HR leadership as an internal governance mechanism: enacting ethics and organisational justice in a developing economy
Bharti Shauran/Chaudhary, Shilpee Aggarwal, Neetu JainPurpose
This study aims to investigate how senior HR leaders in India enact corporate governance through everyday ethical practice, challenging board-centric, agency-theoretic accounts of governance and repositioning HR leadership as a governance mechanism.
Design/methodology/approach
The study uses interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to examine the lived experience of 15 senior HR personnel from public and private organisations in Delhi NCR, India, via purposive sampling. Data was collected through 40- to 85-minute semi-structured interviews, analysed using IPA’s protocol, with rigour supported by reflexive memoing and expert validation.
Findings
Five interrelated themes emerged: Legal Compliance and Risk Management, Ethics and Integrity, Justice and Equity, Ethical Leadership and Stakeholder Engagement. This shows HR leaders acting as sense-makers, gatekeepers and boundary spanners who interpret, embed and negotiate governance principles rather than applying rules.
Research limitations/implications
The study is bounded by a single-economy, cross-sectional design and a senior HR perspective, so findings are most applicable to similar institutional settings. Future research should adopt longitudinal, multi-actor and cross-country comparative approaches.
Practical implications
Organisations should formally treat HR leadership as a governance role rather than an administrative one and develop evaluation frameworks capturing relational factors such as trust and fairness alongside structural compliance. Policymakers should consider the interpretive burden on HR actors under weak regulatory enforcement.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is among the first studies to offer a phenomenological account of HR leadership as an enacted internal governance mechanism in an emerging economy, integrating governance micro-foundations, sensemaking, organisational justice and stakeholder theory within a unified processual framework.