Anthony McDonnell

Research Summary: This paper explores how individuals experience and cope with the demands of global boundary spanning in multinational enterprises (MNEs). We foreground temporary colocation as a modality through which mobile global boundary spanners repeatedly traverse multiple boundaries, triggering intense demands with adverse consequences. Extending the micro‐level perspective on boundary spanning, we show that active coping behaviors enable mobile global boundary spanners to generate strategic value for the MNE through network coordination, knowledge mobilization, and contextual adjustment. Our typology demonstrates how structural and spatial variability in global boundary spanning roles shapes the dynamic interplay between demands, adverse effects, and coping behaviors. Contributing to the dark side of global boundary spanning, we illustrate how global orchestrator roles challenge individuals to operate in a state of perpetual motion. Managerial Summary: Managers in multinational enterprises (MNEs) are under increasing pressure to be more flexible, mobile, and strategic as they span organizational and geographical boundaries across a dispersed global network. Our study explores how mobile global boundary spanners who traverse and negotiate multiple boundaries cope with intense demands and unanticipated negative consequences. Our findings caution global firms against overburdening these strategically valuable boundary spanners, as doing so may constrain network relations, impair knowledge flows, and hamper local learning. We offer a typology that managers and organizations can use to assess the adverse effects of these demands and understand how MNEs can harness the integrative scope and adaptive breadth of these strategically flexible individuals.

This editorial introduces the 12 papers of this Special Issue on the Workplace of the Future and organizes them into four thematic clusters, namely the changing architecture of work beyond firm boundaries; the expanded role of technology as teammate, infrastructure, and mechanism of control; the lived experiences of flexibility, fragmentation, and professional isolation; and the conditions under which agency, creativity, and care can rehumanize future workplaces. Across these papers, the workplace of the future emerges as a set of context‐dependent arrangements shaped through interactions among workers, managers, organizations, platforms, customers, and institutions. We draw on co‐creation as an integrative lens through which the contributions of this Special Issue can be read together. We argue that outcomes, such as well‐being, inclusion, coordination, creativity, and governance, are not delivered by technologies, spaces, or formal practices alone, but rather they are produced through ongoing interactions among workers, managers, organizations, platforms, customers, and institutional environments. At the same time, the papers also show that these processes are not uniformly positive: future workplaces may reproduce exclusion, intensify surveillance, and distribute voice and value unevenly. We conclude by outlining a research agenda structured around four tensions surfaced by the collection: technology as driver versus technology‐in‐use, place as location versus place as inclusion infrastructure, firm‐level Human Resource Management (HRM) versus ecosystem governance, and co‐creation versus co‐destruction.

Do platform workers inadvertently strengthen the algorithmic management (AM) systems they seek to resist? Drawing on 37 interviews with digital labor platform managers, this paper provides an organizational perspective on workers’ “algoactivism” in food and grocery delivery. We reveal that platforms are not passive targets and their reactions to algoactivist acts unfold through a dynamic cycle of sensemaking across three stages: noticing, framing, and acting. We identify key determinants at each stage, explaining why platforms react differently to worker acts. Unlike traditional organizations with formal conflict management procedures, we suggest that platforms operate as adaptive socio-technical systems, continually recalibrating managerial mechanisms through experimentation. We find that workers exploit gaps that platforms subsequently close, rendering them unwitting contributors to their own control. Explaining workers’ algoactivism and its role in shaping AM practices, we situate sensemaking within the duality of AM, highlighting how its interpretive flexibility creates tensions between intended design and actual use. We refine this conceptualization, asserting that the recursivity of AM is not open-ended, as interpretive flexibility may shrink with platforms continually adapting to algoactivist acts. While mutual shaping persists, recursive dynamics may compress worker agency, exposing the limits of algoactivism and challenging assumptions about its emancipatory potential.

The algorithmic control of human resources (HR) represents a profound tension in contemporary work arrangements: as technological sophistication in management increases, workers’ ability to express...

Algorithms increasingly manage the exchange between workers and organisations. This raises the question of whether agency can be attributed to, and psychological contracts formed with, such non‐human organisational representatives. Against this backdrop, we assemble and critically review streams of literature regarding app working and psychological contract making to better understand the psychological dynamics of app‐work. We show how such non‐human entities are commonly ascribed traits and intentions characteristic of a human agent, which foster positive emotions and relationship continuity for app‐workers. To theoretically explain the mechanisms at play in how app‐workers may create a psychological contract with an algorithm, we curate ideas from ‘Theory of Mind’ which accounts for key aspects of relationship development through direct experience with a target party. Our work unpacks the experiences of app‐workers and underscores the expanding role of the HR function in managing such independent contractors, along with the evolving means by which this can be achieved. Arising from our review, we set down key implications for the role of algorithmic agents in the design of work and the management practice of HR professionals.

This systematic review investigates why and how platform workers express voice in a context where institutional and organisational voice mechanisms and representation structures are lacking or absent. Platform workers have been restricted in their ability to formally unionise or collectively bargain, and the presence of a digital intermediary in the form of a platform organisation limits the scope of worker voice. In this paper, we identify and synthesise the motives for voice use by platform workers—namely mutual aid, organising, visibility, and confrontation, and unpack how these are realised through bottom‐up and independent voice channels that may potentially influence multiple stakeholders. The paper's core contribution lies in highlighting how the blurred employment boundaries of platform work structurally render labour power even more indeterminate, informing our conceptualisation of a ‘grassroots voice mechanism’, wherein the social relations of platform work and digital technologies convey worker voice beyond traditional organisational boundaries. We conclude with an agenda to guide future research centred heavily around the dynamics of platform work, the use of novel voice channels, and worker attitudes towards them.

Purpose: Society is critically dependent on an adequate supply of hospital doctors to ensure optimal health care. Voluntary turnover amongst hospital doctors is, however, an increasing problem for hospitals. The aim of this study was to systematically review the extant academic literature to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the current knowledge base on hospital doctor turnover and retention. In addition to this, we synthesise the most common methodological approaches used before then offering an agenda to guide future research.Design/methodology/approach: Adopting the PRISMA methodology, we conducted a systematic literature search of four databases, namely CINAHL, MEDLINE, PsycINFO and Web of Science.Findings: We identified 51 papers that empirically examined hospital doctor turnover and retention. Most of these papers were quantitative, cross-sectional studies focussed on meso-level predictors of doctor turnover.Research limitations/implications: Selection criteria concentrated on doctors who worked in hospitals, which limited knowledge of one area of the healthcare environment. The review could disregard relevant articles, such as those that discuss the turnover and retention of doctors in other specialities, including general practitioners. Additionally, being limited to peer-reviewed published journals eliminates grey literature such as dissertations, reports and case studies, which may bring impactful results.Practical implications: Globally, hospital doctor turnover is a prevalent issue that is influenced by a variety of factors. However, a lack of focus on doctors who remain in their job hinders a comprehensive understanding of the issue. Conducting “stay interviews” with doctors could provide valuable insight into what motivates them to remain and what could be done to enhance their work conditions. In addition, hospital management and recruiters should consider aspects of job embeddedness that occur outside of the workplace, such as facilitating connections outside of work. By resolving these concerns, hospitals can retain physicians more effectively and enhance their overall retention efforts.Social implications: Focussing on the reasons why employees remain with an organisation can have significant social repercussions. When organisations invest in gaining an understanding of what motivates their employees to stay in the job, they are better able to establish a positive work environment that likely to promote employee well-being and job satisfaction. This can result in enhanced job performance, increased productivity and higher employee retention rates, all of which are advantageous to the organisation and its employees.Originality/value: The review concludes that there has been little consideration of the retention, as opposed to the turnover, of hospital doctors. We argue that more expansive methodological approaches would be useful, with more qualitative approaches likely to be particularly useful. We also call on future researchers to consider focussing further on why doctors remain in posts when so many are leaving.

The post-pandemic ‘Great Resignation’ has produced a heightened war for talent, especially in the hospitality industry, which historically has been challenged by unattractive working conditions, high staff turnover, and long-standing skills shortages. This chapter proposes employer branding, a strategic talent management practice, as a promising solution to enable hospitality organizations to attract both a larger and a more diversified pool of talent that is well-aligned with their mission and core values. Hospitality employers can win the war for talent by creating compelling employee value propositions that not only attract more people from their traditional sources but also meet the needs and values of more diverse non-traditional talent segments. A conceptual framework of employer branding and its theoretical underpinnings is presented in this chapter to unpack the concept and its related processes. Key content and stages of employer brand development, communication, and outcomes are specified in the framework, along with potential demographic identity moderators (e.g., age, gender, race, and carer status) of perceived brand attractiveness. An agenda for future research into the application and benefits of employer branding in hospitality talent attraction and recruitment is provided, along with a set of practical recommendations on employer branding for implementation by hospitality organizations.

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the talent challenges faced by hospitality organisations. This paper aims to propose a new concept – industry talent branding – which, is argued, offers industry stakeholders the opportunity to reduce such issues through working more collaboratively and strategically to magnify the pool in which individual organisations compete for talent.Design/methodology/approach: This paper proposes a conceptual framework of industry talent branding, based on brand equity theory, signalling theory and the employer branding literature.Findings: Industry talent branding opens a potentially new stream of research on how talent attraction and retention issues may be addressed. The authors propose that there is merit in moving beyond the organisational-level phenomenon of employer branding to industry talent branding through articulating a broader collaborative and strategic agenda to increase and widen the talent pool available to organisations.Research limitations/implications: The proposed framework offers the hospitality industry and its encompassing stakeholders a means to adopt a more proactive, collective and strategic approach to address long-standing talent challenges.Originality/value: This paper combines brand equity and signalling theories to develop the concept of industry talent branding, defined as a strategically curated, yet realistic impression of the employee value proposition (i.e. the benefits and rewards received by employees in return for their work performance) available within the industry, that by design will sustainably attract new employees into the industry and retain existing talent.