The International Journal of Human Resource Management

The Interplay of Human Resource Management and Leadership: Alignment, Tensions, and Consequences

Summary

This special issue aims to advance understanding of the interplay between human resource management (HRM) and leadership in shaping employee and organizational outcomes. We invite empirical and conceptual papers that:

1. Examine how HRM systems and leadership behaviors align, misalign, reinforce, substitute for, or contradict one another to shape employee well-being, performance, and organizational outcomes.
2. Advanced theory on the dynamic and multilevel interplay between HRM and leadership across evolving organizational contexts, including digitalized, remote, and hybrid work.

Rationale of Special Issue

Managing people in organizations requires a combination of Human Resource Management (HRM) and leadership, often referred to as ‘people management’ (Purcell & Hutchinson, 2007; Knies et al., 2017). 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 (Poškienė et al., 2026). Therefore, the outcomes we traditionally associate with people management do not emerge from HRM or leadership in isolation, but from their ongoing interrelationship across organizational levels.

Despite this inherent interdependence, Leroy and colleagues (2018) noted in their seminal article that research on HRM and leadership have largely developed as parallel research streams, with limited theoretical and empirical integration. Despite a growing body of research that has begun to examine HRM–leadership linkages (e.g., Hauff et al., 2022; Kilroy et al., 2023; Suhail et al., 2025), almost a decade later, this fragmentation still persists and some of Leroy et al.’s (2018) original calls about “leader-HRM fit” remain unanswered (Bauwens & Batistic, 2025; Wunderlich & Lokke, 2025). On a practical level, it is important that we understand not only what constitutes well-designed HRM systems (or practices) 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 so-called ' alignment’ and ‘misalignment ' between HRM systems and leader behaviors. Leroy et al. (2018) conceptualize alignment between HRM and leadership 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. Alignment is often implicitly assumed to be beneficial; yet emerging work indicates that alignment may take different forms (e.g., supplementary fit, complementary fit, synergistic fit, and perceptual filtering) with distinct consequences for employee attitudes, well-being, and performance (Leroy et al., 2018). At the same time, drawing on substitutes for leadership theory (Kerr & Jermier, 1978; Jermier & Kerr, 1997), HRM systems may partially or fully substitute for leadership by structuring work, clarifying expectations, and shaping employee behavior independently of leaders’ actions. As a result, understanding how HRM systems and leader behaviors align, misalign, or substitute for one another is essential for a comprehensive understanding of people management.  In this regard, the limited empirical research on HRM and leadership combinations to date has largely focused on employee well-being outcomes only and has largely focused on a select few leadership behaviors (e.g., Hauff et al., 2022; Kilroy et al., 2023; Suhail et al., 2025; Mostafa et al., 2026). 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, given possible trade-offs that might emerge between them (Grant et al., 2007; Van de Voorde et al., 2012).

Existing research has also begun to document the dark sides of HRM systems such as work intensification, employee strain, and performance–well-being trade-offs (Jensen & Van de Voorde, 2016; Mulder et al., 2025) and leadership forms such as destructive or dysfunctional leadership behaviors (Mehraein et al., 2023). However, similar to the general HRM and leadership literatures, 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, for example, when well-intended HRM systems are enacted through coercive leadership, or when empowering leadership operates within controlling or compliance-oriented HRM systems and architectures. With just a few exceptions (e.g., Agarwal & Farndale, 2026; Ehrnrooth et al., 2023), 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 (Parker & Grote, 2020). 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 (Collings et al., 2021a; Höddinghaus et al., 2024). 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 (Bonesso et al., 2026).

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 (Meijerink et al., 2021). 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 (Fu et al., 2018). 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 (Ostroff & Bowen, 2016). 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 (Steffensen et al., 2019). 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 (Nishii & Paluch, 2018). 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 therefore 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 (Boon et al., 2025; Kelemen et al., 2020), 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.

Aims/Objectives of Special Issue

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. 

At the same time, 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. In addition, 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.

Potential Themes and Research Questions

Broadly aligned with the four streams outlined above, we invite manuscripts that address but are not restricted to the following key (sub)themes.

Theme 1: Interplay, alignment, and substitution between HRM and leadership

• How do HRM systems and leadership behaviors interact in shaping employee and organizational outcomes across organizational levels?
• How do 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 do HRM systems function as substitutes for leadership, and what are the resulting consequences for employee and organizational outcomes?

Theme 2: Misalignment and the dark side of integrated people management

• How does misalignment between HRM systems and leadership behaviors emerge, persist, or become institutionalized within organizations?
• When does alignment between HRM systems and leadership amplify negative outcomes such as work intensification, role overload, or employee strain?
• How do employees interpret and respond to situations in which HRM systems substitute for, constrain, or contradict leadership behaviors?

Theme 3: Digitization, remote and hybrid work, and changing configurations of HRM and leadership

• Which configurations of HRM systems and leadership forms (including behaviors) strengthen the effectiveness and sustainability of remote and hybrid work arrangements?
• How do 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 do 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?

Theme 4: Dynamics over Time 

• How do HRM–leadership configurations evolve over time and how do these experiences affect pertinent employee and organizational outcomes
• How do alignment, misalignment, and substitution between HRM and leadership shape employee well-being and performance over time?
• How do temporal shifts in leadership behaviors or HRM systems alter the balance between substitution and complementarity?