Managing Knowledge in Professional Service Firms: A Longitudinal Investigation

The world is rapidly shifting from a production-based economy to a knowledge-based one, in which knowledge is one of the most critical sources of sustained competitive advantage. Professional service firms are prime examples of organizations with high knowledge intensity. Because knowledge emanates from and mostly resides within individuals, this dissertation concentrates on the microfoundations of knowledge creation, knowledge sharing, and knowledge retention in today’s professional service firms. Specifically, this work focuses on three distinctive contextual factors that shape how employees experience those knowledge processes: (i) billability, (ii) multiple team membership, and (iii) mentoring. This cumulative dissertation consists of three introductory parts and three coauthored essays based on large-scale longitudinal, multisource data collection in a professional service firm. Essay I examines employees’ imperative challenge of exhibiting creativity while working under the pressure of billability. The essay explores the mechanism through which an increase in prolonged time pressure affects employee creativity and examines the extent to which leader, team, and organizational support for creativity may help employees direct their self-regulatory resources towards creativity. Essay II investigates the implications of multiple team membership for employee socialization. The essay explores the mechanism and contingency factors underlying employees’ successful adjustment to their new roles while being expected to collaborate in multiple teams. Essay III examines the role of mentoring in employee turnover intentions. The essay analyzes how mentor-protégé disagreement in each party’s perceptions of their relationship quality affects protégés’ turnover intentions over time. The findings of this research are relevant to both theory and practice. First, this work adds to the scholarly understanding of the microfoundations of managing knowledge in professional service firms. Specifically, this dissertation contributes to the literature on employee creativity, socialization, proactivity, and voluntary turnover. Second, practitioners may find significant value in the research findings, which emphasize the role of team and organizational support for employee creativity, reveal that polychronic employees better benefit from multiple team membership, and establish the importance of aligning mentor-protégé expectations regarding mentoring to retain employees within organizations. Last, this work suggests several avenues for further research. Notably, future studies could ascertain whether the findings hold true in different organizational contexts in which billability, multiple team membership, and mentoring are less salient

Designing human resource management systems in the age of AI

The increasing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the practices of human resource management (HRM). We propose a typology of HR–AI collaboration systems across the dimensions of task characteristics (routine vs. non-routine; low vs. high cognitive complexity) and social acceptability of such systems among organizational members. We discuss how organizations should design HR–AI collaboration systems in light of issues of AI explainability, high stakes contexts, and threat to employees’ professional identities. We point out important design considerations that may affect employees' perceptions of organizational fairness and emphasize HR professionals' role in the design process. We conclude by discussing how our Point of View article contributes to literatures on organization design and human–AI collaboration and suggesting potential avenues for future research.ISSN:2245-408

Pancreatic surgery outcomes: multicentre prospective snapshot study in 67 countries

Background: Pancreatic surgery remains associated with high morbidity rates. Although postoperative mortality appears to have improved with specialization, the outcomes reported in the literature reflect the activity of highly specialized centres. The aim of this study was to evaluate the outcomes following pancreatic surgery worldwide.Methods: This was an international, prospective, multicentre, cross-sectional snapshot study of consecutive patients undergoing pancreatic operations worldwide in a 3-month interval in 2021. The primary outcome was postoperative mortality within 90 days of surgery. Multivariable logistic regression was used to explore relationships with Human Development Index (HDI) and other parameters.Results: A total of 4223 patients from 67 countries were analysed. A complication of any severity was detected in 68.7 percent of patients (2901 of 4223). Major complication rates (Clavien-Dindo grade at least IIIa) were 24, 18, and 27 percent, and mortality rates were 10, 5, and 5 per cent in low-to-middle-, high-, and very high-HDI countries respectively. The 90-day postoperative mortality rate was 5.4 per cent (229 of 4223) overall, but was significantly higher in the low-to-middle-HDI group (adjusted OR 2.88, 95 per cent c.i. 1.80 to 4.48). The overall failure-to-rescue rate was 21 percent; however, it was 41 per cent in low-to-middle-compared with 19 per cent in very high-HDI countries.Conclusion: Excess mortality in low-to-middle-HDI countries could be attributable to failure to rescue of patients from severe complications. The authors call for a collaborative response from international and regional associations of pancreatic surgeons to address management related to death from postoperative complications to tackle the global disparities in the outcomes of pancreatic surgery (NCT04652271; ISRCTN95140761)