Strategic human resources management in times of economic uncertainty: a lifebuoy for employees?

Purpose – Drawing on social exchange and street-level bureaucracy (SLB) theories, the authors of the present paper seek to identify how public banks in Egypt strategically manage their frontline employees to maintain high performance even during periods of economic uncertainty. Design/methodology/approach – The empirical sample comprises semi-structured interviews with 28 frontline employees working in 4 public banks. The authors used the Gioia mechanism to analyze their data. Findings – The authors identified job-related (discretionary power of bank employees, nature of banking jobs and hiring elite individuals for banking jobs); learning-related (continuous learning of bank employees, spread of MBA programs and resilience of bank employees) and context-related categories of factors (career support and more financial rewards during economic uncertainty) that explain the stability of the performance of the frontline bank employees addressed in this study despite the economic uncertainty their country is passing through. Practical implications – Given the findings of the present paper, the authors propose that the administration of the addressed banks maintain the policy of providing training opportunities to their employees. However, such training should pay more attention to issues such as crisis management, customer-employee engagement and the mental health of employees during crises, among others. Second, as dissatisfaction is very high with other public sector organizations in Egypt, their top management should try to learn from public banks, follow the best practices and collaborate with them to improve their service offerings to the citizens. Finally, for global financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund who are involved in rescuing Egyptian economy should incorporate strategic human resources management implementation in public sector organizations in their recommendations, along with economic reforms package. Originality/value – This paper contributes by filling a gap in the literature on strategic human resources management and economic uncertainty in which empirical studies of the association between them, particularly in the context of North African countries such as Egypt, have been limited so far.