Making Sense of (Mis)Matched Frames of Reference in Employment Relations and Human Resources

An animated introduction to an article published in Industrial Relations by John Budd, Dionne Pohler, and Wei Huang. We bring scholarship on cognitive frames and framing processes into employment relations research by positing that frames of reference have a cognitive influence on the behavior of employment relations actors. Specifically, we theorize that actors’ frames influence their desired HR practices, and these practices will be stable if managers and employees share similar frames. When actors’ frames are mismatched, however, HR practices can violate employee expectations and trigger a sensemaking process, potentially leading to framing contests and conflict. Allowing for frames mismatch uniquely highlights the importance of recognizing managers’ and employees’ frames for understanding HR outcomes and conflicts observed in practice. Adopting a cognitive frames approach to understanding the employment relationship also complements emerging employment relations research on ideas, but our approach uniquely reveals new opportunities to research framing and discursive contests within organizations and to understand old conflicts in a new light.
Published article: http://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12275
Non-paywall version: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...
Version of this animation without background music:    • Making Sense of (Mis)Matched Frames o...