Accompaniment at Work: Relational and Developmental Approaches to Humanizing Organizations

Contemporary organizations operate in a global environment shaped by digitalization, automation, and the growing integration of artificial intelligence into everyday work. These changes call for greater efficiency and innovation, but also for more human-centered work environments and ethical organizational cultures. Employee engagement remains low in many workplaces, and culture-change initiatives often fail because they are not translated into concrete relational practices, such as how leaders listen to, develop, and support their teams. Research in organizational psychology, human resource management, and leadership has studied engagement, well-being, and organizational climate, yet the relational and developmental dimension that helps people grow at work remains under-examined and scattered across separate constructs. This Research Topic addresses that gap by focusing on accompaniment as a relational and developmental approach to humanizing organizations.This Research Topic examines accompaniment as a relational and developmental process, grounded in attentive listening, dialogue, trust, and ethical responsibility, and oriented towards the growth of individuals within organizations. In contrast to approaches focused only on performance, accompaniment places human relationships and development at the center of working life, while still connecting to performance and organizational effectiveness. We seek to understand how accompaniment practices, including mentoring, coaching, developmental feedback, and supportive leadership, shape employee development, motivation, work engagement, well-being, retention, talent management, organizational culture and climate. We also welcome work that measures accompaniment and distinguishes it from related constructs such as mentoring, developmental relationships, perceived organizational support, and servant or authentic leadership, and that identifies how and when it works. This includes workplaces reshaped by artificial intelligence, digital tools, and hybrid arrangements, together with the ethical questions these raise.Contributions are invited around: - the meaning of work and human-centered organizations; - accompaniment and developmental relationships in AI-enabled, digital, and hybrid workplaces, including ethical implications; - relational, servant, and authentic leadership, organizational culture and climate, trust, and psychological safety; - employee well-being, meaningful work, sustainable careers, and organizational responsibility; - mentoring, coaching, developmental feedback, and talent and competency development; - developing future professionals and early-career employees, including the transition into work and the building of leadership pipelines within organizations. We welcome conceptual and empirical work using quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods, or comparative designs, with a clear link to organizational psychology and to workplace attitudes, behaviors, or outcomes. Article types include Original Research, Brief Research Report, Review, Mini-Review, Systematic Review, Hypothesis and Theory, Methods, and Perspective. Topic editors: Paula Crespí, Jorge López González, Teresa De Dios Alija, Elaine Rabelo Neiva Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/83970/accompaniment-at-work-relational-and-developmental-approaches-to-humanizing-organizations