a collection of empirical papers examining workplace diversity and inclusion in a global context. We introduce this topic raising three overarching challenges: to develop more context-specific definitions of diversity and inclusion; to include dimensions pertinent to a global context in the definition of diversity and inclusion; and to consider the impact of diversity and inclusion practices on performance outcomes across countries as well as within multinational corporations. We explore these challenges through three diversity and inclusion lenses – gender, age and nationality – exploring global perspectives at the national, organisational and team levels of analysis. In conclusion, we present an agenda for future research. Keywords:: diversity, inclusion, international human resource management, national cultur

A vision of international HRM research

This editorial was written as a vision of IHRM research, to be both thought-provoking and to start a conversation that can continue to move the field forward. Starting with a brief outline of the field, the editorial emphasizes distinct research route trajectories charting the landscape and anatomy of HRM in an international context, focusing on HRM in multinational corporations (MNCs) as well as Comparative HRM and the related, but distinct, cross-cultural management thread. Additionally, the editorial accentuates the importance of context in IHRM research, explaining the resultant debate on adopting a universalist vs. a contextual paradigm. The editorial presents a future agenda for IHRM research, focusing on challenges of research sampling, appropriate methodologies, social impact and interdisciplinary research. Finally, the editorial introduces four featured articles from the 2nd Global Conference on IHRM. Each article represents an interesting take on comparative HRM and/or strategic IHRM in MNCs. The studies are clear examples of how context can be used to explain the phenomena being studied