Defending and Expanding Boundaries: Exploring How COVID-19 Triggered Boundary Work Among HR Managers in the Public Sector

• Published date: 01 March 2025
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0734371X231214994
• Author: Daniel Tyskbo
• Date: 01 March 2025
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0734371X231214994

Review of Public Personnel Administration

2025, Vol. 45(1) 101 –123

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/0734371X231214994

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Article

Defending and Expanding

Boundaries: Exploring

How COVID-19 Triggered

Boundary Work Among HR

Managers in the Public Sector

Daniel Tyskbo1

Abstract

While important insights have been provided into the role of HR managers in

performing change in the workplace, still little is known about how HR managers

themselves are shaped by change, in particular in relation to those changes triggered

by radical or disruptive shock events and crisis situations, and in the public sector

context. In this study, we aim to address this, using an exploratory qualitative

interview study to explore how the serious and profound COVID-19 pandemic

triggered boundary work among HR managers in public sector municipalities. Our

findings illustrate that COVID-19 triggered HR managers to engage in boundary work

in two main ways: either by defending their boundaries (through the two practices

of counteracting dumping and counteracting shirking) or by expanding them (through

the two practices of facilitating self-fulfillment and facilitating status-enhancement).

We discuss how this variation is related to whether the HR managers experienced

and made sense of the pandemic mainly as a threat—of being forced into unwanted

responsibility—or if they experienced and made sense of it mainly as an opportunity

to take advantage of the situation. In showing this, the study makes a number of

important contributions to both theory and practice.

Keywords

COVID-19, shock events, workplace change, boundary work, defending boundaries,

expanding boundaries, HR managers, public sector, municipalities

1Halmstad University, Sweden

Corresponding Author:

Daniel Tyskbo, School of Health and Welfare, Halmstad University, Box 823, Halmstad, SE-301 18,

Sweden.

Email: Daniel.tyskbo@hh.se

1214994ROPXXX10.1177/0734371X231214994Review of Public Personnel AdministrationTyskbo

research-article2023

102 Review of Public Personnel Administration 45(1)

Introduction

While the existing literature has provided important insights into how HR managers

are involved in performing change in the workplace (e.g., Alfes et al., 2010, 2019;

Brown et al., 2017), less is known about how HR managers themselves are shaped by

change, particularly in relation to those changes triggered by so-called shock events or

catastrophic stressors (e.g., financial crises, natural disasters, or terrorism) (Biron

et al., 2021; Caligiuri et al., 2020; Figley & McCubbin, 2016). As with other profes-

sional and occupational groups facing these disruptive and highly uncertain situations,

we would expect HR managers to also start to struggle in managing the situation and

negotiating their boundaries, for example, constructing, defending, contesting, or

expanding them (see e.g., Abbott, 1988; Branicki et al., 2022; Ibarra, 1999; Langley

et al., 2019; Pratt et al., 2006). However, few empirical studies have been conducted

and the extent to which this is the case in practice is unclear. Various calls have been

made for in-depth qualitative research exploring how HR managers are shaped by

change, particularly in the public sector (Baran et al., 2019; Brunetto & Beattie, 2020;

Harney & Collings, 2021; Malik & Sanders, 2021).

In this study, we address this call for studies by using a qualitative interview study

to explore how the serious and profound COVID-19 pandemic shaped HR managers

in public sector municipalities. While adding to the list of shock events or catastrophic

stressors (Caligiuri et al., 2020; Figley & McCubbin, 2016), COVID-19 also stands

out in the way it is fundamentally a human event, placing HR managers in a central

role (Berry et al., 2022; Chang et al., 2022; Collings, Nyberg, et al., 2021; Dirani et al.,

2020; Hamouche, 2021). A focus on the public sector context is both theoretically

interesting and important practically for several reasons. It is a context generally given

little attention in the broader Human Resource Management (HRM) and change litera-

ture (Brunetto & Beattie, 2020; Knies et al., 2015; Ritz et al., 2012; Van der Voet et al.,

2015); more importantly, public sector organizations are, in many countries, consid-

ered to have important economic and social roles in managing crisis situations, such as

the COVID-19 pandemic (Mann, 2014; Schuster et al., 2020). The public sector is also

traditionally thought of as conservative, bureaucratic, and difficult to change (Boyne,

2002; Christensen et al., 2007), and, given these factors, it is likely that its HR manag-

ers will demonstrate “stubborn traditionalism” (Boudreau & Lawler, 2014), resulting

in their negotiation of boundaries during uncertain and disruptive situations being par-

ticularly evident and heightened (Kettl, 2006). We therefore ask: How did the COVID-

19 pandemic trigger boundary work in practice among HR managers in public sector

municipalities?

Our study revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic triggered HR managers to engage

in boundary work in two main ways: either by defending their boundaries or expand-

ing them. Defending boundaries was performed through the two practices of counter-

acting dumping (i.e., defending themselves from being handed-over undesirable work)

and counteracting shirking (i.e., defending themselves from being assigned unwanted

responsibility for sensitive issues). Expanding boundaries was performed through the

two practices of facilitating self-fulfillment (i.e., broadening themselves to be and feel