The Future of Human Resource Management

The landscape of human resource management (HRM) is evolving more rapidly than ever. Human resource managers are facing new and previously unimagined challenges ranging from the rise of artificial intelligence to the shift to work-from-home arrangements. As the HR profession changes, research in the field must keep pace to provide relevant evidence to inform planning and decision making. The authors in this volume of Research in Human Resource Management identify important emerging issues and offer an agenda the future of HRM studies. This fifteen article volume includes an outstanding roster of established and emerging HR scholars who define the future of the profession. The editors open the volume with a question of how HR research can best serve current evidence needs while preparing practitioners and scholars for emerging issues. They present the volume in four sets of articles. Authors in part one pose the questions of how the world of work changed due to the pandemic period and what lessons we can learn having emerged from it. Authors in part two examine the emerging role of artificial intelligence in HRM, how stakeholders respond to it, and how it supports a growing interest in HR analytics. Authors in part three provide direction for diversity research in support of understudied groups and the enduring influence of inclusion, power, and performance. The volume closes with two articles guiding new ways of thinking about HR research, including a reconsideration of HR function research based on relational theory and challenges to how we think about goal setting theory. The volume is designed primarily for scholars in the field of human resource management. It also serves the needs of instructors and students in master's and doctoral courses in industrial-organizational psychology, human resource management, or organizational behavior. Each article is grounded in managerial context that will appeal to practitioners in the field.