EXPLORING EMPLOYEE AUTONOMY: TRACING THE ROOTS AND CHARTING FUTURE STEPS THROUGH BIBLIOMETRIC DATA ANALYSIS AND REVIEW

Abstract

Theoretical background – Following the phenomena of the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, and ubiquitous remote work in post-COVID human resource management, researchers’ interest in employee autonomy has grown to an all-time high. Besides the growing scientific maturity of the field, the extent to which employees should enjoy autonomy in crafting their workload, choosing their work methods and workplace, and the impact on the work outcomes is not synthesized and open to debates (Clausen et al., 2022). The concept in the broadest sense can be defined as the level of freedom and discretion employees have in terms of their workplace autonomy, worktime autonomy, and methods autonomy (Kubicek et al., 2017). Purpose of study – The purpose of this study is to uncover the inherent intellectual structure of the employee autonomy body of research, identify the most influential concepts, themes, and hotspots, and stress new paths for future research on the topic. Method – The research is grounded in multitechnique bibliometric analysis, which is useful for obtaining a more objective, comprehensive, aerial view of a certain topic or research niche (Zupic & Cater, 2013). Descriptive bibliometric analysis, co-authorship analysis, and keyword co-occurrence bibliometric analysis are conducted. The data for carrying out the analysis was based on a keyword-based search query in the Scopus database of global quality research about articles published in scientific, peer-reviewed journals, written in English. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement is used for obtaining and cleaning data (Moher et al., 2015). The final dataset includes 1041 articles. Following the bibliometric analysis, a systematic literature review is presented through the prism of the invisible college framework. The framework helps us interpret the field’s development across four phases from its origins in the 1950s until now (Vogel, 2012), including college transformation, drift, differentiation, and fusion.Findings – More than 900 articles detailing employee autonomy have been published since 2010, which is nine times more than in all years before 2010 combined. Moreover, the findings focused on tracing the evolutionary development of the field point out a few core themes such as benefits of employee autonomy, job satisfaction and well-being, environmental context, motivation, employee behavior, organizational psychology, work organization, leadership, digitalization, and job performance. Connected to this, the output of the keyword co-occurrence analysis resulted in a visual network map of 10 interconnected clusters of keywords from the vast research landscape on employee autonomy. Subsequently, five distinct paths for future research endeavors are outlined. Theoretical contribution – This is one of the first bibliometric analyses on employee autonomy as a testament to its originality. To date, published research has focused mainly on determining various relationships between employee autonomy and other organizational phenomena, and assessing its influences on employee well-being, work-life balance, job performance, and work outcomes (Muecke & Iseke, 2019). Additionally, several meta-literature reviews exist on the topic, yet are predominantly partial and focused on specific relationships between constructs (Khoshnaw & Alavi, 2020) or are in turn industry specific (Pursio et al., 2021). This represented an additional motivation for the researchers to carry out the research as a way of presenting an overarching aerial view of this concept through bibliometric analysis. Additionally, the systematic literature review grounded in the invisible college framework is an innovative theoretical presentation in this field. Practical implications – The findings have the potential to benefit policymakers, practitioners, and the academic community as crucial stakeholders in the field. Namely, policymakers can benefit from these findings when regulating unionization and forms of increased employee participation to further democratize workplaces. Additionally, practitioners and the academic community can benefit from the synthesized findings when choosing fields for new research and further cross-pollination with other managerial concepts