Beyond Common Ground: Dialogical Responsibility in Sustainable Human Resource Management

Sustainable human resource management (HRM) advocates a shift toward pluralism, emphasizing the legitimacy of multiple stakeholder interests, voices, and meanings. Intended dialogue is often promoted as a key practice to support this shift. However, how intended dialogue actually contributes to pluralism remains under-theorized. Moreover, dialogue is frequently idealized as a route to harmony or 'common ground,' which can obscure power dynamics, silence dissent, and suppress difference. Building on dialogical ethics and framing theory, this conceptual paper introduces the intended dialogical responsibility (IDR) model, which reconceptualizes intended dialogue not as consensus-seeking but as a reflective space for exploring irreducible differences. Drawing on dialogue theorists such as Buber, Levinas, and Bakhtin, dialogical responsibility is proposed as an ethical form of 'thirdness'-a mediating presence in the leader-worker dyad that invites participants to remain open to the other, question their own frames, and attend to asymmetries in voice and power. To support this stance, the IDR model employs framing theory to distinguish between micro-level situated frames (e.g., issue and relationship frames), meso-level strategic frames, and macro-level institutional frames. Dialogue is thus understood as a dynamic, ongoing, and reflexive process-occurring within and beyond episodic conversations-where meanings are co-constructed and contested over time. This paper contributes to sustainable HRM literature by offering a multilevel theoretical model and sensitizing questions to support ethically responsive dialogue. It provides a conceptual foundation for navigating pluralism and fostering dialogical spaces in complex organizational contexts.