Call for Chapter Proposals

SPECIAL TOPIC: STRATEGIC BENEFITS:
It has been many decades since Human Resource Management was first looked at through a strategic lens (Schuler and Jackson, 1987). Since then Strategic Human Resource Management has received considerable attention from scholars and practitioners (see, for example, Wright and Snell, 1998; Greer, 2001; Lengnick-Hall, Lengnick-Hall, Andrade, and Drake, 2009; Jackson, Schuler, and Jiang, 2014). Around the same time as the strategic focus began on the functional area of human resource management, scholars started to look at sub-functions, such as compensation, strategically (Balkin and Gomez-Mejia, 1987; Gomez-Mejia and Welborne, 1988, Balkin and Gomez-Mejia, 1990). This new perspective on compensation also received considerable attention from scholars and practitioners (see, for example, Gomez-Mejia and Balkin, 1992; Gerhart and Rynes, 2003; Martocchio, 2020). Although benefits are approximately 30% of total labor costs, interestingly, there has been very little focus on the strategic aspects of benefits until very recently. We hope this volume of Research in Human Resource Management helps stimulate research and interest in this important area.

Theme of the Special Issue:
This volume of Research in Human Resource Management welcomes high-quality research that aids the understanding of the strategic implications of employee benefits. Articles may be theoretical or empirical, but all should enhance our understanding of employee benefits using a strategy lens. Although a number of recent articles have explored the topic of strategic benefits (e.g., Balkin and Werner, 2023; Werner and Balkin, 2021; Murray and Dulebohn, 2021; Mitra and Shaw, 2021; Fulmer, Chen, and Li, 2021; Banks and Witt, 2021; Afonso, Franco-Santo, and Gomez-Mejia, 2021) many questions remain. We invite manuscripts that address, but are not restricted to, the following questions:

• How do employee benefits relate to organizational strategies and organizational outcomes?
• How do specific employee benefits relate to strategically important individual employee behaviors?
• Are there specific strategic benefit profiles, patterns, portfolios, or systems and how do they relate to internal and external environmental factors?
• Do different specific benefits attract different strategically important potential employees?
• How do specific benefit strategies fit within HR strategies and fit with other functional, business, and corporate strategies?
• What do benefits strategies signal to employees and what are the consequences of these signals?
• How does the composition of the workforce affect benefits strategies and their outcomes?
• How can the administrative decisions of benefits be incorporated into a strategic framework?
• What are the important aspects of the implementation of strategic benefits?
• What are the current trends in strategic benefits?
• How can benefits shape an organization’s identity, culture, and reputation?
• Are their specific organizational case examples that show the potential strategic effect of benefits?

SUBMISSION AND REVIEW PROCESS:
Authors can submit proposals between now and October 31, 2023 to the Issue Editor, Steve Werner at swerner@uh.edu. Proposals should detail the content and contributions of the full article. Proposals should be double-spaced and include no more than five pages of text. References, tables, and appendices do not count against this page limit. Please do not send complete papers, although you may note in the proposal that you have a draft. If you have questions about a potential submission, please contact Steve Werner via swerner@uh.edu. Full papers will be double blind reviewed by at least 2 peer reviewers.

RELEVANT DATES:
Proposals Due: October 31, 2023
Final Decisions on Proposals communicated by: December 1, 2023
Full draft of paper due: August 31, 2024
Feedback to authors on full paper: November 14, 2024
Final paper submission due: February 1, 2025