Merits — Journal of Human Resources

The aim of the study is to compare perceptions of work-related psychosocial factors as workplace values (vertical and horizontal trust, justice, and respect) and the meaning of work among educators (teachers and social pedagogues) with different experiences of bullying behavior. A quantitative exploratory research design was employed. The sample consists of Estonian teachers (N = 445, purposive sample) and social pedagogues (N = 172, representative sample) who completed a self-report questionnaire on bullying experiences and the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire II version (COPSOQ II) to assess work-related psychosocial factors. For data analysis, a CFA was conducted to assess the proposed factor structure for the present sample and a Kruskal–Wallis test with Dunn’s post hoc test was conducted. The results show that 73.6% of educators had personal history with bullying behavior, and different personal pathways of bullying involvement tended to shape their current perceptions of workplace values (trust, justice and respect) and meaning of work. Both teachers and social pedagogues who had experienced victimization at school and at work reported the lowest levels of workplace values compared to educators with different experiences or without bullying experiences. Educators who have been victimized at work perceive lower levels of meaning of work compared to other study groups.

Destination Management and Marketing Organizations (DMMOs) shape the human resource and technological conditions under which tourism enterprises, including digital ventures, pursue resilience and growth, yet their structures are often designed as technical–administrative arrangements detached from the capacities of the destination community. This study investigates how participatory processes engaging local institutions, businesses and residents can inform the organizational and human resource design of contemporary DMMOs: their functional units, decision rights, participation routines and competency profile. Four Greek destinations of differing scale and type—Delphi, Meteora, Larisa and the Region of Epirus—each developing a DMMO under a nationally coordinated, recovery-funded programme, are examined through a qualitative, multiple-case design. Structural contingency and configurational fit serve as the primary lens; four mechanisms link participation to organizational form, with human resource capacity as a rate-limiting constraint. Expectations of a decision-making role vary with the custodial control exercised over core assets rather than with administrative scale. Endorsement of human resource development practices is near-invariant across contexts while expected resourcing scales with administrative level; the gap between the two is widest in small destinations. Technology priorities track perceived competency availability: ratings of AI-based tools are near-invariant across cases and do not rise with general technology enthusiasm, while training in data and digital skills is endorsed at uniformly high levels. Participatory organizational design is advanced as a theoretically grounded construct with stated scope conditions; its proposed consequences for configurational fit, legitimacy and entrepreneurial resilience are formulated as testable propositions rather than findings of this study.

Family-run small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) dominate the tourism and hospitality sector, and a growing number are digitalizing while retaining their family character. The present study develops a multi-level conceptual framework explaining how strategic human resource management (SHRM) practices support talent retention in these firms under digital transformation. Three research streams bear on the question, namely strategic HRM and employee well-being, socioemotional wealth in family business, and digital transformation in tourism and hospitality, and each rests on an assumption that the other two contradict in this setting, concerning respectively the formality of the HR system, the stability of the relational channel of delivery, and the irrelevance of ownership structure to how employees experience technology. Drawing on the deliberate–emergent strategy distinction and on the separation between intended, implemented, and perceived HR practices, the study argues that strategic HRM in these firms is emergent rather than absent. Seven propositions are formulated from job demands–resources and socioemotional wealth theory, according to which SHRM practices support retention through employee well-being, family involvement strengthens this conversion, digital transformation weakens it, the two organizational forces interact, and the external labor environment conditions the outcome. The framework identifies the mechanism through which digitalization erodes the HR advantage of family firms, which rests on the channel of implementation rather than family ownership as such.