Conference „Empirical Personnel and Organizational Research“ on 9 and 10 November 2023 at the University of Southern Denmark Sønderborg & Special Issue

With the thematic focus, this year’s annual meeting addresses the megatrends of social sustainability and new understandings of quality work for employees. Social sustainability means offering processes for creating successful places that promote well-being by understanding what people need from the places they live and work.

Social sustainability supports social and cultural life, social amenities, citizen and employee engagement opportunities, and space for people and places to evolve as belonging and identity. Social sustainability can be reached by aligning formal and informal processes; systems, structures, and relationships must allow current and future generations to create healthy and durable living. Socially sustainable communities are equitable, diverse, connected, and democratic and provide a good quality of life. The annual meeting organisers are interested in how organisations of all types can contribute to a social sustainability culture and how these cultures can be organised. Examples of problems, challenges, work practices and initiatives of interest to the conference and social sustainability paradigm are, among other things:

• The reproduction and production of social closure and exclusion in organisations: starting from cultural and social bias in recruiting, over-performance and promotion management (meritocracy, the seniority principle) to self-exclusion of particular demographic groups, workplaces have the power to divide social groups further – or potentially mend this gap.
• Private companies are increasingly interested in alternative work standards concerning technological progression: changes include agile, low-hierarchy digitalised workflows, and liberal group and project management, especially in IT and high-tech, but also in other domains.
• Organisations are increasingly encouraging issues of employee identity, belonging, (mental) health and psychological safety, cultural struggles, and empowerment: such momentum can be explored and evaluated from different perspectives. While ethical considerations (e.g., overcoming racial discrimination) matter, managing employee demands resulting from their identity and belonging and integrating resulting practices in the business and management model (e.g., rewarding employee engagement appropriately) must be equally thought through.
• The megatrends towards sustainability and new standards of good work have increased the „talk“ about such issues: Organisations have professionalised their public verbiage, installed public corporate persona and otherwise improved their image regarding corporate consciousness and engagement. Team building measures and a focus on good and friendly work milieus are ubiquitous – however, whether or not such measures benefit employees or merely the „new spirit of capitalism“ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007) is to be explored.

In addition, contributions that deal with other empirical personnel and organisational research topics beyond the conference topic are also welcome.

Conference dates:
Submission deadline: 30 September 2023.
Registration deadline: 15 October 2023.
Conference: 9 & 10 November 2023.
Conference’s website.
Special Issue dates:
Full paper submission deadline: 28 February 2024.
Publication planned for Issue 4/2024.
View the complete Call for Papers here.

We cordially invite you to submit your work to the Minitrack (it will be our third time) on the “Digitalization of Work“ at the 57th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2024, planned to take place at the beautiful island of Maui in January 2024!

We anticipate submissions including (but not limited to) the following topics:

Employee Relations

• Motivating the future digital workforce
• Work-life-balance, work-life separation, and work-life-blending
• Dealing with mental health issues in digitized work
• Dealing with social isolation in digitized work
• Dealing with the digital divide from a temporal and spatial perspective
• Temporary groups (pick-up groups) transforming into long-term team
• Intercultural communication and intercultural challenges

Human Resource Management

• Distant leadership and management of the digitalized workforce
• The implications of AI and algorithmic leadership
• Leadership for cloud-worker, click-worker, crowd-worker, and digital nomads
• Gamification of performance measurements in digital work
• Balancing self-leadership and intrinsic motivation with self-exploitation
• Empowerment and motivation of the employees digitally
• Skill development, learning, and talent identification in the digital environment
• The design of virtual recruiting (e.g., gamified assessment center, virtual onboarding)
• Establishing human automation resource management in the organization

Digital Work

• Digital professions and practices
• Balancing trust and surveillance in digital work and remote work
• Augmentation of the work interface
• Utilization of big data to empowering the digital employees
• Platformization of digital work
• Digitalized professions and work forms

Virtual and borderless organization

• Foster (open) innovation and intrapreneurship
• Fostering an organizational culture, work climate, commitment, and retention in a virtual organization
• Dissolution of company borders into the borderless organization
• Employee participation, collaboration, workers councils, and unions in a global digital world
• Avoiding the digital Taylorism and tackling the power shift in the new work forms
• Establishing employee-focused strategies and creating a sustainable business model
• Professionalization of a hybrid workplace
• Juridical and regulatory issues concerning remote and digitalized work
• The role of the HR department in this digital world

There are several mini-tracks related to this call, and we all coordinate. They include Games & Gaming (in Digital and Social Media), Gamification (in Decision Analytics and Service Science), Streaming Media in Entertainment (in Digital and Social Media), Esports (in Internet and the Digital Economy), Game-based Learning (in Knowledge Innovation and Entrepreneurial Systems), and the Metaverse (in Organizational Systems and Technology).

Organizers

• Tobias Scholz, University of Siegen
• Juho Hamari, Tampere University
• Stephanie Orme, Emmanuel College
• Brian McCauley, Jönköping University

View the detailed Call for papers here.
View the guide for authors here.
Deadline for submission of papers: 15 June 2023.
Conference date: 03 to 06 January 2024.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set a global roadmap for reducing inequality, improving institutions, and enhancing economic growth while tackling climate change. This brings both opportunities and challenges for firms worldwide, ranging from technological development and reorganization of value chains in response to the green energy transition to the implementation of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG). This conference will take a closer look at firm-level sustainable behavior, its drivers, costs, and benefits. Following the SDGs, we focus on different aspects of sustainability, including but not limited to institutional frameworks, inequality, and the environment. Our aim is to generate a better understanding of the role of sustainability in firm behavior and performance. We use a broader definition of „firms“ and their performance that includes looking at profits, employment, corporate social responsibility, and ethics issues while focusing on firms of all sizes from individual entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to multinational corporations.

The conference topics include (but are not limited to) the following key questions:

• Firm-level factors shaping the sustainable and energy-efficient behavior
• The effects of sustainability on firm profitability, employment, and overall performance
• Issues of corporate social responsibility
• Governance and management of firms’ sustainable behavior in different industries
• Non-financial reporting of companies and the related national and global standards
• Firm-level perspectives on financing energy transition and green growth
• The role of social, ethical, and institutional factors in firms’ sustainable behavior

We welcome applications, regardless of discipline, that address these or related topics using quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods. Comparative perspectives between Europe and the Americas are particularly welcome.

Organizers

• Olga Popova, IOS (Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies)
• Thomas Steger, Universität Regensburg

The conference language is English. There is no conference fee.
Accommodation in Regensburg for one author of each accepted paper will be provided by the organizers. Early career researchers and presenters with a lack of travel support from their own institution are also welcome to enquire about contributions towards travel costs.

Deadline for extended abstract submission: 01 May 2023.
Notification of acceptance: 01 June 2023.
Deadline for submission of full papers: 01 November 2023.
Conference homepage.
The complete CfP.

Combining data from employees on the one hand and establishments on the other is considered a promising research basis from different perspectives. Such datasets ideally provide information from different sources, which can increase the validity of the data, and operationalise a multi-level design, which is called for by various theoretical approaches. Furthermore, such data are of interest to different disciplines. Examples from different disciplines are:

• 1) occupational and organisational psychology use such data to study subjective stress and leadership style,
• 2) personnel research is interested in turnover rates and how this relates to relations between employers and employees,
• 3) situational research is interested in fluctuation rates and situational conditions of personnel management,
• 4) sociology is interested in career paths in different work organisations and the social structure of society, and
• 5) economics interested in labour market outcomes more generally.

Of course, from these perspectives survey design in terms of e.g. information in questionaire and time dimension with possible panel structure is of interest in assessing the research potential of LEE datasets. The construction of such surveys is costly and entails a series of aspects concerening design. Therefore, their subsequent use is desirable, which necessitates institutional archiving and, better still, institutional data production. Most importantly, an overview of available data sets and projects on LEE data would promote international research. This entails systematic archiving, documentation and methodological research on possible caveats in specific survey designs producing LEE datasets. The advantages and disadvantages of these practices and quality management are also of great interest. Furthermore, a great interest is associated with theoretical and methodological questions on survey designs as well as possible applications in different disciplines. Accordingly, this workshop brings together researchers on methods concerning survey designs of LEE datasets with researchers doing research using LEE datasets to promote the mutial understanding of potentials and caveats in different designs of LEE datasets. Examples of contributions could be:

• Specific employer, employee, and in particular linked data sets and projects
• Methodological difficulties and solutions in the context of data collection, archiving and re-use
• Theoretical issues dealt with when using LEE datasets in different disciplines and what  dimensions on LEE datasets are essential in that respect
• Aspects of quality assurance and solutions on such issues
• Issues concerning weighting, non-response and attrition in different types of survey datasets
• Types of LEE datasets based on registers or surveys and issues therein
• Examples of using LEE datasets for research in different disciplines

Course Directors & Guest Editors

• Chris Brewster, Henley Business School, University of Reading, UK
• Wenzel Matiaske, Helmut-Schmidt-University/University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg (Germany)

Deadline for abstract submission for the seminar: 31 July 2023.
Seminar at the IUC Dubrovnik: 2-6 October 2023.
Deadline for submission of the full paper for the Special Issue: 30 November 2023.
Publication date: Issue 4/2024
View the complete Call here.