Risk Management: Exploring Emerging Human Resource Issues during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The unanticipated coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has hit global business heavily, disrupting the management of human resources across numerous industries. More than 500 articles (indexed in Scopus and the Web of Science) on the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on emerging human resources issues and related practices were published from 1 January 2020 to 31 January 2021. In this study, we conduct a systematic literature review on emerging studies in the business and management field to explore what the emerging human resource issues are during the COVID-19 pandemic and propose related practices to solve these issues. The analysis of the published literature identifies nine main human resource issues across 13 industries. The findings of this study suggest that COVID-19 has enormous impact on conventional human resource management and requires the theoretical and empirical attention of researchers. The propositions nominate related human resource practices to deal with emerging human resources issues and identify several research venues for future studies in this field.