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Introduction
HR practice has always involved attempts by HR to be taken “seriously” by other, powerful, organizational actors, such as line managers, related functions or corporate executives (Brandl and Pohler, 2010; Ulrich et al., 2019; Anderson, 2014). Recently, two ideas have been heavily promoted as the “next new trends” by HR scholars and HR consultancy firms, namely a “design thinking” approach to HRM (Rasca, 2018) and the idea of HRM as “employee experience (EX)” management (Bersin et al., 2016; Morgan, 2017; Plaskoff, 2017; Claus, 2019). Together, this repositions HR practice as “Employee Experience design”, in short: EX design (Yohn, 2016; Ulrich, 2019). EX design has been applauded as a “game changer” in HRM (Shivathanu, 2019); it is extensively discussed among practitioners (e.g. Bersin et al., 2017; Mazor et al., 2017; Arnold, 2018; Ellis, 2018; IBM, 2018; Volini et al., 2019) and, increasingly so, in practice-oriented academic journals (Yohn, 2016; Plaskoff, 2017; Burrell, 2018), with an emerging stream of academic research (Claus, 2019; Sinha and Biju, 2019).
Stemming from customer experience (CX), and partly user experience (UX), the conceptualization of EX involves data- and technology-driven approaches, as well as the appropriation of marketing and design thinking concepts by HR (Bersin et al., 2016; Lesser et al., 2016; Yohn, 2016; Maylett and Wride, 2017; Meister and Mulcahy, 2017; Morgan, 2017; Sivathanu, 2019). Design thinking received attention as an approach that enables organizations to deal with complexity and to support innovation (Brown, 2008; Bersin et al., 2016; Liedtka, 2018; Sivathanu, 2019). It has come to be understood as a systematic human-centered problem-solving approach that fosters interdisciplinary collaboration with a strong focus on the end user (Elsbach and Stigliani, 2018). Its effects for business have been reported to be positive (Elsbach and Stigliani, 2018). Consequently, it has been positioned as a core element of effective strategy development in general (Sivathanu, 2019) and, specifically, as a suitable best practice to “transform HR” from its previous role of a “process developer” to an “experience architect,” “empower[ing] HR to reimagine every aspect of work” (Bersin et al., 2016, p. 67).
Against this background, our study departs from the insight that ideas of “best practice HRM” are not just value-free or objective suggestions for...