Extant literature has generated limited understanding of whether and how sustainable human resource management (HRM) will lead to better and more sustainable outcomes, such as enhanced employee well‐being and improved employee performance. Moving toward common good values and drawing on the job demands‐resources model, this study theorizes and tests the relationships among sustainable HRM practices, employee resilience, work engagement, and employee performance. The empirical results of a multilevel and multisource study in the Chinese context provide supporting evidence for our theoretical model. The findings demonstrate that sustainable HRM practices positively affect employee resilience, and lead to a high level of work engagement among employees. Employee resilience also has an indirect effect on employee performance through work engagement. This study, with its theoretical and practical implications, reveals a serial mediation mechanism through which sustainable HRM practices contribute to both employee well‐being and employee performance.

This study addresses the recent call to restore employees' well-being to the centre of high-performance work system (HPWS) research through investigating the effects of HPWS on the major dimensions of work-related well-being, such as emotional exhaustion, work engagement and job satisfaction. Based on data collected from a sample of 207 clinicians (medical practitioners and nurses) and administration staff in six Chinese hospitals, we introduced the perceived nature of the employee–employer relationship as a moderator to understand the complex mechanisms through which HPWS may influence employee well-being. Given that China's health care system is one of the most market-orientated systems in the world, the Chinese health care context provides an ideal site to study the implications of HR practices for employees. The findings demonstrated that HPWS may lead to work engagement or emotional exhaustion, depending on employee perceptions about the nature of the employee–employer relationship. The economic exchange perception increases the possibility that HPWS leads to employees' emotional exhaustion, while the social exchange perception decreases the possibility that HPWS leads to employee work engagement. The findings have significant practical implications for hospital management.

Over the last two decades, high performance work systems (HPWSs) research has been dominated by examining the effects of these systems on firm performance. Research on the impact of HPWSs on employees has been marginalised. This study examines the impact of HPWSs on two psychological outcomes for employees, namely, subjective well-being (SWB) and workplace burnout, by utilising data collected from 1488 physicians and nurses in 25 Chinese hospitals. It also examines the moderating effects of employees' organisational based self-esteem (OBSE), as an individual intervention and physician–nurse relationships, as an organisational intervention, on the relationship between HPWSs and employee outcomes. HPWS is found to increase employees' SWB and decrease burnout. Such well-being-enhancing and burnout-relieving effects are stronger when employees have high OBSE. The positive effect of HPWS on SWB is also stronger when there is a collaborative relationship among employees in an organisation. The major contribution of this study is to unpack the ‘black box’ of how HPWS influences employee well-being in the Chinese healthcare sector context.

The rise of algorithmic management (AM) is helping to transform work and employment relationships, creating new challenges and opportunities alike. AM leverages machine‐learning algorithms to help automate managerial functions. This raises key questions about its impact on work, organisations, and the broader society. This paper synthesises existing research on AM and categorizes scholarly insights into five theoretical perspectives: AM as a surveillance and control system, as a neutral tool, as an agentic boss, as a socio‐technical process, and AM as a contradictory unity. While AM enhances coordination and efficiency, it also raises concerns such as pervasive surveillance, bias, dehumanization and worker alienation. We highlight the tensions between control and autonomy, transparency and opacity, and efficiency and fairness, illustrating the paradoxical nature of AM. This paper proposes a future research agenda, calling for ethical governance and responsible design of algorithmic systems to reap the benefits of AM while managing potential risks and mitigating harms.

This article draws on a survey of internal migrant workers in China’s Jiangsu province to shed light on the characteristics of migrant workers who receive social insurance and explain why some migrants take up social insurance while others do not. Of the factors which potentially explain which migrants receive social insurance, gender, past earnings, ties to the city to which the migrant had moved, the ownership type of the enterprise in which the migrant works and residential registration status are all found to be statistically significant predictors. The article concludes with the suggestion that the high level of scepticism with respect to social protection that has been reported as being manifest among migrants is justified. There is little likelihood the majority of migrant workers who have moved to China’s towns and cities will be able to access the social insurance benefits traditionally available to those with urban registration.