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This study tries to free women from the “invisible role” prison and understand the different managerial goals and styles adopted by males and females in family small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in managing employees. In particular, this paper grasps the complexity of the relationship between women’s leadership positions and configurational human resource management (HRM) practices in family SMEs.

The authors use the qualitative fuzzy set comparative analysis (fsQCA) on 623 small and medium Italian family businesses to explore women’s contributions and impacts on adopting HRM practices and business performance.

The findings confirm that gender-specific leadership styles influence the adoption of distinct bundles of HRM practices and ultimately affect organizational performance in family SMEs. Indeed, women in the family SME social context, to meet certain gender expectations, are more likely to implement steward-oriented HRM practices. This reinforces the role of women as key players in improving organizational performance by adopting people-centered HRM practices that promote employee satisfaction and retention.

Using the fsQCA analysis and the gender theory, family business and HRM literature, the paper investigates the role of women in Italian family SMEs as CEOs or HR managers in implementing HR management practices to achieve good organizational performance.

This paper explores the field of human resource management (HRM) in family firms, assessing the evolution of this research through a four-domain model that reflects the relationships between cognitions, actions and performances associated with organizational choices.

The authors have performed a bibliometric review of 363 peer-reviewed papers from over the past four decades (1976–2016) in order to provide activity indicators for the overall phenomenon and systemize the entire body of literature into specific HRM strategy domains or practices, using a double-entered pivot table.

The study framework provides managerial implications with regard to the HRM decisions made when attempting to improve human capital in family firms. Accordingly, the authors view HRM-centered decisions and strategies in family firms as ways to scan for and appraise contingent dimensions, make sense of the current environment, make good choices and achieve high performance levels.

The authors offer this four-domain theoretical scheme as a framework through which the field can be interpreted, proposing some potential avenues for moving forward.

This study aims to shed light on the ambiguous effects of smart working (SW) on work meaningfulness. On the one hand, SW enables people to benefit from greater work flexibility, advancing individual control over organizational activities. On the other hand, it may impair interpersonal exchanges at work, disrupting job meaningfulness. Hence, the implications of SW on work meaningfulness are investigated through the mediating role of interpersonal exchanges at work.

The authors investigate both the direct and indirect effects of SW on employees’ perceived meaningfulness at work. Secondary data come from the sixth European Working Conditions Survey. The study encompasses a sample of 30,932 employees. A mediation model based on ordinary least square regressions and bootstrap sampling is designed to obtain evidence of SW’s implications on meaningfulness at work through the mediating role of interpersonal relationships (IR).

The research findings suggest that SW triggers a positive sense of the significance of work. However, it negatively affects IR with peers and supervisors, entailing professional and spatial isolation. Impaired IR twists the positive implications of SW on organizational meaningfulness (OM), curtailing the employees’ sense of significance at work.

SW is a double-edged sword. It contributes to the enrichment of OM, enhancing the individual self-determination to shape the spatial context of work. However, its side effects on interpersonal exchanges generate a drift toward organizational meaninglessness. Tailored management interventions intended to sustain IR at work are needed to fit the design of SW arrangements to the employees’ evolving social needs.

The paper pushes forward what is currently known about the implications of SW on OM, examining them through the mediating role of IR at work.

Literature is not consistent in discussing the implications of teleworking on work–life balance (WLB). Even though teleworking may enhance work arrangements’ flexibility, it blurs boundaries between life and work, endangering the individual WLB. The paper intends to illuminate this issue, moving forward our understanding of teleworking’s implications using the Social Exchange Theory framework.

Secondary data were collected from Eurofound’s sixth European Working Condition Survey. A large sample of Europeans (n = 16,473) was involved in this study. The authors designed a serial mediation analysis to investigate the direct and indirect effects of teleworking on WLB. The authors included employees’ job motivation and job satisfaction as intervening variables that mediate the relationship between teleworking and WLB.

The authors found teleworking to negatively affect WLB, putting under stress the teleworkers’ ability to handle the interplay between work and life. However, the serial mediation analysis pointed out that teleworking triggers an improvement of job motivation, which, in turn, boosts job satisfaction. Increased job motivation and job satisfaction nurture positive employees’ perception of WLB.

The study results invite us to pay attention to the complex interplay between teleworking and WLB, emphasizing the mediating role of job motivation and job satisfaction. As a flexible work arrangement, teleworking may increase the employees’ sense of control over their work, which leads to better perceived WLB. However, confounding the boundaries between work and daily life, it may nourish work-to-life and life-to-work conflicts.

This paper advances what is currently known about teleworking’s implications on WLB, envisioning avenues for further conceptual and empirical developments.