Human resource management and the COVID-19 crisis: implications, challenges, opportunities, and future organizational directions

Salima Hamouche

doi:10.1017/jmo.2021.15

Abstract

AbstractThe COVID-19 has grandly shaken all organizations, creating a complex and challenging environment for managers and human resource management (HRM) practitioners, who need to find ingenious solutions to ensure the continuity of their companies and to help their employees to cope with this extraordinary crisis. Studies addressing the impact of this crisis on HRM are sparse. This paper is a general literature review, which aims at broadening the scope of management research, by exploring the impact of the COVID-19 on HRM. It identifies the main challenges and opportunities that have arisen from this new pandemic and it offers insights for managers and HRM practitioners into possible future organizational directions that might arise from these opportunities.

Highlights

COVID-19 is an unprecedented health crisis that has strongly shaken the whole world, plunging it into great fear and uncertainty. It has heavily impacted economies, societies, employees, and organizations. This crisis has started first in the city of Wuhan (China), which has witnessed in December 2019 the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that has known a fast spread propelling its status to a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, by the World Health Organization (WHO, 2020b)
The COVID-19 outbreak had led to a significant slowdown in the world economic activities (Brodeur et al, 2020; Gourinchas, 2020), triggering furloughs and layoffs (World Economic Forum, 2020), that led to the increase in the unemployment rate in many countries
This paper is a general literature review, with an informative purpose, that aims to examine recent and relevant literature which investigated the impact of COVID-19 on human resource management (HRM)

Summary

Introduction

COVID-19 is an unprecedented health crisis that has strongly shaken the whole world, plunging it into great fear and uncertainty. Lockdown measures have been imposed; people were quarantined; schools, universities, nonessential businesses, and non-governmental organizations have been temporarily closed; travels were restricted; flights were canceled; and mass public gathering as well as social events have been prohibited (Brodeur, Gray, Islam, & Bhuiyan, 2020; Gourinchas, 2020) Coupled with these measures, the COVID-19 outbreak had led to a significant slowdown in the world economic activities (Brodeur et al, 2020; Gourinchas, 2020), triggering furloughs and layoffs (World Economic Forum, 2020), that led to the increase in the unemployment rate in many countries. According to Gourinchas (2020), COVID-19 has generated a situation where in a short period 50 percent or more of the workforce might not be able to work

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