Published on: July 8, 2025 at 9:40 pm
As companies transfer more human-resources responsibilities from centralized HR departments to line managers, employees are now having critical HR-related conversations with their direct supervisor. Many line managers are shaping key employee experiences without formal guidance from HR professionals.
Academy of Management Scholar Carol Kulik of the University of South Australia said this trend is “troubling, but it’s also exciting.” She said that 20-plus years ago, managers’ primary ‘people’ responsibility was implementing formal policies that had been designed by the HR unit.
“The big problem then was that line managers acted as gatekeepers,” Kulik said. “There might have been a great mentoring program on the books, but if line managers weren’t actually enacting the program, employees couldn’t benefit from it.”
Now line managers have much broader people management responsibilities. In some cases, line managers are expected to lay more of the groundwork for their team members’ onboarding and integration with organization culture, and they are more involved with training and development—often with positive effects. Kulik said that manager involvement in these activities can result in customized initiatives that employees find more personally meaningful, but “if those line managers haven’t been trained in their people responsibilities, their customization can look willy-nilly or inequitable.”
Employees value customized arrangements that directly meet their needs. But while the trend is empowering line managers, this can also be risky. Line manager involvement in HR may be more effective than the traditional model, but some line managers find it to be challenging or even overwhelming.
“Line managers may act without considering the equity of their actions. They may unintentionally favor some employees because they have better relationships with those team members,” Kulik said.
“Giving line managers more autonomy in designing people management initiatives is a trend that I would want to encourage, but with a caveat: organizations need to offer line managers enough support and development to do it properly,” she said.
