Aneeqa Suhail, Tilburg University

Steven Kilroy, Trinity College Dublin

Robin Bauwens, Tilburg University

Sut I Wong, BI Norwegian Business School

Sasa Batistič, Tilburg University

Managing people in organizations requires a combination of Human Resource Management (HRM) and leadership, often referred to as 'people management'. While HRM provides formalized systems, practices, and architectures that structure employment relationships, leadership shapes how these systems are enacted, interpreted, and given meaning in everyday work. Therefore, the outcomes traditionally associated with people management do not emerge from HRM or leadership in isolation, but from their ongoing interrelationship across organizational levels.

Despite this inherent interdependence, research on HRM and leadership have largely developed as parallel research streams, with limited theoretical and empirical integration. Although a growing body of research has begun to examine HRM–leadership linkages, this fragmentation still persists and some original calls about 'leader-HRM fit' remain unanswered. On a practical level, it is important to understand not only what constitutes well-designed HRM systems or how leaders behave, but also how they interact and influence one another in organizations. For future HRM scholarship, disregarding the two components of people management risks overestimating leaders or overlooking leaders' agency in HRM system implementation, or even neglecting the boundary conditions under which HRM and leadership influence, undermine, or reinforce each other.

A particularly underdeveloped issue concerns the alignment and misalignment between HRM systems and leader behaviors. Alignment between HRM and leadership can be conceptualized as the degree of fit between these two systems of people management, such that their underlying values, modes of influence, and enacted signals converge, complement, or filter one another in shaping employee and organizational outcomes. While alignment is often implicitly assumed to be beneficial, emerging work indicates that alignment may take different forms with distinct consequences for employee attitudes, well-being, and performance. Additionally, HRM systems may partially or fully substitute for leadership by structuring work, clarifying expectations, and shaping employee behavior independently of leaders' actions. Understanding how HRM systems and leader behaviors align, misalign, or substitute for one another is essential for a comprehensive understanding of people management. The limited empirical research on HRM and leadership combinations has largely focused on employee well-being outcomes only and has largely focused on a select few leadership behaviors. As such, there is a need to explore a wider range of leadership behaviors and extend the range of outcomes studied to performance and the interrelationship between well-being and performance.

Existing research has documented the dark sides of HRM systems such as work intensification, employee strain, and performance–well-being trade-offs and leadership forms such as destructive or dysfunctional leadership behaviors. However, studies that examine a critical perspective on HRM or look at destructive forms of leader behaviors have largely evolved in isolation. We know remarkably little about how negative outcomes emerge at the intersection of HRM and leadership, such as when well-intended HRM systems are enacted through coercive leadership, or when empowering leadership operates within controlling or compliance-oriented HRM systems and architectures. The joint pathways through which HRM and leadership generate unintended, ambivalent, or harmful consequences remain largely unexplored.

These gaps in our understanding are particularly consequential given the rapidly evolving context of digitalization and organizational change. Digitization should not be understood merely as the adoption of new technologies, but as a broader transformation of how work is organized, coordinated, and controlled, most visibly reflected in the rise of remote, hybrid, and digitally mediated work arrangements. In such contexts, HRM systems increasingly structure work in the absence of physical proximity, while leadership is enacted through mediated interactions rather than direct, co-located supervision. Understanding which configurations of HRM systems and leadership behaviors strengthen or weaken remote and hybrid work is therefore central to advancing theory on contemporary people management.

Beyond transforming work arrangements, digitization also reshapes the way HRM systems and leadership interact in guiding employee behavior and interpretations. In contemporary organizations, the integration of digitalized HRM systems and leadership behavior creates a complex, multilayered influence on both employee outcomes and organizational effectiveness. As HRM systems become increasingly digitalized, they often manifest through real-time performance tracking, data-driven evaluation, and algorithmic management practices. While such systems can enhance coordination and transparency, they may also heighten employee awareness of surveillance and intensify concerns about monitoring and control. Within this digital framework, leadership becomes a critical interpretive layer through which employees make sense of these systems.

A multilayered perspective suggests that leadership does not merely supplement HRM systems; rather, it can amplify, reinterpret, or even contradict the signals embedded within them. At the same time, leaders may also have to balance consistent HR implementation with responsiveness to individual needs. When leadership behaviors and HRM systems are aligned, they can create a strong organizational climate that provides consistent cues to employees about valued behaviors and expectations. However, tensions may arise when these signals diverge. For example, a digital HRM system that emphasizes rigid, data-driven performance indicators may conflict with leadership behaviors that encourage flexibility, experimentation, or developmental learning. Such contradictions can create cognitive dissonance, role ambiguity, and uncertainty among employees. In these situations, employees may perceive the organization as sending mixed messages, where the formal system communicates one set of expectations while leaders communicate another.

Despite the increasing prevalence of digitalized HR architectures, we still know remarkably little about how employees interpret and respond to these potentially conflicting signals. Misalignment between digital HRM systems and leadership behaviors may weaken the clarity and credibility of organizational signals, thereby undermining trust, psychological safety, and the effectiveness of people management systems. At the same time, alignment between HRM and leadership in digitally mediated contexts may amplify both positive and negative consequences, shaping employee well-being and performance in ways that remain insufficiently understood.

Understanding these dynamics is crucial for advancing theory on people management in contemporary organizations. In particular, HRM and leadership are now understood as dynamic, temporally unfolding processes that evolve during periods of change rather than being static inputs. However, research to date rarely examines how their interplay and associated consequences for employee well-being and organizational performance develop over time.

This Special Issue seeks to advance scholarly understanding of how HRM systems and leadership behaviors jointly shape employee and organizational outcomes in contemporary organizations. Rather than treating HRM and leadership as parallel or additive influences, this issue foregrounds their interdependence by addressing their alignment, misalignment, and cross-level interaction. Specifically, it invites new theoretical perspectives that explain how HRM and leadership can reinforce, substitute for, or contradict one another. Knowledge on this topic will allow organizations to ensure that the intended aims of both their HRM systems and leadership materialize.

The Special Issue encourages scholarship that shifts attention from static to temporal and context-embedded understandings of HRM–leadership relationships, particularly within evolving work arrangements such as remote and hybrid settings. By integrating diverse epistemological perspectives, theoretical traditions, and methodological approaches, contributions can illuminate how people management systems develop, adapt, and co-evolve over time, generating a more nuanced understanding of people management as a dynamic, multi-level phenomenon rather than a collection of isolated practices or behaviors.

From a practical perspective, this Special Issue aims to generate actionable insights for organizations, HR professionals, and leaders seeking to design coherent and effective people management systems. By clarifying when HRM practices and leadership behaviors align, misalign, or substitute for one another, the contributions can inform more consistent implementation of HR strategies, improve employee experiences, and support sustainable organizational performance. By adopting temporal and context-sensitive perspectives, such as in remote and hybrid work settings, the Special Issue can guide practitioners in adapting people management approaches over time, responding to shifting work arrangements, and navigating emerging tensions between flexibility and control, autonomy and coordination, well-being, and performance.

This Special Issue welcomes diverse methodological approaches to advance theory on the interplay between HRM and leadership and for ensuring a strong alignment between research designs and the complexity of real-world people management challenges. In particular, contributions are encouraged that leverage longitudinal, qualitative, experimental, and computational methods to capture the multilevel, relational, and dynamic nature of people management systems. Only studies that consider both leadership behaviors/approaches and HRM practices/systems instead of examining them in isolation will be considered.

The proposed Special Issue has the potential to reinvigorate HRM scholarship by moving beyond static and isolated conceptualizations of HRM systems or leadership behaviors toward a more integrated, multilevel, and dynamic understanding of people management. By encouraging contextualized research across digitalized, remote, hybrid, and changing work environments, the Special Issue responds directly to contemporary transformations in the world of work while reinforcing IJHRM's commitment to methodological pluralism and international relevance. Additionally, the Special Issue will generate actionable insights for organizations seeking to design coherent people management systems that balance employee well-being, performance, flexibility, and sustainable organizational effectiveness.

Potential topics

• How HRM systems and leadership behaviors interact in shaping employee and organizational outcomes across organizational levels
• How different forms of alignment between HRM and leadership (e.g., supplementary fit, complementary fit, perceptual filtering) produce distinct employee and organizational outcomes
• When and how HRM systems function as substitutes for leadership, and what are the resulting consequences for employee and organizational outcomes
• How misalignment between HRM systems and leadership behaviors emerge, persist, or become institutionalized within organizations
• When alignment between HRM systems and leadership amplifies negative outcomes such as work intensification, role overload, or employee strain
• How employees interpret and respond to situations in which HRM systems substitute for, constrain, or contradict leadership behaviors
• Which configurations of HRM systems and leadership forms strengthen the effectiveness and sustainability of remote and hybrid work arrangements
• How leaders enact, adapt, or resist HRM systems when leading employees at a distance, and how does this shape employees' sensemaking and experiences of people management
• How employees experience alignment, misalignment, or substitution between HRM systems and leadership in remote and hybrid work settings, and how do these experiences affect employee and organizational outcomes
• How HRM–leadership configurations evolve over time and how do these experiences affect pertinent employee and organizational outcomes
• How alignment, misalignment, and substitution between HRM and leadership shape employee well-being and performance over time
• How temporal shifts in leadership behaviors or HRM systems alter the balance between substitution and complementarity

Timeline

• Invalid DateTime: Expected publication date of special issue
• March 31, 2027: Full paper submission deadline